 So, in addition to being the head of the Center for the Future of Libraries, I'm the only person at the Center for the Future of Libraries. So, you know, it's an interesting thing. When we were talking through what we wanted to talk about, you know, sometimes people just want to hear about the trends and the signals and other indicators for the Future of Libraries. But I think one of the really interesting things that we've learned over the process of developing this Center and really thinking about how we can be helpful for the Future is that libraries have a really strong asset that perhaps other futurists or foresight professionals don't consider or don't factor into the processes that they use. And it's become really apparent that our values are central to developing our futures. And so that's kind of the direction that I wanted to take part of this presentation today. And maybe we'll tease with a little bit of some of the foresight and futuring stuff, but we're going to kind of try and dig into a little bit more of the values piece. So, the fundamental thing for thinking about the future is that foresight is fundamentally about the study of change. Futurists and foresight professionals will start every conversation they have about thinking about the future with this idea. That it's really not something where we need to spend hours alone in a room studying and producing a singular report. It's not something that we need to delegate out to just the director of a library or just certain people who are well versed in technology or whatever the capacity may be. They say that thinking about the future is really something that all of us can engage around. It's something that we activate from wherever we are within the library, whether we're on the floor at a branch library, whether we're working in administration, whether we're out on the bookmobile learning about things. It's just a simple process about activating our minds to really notice things that are changing in our communities. The key for this is that we have to think in terms of not only the changes that are happening inside the library, but also the changes that are happening outside of the library across lots of different sectors. It can't solely be a focus on the future of the library. We really have to think about the future that the whole world is encountering and what they're happening, what's happening for them. So they will say that we can learn a great deal about the future by looking at what is happening now, and that's something that any one of us can do. This is Marcia Ray, and she does a really nice job of kind of summarizing this future's thinking. She says that foresight is thinking ahead to how trends, issues, and developments that can be observed in the present are likely to shape alternative futures. That's that simple summation. Start noticing the changes that you experience. She says though that we kind of have to engage around three steps after we start taking note of trends and changes. We have to ask ourselves, what are the key forces that are shaping the future? In the same way that as information professionals, we prioritize certain information resources and say, this is a really good source of information. And this source of information perhaps is questionable or indicative of other changes, but perhaps it doesn't have the authority or reliability or dependence that we want to put on other things. In the same way, we need to look around at the trends and changes and say, these are really key trends and changes for the work that I'm doing in my library, for the community that I serve, for the vision that I want to pursue. And perhaps there will be trends and changes that we take note of but that don't fit into the immediate needs that we have for our work. And it's OK that we take note of them, but we don't need to move on them. We don't need to feel pressured that we have to move in so many different directions. Prioritize the trends and changes that you see. She also says we need to think through what might be their possible outcomes. As we take note of a particular trend or change, try and tell or develop a reliable story behind that trend or change. Something that is somewhat believable about if that trend or change really accelerates in the world, could you convince one of your colleagues, a member of the public, someone else about where that trend might lead you? And also think in terms of combining some of those trends. If you find two or three trends or changes that you really take note of, can you combine them into a really robust narrative that starts to tell a story of five or 10 years in the future that isn't so far fetched that you lose people, but it's wild enough that it's kind of intriguing to them? And then she also says we have to think through what implications could they have for the learning and actions that have to happen in the present. If all we do is study trends and changes, we really aren't doing futures thinking. We're just taking note of things. We really have to use this trend scanning and change noticing to actually drive changes in our organization. I sometimes think of it in terms of my own habits around books. So I'm a librarian at heart, so I end up buying and acquiring a lot of books. And I encountered this moment six or eight months ago where I looked on my bookshelf and realized that 80% of them have not been read. And so I'm kind of like, oh, all I'm doing is acquiring these things, but I'm not unleashing their potential value. And so I kind of stopped and took a moment and said, I'm going to actively read through this bookshelf. I'm not going to continue to acquire these things without a plan to put them into use. And in much the same way, trends and changes, we need to do that. We need to say, OK, I notice this trend or change I need to think through. What does it tell me about how I might need to reconfigure the space that I work in, the