Smart ageing

Extended, monitored and optimised life

People’s life expectancy may seem to perpetually extend without people knowing when death may come. Living with an ageing body will be a longer part of life, and therefore illness is even more problematic. People may dedicate more of their life to extending their lives.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we portray the proliferation of life-extending services. People may live for longer due to general improvements in medical science and through the success of specific scientific methods for the extension of life. Asthese services could likely be unevenly distributed, we will find some people in a state of perpetual life extension. We illustrate circumstances where although people will not live forever, people may find themselves in the unusual situation of having extended life plans rather than decreasing.

We also consider the blending of healthcare with wellbeing and an increasing association with human behaviour and lifestyle choices. The consequent targeting of behaviour change for prevention may allow non-traditional health providers to dominate the market and shift the power to the private sector with the use of advanced monitoring technologies to quantify all aspects of life and nudge people in the right direction.

The context that may emerge is an environment with a heightened focus on what people value about life  —Quality or Quantity?

We explore the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character who we created based on our research with real people.

What might that mean for Robert?

For people like Robert, their happiness is dependent on the capability of their bodies to allow them the life they want. We explore how services may evolve around these insecurities.

You have to stay on top of your body if it’s going to carry on working for you. Staying younger for longer also means staying older for longer.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Personal control

Devices quantify and measure all aspects of the people’s lives and body amplifying obsessive behaviours. People’s personal identity becomes more based on an idealised virtual version of oneself rather than your existing reality.

Dimensions of change

Work

Work becomes fluid, remote, unstable and performative The possibilities and challenges for working life continue to grow.

Robert retired four years ago after spending his career in the financial sector, having worked in London and New York with large and small companies. He grew restless after a few months of retirement as it made him feel old. He decided to purchase his first road bike, a Bianchi Specialissima. Riding began to give him knee pain, so he preventatively began to invest in platelet-rich plasma and bone marrow concentration injections. He talked to a doctor about knee enhancements. And he is enthusiastic about future health tech.

He finds his greatest happiness in cycling, which has become a mix of exercise and meditation. The rhythm is like a trance that lets him forget his worries. Life is too short to pretend to be someone else, and he has the power to choose who he is and how he spends his time. He is worried about the quality of the end of his life.

His goals

Robert’s goals are to slow down and pay attention to the moments that matter while also discovering new passions to explore later in life. He always aims to keep healthy and active, so he never becomes obsolete.

For Robert, his body is a means to lead the life he wants. He has to balance living how he wants to with living in a way that preserves his health.

Explorations in ‘Smart ageing

We explore the future in this scenario by looking for potential points of friction between this context of ‘smart ageing’ and the needs of someone like Robert. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or  spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘created the framework for future thinking’.
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01

Dignitime

Dignitime quantifies the life expectancy cost of all your actions and relates them to how happy they make you. Based on these choices, Dignitime can show you a score for how you value the time you have left. How would you decide between things that are harmful but make you happy and things that are healthy but make you less happy?

DigniTime can also predict health issues that might stand in the way of how you live and prepare you accordingly. When things go wrong, you can see how your priorities have changed over time and recommend alternative sources of happiness.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.
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02

Portal

Portal allows you to experience other people’s life experiences through VR and the people who live the experience for you.

Thanks to Portal, you can choose the person available in the area of your choice or the type of experience you want to live. You can subscribe to people’s channels or pay on demand. By paying more, you can influence how the person lives.

You can always become an ‘experiencer’ and earn money for living unique experiences for other people.

Team: The Lab

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Service Visions

Playground

Playground offers a digitally augmented realworld playtime aiming to enhance and encourage active imagination and defend a space for play in a cluttered world.
Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.
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Emerging topics

Through these explorations, we can foresee services that quantify previously abstract attributes of life, bringing new insight to people and allowing more informed decision making about the course, length and quality of their life. However, if such decisions can be made meaningfully, is there an inherent indignity in living a life so shaped by algorithms? Interesting characteristics may emerge based on people’s decisions to lead shorter, more intense lives versus longer, steadier ones. We may find new lines of conflict in our decision making. Rather than health vs happiness, people may derive happiness from a deeper connection to their health and bodies. The influence of these new capacities to decide may be dwarfed by the potential for these profound scores to reframe our perceptions of the value of our lives.

