A Mapping Experiment for Signals of Change
Help me find and map signs of the future, stuff that's obvious elsewhere
As a foresight professional, I spend a lot of time hunting for, or keeping an eye out for, signals of change - those small, concrete, surprising and delightful little things that have the potential of being early warning indicators that something fundamental is shifting in our world.
One of the best ways to find signals is traveling, because you are then able to observe with fresh eyes and experience what William Gibson said:
The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.
Somewhere, right now, what feels revolutionary to you is utterly mundane and obvious to someone else and their life.
In almost all cases, someone somewhere in the world is living in a slice of the future that will reach us at some point.
It wasn’t there…
I’ve accumulated signals through various methods over the years. Notebooks with observations from client sites and traveling. Browser bookmarks (omg those things… I will read them one day). Often photos from travel, categorized in signals albums. Even Excel sheets that inevitably become abandoned graveyards of good intentions.
There are some pretty decent commercial signals services out there that aggregate and analyze weak signals professionally, but as an individual practitioner these present two key challenges:
They’re expensive!
They’re geared towards corporate users, and as such tend to exclude some really interesting stuff.
None appear to offer a compelling map-based interface; I couldn’t easily see the geographic and temporal distribution patterns.
I looked for a tool that would let me geocode signals, timestamp them, categorize by domain, and display them easily on an interactive map, and found...nothing. The building blocks were there, but not the integrated whole.
…so I built it.
I have a few poems that function as guiding principles in my life. This one by Andrea Balt is one of them:
In that spirit, I thought I’d hack something together myself.
As always, one hard part about these things is coming up with a name, in this case for the website this was going to live on.
After some brainstorming, the top 2 candidates were a straightforward The Future is Already Here, and a more subtle Obvious Elsewhere.
I could hardly believe that both were available as the .com TLD, so I snapped them both up.
As such, I’m presenting The Future Is Already Here at thefutureisalreadyhere.com – and obviouselsewhere.com redirects there too.
I spun up a WordPress site, integrated a mapping plugins, and built what I’d been looking for.
The result is decidedly alpha-stage, but functional.
What does it do?
It’s a geocoded database of signals. Each submission includes:
Title and description of what this signal is about
Precise location (down to GPS coordinates if useful)
Timestamp showing when this was observed
Category (Civic, Commerce, Energy, Food, Mobility, Money, Urban, Work, AI & Robotics)
Evidence (photos, links, firsthand observation)
Name of person submitting
The interface displays these as round dots on an interactive map, and there’s a list below the map, too. You can filter by category, by location radius, and by time ranges. Click on an a signal on the list or a dot on the map and it opens up the signal on a sidebar displaying everything recorded about it. Click on the thumbnail image to get the full-size image.
Pretty obvious stuff.
Who is this for?
Honestly, I don’t know. It could be for no one! The more generous answer might be that it’s for foresight professionals, innovation scouts, trend analysts, strategic planners, anthropologists, researchers, or simply curious people who travel across contexts and notice things, and would like to share them and explore what other people have noticed.
People who already do this observation work but lack a systematic way to capture and compare it.
So what? An invitation!
I’m genuinely uncertain whether this will prove useful beyond my own practice. Hence treating it as an experiment and being transparent about that status.
I already have a long list of improvements in mind, like streamlined submission flow, better mobile experience, but first I really want to see if the core concept resonates with anyone.
If you’re a curious person who notices things, I’d welcome your participation. If you would like to contribute – which I would love - head onto the Contribute page, and click the link towards the end of that to request to be registered. I don’t want to open it to anonymous non-registered people because we all know what happens then.
This is very much a “experiment and build in public”-experiment. I’m sharing it not as a polished product but as a working hypothesis about how we might better see the future that’s already here, just unevenly distributed around us.
Head over to https://thefutureisalreadyhere.com/ and let’s see what we can find!
I’m in!