service that I offer? Maybe it tells me something about the future budget needs that we'll have. And perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to confront is that it will tell us something about the new skills and abilities that we need to acquire or learn or develop. And that's really hard when we confront something and say, I really don't know anything about this topic, but we need to find a way to dive into it or find our other colleagues to join us in that. So that's all futures thinking. Let's take a look at another group. So this is from Skift. And Skift is a market research firm that focuses on travel and tourism, kind of far afield from libraries. They're monitoring things that happen with orbits and Expedia, but they're also looking at what different airlines are doing, what hotels are doing, everything in that travel and tourism sector. And they have a manifesto that they published. And I'm reading through the preface of this manifesto and I run across this line. And it just struck me as so essential to what we want to do. All I did was everywhere they mentioned traveler tourism, I subbed in the word libraries. And so they say they do what they do because they want to be fanatically focused on the changing consumer behaviors across all sectors, not just libraries, whether because of digital tools or globalization or other generational factors. The future of libraries will be defined by leaders who understand the larger context in which libraries operate, not by naval gazing. And this is, I think, absolutely true when we think about the best libraries that we know, the best library administrators that we've worked with and worked for, or even the library innovators that we really appreciate and admire is that they find a way to do this. They find a way to bring the external context into the work that they do and they match and align their work to them. I went out to lunch the other day with this mentor who's now retired and she asked like what am I doing? And I explained our little process and she goes, oh, everything old is new again. And I'm like, thanks a lot. That really makes me feel great, but I was also caught. It's true. I mean, this isn't new to us. I think the best of our services are built on this model. I often think of our work in outreach services and I remember those really great outreach librarians that go out into their communities and spend time observing and listening to the needs of people. And then they come back to the library and with their librarian colleagues, they talk through, well, what did we learn through that process? How do we adapt our services to make them relevant to the needs of our users right now? So the user experience context that Luis was just talking about. But in right now, especially with so much change happening, it can't be delegated to just one group. It's something that all of us need to do in a really fundamental way. I mentioned that the weird thing that I started to note is that the thing that we have that a lot of futurist and foresight professionals kind of skip over. A lot of them work for industry. They work for Ford or they work for a technology company or someone else and they're really focusing on trends in terms of how they market and how they develop new products to maximize user and consumer interest. We're not doing that. We're not here for popularity and profit. We're here because we know that libraries serve a fundamental purpose. The work that we do is guided by a set of values. We stand for access. We create a civic commons. We provide creation and expression. We support democracy. We advance discovery. We're focused on diversity. We believe we're fundamental to education. We stand for intellectual freedom. We're foundational to literacy. We create a sense of place that people need so much in today's world. We're committed to preservation. We secure privacy. We engage in public discourse and we're here fundamentally for service. We do the things that we do because we're guided by these values and these values serve us well because they've helped us advance through lots of periods of change, not just the period of change that we're encountering right now. So what we really wanna do is think about, as we look through these trends and changes, how do we fit our values into those? How do the values play into that idea of trends and change? Whenever I talk about values, I've started to think about this quote from Charles Landry and he wrote this book called Cities of Ambition. Landry's an urbanist and so he works with really high-functioning cities around the world and observes and studies those cities that have really defined themselves and become admirable around the world as examples of where people wanna live. And he says that the best cities start with values about what is important to them in the longer term. On this basis, they establish principles they are truly committed to that guide their actions. They can't be too obvious in their values. Statements no one would disagree with gain little traction. The wish needs a compelling narrative attached to it. He says that if you look at places that have ambition, what they have been able to do is pivot and make a compelling statement about very specific values. And I know all of that field of values is really important to us and it's fundamental to driving a lot of the work that we do. But I also think to some of the libraries that have really started to define themselves and I noticed that they make a specific investment in one of those values above all others or a network or cluster of two or three of those values and they start to realize how they work together. In Chicago, I think often about the reflection that our libraries have pivoted to start to look at the individual needs of the user. So they really are about reflecting user interests in their libraries. And we see that in the You Media program that was developed for