NEXTCONF: Recent Episodes
NEXTCONF
NEXT gets discussions flowing on topics imperative for the future: How does innovation in the age of machines affect everyone? How do human behaviour and customer expectations change? And what does this mean for us, the drivers of digitalisation, and our companies?
This podcast features some of the best thinkers we know, like Douglas Rushkoff, Amy Webb, David Mattin, Amber Case and many more. From fantastic keynotes at our NEXT Conferences, to all episodes from our digital NEXT–SHOW as well as exclusive interviews with digital experts from around the world.
Get inspired – and shift your perspective.
www.nextconf.eu
Web3 Is Coming – What Does It Mean for Brands?
Named one of “The World’s Most Influential CMOs” by Forbes Magazine, Ana Andjelic recently left her marketing post at Banana Republic to launch an exciting new venture. In Show 3, Ana talks to NEXT about Web3 and what it means for brands. How will consumers stand out from the crowd and display their status? Because in the modern “Aspiration Economy” consumers yearn for cultural, social, and environmental recognition. As Ana points out, it’s not just business experience, but also social urgency that brands need to trade in tomorrow’s Aspiration Economy.
Hear why John Schoolcraft (Global Chief Creative Officer, Oatly) thinks the traditional agency-client model is fundamentally broken. Which is why, when he joined Oatly - a Swedish food company that produces alternatives to dairy products from oats - in 2012, he famously axed the marketing department. He often says, half-jokingly, that his motivation was to stick a finger up at all the marketing directors who’d in the past ruined his best work. In his current role, he isn’t the CMO but the chief creative officer, and now Oatly doesn’t even have a CMO. Instead, he leads an elite internal team of creatives at the trailblazing food company. How does this work?
Thank you to our partners!
Accenture Interactive – FAKTOR 3 – t3n
In the first episode of our new NEXT Show Season, trend expert Chris Böhnke talks about new forms of creative work and surprising collaborations. And of course, Metaverse can't be missing in the trends forecast for 2022. In conversation with our NEXT Programme Director Monique van Dusseldorp: Chris will share his views on the recently released Fjord Trends report, which sees the need for vast changes in our relationships with people, business and the planet. Importantly, the report spells out these shifts in different areas:
- Work and the workplace
- Supply chains, sustainability and the return of scarcity
- The metaverse as the next frontier
- Trust, truth, and values
- Care beyond the health industry
Right after taking the stage at our NEXT Conference Limited Edition in September 2021, Dr Parag Khanna sat down with our conference curator Monique van Dusseldorp to follow up on the important points he made regarding the political issue of mass migration and how this will influence the years to come. Parag also revealed his special connection to Hamburg and gave us a little insight into his growing up, being a son of a migrant family himself.
At our NEXT Conference Limited Edition in September 2021, Timandra Harkness and David Mattin sat down for a one-on-one conversation. After Timandra explained how she came to maths and statistics from a rather creative background of theatre and circus, the two turned to the topics of Big Data, personalisation and their social implications: How can we retain the freedom and self-determination promised by the Personalised Century, but rebuild the community and solidarity we lost when we escaped from mass society?
In 2021, everyone is talking about the metaverse. But what does the emergence of these worlds mean for our shared future? And what opportunities does it present? In this fast-paced talk, leading trend watcher David Mattin takes you on a tour of the virtual and simulated worlds to come, and how they’ll supercharge the eternal human quests for connection, status, and meaning.
Also check out the live blog to this keynote and discover more videos here.
Imagine this…It is the near future. A team of 1,000 specially selected people will travel far beyond the solar system to the planet N.EXT.1. There, they will establish a permanent base. A new society. A new home for human beings.
Many of our guest have undertaken this journey with us on the digital show WHAT'S NEXT during the pandemic. At NEXT21, we watched them board the space shuttle and asked our audience to join us by answering five questions…
Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China changes everything from one direction and regulation comes from the other. Benedict Evans gives an update on the macro and strategic trends in the tech industry.
As climate change tips towards a full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize and technology disrupts, we’re also entering a new age of mass migration. What is the next phase of human civilization? What are the future behavioural changes in global mobility? Leading global strategy advisor and best-selling author Parag Khanna shares his answers.
Nils Wollny shares the story of holoride – a spin-out from Audi that focuses on the next generation of in-car entertainment. How can we take everyday journeys and transforms them into hyper-immersive experiences? Explore holorides vision for the future of mobility.
If the last century was the Mass Century – mass production, mass marketing, mass media and the rise of mass politics – this one is the Personalised Century.
