Welcome to week two of your forecasting skills course, and this week is where forecasting skills get really fun to grow and experiment with because you've got some of the basics down and now we're going to do it at a higher level and get a little more complex with our forecasts. You may have noticed this jar of jelly beans over here. I always bring jelly beans to class when we get deep into the more complicated future forecasting skills because it's a reminder that while forecasting is based on evidence and there's a lot of data and science and rigor involved, it's also meant to be a really creative process and that we should have fun and play with because creativity allows us to come up with forecasts that surprise people. So I'm here to tell you that signals and drivers are essentially just like jelly beans, and not just any jelly beans but my favorite type of jelly bean which you may have encountered before, jelly belly jelly beans. If you've ever had a bag or box of jelly belly jelly beans, you may have seen recipes on the back that tell you how to combine the flavors of the jelly beans into new complex flavors that don't exist in a single bean. So for example, one of my favorite jelly belly recipes, I happen to know that if you take a two blueberry jelly beans, and one lemon, and one butter jelly bean and you pop them all into your mouth at the same time, it is suppose to taste like a hot buttered blueberry muffin, and I can tell you, it does, it's true. There are literally hundreds of recipes and you can pop different flavors in her mouth and experience something bigger than just one bean, and that's what we're going to do with signals and drivers. Because every signal and driver that you find, it has its own flavor and it produces a different feeling when you think about it. It might be curiosity or excitement or delight or anxiety. When you pop these different feelings and flavors together into your mind at the same time, they can create a more complicated idea that doesn't exist in just a single signal or driver. To show you how this works, I'm not going to eat the jelly beans actually, I'm going to eat the future by sharing with you a few signals that suggest a few drivers and share with you one of the forecasts that I'm working on right now, that comes as a result. So here we go. The first signal is a new technology called 3D printing for food. Now, you may have encountered 3D printers in other contexts, and 3D printers instead of using ink to print words or pictures on a page, they use physical materials to print everything from new computing components to physical objects to things we can even build houses or cars out of. Now we have the material to print food using the same technology. You can put different nutritional components, different food coloring, different flavor components into the printer. You can 3D design foods and objects that do not exist in nature that have never been eaten before and you can make these beautiful weird-looking, fun-tasting food objects just by plugging in a recipe into the printer and it comes printed out on the other side. So that is the signal. Another signal comes from some research that our food lab, did here at the Institute for the future, and we've seen other people picking it up and replicating it as well, which is that you can actually use virtual reality to change somebody's taste perception or how their taste buds perceive food that they're eating. For example, you can convince them that they are eating juicy chicken instead of tofu or you can convince them they're eating an orange instead of a grapefruit and not only has this been tested in labs but individuals are taking it up as a challenge to prototype systems that could help them eat healthier. I found this signal just last week. Actually, somebody at a virtual reality hackathon decided to prototype a system that would allow him to eat healthier and he was literally replacing french fries with carrot sticks in virtual reality. He could see, feel the french fries but in reality he's eating carrot sticks and he actually reports that he was able to trick his brain and other people's brains into enjoying the food almost as much as they would enjoy, a real french fry. Pretty interesting. Another signal that I am very excited about but also slightly anxious about, which is always with a good signal you shouldn't have multiple feelings about it is something out of virtual reality lab at Stanford University, Jeremy Bailenson Virtual Reality Lab. They created a cow simulator. In virtual reality, you get to be a cow, you crawl around on the floor which is a haptic-input floor. So as you crawl around, it moves your cow avatar around the virtual reality space and you get to enjoy being a cow and seeing other cows and eating grass and looking up at the sky, and then the simulator slowly lead you out of the field, out of pasture towards a slaughter house and that is the end of your virtual reality experience. So w hat's interesting about this signal is that they ran some research and found that people who participated in the simulation went on to consume less red meat in the two weeks after the experiment even though they had not been asked to do that. The researchers asked them lots of questions about how much they exercise and how much they were drinking and the red meat was just one of the questions, and it turned out that they were eating less red meat. So this idea that virtual reality could be used to change our eating behavior in other ways, maybe by giving us more empathy perhaps for the animals that we would otherwise eat. Then we're seeing environmentalists advocate for new information on food packaging that in addition to seeing the nutritional information such as the calories and the fat content or the vitamin content that we should see carbon footprint content. So what is the carbon impact of that cheeseburger that you're eating? What is the environmental cost to it? People are advocating to have this information on every food item we purchase just the way we have nutritional information today. Let's combine these flavors of the future, all of these signals, see way drivers they suggest and what forecasts might bubble up as a result. You've got 3D printing which can event food that we've never seen or even before, you've got virtual reality being used to change food perception and eating behaviors and you've got a desire to change people's eating behaviors to have a lower carbon footprint as well as to eat healthier. So we add all these things up together. What are the drivers that we're seeing? Well, one driver we're seeing is that 3D food printing will be allowing us to create food that's never existed before, and this might make food imbued with a sense of discovery and curiosity and creativity. So maybe we're moving towards a future where we have this renaissance of discovering new food together. We're seeing the driver of people wanting to reduce the carbon footprint of their food, so moving towards a future where we are more conscious of the carbon impact of our food and actively making an effort to reduce it. We have the constant drive for people wanting to make healthier food choices so they can maintain their health and be in better shape, and then we have the driver of virtual reality being used to change food perception and food sensations. So combine these altogether and what forecasts might we come up with. Well, here's a forecast that I think describes a future that we are likely to experience. I call this future, yes, you can play with your food and this feature describes a world in which we all play with our food more. Here's how I would describe it. In 2029, virtual reality technology will be common in cafeterias and restaurants as a way to indulge in favorite foods and live out our food fantasies while eating more healthfully and more sustainably. Meanwhile, 3D printers at home will bring the fun to nutritious sustainable eating like Lego or Minecraft for cooking. Once you have a forecast like this, then you can start to combine it with topics of interest and see how it might play out in different domains. I'm going to throw up on the screen a really interesting set of ideas for innovations from a company called ProjectNourished which is a startup company in California that's taking very seriously the idea that in the future we might use virtual reality and augmented reality to play with our food more to achieve a variety of mental health and physical health goals, everything from weight loss to allergy and diabetes management to what will eat in space when maybe we're all traveling to Mars in the future. So take a look at that and when you're done, I'll see you in the next video to do another demonstration of how we can combine flavors in the future into a really intriguing forecast.
