Back to the F**kture

Our new Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Martin Raymond and Devon Powers discuss why forecasters failed to spot Covid-19.

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Martin Raymond talks to Stefan Liske and Adrien Hobt from the PCH Innovations studio about Changing Matter, (https://changing-matter.org) their recently launched transformation catalogue. PCH Innovations (https://pch-innovations.com) is a multi-disciplinary innovation s...

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Martin Raymond talks to Ryan Lanji (https://www.instagram.com/ryanlanji/)  a queer curator, dj, club organiser, archivist, influencer and all-round Instagram personality with his own show and a pretty massive following. In this episode, we talk about Hungama (http://www...

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Martin Raymond caught up with long-time forecaster and entrepreneur Henry Coutinho-Mason, who has just left his job as managing director of TrendWatching.com to become director of content strategy with Brent Hoberman and his team at Founders Forum (https://ff.co/) , Euro...

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month we speak to Cat Tully, the founder of the School of International Futures. Cat has extensive experience as a practitioner, helping governments, civil society and businesses to be more strategic, more effective, and better prepared for the future.  For Cat Tully, decodin...

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Martin Raymond speaks to Bas Van de Poel, ex-creative director and visionary behind Ikea’s famed Space10 design and innovation lab. Bas Van de Poel describes his new venture, Modem – co-founded with fellow designer and creative director Astin Le Clercq – as an office fo...

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Martin Raymond speaks to Ariane van de Ven, a French trend forecaster and cultural analyst. Ariane works with Fortune 500 companies, organisations and brands around the world to help them set up their first trends and forecasting departments and programmes. In this epis...

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Martin Raymond speaks to Ozlem Tuskan, founder of the conscious female coaching and entrepreneur accelerator The Resilient.  She has launched her own academy and private business coaching programme to help brands tackle future challenges and create winning brand strategi...

Our Back to the F**kture series asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. In episode 9, Martin Raymond speaks to sociologist, columnist and author, Ana Andjelic to discuss how we should look to prioritise solid cultural growth. Ana specialises in strategy and has worked for some of Fortune’s top 500 brands, she was recently appointed as chief brand offi...

In the final episode of season one of our Back to the F**kture podcast, The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond spoke with artist-curator, art director, editor and writer Georgina Johnson. Georgina has previously worked with the V&A, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, Now Gallery and Ace & Tate. She founded The Laundry Arts in 2017, a platform centred ...

Welcome back to the second series of our Back to the F**kture podcast, where we ask renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. In the first episode of series two, The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond speaks to Belgian forecaster Herman Konings. Herman Konings is author of seven books, studied theoretical psychology at the University of Leuven, and ...

In the second episode of season 2 of our Back to the F**kture podcast, Martin Raymond speaks to Victoria Stoyanova, strategist by trade and connector at heart. Victoria recently founded Institute of Belonging, a studio exploring the generative power of networks, designed to bring people together to experiment, play, learn and co-create. In this episode, we discuss the power of networking. For ...

In this episode of our Back to the F**kture podcast, Martin Raymond speaks to Harry Jameson, performance coach and personal trainer to athletes, celebrities and professionals, and columnist at The Times. Harry is also the founder of RAIN, a luxury CBD home and body balm range, and his latest company Pillar Wellbeing, which focuses on what he refers to as ‘the three guiding pillars of Synchroni...

In the fourth episode of season two of our Back to the F**kture podcast, Martin Raymond speaks with techno-optimist Bethany Koby-Hirschmann about the importance of a healthy relationship between children and technology. Beth is the co-founder of Tech Will Save Us (https://www.robocube.co.uk/collections/tech-will-save-us) , and founder of FAM (https://famstudio.co/) , the family inventions stud...

In the fifth episode of season two of our Back to the F**kture podcast, Martin Raymond speaks with innovation-seeker and author of The Serendipity Mindset, Dr. Christian Busch, about the importance of having an open and curious outlook. Dr. Christian Busch is a globally renowned expert in innovation and serendipity and director of the CGA Global Economy Programme at New York University, also t...