We buy products that express who we are, we see adverts targeted to our individual tastes and habits. Each of us has our own individual media channel for news and entertainment, edited by our own choices, our network of friends and contacts – and of course the algorithms that predict what we want to see next. Even politics is shifting its focus, from mass movements for universal rights to individual issues of respect for our diverse identities.
Technology has made this personalised world possible, but it is not the sole driving force. We are more free than our grandparents from the limits of economic scarcity and social expectation, but we are also more isolated. We turn to technology to connect us, to reflect ourselves back from the lonely darkness of the screen, to reassure us that we are recognised.
But this automated recognition never quite satisfies our human needs for purpose, for intimacy, and for social solidarity. Covid-19 accelerated our slide into atomisation, millions of individuals digitally connected but socially isolated.
How can we retain the freedom and self-determination promised by the Personalised Century, but rebuild the community and solidarity we lost when we escaped from mass society?
Francesca Bria is an innovation economist and digital policy expert, working at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, economics and society. At NEXT21 we discussed: Can Europe navigate a path between the digital giants of the US and the state control of China, to build a digital utopia from our current dystopia?
Today, consumers demand sustainability. People are starting to understand that more consumption is bad. But they are still existing in the dichotomy of more versus less, instead of more versus better. The big question is: how can we create innovative experiences that drive better, not more, consumption? We spent a long time expecting consumers to demand change from enterprises. But real pressure on companies now comes from other quarters. This likely means that enterprises will be driving consumer behaviour change, much more than the other way round.
This is a unique opportunity for enterprises today to drive change, and to convert new consumer intentions into new consumer behaviours, by creating Sustainable Experiences. The tension between convenience and sustainability can only be dealt with by making the shift from user-centric design to life-centric design.
Also check out the liveblog to this keynote and. discover more videos here.
Our NEXT Conference finally went live again – both IRL and via livestream. And it couldn't have been more exciting! An action-packed day filled with brilliant keynotes, inspiring panels, music, networking, boat cruises and a well-deserved bit of partying. We have so many people to thank for making this year’s event so special: First and foremost, we would like to thank you - our NEXT crowd - because without you, none of this would have been possible. Then of course we want to thank our partners, the City of Hamburg, next.Media, t3n and our streaming partner TwentyThree, who helped make the event happen. And of course we want to thank all those behind the scenes, from the fantastic speakers and their teams, the refreshment servers and location crews right through to all the helping hands at Accenture Interactive and Faktor 3.
For those unfortunate to have missed NEXT21: We documented the entire day in photos, our dear friend Adam did a superb job live blogging all the amazing keynotes, and very soon keynote videos and interviews with some of our speakers will be uploaded.
In the seventh episode of season two of WHAT'S NEXT, Kristina Bonitz (Managing Director, SinnerSchrader) explored how to find and develop creativity and innovation in life, business and the pandemic age.
Kristina is an innovation consultant, business designer and strategist working in the intersection of business, design, culture, technology and human realities. She strives to inspire organisations to imagine and design better futures for people, society, and the planet.
Azeem Azhar is the writer behind Exponential View which explains how society and the political economy are changing under the force of technology. He brings a unique background to explain the intersection of breakthrough technologies and the economies and societies in which we live.
In the fifth episode of season two of What’s NEXT, he explored the two key technologies likely to reshape the way we live, and the mindset shift we’ll need to make the most of them.
During the second episode of the second season of WHAT'S NEXT, Fjord's Managing Director Thomas Müller explored the four mega-crises that face us, and how the combination of design and foresight can help navigate us through them into a better future.
Team Human: Is this Game Over? Have we passed the tipping point? How do we live, work, educate, and find meaning when we suspect the world itself is ending – at least the civilisation we know? In episode 6 of 'What's NEXT' author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explained that the current crisis offers an opportunity for us to rethink everything from capitalism through media to education. It also offers multiple opportunities to re-engineer how we live to make it more profoundly human.
In episode 8 of 'What's NEXT', Payal Arora explored the emerging narratives around rethinking global value chains – and some of the problematic assumptions built into them.
Born in India, Payal Arora moved to the US where she studied technology and development at Harvard and Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning books "Leisure Commons" and more recently "The Next Billion Users" (Harvard Press), which won the 2019 PROSE award by the American Publishers Association under the Business category.
Here you can find the links to Monique's and David's picks of the week:
/ Stan activism:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/st...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...
/ If you missed the BTS concert:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPFnY...
https://nextconf.eu/2020/06/how-the-b...
/ You probably saw the WWDC 2020 Special Event Keynote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEZhD...
Mark Adams believes that by watching the networks you can spot the tsunamis of cultural change coming your way and adapt before they hit. In the ninth episode of What’s NEXT, he explored how a brand’s values allow it to spread rapidly through networks of passion and interest, and to keep growing as a result.