While some services may emerge to manage our behaviour and decision making other services may develop to offer alternative choices. Instead of living an experience that may have a high cost to your health, you live it through simulations,aising topics around how services will provide authentic yet simulated experiences. 

Services such as Portal extend the notion of ‘celebrity instagrammer’ where ‘Followers’ could live through the subjects they follow in far more real ways. Instagrammers are already guided by their followers. In the future, new relationships may emerge where people may prefer to experience or guide the subject’s event either alone or as part of a crowd.

These explorations portray services that may support or challenge how people balance their quality of life, and they also depict new ways to have experiences that may equally make us consider what we value in a quality life.

Related to ‘Smart Ageing’

Propositions

Yolt

Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Smart ageing

Extended, monitored and optimised life

Constant social media judgement could lead to extended states of anxiety, potentially making people attempt to perfect their outward appearance. Data could be collected against people’s will and without their knowledge, leading to further control over people’s behaviour.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we can foresee the continuation of emerging trends we see today. We can hypothesise that companies will find new ways to continue collecting more and more data from people to understand them better and encourage preferred behaviours. Their tactics to capture more of our time and data may harness increasingly sophisticated and hyper-personalised behavioural economic theory. The proliferation of social media and introduction of ‘social’ features in many services may mean that more of our lives will be lived in ‘social spaces’ where people may feel pressure to be present, perform and conform or potentially be judged or isolated. 

Some of these already emerging patterns have been linked to rising l anxiety levels among young people who may typically be more vulnerable to anxiety and social pressures already.

In some cases, we may even argue that increased anxiety may be used and exploited to gain data insights and demand more of people’s time (and potentially money). 

The context that may emerge is an increasingly digital social life structured to encourage judgement and pressure and facilitated by sophisticated psychological techniques. —all toward the benefit of tech companies.

We explore the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character we created based on our research with real people.

What might that mean for Jessica?

For someone like Jess, their happiness is deteriorated by constant social pressure, particularly focussed on her outward appearance. We explore how services may evolve around these types of insecurity.

I’m too young to worry about the long term implications of smoking, drugs + alcohol. The health decisions I battle are about right now… ‘come downs’ make me feel worthless and anxious, so I fix that by partying.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Personal control

Devices quantify and measure all aspects of the people’s lives and body amplifying obsessive behaviours. People’s personal identity becomes more based on an idealised virtual version of oneself rather than your existing reality.

Scenarios

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

As a college student, Jessica still feels that she doesn’t have a clear purpose in life. She is only studying because she thinks she needs to prove to the world that she’s smart. She lives under the constant shadow of anxiety and has consistently struggled with friendships and relationships. Her emotional state is heavily influenced by her Instagram and how she looks each day. She has struggled in the past with anorexia and is terrified of boredom.

Her happiness is associated with fleeting moments of pleasure to hold off anxiety while seeking emotional connection simply for the joy of feeling. She prefers activities that combat boredom and keep her body thin —sex, drugs, and partying keep her attention away from the problems she sees in the mirror.

Her goal

Jessica wants to perfect her image to avoid anxiety and move towards a healthier lifestyle. She also wants to discover new things to avoid boredom + help her find purpose to move from small moments of pleasure to longer-term happiness.

Explorations in ‘Structured Social Judgement

We explore the future in this scenario by looking for potential points of friction between this context of structured social judgement and the needs of someone like Jessica. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.
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01

Perfect friends

Perfect friends is a group of AI Agents that support your mental wellbeing with positive machine-learning-powered messages that model positive human interactions.

Perfect friends is the best place to complain as well as find support thanks to its different groups of ‘friends’.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

EQLS

EQLS is a digital space where people can speak to AI characters about anything they’d like. They help people learn about themselves and they help life get easier.