In the sixth episode of season two of our Back to the F**kture podcast, Martin Raymond speaks with futurist, retail strategist and designer, Ibrahim Ibrahim, to discuss the emotional membership consumers can have with brands, the future of blended retail spaces and connecting online and offline data to shape tomorrow’s businesses. Ibrahim Ibrahim is managing director of Portland Design, a mult...

Our Back to the F**kture podcast series, hosted by The Future Laboratory's co-founder Martin Raymond, asks renowned thinkers to put foresight predictions under the hindsight spotlight. This month Adrien Hobt and Dev Mishra from the PCH Innovations (https://pch-innovations.com/) studio return to discuss the power and spirituality of science and technology in tackling issues of the climate crisis...

In this episode of our Back to the F**kture podcast, The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond speaks with Dr Catherine Nakalembe, Africa programme director at NASA Harvest, scientist, remote sensing expert, a machine learning specialist, and winner of our Futures 100 Innovators Awards. Catherine currently uses drones, satellite data and the latest AI technologies to map the impacts of e...

In this episode of our Back to the F**kture podcast, The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond talks to the award-winning technologist and space architect Melodie Yashar about how her work on future Mars habitats is providing Earth-bound communities affordable, sustainable, low-carbon homes – and beautiful ones at that. Melodie Yashar, and her team at ICON, recently won Builder magazine ...

Scent is set to change the nature of health, wellbeing and self-care, according to Firmenich’s chief consumer and innovation officer Matteo Magnani, who speaks to The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond in this episode of the Back To The F**kture podcast. Matteo Magnani and his team are exploring how we can potentially enrich our presence in the metaverse via scent, use fragrance in ...

As we seek purpose at a time of continued global uncertainty, Your Brain on Art authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross join Martin Raymond on his Back To The F**kture podcast to discuss the science behind art, and the true power it has to heal and transform. Martin has know Ivy Ross for many years in her role as jeweller, artist and vice-president of design for hardware products at Google, while ...

In a world of fake news and hate-fuelled algorithms, entrepreneur Sue Fennessy discusses her new power-for-good platform, WeAre8, in the latest episode of Back To The F**kture with The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond. While many of us blame the stupidity and biases of right-leaning social media users for spreading fake news, the founder of ‘no-hate’ app WeAre8, Sue Fennessy, has a ...

Author, feminist and founder of the sober-curious movement Ruby Warrington chats to Back to the F**kture’s Martin Raymond, co-founder of The Future Laboratory, about why women without children isn’t an alternative choice, but a  mainstream reality, as 50% of women under 30 in the UK alone go without. Ruby Warrington pulls no punches when she writes and speaks. Her determination, like her prose...

Retail experience isn’t just about UX tech, but about understanding how we blend all touchpoints we have with the customer into a single, seamless conversation, as Quinine’s founder Ian Johnston explains to Martin Raymond in his latest Back to the F**kture podcast. Quinine Design’s Ian Johnston is a man with a mission – and it’s all about experience. Or should that read phygXperience, digUXper...

In the latest episode of the Back to the F**kture podcast, The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond chats with Rhona Ezuma, entrepreneurial founder of THIIIRD magazine, a multi-faceted platform that champions next-generation creatives from people of colour and Black, queer, trans and non-binary communities who are redefining our collective tomorrows through their work and lives. Tune ...

How can we use the power of everyday awe to prime innovation or create heightened levels of wellbeing? In his latest Back to The F**kture podcast episode with professor Dacher Keltner, The Future Laboratory’s co-founder, Martin Raymond, finds out. They discuss what produces awe and the subjective qualities of it, from a leaf falling from a tree and children laughing in duets, to light shining ...

Reluctant futurists is the collective descriptor used by Henry Coutinho-Mason and Rohit Bhargava to describe their current career trajectory. Their preferred term is near futurists since their work is invariably about a quest to catalogue and understand the implications of the biggest innovations on our lives today and over the coming years. The Future Laboratory’s co-founder and LS:N Global’s...