Mark Adams is the Chief Innovation Officer at VICE. Before that, Mark was the co-founder of The Audience, which raised $40 million in funding to become a digital creative agency for the world’s most iconic celebrities.
‘What’s NEXT’ is the new show to shift your perspective on digital business: 45 minutes of news and insights with international experts and an audience from around the globe.
At this moment, we all sense that so many old assumptions are being tested. Amid the daily news updates, a single, powerful question is becoming clear: is this a Great Reset, or simply a pause? Are we about to make far-reaching changes to the way we live, work, travel, and do business? Or will we fall back into the same old patterns? In the very first episode of ‘What’s NEXT’ content curator Monique van Dusseldorp, trend watcher David Mattin and NEXT Chief Editor Ina Feistritzer discuss the NEXT theme of Halt and Catch Fire.
Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist. He is a Professor at Tamkang University and Associate, Melbourne Business School. In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, and he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Future Studies.
In our fifth episode of What’s NEXT, he explored how changing your narrative of the present opens the door to a series of alternative futures, giving you the opportunity to choose the ones you want – and work towards it.
In the final episode of What’s NEXT's first season, Efosa Ojomo explored how a framework for exploring innovation can help you make the right choices to grow your business.
Efosa Ojomo leads the Global Prosperity research group at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, a think tank based in Boston and Silicon Valley. In January 2019, Ojomo and late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty.
Mark Adams believes that by watching the networks you can spot the tsunamis of cultural change coming your way and adapt before they hit. In the ninth episode of What’s NEXT, he explored how a brand’s values allow it to spread rapidly through networks of passion and interest, and to keep growing as a result.
Mark Adams is the Chief Innovation Officer at VICE. Before that, Mark was the co-founder of The Audience, which raised $40 million in funding to become a digital creative agency for the world’s most iconic celebrities.
In episode 8 of 'What's NEXT', Payal Arora explored the emerging narratives around rethinking global value chains – and some of the problematic assumptions built into them.Born in India, Payal Arora moved to the US where she studied technology and development at Harvard and Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning books "Leisure Commons" and more recently "The Next Billion Users" (Harvard Press), which won the 2019 PROSE award by the American Publishers Association under the Business category.
Ben Sauer is a product design leader, formerly employed by Babylon Health and Clearleft. He's currently writing a book, titled Secret Design Skills.
In Episode 7 of 'What's NEXT' Ben Sauer argued that we need frameworks to navigate times of crisis. However, the metaphors we choose can have a profound effect on the solutions we create. Ben explained how to avoid being shackled by the concepts of the past.
Team Human: Is this Game Over? Have we passed the tipping point? How do we live, work, educate, and find meaning when we suspect the world itself is ending – at least the civilisation we know? In episode 6 of 'What's NEXT' author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explained that the current crisis offers an opportunity for us to rethink everything from capitalism through media to education. It also offers multiple opportunities to re-engineer how we live to make it more profoundly human.
Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist. He is a Professor at Tamkang University and Associate, Melbourne Business School. In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, and he is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Future Studies. In our fifth episode of What’s NEXT, he explored how changing your narrative of the present opens the door to a series of alternative futures, giving you the opportunity to choose the ones you want - and work towards it.
Lockdown and physical distancing are playing havoc with our emotions. So, how can emotional technology help us navigate stormy pandemic seas and set course towards a new normal? For episode 4 of 'What's NEXT' we welcomed Pamela Pavliscak to our digital stage. She explored our relationships with tech and how machines read our emotions.
Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. He spends most of his life building big things, hacking things, and talking about doing both of those things. As CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign, Harper was the first to bring the tech mentality to a political level. He believes the talent of a great bunch of humans can transform an organization like nothing else and uses that belief to strengthen, deploy, and inspire every team he works with.
Harper also believes his incredible luck has led him to achieve wonderful things like pioneering crowdsourcing at Threadless.com, founding Modest Inc, and guiding the software team at PayPal. You can find Harper hacking on personal projects and enjoying life in Chicago with his partner, Hiromi and their beautiful and bizarre poodle, Lulu.
How can we use and channel our pandemic-driven anxiety levels for the common good? And what's the role of technology in all this? We touched upon these and further questions in this week’s episode of 'What's NEXT'. Harper Reed proved that he’s able to juggle many things at the same time (including knives). He talked about the importance of the community and why some companies should become states.
Where next? As each week passes it looks less and less likely that we'll emerge out of lockdown into the world we left behind. What will be our New Normal? In Episode 2, independent analyst Benedict Evans took viewers of 'What’s NEXT' through a tour of where we are, and where we’re likely going, as we emerge from the shock of being locked down.