Find out how we ‘Conducted lab explorations’.
02

Diplomatic mirror

Diplomatic mirror is a mirror powered by AI that assesses your level of beauty based on aesthetic standards developed algorithmically to be ‘democratic’. It doesn’t only recognise your proportions and body mass, but it provides a rating of your beauty, highlights your assets and makes suggestions on how to look better.

Team: The Lab

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Service visions

Digital drugstore

Digital drug store is a store specialised in augmentation technologies that can be installed on or into humans. The range of options is ever expanding.
Find out how we ‘Crafted future service concepts’.
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03

Test Pilot

Test Pilot is an AI system that tries games and services and gives ratings on their addictiveness and potential for abuse. Thanks to its risk identification system, this AI service is able to try digital services and games, rate how much they are focused on addiction and provide personal advice based on your past behaviours and experiences about how best to use them.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Service visions

Relate

Relate divides your relationship needs into multiple categories so they can be fulfilled by different people that are matched perfectly and arranged for you.
04

Digitox

On Digitox you can find a support network of digital dieticians that help you manage your dependency on digital experiences. Giving access and control over your use of data and activity, professionals trained in psychology and captological practices will analyse your usage, your data and psychological status and provide you with personalised recommendation of therapies.

Team: The Lab

Find out how we ‘Visualised and prototyped’ Far future service concepts.
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05

Skai

Skai is a system where people can get personal recommendations on skincare products and receive tailored advice through AI chatbots. The scanner constantly monitors your skin condition and is analysed by specialists to give you insight into what helps and what doesn’t.

The app also offers a face simulation to help you know how a skincare product will affect your face and track how a skin condition could change through the use of a specific product.

Team:
Binhai Wang
Haoyu Jin
Huitong Li
Minkyeong Shin
Ruotong Guan

Emerging topics

Through these explorations, we can foresee a range of services that respond to the issue of anxiety in different ways. Some respond to support you and defend you against some of the more pervasive and harmful elements of services by educating you, drawing attention to bad practices and training you on how to use them safely. Other services may respond by solving the surface level problems and potentially cause more damage to the underlying problems. For instance, the need to improve your skin could be driven by a need for social acceptance based on your appearance. Therefore, while a service that constantly monitors and advises you about your skin may help improve your skin, your appearance and potentially your self confidence, it may also enable and empower your underlying need for acceptance of this nature, which may lead to anxiety.

There is also a third category of potential service that is slightly more ambiguous, like ‘Perfect Friends’. The idea of being dependent on artificial friends for emotional support raises fears about the potential for abuse and questions about how the nature of such  dependence may influence people’s social skills and characters. However, at the same time, the nature of conversational content could be enabling and responsible, or in other words, healthy. So, there may be potential within services that reside within this middle ground. Moreover, it could simply be that the delivery mechanism, ‘a conversation’ seems insidious when it is anthropomorphised and positioned as friendship.

What these explorations portray is the potential array of types of relationship we may have with our services that could pit themselves against each other and align themselves with you in ways that might seem uncomfortable to us now.

Related to ‘Smart Ageing’

Propositions

Yolt

Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Smart ageing

Extended, monitored and optimised life

Obsession with measuring everything that goes in and out of the body amplifies obsessive conditions. Personal identity becomes the virtual idealised (perfect) self instead of current physical reality. Devices measure everything and anything about people.

How the scenario could unfold

In this scenario, we can foresee a potential expansion of the quantified self. We already live in an era where our health and wellbeing is monitored based on everything from our eating and sleeping patterns to how much we run, exercise, medicate and increasingly even our genes and DNA.

As these data sources become more sophisticated, we may see the emergence of implants that can monitor and track our wellbeing, bodies, brain and even our thoughts. Alongside this potential trajectory is the opportunity for growth in technologies that allow us to build simulations of real places, cities, events and potentially people. 

These conditions combined imply a potential future where not only our health and wellbeing can be intricately and accurately monitored, but also the trajectories of our lives could be mapped, offering us new future scenarios of ourselves, which may  inform our decisions about our present lives.