teens and young adults to come in and follow interest-driven learning activities that produce new media. I also think see it in something as simple as CPL's awareness campaign that talks about all the different types of people that are welcome at the library. Discoverers are welcome, fan fiction people are welcome, everyone's welcome. They try to create that platform. I think about the Fayetteville Free Library in upstate New York that's really focused on community-based peer-to-peer learning wherein they provide a platform for neighbors to come and learn from each other. I think about Cleveland Public Library and how they've pivoted to really emphasize their idea of the people's university. So they're putting one ambitious vision of their values first and foremost to make things happen. I think libraries of the future will realize that we have to manage our work in a world of inbound change, change that is happening to us, that we are going to look around and try to figure out of all the trends and changes that are happening, how do we make sense of that? Whether it's new demographics, new information formats, new technologies, new user needs, new economic realities, new environmental changes, new political and government landscapes. I think we're all going through that right now. We're gonna look at all of those inbound changes and we need to filter through those values and say, okay, how do we use our values to create and reflect a new outbound change so that we take the best elements of those trends and changes, we use them to advance our values and we push those back into the community in a new and different way that's very reflective to them where they understand the sources of our innovation. In the same way we may encounter inbound change that is negative or detrimental to those values and we will create outbound change that actually shows our positioning against certain trends in our world and says the library will help us navigate around these difficult times, around these negative elements so that we continue to progress as a country and culture. So my work ends up focusing a lot on organizing this trend and change information if you visited our website. The bulk of the content resides in this trend collection that we have. It's this and actually a little bit more that's a little outdated but it fits nicely on the slide. So basically what I try and do is figure out, okay, what are some trends that might have relevance to libraries? My boring job is to document how the trend is developing. The really smart work, the great work happens when library colleagues and our advocates and partners start to chime in and say, this is why it matters. And so our coverage of every trend defines the trend specifically, documents how it's developing and then starts to connect it to all of those values. How will these trends affect what we do? How do we punch at all of these trends and say what does it have to do with access? What does it have to do with children's services? What does it have to do with diversity? What does it have to do with any one of a number of things? And that's where the work starts to happen. With the rest of today, I wanted to talk through some of the trends specifically and then also take a look at some of the work that I've started to hear from different colleagues when they start to innovate around these trends with a very specific focus on values. We spend a lot of time talking about demographic trends and I think that that's useful because it's one of the most apparent realities that we can confront. We know that our communities are changing. We are all individuals. We bring a unique context to this world and we know that it's becoming more apparent that people identify in very specific ways and changing language about how they represent themselves. One of the earliest trends that we took note of was this idea of aging advances. Right now, we know that our population, especially in the US and other westernized nations is getting older. We have more people living well beyond age 65 and living very active lifestyles. Demographers start to note that by 2050 it could be one in five adults would be age 65 or older. That's a significant change for our cultures. This image on the left is actually an adult playground in the United Kingdom. I love the woman with the yellow headband. Like, I want to be her in my soul. But we start to see more and more cities and governments starting to invest in these sort of very active, intentional efforts to engage older adults and ensure that they remain mentally and physically healthy well beyond their retirement age because we know that modern medicine and other features are gonna allow people to live longer and we want them to continue to contribute to our society. At the same time, we're starting to see a trend in recognition for emerging adults or new adult categories. Some of those terms are controversial, but it's probably the best language that we have to use for it. And these demographers start to take note and say that perhaps we need to readjust some of our concepts of how people develop through specific life stages that traditionally we have thought that people were babies and children and then we recognized a unique period of development in the teenage years and adolescent years and then kind of everything else was an adult period and then when the boomers really started to take off we recognized this older adult category. But demographers are starting to say, well, what if somewhere in between from age 18 to 28 there's a unique life stage that starts to happen? A lot of this was driven by the economic downturn in 2008 and a recognition that some of the hallmarks of adulthood it was taking individuals longer to achieve those. The traditional hallmarks of adulthood have been completing school, getting a job, moving out of your house, getting married and having children. And certainly in an economic