‘What’s NEXT’ is the new show to shift your perspective on digital business: 45 minutes of news and insights. Trend researcher David Mattin, our very own curator Monique van Dusseldorp and NEXT Chief Editor Ina Feistritzer addressed this year’s theme of 'Halt and Catch Fire'.
During his talks, Webb often highlights, how a lack of understanding of the technology around us leads to an underappreciation of it. By breaking down techniques and theories of technology, Webb highlights in his keynotes the art involved in technological processes, carefully constructed code holding the same potential beauty as a typical piece of art. Webb today continues to champion this thinking through his artwork, using the same techniques to create thought-provoking artwork.
In this keynote for NEXT19 he will talk about the next 5 years of society and how the face filter has changed everything – using real-time data and his theory of art to make the magic happen.
Organisations have become obsessed with speed in software production. Methods like Lean and Agile have been adopted dogmatically: efficiency is the rule, and business leaders are lapping it up. By pushing teams to release early and measure things, we’ve become over-reliant on shallow evidence for progress. Got a number to show off? You’re all set. Good reasoning has taken a back-seat to scientism.
What we may have forgotten, is that many of the innovations we rely on every single day weren’t created this way. In this talk, Ben will examine the problems of the modern production process, recap how some of our most important innovations really happened, and propose a way forward.
After immersing herself in factory towns, slums, townships, and favelas, Payal Arora assesses real patterns of internet usage in India, China, South Africa, Brazil, and the Middle East. Why do citizens of states with strict surveillance policies appear to care so little about their digital privacy? Why do Brazilians eschew geotagging on social media? What drives young Indians to friend ‘foreign’ strangers on Facebook and give ‘missed calls’ to people? Arora reveals habits of use, bound to intrigue everyone from casual internet users to developers of global digital platforms to organisations seeking to reach the next billion internet users. She pushes us to look beyond the framing of users as data producers and markets and instead as new global publics shaping the future of the internet.
While Africa is often portrayed as the ‘hopeless continent’ in the West, the reality on the ground couldn’t be more different. In every corner of the continent, entrepreneurs are creating ecosystems (hubs, accelerators etc.) to enable a grassroots entrepreneurship movement that is enabling more and more entrepreneurs to leverage technology to create innovations to solve local problems of global significance. Based on my experience from working in the startup ecosystem across 20 African countries over the past 5 years, this talk will take you on a tour of the buzzing entrepreneurship scene across the continent and highlight incredible innovations that are fundamentally transforming the reality on the ground. The tour will expose you to a new world of innovation that is already contributing to further accelerating the ongoing transformation, development and growth of economies and societies across the African continent.
The word innovation has become ubiquitous, but it often means different things depending on who you’re talking to. In this talk, Efosa Ojomo, co-author of the groundbreaking book, The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty, will provide a clear categorization which explains the three different types of innovation. He’ll explain that innovation is not necessarily something that is high-tech, overly advanced, or even entirely new, and is therefore different from invention. From an economic development standpoint, innovations can be categorized as being market-creating, sustaining, or improving efficiency.
His talk will focus on the power of market-creating innovation – innovations which transform complicated and expensive products into products that are simple and affordable – and how they have potential to transform organisations and economies. Market-creating innovations have been the foundation upon which corporations and countries have built new growth engines that have triggered economic prosperity. By leveraging digital technology, some market-creating innovations can scale more quickly today than ever before.
The fabric of the universe is made of quantum information. Hacking reality might sound like science fiction, real progress is being made in quantum computing that will lead to world changing breakthroughs. From advancing artificial intelligence, to driving breakthroughs in molecular modeling, to creating next-gen cryptography, quantum computing will have an impact. Come discover where the quantum power comes from, where it will take us, and why it is important to you.
As we move deeper into the 21st-century, the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution are reshaping our world. Leading technologists forecast a world in which facial recognition watches us at every corner, and in which algorithms know us better than we know ourselves.
In this talk TrendWatching’s Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin conjures a vision of a very different future. A future in which we ensure that technologies are there to serve humans, and not vice versa. In which new human capabilities and ways of life are set free. And in which we understand that human beings – and the human spirit – will always be more than any algorithm. Innovators, unite: we have nothing to lose but our chains!
Prof. Olinga Taeed is Council Member and Expert Advisor to the ‘China E-Commerce Blockchain Committee’ (CECBC) responsible for targeting growth to US$ 100 trillion.
In this interview he will outline some of the main strategies of the Chinese government and their effects on the world markets.
Gaming has become a mainstream leisure activity with people now playing on a variety of devices and throughout their day. What many may not realise, however, is there has also been a profound revolution in media as all that play has started to be shared online. While most are probably familiar with recorded game videos on YouTube, real-time broadcasting has risen in the last five years to be a site of profound creative activity.
