Festival

FESTIVAL OF THE FUTURE

CALIFORNIA DREAMS - coming Fall 2012 – Silicon Valley

The start of 2011 sees California embark on an ambitious PR campaign to re-brand itself in effort to boldly go where no state has gone before, declaring the coming Decade of the Future and claiming the title, State of the Future. The zeitgeist-defining move catalyzes the popular imagination with an unprecedented solidarity and a singular vision of unity: a healthy, creative and prosperous future for CA, the nation, and humanity. The centerpiece: Festival of the Future – an annual celebration capturing the spirit of a New Future Age, one driven by foresight, innovation, sustainable solutions and proactive synergies.

What is the future of California? America? The planet as a whole? What type of world do we want? What legacy will we leave our children? Festival of the Future is an exciting new special event that embraces the full spectrum of those things that concern the world that we live in and the future we will create together.

California Dreaming…

Festival of the Future is a visionary exposition for firing the futurist imagination and serving as a cultural icon on which Californian’s and people from all over the world can fix their hopes for peace, prosperity and longevity. It will be a celebration where great ideas can be broadly promoted, proclaiming the arrival of a renewed future for California and beyond.

Festival of the Future provides an open forum for California to show off its most crowning achievements and innovative minds. As an integrated showcase of cutting-edge media, arts, design, entertainment, industry, culture, and technology, expect a fast-moving vehicle that touts California’s many accomplishments as well as a barometer of its optimism about the future.

As a cultural phenomenon that can play a significant role in shaping California’s and America’s global identity, Festival of the Future has the ability to excite the imagination, instill national pride, and stimulate the senses of people far and wide. As part of this process, we will make a simple yet powerful declaration that depicts our collective aspirations for the “place we call home.” A declaration that states: “California is recognized worldwide for its inventive spirit, its vibrant economy and its outstanding quality of life.”

Putting all of the state’s brainpower to work, Festival of the Future offers a dynamic platform for communicating California’s innovation and America’s ingenuity. As a stage on which human achievements are celebrated through imagination, wonders of enterprise, and concepts of a future that promise new and exciting benefits for all, Festival of the Future is an experience that will instill a new sense of belief and pride in California’s ability to shape a world that offers hope to people everywhere in the world.

It’s still a dream state. In fact, the pioneering megastate that gave us microchips, freeways, blue jeans, tax revolts, extreme sports, energy efficiency, health clubs, Google searches, Craigslist, iPhones and the Hollywood vision of success is still the cutting edge of the American future — economically, environmentally, demographically, culturally and maybe politically. It’s the greenest and most diverse state, the most globalized in general and most Asia-oriented in particular at a time when the world is heading in all those directions. It’s also an unparalleled engine of innovation, the mecca of high tech, biotech and now clean tech. In 2008, California’s wipeout economy attracted more venture capital than the rest of the nation combined. Somehow its supposedly hostile business climate has nurtured Google, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Facebook, Twitter, Disney, Cisco, Intel, eBay, YouTube, MySpace, the Gap and countless other companies that drive the way we live.

Why California is Still America’s Future by Michael Grunwald, TIME

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Breaking News

FESTIVAL OF THE FUTURE has just won the most popular vote category in the Institute for the Future’s California Dreams contest. On May 3rd, Mark Riva, along with four other contestants, will make a live presentation at IFTF in Palo Alto for the prestigious $3,000 Roy Amara Prize for Participatory Foresight.

More information coming very soon!

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Anticipating Worlds Fair 2020 SF Bay

FESTIVAL OF THE FUTURE draws inspiration from The World Exposition (Expo), also known as a World’s Fair, one of the world’s oldest international events and the largest gathering of people on the planet.  The last North American World’s Fair was The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition held in New Orleans, Louisiana 100 years after the city’s earlier World’s Fair, the World Cotton Centennial in 1884.

2020 is the next open slot available for an international exposition of the larger scale. As of December 2010, Silicon Valley seems to be the farthest along to put forth a bid since it has the support of former Governor Schwarzenegger. As a technology and creative capitol of the world with a diverse population, the region is ideal for a world celebration on the scale of a 2020 World’s Fair. Should the bid win – the Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) will pick the winner at the end of 2012 – the world will be coming to Moffett Field, specifically to approximately 450 acres of the NASA-owned property in Mountain View, literally next door to Google Inc.

If successful, World Expo 2020 would be California’s first time to host the event since 1940. One wrinkle, however is that the US withdrew from the BIE in 2004 because of unpaid dues. It will take an act of Congress and a $33,000 check to get back in. The Bay Area Council, which has pushed for the expo bid, is currently working with Congressional representatives and the U.S. State Department to reinstate the U.S. as a contributing member.

• Expo 2020 USA
• Expo Bids 2020
• 2020 Worlds Fair
• USA Pavilion 2010
• The World’s Fair Museum
• The World’s Fair Community
• Expo 2020 USA on Facebook
• 2020 World’s Fair on Facebook
• A World’s Fair look into the Future
• Bureau International des Expositions
• California to Bid for World Expo 2020
• Wikipedia’s list of all the World’s Fairs
• Silicon Valley bids for 2020 World Expo
• Silicon Valley Maps Strategy for 2020 World Expo
• Proposed Site - an artist rendering of Moffett Field
• Proposed Site – see the current site on Google Maps
• Exporting Architecture: The Rise and Fall of U.S. World Expo Pavilions

Recent Expos

Expo 2010 was China’s first world’s fair held in Shanghai from May 1st to October 31 2010. The theme “Better City, Better Life” focused on urban and environmental themes. It was the largest expo in history, eclipsing the area of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Nearly 200 countries participated, one of many world’s fair records. This Expo was the impetus for the Bay Area’s bid effort after a local delegation traveled to China to see it.