downturn a lot of people deferred graduation from college to help defer some of those loans and avoid a very constrained marketplace. With that in place they couldn't find a job as actively. Perhaps they then could not find a home of their own and continue to live with their parents. And certainly if you're living at home your dating life isn't as robust as it could be so you don't get married and that also delays the child rearing years. The weird thing is that brain development and brain psychologists and brain scientists started to look at the decision-making patterns of this category and they also recognized that during this 18 to 28 period people take a little bit longer to make decisions. They factor in different influences into their decision-making. And perhaps it isn't just that it's economic circumstances perhaps it's actually how our brains are wired, how our psyche exists. So there's these two kind of things that are happening. I do this exercise where we kind of have people look at trends and connect them to specific values and propose an innovation. And at one of the activities I did the individuals picked this aging advances and emerging adulthood trends and they put them together. They didn't quite know where they were gonna go with it but when they reported out it's gonna sound silly. They said this was at a suburban library outside of Milwaukee. So it was kind of a smaller community and somewhat geographically isolated I guess. And so they said that what they were gonna do is propose a weekly program wherein for an hour or two hours they would have a room within the library that was only available to emerging adults and older adults. And those communities would have to come together and do co-learning together in intergenerational programming. And we've heard a lot about intergenerational programming so I thought okay this is good. But as they talked through it they certainly mentioned elements of education as a value and diversity as a value. But they really honed in on the value of the Civic Commons of libraries responsibilities to have people from different perspectives confront each other in very intentional ways. And they noted that there are fewer and fewer spaces available in public where people from different perspectives can really come together and meet each other. And that really struck me that they took an ambitious stance around that Civic Commons idea and were adamant about it. And I kind of went back to Chicago and I thought and I opened the newspaper in Chicago and saw that Chicago Public Library has actually proposed three new branches that will be built into the city's affordable housing units. So two of them will actually go into low income housing units and one of the new branch libraries will go into an older adult housing community. The Department of Public Housing and the Chicago Public Library were actually quite adamant in the reasons behind their doing this. They said what they really wanted to do was find ways for young families that are moving into Chicago to be drawn into dialogue with communities that are traditionally isolated because of economic or other social reasons. They had to figure out a way for us to bring people together and they saw the library as the fundamental unit that does that. From children's story time to any one of a number of activities, we know families come into our spaces. How do we make sure that we use those to decrease social isolation and increase dialogue across communities? So I thought that was really interesting. I'm gonna talk about drones first because curated kits wasn't on my radar until a little while ago. So drones I think is something that we've all started to think about, especially as Amazon and Walmart start to look at drone delivery as a means of transporting goods to consumers. And I think most of us are more aware of the movement of aerial drones as a means of delivery. But quietly, Starship Technologies, which is the maker of this little guy based out here, I think they're in Redwood, I was at Redwood City and they talked about this guy. So it's a wheeled autonomous robot that kind of delivers goods around cities and communities. In Florida, Virginia, Ohio and Idaho, these guys have already been legalized for use on all city sidewalks and crosswalks. So they can actually start deploying these vehicles wherever they are to deliver any one of a number of things. They're mostly being used to transport food but certainly as we talk about these things we can see that this would be a great way to send materials to homebound patrons, individuals who don't wanna come into the library, whether they're home schoolers or something else, providing those books and making them available via drones. At the same time, we're starting to see this movement towards curated kits on Birchbox and Blue Apron and other types of things that are really marketing their services not only in terms of convenience, saying we'll package and give you the discovery and delight of having a monthly opportunity to open this box and experience new ingredients or new beauty products but they also emphasize the chef curated element or the beauty curated element. They're emphasizing the level of expertise over those boxes that normal people might not have that we all don't have the time to explore these new recipes and ingredients or we don't have time to follow all the beauty bloggers and other types of things. So they're saying we'll replace that service for you. So again, in one of my activities, I think, I had sent out the card deck and people started sifting through these trends. They quickly picked up on the drones. This was a group of mostly public librarians who started talking about drones and as they talked through their idea, they said, you know, we'll have robots use an algorithm to box books of certain types of interest to users and everything and then drones will deliver them and they got really into