This talk will take a closer look at this new form of entertainment, the work that is happening behind the scenes to make it possible, and what we might learn about the future of fandom and spectatorship from it. The talk will pay particular attention to models of audience and engagement, important challenges in this domain, and how co-creative culture is the driving ethos for this new space.
How do you enable a rising generation to be futurists? How do you build the future while leading in the present? Head of Changeist, foresight expert Scott Smith, will share the challenges and opportunities of equipping young leaders in a unique and turbulent part of the world—the Gulf—to use experiential futures as a tool to prepare a society for critical transitions ahead.
Human energy and time are precious and increasingly finite, as we struggle to navigate a world cluttered with junk, fake news and brands scrapping for their piece of the pie. Amidst the noise, life’s poignant moments remind us what’s important. Grocery shopping is not important, but feeding my family is. Social media isn’t important but staying plugged in to my community is. Solutions in service of core human values create purpose, which is the only sustainable currency in today’s marketplace.
Success is no longer measured by shareholder value or pure profit, alone. Everyone is an innovator. The leaders of tomorrow are placing empathy and compassion at the top of their resumes. This critical tectonic shift begins with a collective demand that technology and commerce serve humanity—and the journey begins at the intersection of purpose and innovation.
Over the past few years, China has embarked on a policy of informatization, which seeks to introduce ITs into all aspects of social and economic life. Ambitious plans on the use of big data, blockchain, artificial intelligence promise a better future and continued development for the Chinese nation. Moreover, China is increasingly playing a global role as a technology leader. These efforts are often met with criticism or even fear in the Western world, yet to what extent is this warranted? This keynote will address how China’s leadership sees the world and the role of technology in it, how the ambition of plans has met with reality thus far, and what can be learned from China’s digital drive.
Instead of a utopian future in which technological advancement casts a dazzling, emancipatory light on the world, we seem to be entering a new dark age characterised by ever more bizarre and unforeseen events. The Enlightenment ideal of distributing more information ever more widely has not led us to greater understanding and growing peace, but instead seems to be fostering social divisions, distrust, conspiracy theories and post-factual politics. How have we come to this point – and has utopia gone forever?
Just 40 years ago, China had no brands and no market economy. Fast forward to 2019, China is the biggest e-commerce market in the world, three times the number of internet users than the US, and by far the largest and most sophisticated users of mobile payments.Known for being copycats, China’s tech industry is now being copied. Chinese internet giants (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) and its super apps have transformed consumer lifestyle and business models. Some of these smart applications have been copied by major global players.
A former robo-dancer, computer scientist, and choreographer, Christian is the founder of Waltz Binaire, a creative studio that specializes in the intersection of art and technology. At NEXT he will show how art will help us to understand artificial intelligence and human nature.
Our universe is bizarre. Why is most of the cosmos composed of mysterious dark matter? Why is the Higgs boson so strange? Why do atoms exist? The hottest-and-latest in physics suggests that the biggest puzzles of science could be elegantly solved if our universe were one of a possibly infinite number of parallel universes. But is this a testable scientific idea, or eternally speculative? How do we talk about what’s outside our universe? Join Dr James Beacham, of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, as he explores the edges of knowledge, including CERN’s plans for a colossal Future Circular Collider, and how the future of science, technology, and innovation will be much wilder – and much more collaborative – than we can imagine.
Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, CEO of TwentyThree, is presenting his talk 'The Copenhagen catalog'
A 12-month, 40-city technology and music tour which presents Imogen Heap’s vision for a future music industry, while bringing to life Mycelia’s Creative passport – a blockchain based digital identity standard which empowers music makers to connect their digital self and personal works. Imogen shares the progress of the tour as she meets music makers and shapers working to better seek, acknowledge and reward creators through transformative technologies and creative partnerships. Highlighting how innovations such as Distributed Ledger Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality have the potential to change the lives of music makers, this tour is on a mission to connect the dots, helping to set the framework for a fair, vibrant and flourishing music industry.
John Watton from Adobe is presenting his talk with the topic ‘Humanising customer experiences with AI'.
Joseph Lubin founded and co-founded several companies including the Swiss-based Ethereum, a decentralized cryptocurrency platform. With his latest company ConsenSys, Lubin’s aim is to develope the next stage of the Internet, which he refers to as Web 3.0. In this conversation we will find out why Lubin thinks Blockchain technology could be the cure for the “old web” and a way to get back control over our data.
