Embracing Sci-Fi Futures

reaching into the future today with the Autodesk IDEAS 2013 Workshop at NASA Ames:

“The worlds envisioned by science fiction have entertained generations of readers and movie-goers for over a century. These same words have inspired scientists, inventors, explorers and entrepreneurs to repeatedly push against the boundaries of possibility. Ideas once thought fanciful—deep ocean and space explorations, AI, even nanotechnology and synthetic biology—now form the backdrop of our everyday lives.

Today, as exponentially growing technologies demonstrate almost daily how invention is only limited by our imaginations, we can realistically ask the question, “now that we can do anything, what will we do?”, or, more thoughtfully, “what should design imagine?”

In consideration thereof, Autodesk is gathering a diverse and notable group of thinkers and doers—including renowned science fiction authors, designers, inventors and entrepreneurs—to contemplate and better understand this rapidly shrinking gap between imagination and tangible reality.

Join us for a journey into the nature of imagination and the limits and biases of our concepts of the future. As we envision different futures based on traditional and emerging science fiction themes, we’ll consider what design (and the technologies that support design) might do to harness the power of increasing possibilities.”