this and everything and as they kept talking about it, they kept coming back and referencing, it's like Birchbox, it's like Blue Apron, it's a subscription service that people will be delighted by. It's all of those things and they talked through all the elements, the values of access, the values of convenience, the values of service but what the value that they really focused in on was trust and curation. That libraries and librarians especially, we are considered highly reputable when it comes to our trustworthiness. People believe in the work that we do, they know that we're experts and they also believe that we know the best materials for them to discover and find and so the innovation that they were really staking out wasn't based on ease of access, it wasn't based on the technology, it was based on the value that we've already built through our service, that idea that we know some really good ideas for you to explore, let us unleash those on you in sort of an easy means of discovery. I look a lot at restaurants, retail and hotels, this gets me in trouble sometimes but I like it anyway and I'll tell you why I think sometimes it gets me in trouble. I think sometimes it's difficult for us to consider for-profit ventures as having a value or having something to tell us about the work that we do. We kind of distinguish a certain layering of the dignity of the labor that different groups do and I think that that can sometimes be dangerous and one of the examples that I often point to are these two movements around fast casual and experiential retail. Fast casual was one of the early trends that we started to identify, it's from our restaurant colleagues. Within restaurants, the growing category, the ones that are producing revenue and actually expanding are fast casual restaurants. These are restaurants that are positioned in between fast food restaurants like McDonald's and casual dining like Applebee's, Chili's, anywhere that you have a waiter. And in between those spaces is this growing category that gives you an aspirational experience at relatively affordable prices. Easiest ways to think about them are Chipotle, Panera Bread Company, but even Elements of Starbucks. Fast casual has several hallmarks. They believe in counter service, low level counter service. You have a very direct connection to the people that are providing the service to you. You order at the counter and you have a certain degree of customization over what experience you have. You tell people the ingredients that you want in your burrito, in your salad, whatever it may be. They invest heavily in glass and transparency. They believe strongly that customers and users should be able to see directly into the restaurant and see everything that's happening in them and even see into their kitchens and other preparation areas so that they have a direct ownership of the experience that they're developing. They invest in a lot of flexible furniture. You can easily rearrange furniture in these spaces so that it can accommodate you and your laptop, you and your family, you and the social gathering or network. And they really don't care if you rearrange that furniture. They want you to stay for a long amount of time. They also invest heavily in technology. They were among the first restaurant categories to introduce wireless technology for internet, charging stations, deliberate intentional charging stations where they wanted things conveniently located so you'd have power and even into wireless charging stations. And especially into mobile apps. They wanted to provide a space where you could have your loyalty program on your card, you could do order ahead, order ahead of time, and you can, of course, pay without cash using your phone. A lot of this is driven and motivated because what they want you to do is spend a lot of time in their space. They're doing that to maximize profit in a lot of ways and every one of those steps along the way was focused on that element. They want you to see other people working in that space so you get the idea that you can take your laptop there. They want you to be able to rearrange your chairs because then you'll stay long past lunch to actually embark on the afternoon or something. They want you to log on to their wireless networks because it will keep you there longer but also they can push promotions to you. Your mobile app starts to tell them your behaviors and helps them push different promotions to you as well through that mobile app. In a lot of ways, I don't think they're intentionally doing this but they're infringing on the traditional third spaces that libraries, parks, and museums have always upheld. Unfortunately, they're not doing it for the benefit of citizens and users. They're doing it to maximize profits. This trend is bleeding over into retail in big ways. I was at a couple of presentations earlier this week and I showed that image, just a hand touching a computer screen and people immediately knew where that was. What store is that? All right. So Sephora is one of the few retailers that has grown since the recession. They're actually surviving as other stores are closing and moving out of malls, Sephora is expanding rapidly. And part of the big thing that they've done is they pivoted away from the idea that they're just a store where you buy a lipstick or other beauty products to your a store where they're a store where you learn about different beauty applications. This picture is actually from their tip concept store. Tip stands for teach, inspire, play. That really irritates me that they've hit on those ideas so deliberately. This specific kiosk is built so that you can actually take an image of your face. It'll take a picture of your face. It'll overlay specific beauty products on top of that so you can see how different products would actually affect your appearance. And then at the end of playing with that and kind of being inspired, you can