The profound otherness of computation presents radical opportunities for new ways of being in the world. How might being or becoming computational offer new potentials for the ways that we cognate, observe and calculate the world. How are the categories and definitions we’ve laid down over the modern history of humanity change if we embrace a computational reality devoid of obtuse boundaries and old power structures? In taking technology away from narratives of efficiency, productivity and consumption we open up opportunities for new, sublime, even spiritual ways of being, if we can only imagine them.
We are living at the beginning of a necessary bureaucratic revolution – challenging the ideological roots of modern society – from sovereignty to the very notions of public & private.
Indy Johar will share these conceptual underpinnings & frameworks behind Dark Matter Laboratories work around the world – with world class organisations from the Greater London Authority to UNDP
Artificial Intelligence will be an omnipresent part of our near future. But where does the hype end and the reality start? How do companies prepare for AI-technologies in the making, and how do they make use of them in an ethical and responsible way? We will discuss these questions with Virginia Dignum, Associate Professor on Social Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. In her work she focuses on value-sensitive design of intelligent systems and multi-agent organisations, in particular on the ethical and societal impact of AI. Recently, she was appointed to be on the EU’s AI High-Level Expert Group. The Group will have, as a general objective, to support the implementation of the European strategy on AI. This will include the elaboration of recommendations on future AI-related policy development and on ethical, legal and societal issues related to AI, including socio-economic challenges.
Our world is made of information that competes for our attention. What is needed? What is not? We cannot interact with our everyday life in the same way we interact with a desktop computer. The terms calm computing and calm technology were coined in 1995 by PARC Researchers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown in reaction to the increasing complexities that information technologies were creating. Calm technology describes a state of technological maturity where a user’s primary task is not computing, but being human. The idea behind Calm Technology is to have smarter people, not things. Technology shouldn’t require all of our attention, just some of it, and only when necessary. How can our devices take advantage of location, proximity and haptics to help improve our lives instead of get in the way? How can designers make apps “ambient” while respecting privacy and security? This talk will cover how to use principles of Calm Technology to design the next generation of connected devices. We’ll look at notification styles, compressing information into other senses, and designing for the least amount of cognitive overhead.
We all want to fix digital. But if we want the next wave of technologies – AI, VR, robotics and more – to shape a better future, we need to understand where they are leading us. The way to do that? View these transformative technologies through the lens of our age-old, evolutionary human nature. In this fast-paced session TrendWatching’s Global Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin, argues that the coming wave of digital technologies will transform the search for connection, status and belief in the 21st-century. New trends in lifestyles, behaviours and mindsets will mean huge opportunities for innovators – and huge new challenges for us as individuals and societies. Are we ready?
More than an innovation platform for brands, digital is becoming a survival tool for consumers. So more and more it’s been helping people to solve their daily problems – especially in remote markets. Eco Moliterno, Chief Creative Executive Officer at Accenture Interactive for Latin America, will show how digital can go far beyond advertising and will show examples for digital fixes in countries like India, Peru or Bolivia.
Our smartphones don’t know if we are having a good day or a bad day. Our cars could care less about compassion. Our home assistants are barely aware if we are shouting in frustration or just joking around. Technology is developing more IQ, but it lacks EQ.
At the same time, technology’s hidden operating system seems to move between emotional extremes, from moral outrage to ironic distance. Empathy is on the wane, and technology might be partly to blame. We are feeling new feels that we can’t only express through artful combinations of gifs and emojis. The emotional struggle is real and yet designers and developers try to dial back technology to neutral. It’s time to take as much care with the emotional layer of technology, as we do with the functional layer. Here’s why.
Technology is radically insufficient for the emotional spectrum of our lives. As much as technology designs our way of being in the world, it’s redesigning our inner lives. And the best experiences make us feel a little bit of everything. As technology becomes deeply integrated into every aspect of our daily lives, people will expect more emotionally intelligent interactions. In this talk, Pamela will look how a future with feeling translates to a future we might want.
During the duration of the event Mario Klingemann will set up his Uncanny Photo Booth in the NEXT Networking Hub at Copper House. There, he’ll invite everyone to have their portrait taken through the eye of an artificial intelligence. In this art installation faces will be deconstructed and then regenerated by the machine in strange and surprising ways.
Data and machine learning offer ways for businesses to better serve their customers, understanding and anticipating their needs to build more user-centered services, automate customer service, and support sustainable human-centric cities. Dr. Khanna discusses the potential of AI to help companies re-imagine their products and to employ machine learning in a way that is innovative but also ethical.
HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE lays out solutions to the greatest ills of our digital age. I argue that we have five tools for these fixes: regulation, innovation, consumer choice, citizen engagement and education. These solutions are real world and come from countries as diverse as Estonia, India, Singapore and Germany.
NEXT speaker Jamie Bartlett on the 'Dark Net'. Powered by NEXT Premium Partner nextMedia.Hamburg.
