Years ago my colleague Jason Tester coined a term for a visual forecasting format: artifacts from the future.  They’re pictures of what it might be like to encounter some future force in an everyday situation, in the minutiae that are archaeologists’ usual trade.   Recently, my team and I have been doing a series of blog posts explaining and showcasing the artifacts we made for our newly public Health and Health Care 2020 Map.  Here’s a bit from my latest entry in this series:

Myriad minutiae in our environments impact our health in countless ways.  While we can look at this from many perspectives, one is to identify the risks in our environments, to empower us to avoid, change, organize and agitate around them.

This artifact from the future challenges us (from the perspective of a passerby on a Milwaukee sidewalk) to make the invisible visible: to share places at patterns in our lives that stress us out.  If we looked at the mash-up online that this poster advertises, we could validate our experiences, find ways to avoid particular places for our own health. Or, we could focus on the experiences of others that surprise us, ad be more considerate and caring as we move through places that stress out our neighbors and fellow citizens.  It posits that the ability to quantify and visualize the health impacts of our surroundings will increase our interests and engagement with eco-health issues.

In other awesome news, our Health Horizons’ BodyShock The Future contest scored more entries than a white house challenge on a similar topic.  There are some pretty fun ideas in there.