Centre for Strategic Futures

Cracking the Personality Code: Past Predictions, Present Insights, Future Moves By Wang Jieying Why are humans obsessed with personality tests? As Aristotle put it, “knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom”. The yearning to understand and to be understood by others is a powerful emotion that has both captivated and frustrated humans, and the fascination with personality tests is an indication of the human desire to peel away and reach the layers of our core. Let’s dive into the past, present and future of personality tests. #blogpost #personalitytypes #personalitytests

The Centre has had a productive few years since Singapore emerged from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021. In keeping with our mission to support the Singapore Government’s efforts to navigate an increasingly complex and unpredictable world, the Centre has continued to develop insights about the future and communicate them to a range of audiences, as well as to build up foresight capability across the Singapore Public Service.   Foresight 2024 is now available for download here: https://lnkd.in/gZh3fpSY #centreforstrategicfutures #foresight2024

Futures Tools to Envision a Post-Growth World By Harper Chew In this essay, I propose the use of futures thinking as a tool to defy the inertia of the present and assist us in imagining better, alternate futures. While it is commonly associated with businesses and governments anticipating and preparing for uncertain futures, these tools can be repurposed to help activists, communities, and individuals imagine and create alternate narratives and action plans. This essay will examine how three key futures thinking methods – deliberative visioning, back-casting, and the three horizons framework – particularly through the rising movement of post-growth. #blogpost #foresightmethods #futuresthinking

Non-Linearities and Futures Thinking By Joel Nee In 1980, McKinsey projected that the US cellphone market size in 2000 would be 900,000 subscribers. The actual eventual figure was 109 million, roughly 100x larger than predicted, with 900,000 new subscribers to global cellphone services every three days. When experts get it wrong to the extent of several orders of magnitude, it is instructive to ask, “Why?” More importantly, how can we try to not get it so wrong? #blogpost #nonlinearities #statisticalmodeling #signals #forecasting

Seeing in an Age of Deepfake: Reflections From One Century Ago By Jevon Chandra To prepare for the distortion generative AI impresses upon our information landscape, we should know that the phenomena of image manipulation — that pictorial “truths” can be edited — is not at all new. Through a survey of several moments in art and media history, let us consider image manipulation practices from the turn of the last century, and think through the reflections they bear for our AI-inflected, image-inundated age. #blogpost #deepfake #imagemanipulation #imageinterpretation #arthistory #mediahistory

I learned a lot from Ling Ling Chew’s work on this topic while she was with us at the Centre for Strategic Futures - thanks for opening my eyes to a whole new world!

Memoirs of a Homemaker By Harper Chew This blogpost is the second of a two-part series on tech-bio, featuring a short work of fiction where we explore what the future might look like through the diary entry of an introspective homemaker. #blogpost #techbio #fiction

From Biotech to “Tech-Bio” By Harper Chew Tech-bio is an exercise in applying bits onto atoms as technology seeks to manipulate and redefine biology through both hardware and software solutions, giving us a new understanding of biological data and techniques allowing for the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems. This blogpost is the introduction to our two-part series on tech-bio. In this first part, we will be looking at the key innovations that enabled the shift from biotech to tech-bio, and how these can be applied in the biopharma world. #blogpost #techbio #biopharmaceuticals

“Prudish” Generation Z and What It Means for the Future By Fuad Johari It is almost taken for granted that the young are much more progressive and left-wing, bringing with them highfaluting ideas about freedom and tolerance that may gall some in the older generations. However, in one particular instance, this liberality may not necessarily be true at first glance. Are the younger generations bucking the trend and bringing back Victorian sexual mores, where an exposed ankle more than titillates the mind? #blogpost #genz #relationships #generationaldifferences

The Importance of Having Range in a Wicked World By Lim Yun Hui Everyone knows the famous phrase (or insult) “Jack of all trades, master of none”. For a long time, society has been telling us that specialists triumph over generalists. What most fail to recognise is that the full quote actually reads: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but often times better than a master of one”. It often puzzles me that many have conveniently forgotten about the second half of the famous phrase. #blogpost #wickedproblems #interdisciplinarity