Design and experience strategy isn’t a top-down process for the privileged few, but a collaborative engagement along a narrative arc of surprise and transformation that changes audience and designer alike, according to The Experience Book authors Adam Scott and Dave Waddell, interviewed by The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond. The age of experience, as we learn in the latest LS:N...

It’s November 2019, and an associate of Scott Perugini Kelly suggests that he adds a World Health Organization pandemic preparedness paper to a brief he’s currently readying for the head of the department. But Kelly isn’t at all convinced, as he tells me on the latest Back to the Fu**ture podcast with Sally Washington. At the time, he muses, the subject seemed too fantastical, too far removed f...

Life is f**ked – then you make it happen. And this epithet seems to embody the life of Australian author, broadcaster and entrepreneur, Sarah Wilson. Not that her life has been fu**ed –if anything, the opposite is very much the case - but that her journey through it is a constant reminder to us all that when the chips are down the only person who can save the game is you. With, of course, a li...

As private membership clubs try to regain their privacy and mojo, on this week’s Back to the F**kture podcast The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond talks with hospitality entrepreneur Peter Cole about how they could go about doing it – and at scale. The problem with most private members’ clubs is that they’ve become too public. While luxury itself has returned to being gated, exclu...

‘Empathetic leaders,’ as she tells it, ‘see how others are seeing the world, understand why they are doing what they are doing, but crucially, they are doing it with them, feeling it with them, being it with them, so that they can understand ‘impact’ and consequence from their team’s perspective. That in itself unlocks a new kind of flourishing that no amount of top-down, old-style corporate le...

In our latest Back to the F**kture podcast, Beyond Luxury author and innovator Carlota Rodben discusses the future of luxury and emotion with The Future Laboratory’s co-founder, Martin Raymond. There are two great quotes at the beginning of Carlota Robden’s latest book, 'Beyond Luxury: The Promise of Emotion', which very much sum up luxury’s future, ‘what got us here, won’t get us there,’ and ...

According to the World Health Organization, good health isn’t ‘merely the absence of disease’, but ‘complete physical, mental and social wellbeing’. Dr Tasha Golden, my latest guest on Back to the F**kture, concurs. But – given the fact that she is a poet, songwriter, performer and storyteller, as well as a public health scientist – she takes this definition a step further. For her, aiming f...

In our latest Back to the F**kture podcast, Dr Susanne Etti talks carbon labelling and more collaborative and constructive ways to tackle the climate crisis through her role and work with sustainable travel group, Intrepid. Dr Susanne Etti and I hit it off straight away. For one, she lives in Melbourne – my favourite maritime city and skinny white provider, no challengers – and for two, she pu...

We’ve covered a lot about green cities and the rise of blue zone city districts on LS:N Global, but what if we have been too simplistic, judgemental and morally narrow in our approach and understanding that green is good and the concrete grey of the city is inevitably bad for our physical, spiritual and moral wellbeing? Professor Des Fitzgerald reminds me in our latest Back to the F**kture podc...

In the latest episode of Back to the F**kture! Jacynth Bassett, founder and CEO of global consultancy, community and campaign Ageism Is Never In Style, joins The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond to discuss reframing the anti-ageism narrative.

In the latest episode of Back to the F**kture!, Dr Knatokie Ford explores how Augmented Futures – a fusion of science, storytelling and futurism – can empower under-represented teens to shape their own success. In this conversation, we delve into our shared experience of imposter syndrome, the case for adding the A of ‘arts’ into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), the year 2034 an...

In the latest episode of Back to the F**kture!, Leila Fataar, founder of Platform13 (https://www.platform13.net/company) and author of Culture-Led Brands (https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Led-Brands-Resilience-Cultivate-Resonance/dp/1398619019) , explores how culture-led branding – rooted in real people and real contexts, not marketing gimmicks – can help brands remain relevant in uncertain times.

In the latest episode of Back to the F**kture!, Merlin Hanbury-Tenison – Cornish conservationist, army veteran and founder of The Thousand Year Trust, Britain’s rainforest charity – shares his journey from a blast in Helmand to recovery in a Cornish rainforest, and reveals the need for a deeper, more symbiotic relationship with nature.