actually download the instruction, the application instructions to your phone or other tablet. So you take that with you and continue to learn after the fact. We know that they do a lot of demos and other types of things in their spaces. So they're really moving in that direction. This lower picture is Angela Arendt at the Apple event a couple of weeks ago. And she's the senior vice president of retail for Apple. And she made note that the biggest Apple stores are now going to be called town squares. They're moving towards this idea that they're not just transactional around laptops and iPods and any one of a number of their devices. That they're going to become places where kids can go after school and learn coding, where families can come and do homework time. There will be performances in their spaces. This again, I'm not happy with this. I don't think that they're intentionally trying to compete with libraries, but they're competing with libraries, I think. They know that we have very strong connections to our communities and they know that if they can build that same type of brand allegiance, they will maximize their profits. And everybody's doing it. I just saw the story the other day about Toys R Us, which filed for bankruptcy, is going to proceed with their plans to install augmented reality games in their stores because they want to create an experience beyond just coming in to buy stuff. They want kids and families to come in and almost do a Pokemon Go type thing within their store. It's because they know they have to sell more than this. Anytime I talk about these things, people innovate around lots of different ideas, integrating technology, whatever it may be, but this really emphasizes the importance and centrality of place for our future work, that we have to create really strong senses and identities of place. And it really emphasizes that it can't just be a physical place, it has to be a well-designed aspirational place that people want to go, that is active and well-programmed, that keeps people interested and invested. And as I went around and saw lots of libraries this past week, I was amazed at the buildings that have been built that really create that sense of pride for people, that reinforce the idea that yes, we're doing this because it's a public good, but we're also doing it because it's aesthetically pleasing because we know how to program a space, we know what we're doing in these active learning environments. So keeping an eye on that I think is really important. Two more, autonomous cars are one of those things that I never made the connection to for libraries. We think of them so centrally about just transportation and ease of driving, but an 1843 magazine cover story started to talk about how Ford and a lot of other automobile manufacturers are investing heavily as they're developing these autonomous cars, the driverless systems and the technology behind them, they're also radically rethinking what happens in the interior cabin of the car. And most of their focus is on information and content because they believe that with the time displaced that we normally spent driving, that users will now use those spaces for study, for work, for pleasure reading, for whatever it may be, and they're investing in computerized dashboards and touchscreen digital outlays, audio and other types of speakers, sensors, desks, any one of a number of things. And that really made me start to think like how are libraries starting to think through how we will make our services available in these sort of driverless cars. At the same time, these aren't driverless cars, but it's this growing concept that we have around clustering certain pop-up features together. So this is a pop-up food truck festival that people just quickly programmed in their space and made available, all these food trucks kind of convened. Whenever we talk about autonomous cars, there's a lot of conversation around how these devices will make it much easier to aggregate a lot of different vehicles together to provide an immediate point of need or point of service. So whether it's emergency recovery services or anything else, any kind of mobile maker space or a mobile library or something, it could easily start to happen. We start to see trends in the economy like the sharing economy where they're growing platforms where people have accessible use of different services and goods. Some of them for-profit, some of them for public use. We see this screen, this is of course the Lyft app showing where different cars are and how you request a specific Lyft. I think the sharing economy gave libraries a lot of hope and it continues to give libraries a lot of hope that our users are starting to pivot away from an idea of strict consumerism to really starting to see the value inherent in sharing different services and maximizing use and being responsible consumers. We were kind of sharing before sharing was cool. I think the challenge that we're running into is that sharing economy folks do sharing a little differently than we do. I was at a conversation with some sharing economy innovators in Chicago and they were presenting their different findings and one of them said about their particular innovation. They said that's why we had libraries past tense and nobody cared. I mean, I was the only one who shed a tear. But as they talk further about what they're doing it becomes apparent that what they really believe they're doing is sharing with technology to create an experience. Uber and Lyft, especially Lyft, when Lyft first launched the idea wasn't just that you got a car arrived. The idea was that you met a driver. You were supposed to fist bump the driver and sit in the front seat and build that connection. Mealsharing.com, I elect to cook a meal. You elect to come over to my house and say I'm gonna share that home cooked meal with you. The idea isn't that you get fed. The idea is that you and I broker