Expo 2012 will be held in Yeosu, South Korea. It will be a smaller “recognized” exposition lasting just three months. Yeosu beat out competitors Tangier, Morocco and Wroclaw, Poland.

Expo 2015 will be in Milan, Spain and Expo 2017 will most likely to be held in Belgium or Kazakhstan.

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About the California Dreams Contest, courtesy of IFTF

INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE ANNOUNCES CALIFORNIA DREAMS:
A CALL FOR ENTRIES ON IMAGINING LIFE IN CALIFORNIA IN 2020

Put yourself in the future and show us what a day in your life looks

like. Will California keep growing, start conserving, reinvent itself, or

collapse? How are you living in this new world? Anyone can enter,

anyone can vote; anyone can change the future of California!

California has always been a frontier—a place of change and innovation, reinventing itself time and again. The question is, can California do it again? Today the state is facing some of its toughest challenges. Launching today, IFTF’s California Dreams is a competition with an urgent challenge to recruit citizen visions of the future of California—ideas for what it will be like to live in the state in the next decade—to start creating a new California dream.

California Dreams calls upon the public look 3-10 years into the future and tell a story about a single day in their own life. Videos, graphical entries, and stories will be accepted until January 15, 2011. Up to five winners will be flown to Palo Alto, California in March to present their ideas and be connected to other innovative thinkers to help bring these ideas to life. The grand prize winner will receive the $3,000 IFTF Roy Amara Prize for Participatory Foresight.

“We want to engage Californians in shaping their lives and communities” said Marina Gorbis, Executive Director of IFTF. “The California Dreams contest will outline the kinds of questions and dilemmas we need to be analyzing, and provoke people to ask deep questions.”

Entries may come from anyone anywhere and can include, but are not limited to, the following: Urban farming, online games replacing school, a fast food tax, smaller, sustainable housing, rise in immigrant entrepreneurs, mass migration out of state. Participants are challenged to use IFTF’s California Dreaming map as inspiration, and picture themselves in the next decade, whether it be a future of growth, constraint, transformation, or collapse.

The grand prize, called the Roy Amara Prize, is named for IFTF’s long-time president Roy Amara (1925-2000) and is part of a larger program of social impact projects at IFTF honoring his legacy, known as The Roy Amara Fund for Participatory Foresight, the Fund uses participatory tools to translate foresight research into concrete actions that address future social challenges.

PANEL OF COMPETITION JUDGES

Gina Bianchini, Entrepreneur in Residence, Andreessen Horowitz

Alexandra Carmichael, Research Affiliate, Institute for the Future, Co-Founder, CureTogether, Director, Quantified Self

Bill Cooper, The Urban Water Research Center, UC Irvine

Poppy Davis, Executive Director, EcoFarm

Jesse Dylan, Founder of FreeForm, Founder of Lybba

Marina Gorbis, Executive Director, Institute for the Future

David Hayes-Bautista, Professor of Medicine and Health Services, UCLA School of Public Health

Jessica Jackley, CEO, ProFounder

Xeni Jardin, Partner, Boing Boing, Executive Producer, Boing Boing Video

Jane McGonigal, Director of Game Research and Development, Institute for the Future

Rachel Pike, Clean Tech Analyst, Draper Fisher Jurvetson

Howard Rheingold, Visiting Professor, Stanford / Berkeley, and the Institute of Creative Technologies

Tiffany Shlain, Founder, The Webby Awards
Co-founder International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences

Larry Smarr
Founding Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), Professor, UC San Diego

DETAILS

WHAT: An online competition for visions of the future of California in the next 10 years, along one of four future paths: growth, constraint, transformation, or collapse. Anyone can enter, anyone can vote, anyone can change the future of California.

WHEN: Launch – October 26, 2010
Deadline for entries – January 15, 2011

WHERE: http://californiadreams.org

About the California Dreaming Map, courtesy of IFTF

California has always been a frontier—a place of change and innovation. From the gold rush to the rise of the film industry, from the free speech movement of the 1960s to the emergence of Silicon Valley as an engine of innovation, California has reinvented itself time and again.

Perhaps this is why many of us find ourselves asking: Can California do it again? Today the state is facing some of its toughest challenges. And its future will be crafted from our responses to these challenges—as individuals, as organizations, as communities. We can already see signals of some of these responses as we scan the California landscape. They point to very divergent futures, to alternative scenarios in which we come face-to-face with what we value.

This map is an invitation to explore the future worlds that are already emerging today in California. It’s a tool to tackle, head on, the big questions facing the state. It’s a chance to think about the alternatives, to compare and contrast scenarios that provoke us to think in new ways, to ask better questions and engage in important conversations with our neighbors, our colleagues, and our community leaders. Perhaps most important, it’s a way to reinvent ourselves as 21st century Californians.

Take a tour of California’s landscape-in-the-making. Grapple with one or more of the big questions. Imagine your day in one of the future scenarios. And then take your next step—it may be the first step toward building the new California dream.

The work is the result of a workshop with multi-disciplinary experts and is being published in collaboration with California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS).

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Other initiatives inspiring Festival of the Future

• TED
• Future Everything
• Conference on California’s Future

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More information coming soon to the forthcoming Festival of the Future.com

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Are you called to play a role in some aspect of this vision or have suggestions?
Please contact Mark Riva at 323.383.4049 or thefuturelounge@gmail.com

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