Hello all! After much refinement (and excellent input from colleagues), we have distilled KedgeForward’s passions and protocol’s to their essence to show you – friends, colleagues, and potential clients. We look forward to partnering with you for competitive advantage, building creative processes, increasing product and service innovation, and mapping transformative pathways for your organization or social venture. What follows is Part 1 of 2:
Hi Everyone! Just a brief post to clear up any misconception about the launch of our new foresight consulting firm, KedgeForward. I realize that this site doesn’t do justice to our firm’s services, value-proposition, and approach for our potential clients. And, there’s a reason for that – it’s our company blog! You see, the KedgeForward website is forthcoming – as soon as possible – but we wanted to continue talking and sharing about our latest thoughts, ideas, and happenings while waiting for the official KF launch. Continue to enjoy until then. 
Just a quick update to let everyone know that we are alive and well, and hard at work to improve the offerings and services of KedgeForward. We will be adding new blog posts soon: The next enstallment of the “Holoptic Foresight Dynamics” series, the first installment to our work on “Emerging Cityscapes,” and more on our ongoing project entitled “A New Story for a New World.”
Plus, we want to thank everyone that participated in the SXSW public voting, giving a nod to our panel proposal, “Emerging Cityscapes.” Thank you one and all!
In the meantime, I’ve noticed that a very popular blog post from last year called “The Future of Halloween” is beginning to get a fair amount of readership again… it must be that time of year!
The Panel Picker public voting system for the South by South West (SXSW) conference opened today (August 17th, 2009) and runs through the end of day on September 4th. We (as in the panel members, listed below) have submitted a panel proposal for this year’s conference, and we need your vote!
The public vote counts for 30% of the total (the other 70% is made up of the votes from the SXSW Advisory Board and Staff), but has a huge impact on which panels and sessions get selected in the end, as the SXSW staff want to host the panels that the public wants to attend. As you can see, your vote is important!
Our proposal is entitled “Emergent Cityscapes: Designing Future Spaces for Human Development.” You can read all about it on the voting page, but a brief description nonetheless to wet your whistle:
This session will explore what architectural, technological, and social ideas are emerging that can lead to human-centric and evolutionary cities for the future, specifically covering rising trends and pathways in transformational city design.
The panel not only includes Mike Morrell and myself (KedgeForward), but is lead by Susan Isaacs (founding principal of Paragon Design Group) and Dr. Cindy Frewen Wuellner (architect, futurist, professor, and professional extraordinaire!) You can read their full bios in the comments section when you visit the voting page.
At KedgeForward, we have been working on 2 framework forecasts that will be available for conference, workshop, and client presentation when done: One on mega-trends impacting the future of cities, and the other on global and local generative food economies. Both of these forecasts have a direct tie-in to our SXSW proposal, and this issue is a major focus of our work at KedgeForward. We are very invested in this proposal, and would love for you to help us to spread the ideas and methods that it contains. (Humanity will thank you as well!)
Sign-up for voting only takes a few seconds, and then you just click on the “thumbs up” icon. Viola, you’re done!
P.S. In case you have never heard of SXSW, here’s the link to the SXSW 2010 site.