a conversation. You have insights into how I live and the culture that I have and the food that I cook. And most obvious Airbnb which is the hotel and housing site has really shifted a lot of their marketing to focus on experience life as a local. It's not just that you got an easy and affordable hotel room or place to stay on your vacation. It's that you got to live in a neighborhood the way that other residents of that particular city live. So how do we do these types of things? One of the fundamental things that they use is platform thinking. Just like the Aspen Institute report and other types of things have pointed out libraries need to figure out how we can invest in platforms that allow people to easily access the tools that we're sharing but also to broker connections with the other people in that sharing economy and system. Some of it, I think of things like the Digital Public Library of America does that in a really good way. It creates a common platform that lots of libraries chime into. Certainly OCLC was one of very early ideas around WorldCat where all the libraries kind of aggregate their content. But those systems kind of fail to broker the connection between users and kind of maximize that peer to peer type of connection. And part of it is attention around our privacy commitment and our commitment to anonymity and intellectual freedom. But we're gonna have to figure out a way to navigate that. As I talked with some innovators around this idea, they took up these two concepts and this was in Scotland I think what these individuals come up with it and they shared it with me via email. They said, what if the library created a system wherein they're self-driving vans and bookmobiles and makerspaces? But beyond just that level of innovation we invest in an on-demand app so that members of a neighborhood could all request a particular makerspace or bookmobile and it would self-navigate to that particular area at a specific time based on the demand and interest, the surge of knowledge interest. Instead of surge pricing, surge of curiosity would divert those types of ideas to places. I thought that was really interesting because it's taking not just service and access but really the collective interest of our users and brokering a connection between people. The last set, I guess, connected toys and voice control. Connected toys is usually the creepy one that I start with but these are reversed. I'm sorry, Povey should be on the other side. Normally I show Barbie. Hello Barbie is this connected toy but there's this growing category of toys that connect to wireless internet and other services and it's essential to their functions as play. Hello Barbie was a couple of years ago and she connected to wireless, home wireless networks for speech. She had a microphone and a speaker built into her and as the child played with Barbie, she would transmit the text over the wireless network to servers at Mattel's partner company and they'd run the speech to text and then run that through a learning system and Barbie would provide more and more personalized responses. It raised a lot of concern among privacy advocates and it didn't last very long. We can easily dismiss this category of toys except that they're getting smarter and better. Povey is a little stuffed animal. Povey also connects over wireless networks but Povey's a storyteller around emotional intelligence. Bullying, sibling rivalry, confidence, decision making. Povey has stories for every one of these that were developed by child psychologists and educators and Povey connects over wireless not to take note of what the child responds back about the stories but to track the child's progress through the different story lessons and as the child tracks through the different stories an app on the parent's phone connects and says your child just completed the session on bullying. Here's a series of questions that you can follow up with. Next time you're in the car or at bedtime, reinforce the ideas that Povey had just shared with the child so that they kind of have a sense of how to talk through their questions. It's a much closer and smaller network of security. They're not tracking what the child says. They're giving prompts in the same way that like a wearable health tracker or something else would provide. So they're getting smarter in lots of ways. The other one is this sort of Mattel's Aristotle smart speaker device and camera that they were gonna install for children. This is dated now, because on last Wednesday I think it was Mattel announced that they were gonna scrap Aristotle so it's no longer gonna come to market after a lot of child development and privacy advocates raised concern about this. But this system was meant so that it would exist in the child's room from when they're an infant all the way until they're a teenager almost. As the child cries, this speaker would know to start piping in a lullaby or it might adjust the lighting based on different crying or something else. As the child progresses and maybe becomes a toddler and starts talking, this device would start to do rhyming games with them or help them learn colors or something else, numbers at the alphabet. And even all the way into when they're in grade or school age it would help as a homework helper starting to learn the different topics that the child is learning about in school maybe become more aware of certain subjects that the child excels in or is particularly interested in and feed around that. That's certainly connected to this idea of voice control. We're starting to see more and more systems enter our homes in public that are controlled by our voices. Certainly the Alexa app and Echo devices from Amazon but we also see these products from Google and forthcoming from Apple. We've seen them take over homes. They're also taking over hotels. The Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas is programming with Alexa