When Futuring and Data Analytics Collide - Public Health Dorset
When Futuring and Data Analytics Collide

Wednesday, Week 8:
Public Health Dorset’s Shaping Tomorrow Website
I blogged about our work in Healthy Places Futuring with the Shaping Tomorrow organization last year, but their tools are developing so fast I have to reacquaint myself with the page layout every time I log in just to keep up! Slow down guys! Sorta kidding — it’s great to see such development.
My visit to our site this week, revealed one particular change that got me thinking – has Futuring just collided with Data Analytics?
Our Challenges
This is a section of our website where we set out a number of areas that we expect might pose challenges to population health in our area in the future. Up until this week, we basically had a list that their AI, Athena, produces from a few search terms we’ve suggested.
In the image at the top of this blog, you can see the challenges that we monitor, e.g. Healthy Homes — because we are interested in what the future holds for ‘healthy homes’.
What’s of interest here is not how the tool is no longer a static list of links to lists of insights. For example under our Smart Cities challenge at the moment, a few recent insights:
This futures blog
This blog is about how we create ‘healthy places’ and what our possible ‘futures’ could be given current trends and momentum within society, the economic and political systems, and the environment. I use the plural ‘futures’ intentionally, because our future is not pre-determined (I hope), we can and should work towards the future we want. This blog aims to generate discussion (maybe even some debate) around ‘Healthy places futures’ in the hope that if we all put our minds to it, a collective vision may emerge, which would inform any strategy we might put in place to get us to our preferred future. We’ll be leaning on heavily on futuring tools found on our Shaping Tomorrow hosted website: phd.shapingtomorrow.com.
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed (William Gibson 1993).