We consider the significance of this context from the perspective of a future character we created based on our research with real people.

What might that mean for Maria?

For someone like Maria, their happiness is connected to their capacity to control the condition of their body and mind through their behaviours. We explore how services may evolve around people’s need for that control.

I track everything and identify my health patterns. My wellbeing is very important to my life, and I need to feel good about myself.

Jump to:

Scenarios

Structured Social Judgement

Constant social media judgement could lead to extended states of anxiety potentially making people attempt to perfect their outward appearance. Data could be collected against people’s will and without their knowledge and lead to further control over people’s behaviour.

Scenarios

Self expansion

People have augmented capabilities that boost their productivity and skills and can become working machines that produce non-stop. For them the line of separation between work and home may fade and financial success could simply allow the purchase of more skills in order to earn more money in a dangerous cycle.

Maria is a freelancer working for a few private clients as a consultant. She is highly invested in her health and wellbeing, tracking her daily caloric intake, sleep quality, exercises, and other health factors. She has an active membership at Soho House, Third Space Gym, and a brand new Colour Therapy Yoga Studio. She follows a strict morning and evening routine, even maintaining a shorter version when she’s on holiday. Technology is her ally to keep track of her health, but she also enjoys meditating in nature when feeling overwhelmed.

Happiness for Maria lies in the thrill she gets from achieving a goal. She believes that happiness derives from being self-aware and maintaining a healthy relationship with herself, so she maintains a strict life schedule and regularly uses yoga for  self-exploration.

Her goal

Maria wants to visualise and monitor her progress towards her long-term goals, and avoid costly, negative moments in order to be in control of her body, life and behaviour.

For people like Maria, their body and mind are vehicles that help them achieve the things they want in life. The easier it is to manage them, the happier they are.

Explorations in ‘Personal control’

We explore the future in this scene by looking for potential points of friction between this scenario of extreme personal control and the needs of someone like Maria. These explorations are outlines of services that act as emerging spaces for solutions or spaces to explore the problems and provocations elicited by the services.

Find out how we ‘Learned from extreme users’.
Read More
01

Digital twin

Digital Twin is a tool used to measure real life activities and create a virtual projection of what could happen if you behave outside your routine and patterns. By recognising someone’s actions and behaviours through AI-powered wearables, home sensors and spending, Digital Twin provides a predictive digital simulation and preview of your life in the future, should your behaviour persist. By seeing alternatives of your future self and comparing ‘future you’ with ‘future others’, you can make sure your decisions are based on the long term as well as the short term.

Team: The Lab

Jump to:

Propositions

Edit

Edit is a lifestyle service that helps you edit things in and out of your life through enriched tracking and mini-experiments.

Find out how we ‘Conducted studio explorations’.
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02

Eatopia

Eatopia is a platform with the mission to support individuals on the journey to plant-based diets by promoting a choice of healthy plant-based products over those containing a lot of sugar, fat, sodium and meat. Eatopia learns about users’ behaviour and brings that knowledge back to the food and beverage industry to improve its services. Eventually becoming a potential tool for local health promotion.

Team:
Mengdan Guo
Preedachanok Somprasert
Radim Pekarek

Jump to:

Propositions

Mymes

Mymes uses an understanding of people’s behaviour to create simulations of their future to help them make decisions and it distills different sides of their character to help them explore who they are.

Find out how we ‘Crafted service concepts’.
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03

Eidos

Eidos is a personal AI assistant that works with you to understand who you are and to create desired behaviour change over time. Using nudging, predictive, and peer-to-peer techniques, its data creates unique insight for users about how to change their habits. Eventually, it builds commitment and intelligent, highly personalised strategies toward users’ goals.

By:
Joshua Notley

Jump to:

Service visions

Dignitime

Dignitime quantifies all your actions in relation to their life expectancy cost and how happy they make you.

Emerging topics

In these explorations, we consider how future services may establish highly advanced methods for monitoring, analysing and guiding users’ health and behaviour. These services may bring a new level of agency to people’s lives. They can plainly see the impacts of their behaviours, plan alternate actions and overcome their irrational patterns of behaviour by replacing them with preferred rituals. This newfound visibility offers new insight and  a new mindset framed around managing your decoded, but irrational self.