NEXT speaker Nandini Stocker on speech technology. Powered by NEXT Premium Partner nextMedia.Hamburg.
NEXT speaker Tricia Wang on 'Digital sucks'. Powered by NEXT Premium Partner nextMedia.Hamburg.
NEXT speaker Ame Elliott on the interface between user experience and data security. Powered by NEXT Premium Partner nextMedia.Hamburg.
Watch this interview with James Williams, Writer and Researcher at the University of Oxford.
While the rest of us worry whether smartphones are ruining a generation, Generation Z is quietly and resourcefully inventing a more human future for technology. Creative, clever, and always connected, the cohort of kids born 1995-2015 known as Generation Z, promises to recast everything from community to privacy, from work to culture. And more than anything else, this generation of digital natives is evolving with technology as the foundation of daily life. Grounded in data from hundreds of online research sessions, diaries, and interviews, learn about some of the surprising attitudes and behaviors of Gen Z and discover the ways it will change how we design the next generation of technologies.
Jamie takes us deep into the digital underworld and presents an extraordinary look at the internet we don’t know. Beginning with the rise of the internet and the conflicts and battles that defined its early years, Bartlett reports on trolls, pornographers, drug dealers, hackers, political extremists, Bitcoin programmers, and vigilantes–and puts a human face on those who have many reasons to stay anonymous. Rich with historical research and revelatory reporting, Jamie’s keynote about the Dark Net is an unprecedented, eye-opening look at a world that doesn’t want to be known.
In this session Mark Curtis, Fjord’s Chief Client Officer and Thomas Müller, Fjord’s Head of Design + Innovation in Europe, will examine the critical role of conversation in a world where the choice of media channels and formats is increasing, while the truly available attention window continues to decrease. Brands need to increasingly look to AI in order to master the art and science of the conversation with personality, tone and true relevance at scale. Key Takeaways:
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The importance of mastering conversation for brands
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The implications for conversation in a world of AI + digitisation of everything
This sessions contains:
Lily Kollé – How Minimalism Will Improve Your Design Process
As the designers of digital products and services, how can we ensure we are contributing great design to the world rather than clutter? We follow a “design process” to guide us yet there are inevitably unforeseen challenges from clients, employers, and technology which distract us from the user. Including a minimalist design approach in your process clarifies thinking about the user’s core objectives, which interactions are essential, and experience above features.
Lily Kollé shares the philosophies of designers who embrace a minimalist approach and shows how they have guided her own process when designing for user experiences. This talk will explore methods of great design from the past and how it can inform our practice as designers today.
Ame Elliott – No, Thank You: User Experience Design for Privacy
New technologies, such as Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence applications, are collecting and using our personal data in unclear ways with unknown consequences. The traditional approach of treating information security as purely an engineering issue is an inadequate response to the challenges of protecting our personal lives and civil society. User experience design – including interaction design, brand strategy, copywriting, and user research – has an essential part to play in building systems people trust. This presentation highlights emerging challenges and gives practical examples of how user experience design contributes to a more private, secure, transparent, and ethical future.
Followed by a fireside chat together with Monique van Dusseldorp, Lily Kollé und Ame Elliott.
The early web was founded on optimism: a belief that digital technologies could unlock a new age of undreamed of freedom, self-expression and personal empowerment. But today, that early spirit of optimism has been hijacked by Silicon Valley mega-corporations and TED talk utopians, who have turned it into an ideology that is helping them amass vast, unchecked power. In the opening keynote at NEXT17, TrendWatching’s Global Head of Trends and Insights, David Mattin, makes the case for a new model of optimism and technological progress. And, via compelling examples from startups and brands, shares his thinking on how digital innovators really can help make the world a better place in 2018 and beyond.
From Star Trek’s Computer to Jarvis and Samantha, Sci-Fi has promised us a world integrated with seamless voice interactions – where speech technology is synonymous with artificial intelligence. Yet, our current reality has a lot of catching up to do. Does anyone doubt that we’ll get there eventually? What’s slowing us down? This multi-media presentation will explore these gaps and identify what’s getting in the way of realizing such a fantastical future.
The talk of Samuel West uses the stories of the exhibited items as a backdrop to explore the theme ‘Learning from Innovation Failure’. The main points are: acceptance of failure, improving learning from failure, and establishing a team climate of psychological safety in which it is safe to take meaningful risks.
