The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagining possibilities of what the future could be. And if there was ever a time we needed such imagination, it is today.

“The imagination creates the future,” writes Lewis Hyde, professor and author of the book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World .1

we are losing our capacity to “conceptualize a tomorrow that [is] radically different from our present.

As futurists we look for signals—small, often weird things. They are usually new technologies, new behaviors, new narratives that don’t fit into the mainstream, but that are often precursors of important transformations. We then try to discern the larger patterns that these signals herald to understand where they might lead ten or more years down t