The power of the insight from this level of data is potent. It brings a recurring discussion about the conflict between data used by us to enable our agency and data that is used by others to control us and remove our agency. However, inherent within some of these explorations, there are other opportunities to explore the value of interpersonal data trading, which means owning the value of your data.

Another emerging area of discussion from these explorations is the level of investment people may make in these personal mechanisms for behaviour change. With the promise of such high rewards and the option to experience high fidelity simulations of alternate future selves, people may become obsessed by potential versions of themselves and value less their current self.

The final question that may emerge from these explorations is – How might people balance the control of their lives (to reach a desired future self) with their engaged experience of the present day?

Related to ‘Smart Ageing’

Propositions

Yolt

Yolt is a community building app that orchestrates group meetings online and offline by matching people based on the potential quality of a conversation not simply based on being similarly minded.

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Propositions

Qualitime

Qualitime helps you track how everything you do influences your happiness and your life expectancy so that you can decide what is most important to you.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Body

Your relationship with your body may be under pressure, but you could have more capacity than ever to control it.

The forces acting on ‘Body’ in the future

Among the many forces influencing people’s relationship with their body in the future, we explore new ways to control your body and new ways we may feel pressured about them.

With the emergence of technology that lives in, on and around the body, we can foresee an ever growing capacity to monitor and analyse all aspects of our body and mind. This ability to understand ourselves in more quantified ways may alter how we make decisions about our lives and health, particularly alongside the notion that lifespans may be dramatically extended. There may be advanced tools and techniques to adapt and control people’s rituals, habits and behaviours.

We also observe potential scenarios where intensified and expanded forms of social media use sophisticated behavioural economics and catalysed social pressure to obligate people to live publically and share intimately. These new social pressures may amplify anxiety in those who are already uncomfortable with their body image. Is it possible that people will increasingly adopt a mindset where dominance over their bodies means being in harmony with them?

With these potential forces acting on people’s relationship with their bodies, we explore three hypothetical scenarios: Personal Control, Structured Social Judgement and Smart Aging.

01

Personal control

Obsession with measuring everything that goes in and out of the body amplifies obsessive conditions. Personal identity becomes the virtual idealised (perfect) self instead of current physical reality. Devices measure everything and anything about people.

Jump To:

Service visions

Eidos

Eatopia is a platform with the mission to support individuals on the journey to plant-based diets by promoting a choice of healthy plant-based products over those which contain a lot of sugar, fat, sodium and meat.
Find out how we ‘Explored the future landscape with the project client’.
Read More
02

Structured Social Judgement

Constant social media judgement could lead to extended states of anxiety, potentially making people attempt to perfect their outward appearance. Data could be collected against people’s will and without their knowledge, leading to further control over people’s behaviour.

Jump To:

Service visions

Perfect friends

Perfect friends is a group of AI Agents that support your mental wellbeing with positive machine-learning-powered messages that model positive human interactions.
Find out how we ‘Prioritised the societal dimensions related to health and happiness’.
03

Smart Ageing

People’s life expectancy may seem to perpetually extend without people really knowing when death may come. Living with an ageing body will be a longer part of life and therefore illness is even more problematic. People may dedicate more of their life to extending their lives.

Jump To:

Service Visions

Dignitime

Dignitime quantifies all your actions in relation to how they will reduce or increase your life expectancy and how happy they make you.

Recommended readings

Proposition Types

Relationship Facilitators

Creating and facilitating relationships through enhanced empathy and compatibility.

Proposition Types

Agency Enhancers

Developing a deeper AI driven understanding of yourself to influence your decisions and optimise for your happiness and prosperity.

Proposition Types

Self-Editors

Optimising and Editing yourself and your life to meet your personal criteria for success.

Would you like to know more?

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.

Let's Talk!

Let's find the place to think, the freedom to challenge and the capability to act on real change. Together.