Right now, there’s a fierce battle raging for your attention. Many of the technologies you use every day aim to maximize the amount of time and attention you spend with them. To win, they must increasingly use cheap tricks that exploit your psychological vulnerabilities. This results in an endless barrage of ‘persuasive’ designs — e.g. clickbait, auto-playing videos, or notifications — intended to ‘hook’ us and keep us tapping, clicking, watching, and scrolling for as long as possible. This produces effects in our lives that we tend to minimize as ‘distractions,’ or minor annoyances. However, the problems go much deeper than this. In the short term, these effects can indeed ‘distract’ us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can distract us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, to ‘want what we want to want.’ In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley lamented that the defenders of freedom in his time had ‘failed to take into account…man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In the design of digital technology, we’ve made exactly the same mistake. These ‘deep distractions’ pose major moral and political challenges that have so far been largely ignored. Understanding their dynamics, and better aligning technology design with true human needs and interests, is therefore an urgent task.
The exponential growth of Information technology empowers more people to participate from PC to the Internet. The large design, engineering and production infrastructure of IT products in Shenzhen will further the trend and allow more people to participate in the creation of smart hardware. The information technology runs on Moore’s Law which continues to double the performance/cost ratio in 12-18 months interval. The exponential growth has been one of the biggest drivers for disruptions in the past few decades from PC to Internet. And with each disruption, it brings more people into the participation in the creation of applications of the technologies. Shenzhen with its large design, engineering, and production infrastructure of IT products will drive the next shift.
Bruce Sterling is so much more than a sci-fi author. He is a journalist, critic and futurist. Expect insights, rage, questions and call to action from the man who is regularly featured in Wired or at SXSW. We are looking forward to his thoughts on this year’s NEXT theme ‘Digital Sucks’ and are looking forward to his predictions on the European tech business ten years from now, when today’s hot technologies are as hot as trends from back in 2007.
In this fireside chat with Lars Trieloff, who is responsible for Adobe’s AI programme Sensei, we discuss some of the challenges and implications that pervasive artificial intelligence brings to product designers, users, and consumers of AI-enhanced digital experiences. We will discover:
• Why AI will be in every digital product
• Why the best AI is invisible
• Why we can’t help but to anthropomorphize our digital assistants
• Where the uncanny valley lies and how to get out of it
• Why AI product designers fear nothing more than FUD and your gut
• and what it really means that “data is the new oil”
Blockchain is the driving force of the next generation Internet, also referred to as the decentralized web. It allows us to decentralise trust, creating the basis for a P2P society powered by auto enforceable smart contracts. Smart contracts on the blockchain disintermediate transactions and radically reduce transactions costs. The promise of blockchain has therefore been to challenge centralized, top-down decision-making through auto enforceable code, decentralized control and radical transparency.This talk will give an insight into use cases and potential implications of this new technology.
Jamie will take us inside the strange and exciting worlds of the innovators, disruptors, idealists and extremists who think society is broken, and believe they know how. From dawn raids into open mines to the darkest recesses of the internet, Radicals introduces us to some of the most interesting and important movements today: the US Transhumanist Party, far-right groups seeking to close the borders, militant environmentalists striving to save the planet’s natural reserves by any means possible, libertarian movements founding new countries, autonomous cooperatives in self-sustaining micro-societies, and psychedelic pioneers attempting to heal society with the help of powerful hallucinogens. He will discuss the prospects for these new political movements, why they are growing now, and whether there is anything the mainstream can learn from them.
10 years ago, we founded NEXT Conference to spread the gospel about the digital revolution, a revolution that transforms marketing by shifting power to the consumer at an ever-increasing speed. Ten years later, we’re happy to announce:The 2016 jubilee edition has been a blast! Thank you all for making this year’s event so special.
Talk by William Bao Bean, SOSV & China Accelerator
China accelerator William Bao Bean says that we're underestimating the huge business opportunity in Asia - but it's a different ecosystem, and you need to behave differently. Learn more.
Talk by Stepganie Rieger, Yiibu
Stephanie's presentation introduces you to fascinating and innovative services that are re-shaping the web to serve the consumers of tomorrow. Driven by mobile, the power of personal relationships, and the breakneck pace of globalisation, these services provide a glimpse into the business models, opportunities and challenges we will face, when growing a truly global web.
Talk by Tamara Gaffney, Adobe Systems
Is there anything that would better prepare marketers for this very challenging and ever-changing new world? Tamara Gaffney shows some of her findings and explains how every company can do marketing that is useful and how marketers can do better.
Panel about Product Design
Jeremy Abbett, Jason Cale, Lisa Lang, Martin Oberhäuser and Golden Krishna explore which methods, tools and tricks they use to understand our behaviour and how we all can design products, we want to use every day.
Talk by Brian Solis, Altimeter Group
The best-selling author, digital analyst and anthropologist and influencer, Brian shares his insights around what really makes an experience “an experience,” why and how our favorite brands create experiences and how to become an experience architect in all you do.