devices in hotel rooms that can control air temperature, music, wake up alarms and even the drapes that you see. And I think it's Marriott and Hyatt are in competition to see who will acquire the rights for the Echo use in rooms. Mary Meeker's internet trends report noted how many people have used their voice assistant on their phone for general reference inquiries just asking that device whether it's Siri or Google Assistant for help around a particular question. And so people are becoming more acculturated to this. We're also seeing a lot of institutions, government sponsored institutions invest in this area. Los Angeles has an Alexa skills app that starts to monitor different activities that are happening in the city so you can wake up and say what's happening in Los Angeles today? And it will list school district meetings, city council meetings, festivals, other events. Even smaller communities, I think it's Cary, North Carolina. Population 150,000 has developed an Alexa skills app so you can start a government inquiry on Alexa. You can say, Alexa, the city didn't pick up my trash today and it will start something at City Hall that triggers a response through different channels. As people become more acculturated to this, you know what are their expectations going to be? And especially around reading and literacy and other issues, we're starting to see publishers move into this space. A new firm called Novel Effects has introduced this app that parents download specific soundtracks for books. So if you're reading the Pokey Little Puppy, you start reading it, it recognizes the text of that children's story and it starts to underlay a soundtrack of dogs barking, balls bouncing. It soundtracks the whole story for this, for that reading time so it really creates an active learning environment for that child. I think as I started to talk through these things, innovators, our librarian colleagues have really started to talk about our roles as content providers. And I had one group that really invested heavily in saying, should the library or a network of libraries start to develop an Alexa skill for children's story time? Where in families could go home and say, Alexa, play us the children's story time and it would be some of those essential lap sit songs and rhymes that we do in our baby and me times or even other children's stories. And also they kept saying that they would need to reemphasize at the end of each story, come back to the library for this and more because while we are fine with providing content in all of its different formats, we know that some of that content is best used when people are together in a central place and time. So I wanna wrap up by helping us think like a futurist. So there's four steps from Jane McGonagall. Jane McGonagall is the game developer and she's a scholar and she works with a futurist and works with a reputable firm that does a lot of work with for-profit and non-profit organizations. In a 2016 South by Southwest EDU keynote, she said there's four steps to thinking like a futurist. Collect signals from the future, that's the trend scanning and change noticing. Combine those signals into forecast. Try to figure out the stories that you can tell about those trends five years and 10 years in the future. Make it relatable, make it resonant, make it realistic. She says that we need to create personal foresight. We need to prioritize those trends so that they're relevant to the work that we're doing. Some of the trends we talked about, we just won't care about and that's totally cool. A lot of people feel compelled to follow every one of these trends and that's absolutely not the right approach to things. We overburden ourselves with a responsibility that we don't need to use. What we really need to do is create a personal foresight for each of us and say, this is what's important for me here and now. And then she says to go ahead and play with the future. Try to combine those signals and come up with an innovation even if it's outlandish, even if it leaps beyond budget and space limitations or knowledges and skills to really start to develop a message that people will get excited about, that we can start to motivate and align our budgets towards that we can build support for in the community. That's the only way we'll get to the future. Lastly, so today is national coming out day. So, hooray. I've already done it. We're not, please don't. I kind of think like today, oh, we'll think we're coming out as futurists in a lot of ways. I don't think what we all need to be as futurists. I really think essential to thinking about the future is for us to come out as ourselves. You need to look at the world through your specific lens, not just the work that you do in the library but also think heavily about the insights you have through your unique perspective as a human being outside of your librarian role. You know, I look at things specifically because I'm Hispanic, because I'm gay, because you know, Mary raised me and she was a single mom and I can't help looking at things and not thinking about that. In the same way, we'll think about things because we have kids, because we're taking care of older adults, whatever it may be. It's not just the trends and insights you have from your work in libraries. It's all the trends and insights you have outside of that that are really important. Diversity is gonna be so important to thinking about the future. So, please think together and listen to each other and find those opportunities to connect around those issues. I wanna thank you so much, the website. I do this weird newsletter called Read for Later that I just got through last night. And then, all of this is collaborative, so please take a moment and drop me an email and let me know what you're thinking about for thinking about the future. And we'll make all the slides available afterwards. I apologize for changing them. All right. Thanks.