“Just like [that] I have that older

Rosie in my pocket and I can get

her up for advice whether I’m just

a little uneasy or having a full-

blown panic attack.”

Dr. Pearse Keane, Consultant

ophthalmologist at Moorfields

Age friendly

London

Photo courtesy

of London.gov.

Mental health

chatbots

Photo courtesy

of Woebot, an

app that works

as a therapist.

Medicine and healthcare in 2030

“The number of eye scans we’re

performing is growing at a pace

much faster than human experts

are able to interpret them.”

Rosie King, User of the support

app ‘Brain in Hand’

Signals of the Future Now

Image analysis

DeepMind’s AI

can detect over

50 eye diseases

as accurately as

a doctor. The

Verge.

Overview

The health professional serves an older population with more disabilities, chronic health conditions and care responsibilities, but who continue to work and live active lives.

Priorities have shifted to managing and sustaining health, living well with health problems, and preventing the escalation of health needs.

New roles have emerged for healthy lifestyle coaches and consultants who work within communities to identify and overcome challenges, develop community assets and resilience.

In some regions community owned care cooperatives will use open source tools to manage their own care needs.

Precision medicine, while popular and powerful for the very wealthy and highly motivated, has not translated into widespread improvements in healthy lifespans or cost savings for service providers.

AI-powered diagnostics have made some enormous leaps - breath biopsies can detect many cancers non-invasively, image recognition supports radiologists - but they remain limited at front line diagnosis where one must disentangle symptoms from life, and manage treatment in context.

Data scientists are integrated at every level of health, social care and social work management. They are less expensive than in the early 2020s.

The UK faces a national healthcare workforce shortage, exacerbated by a costly and complex immigration system and long-term underinvestment in training. Within the clinic or hospital, a shortage of clinicians will lead to increased reliance on AI for second opinions and to speed the workflow of human staff.

DESIGN SKILLS

AI and data analytics may improve

efficiency but human contact and

empathy are needed in care situations,

and human judgment may be needed

to understand context and edge cases.

Increase in chatbots mean that the

developers have designed ethical

guidelines to build trust

Data scientists working with frontline

teams create hotbeds of design &

innovation

Retail in 2030Overview

Retailers in 2030 have an even richer understanding of consumers and their behaviours than their well-resourced counterparts in 2019. Generous loyalty and reward programs tempt high spenders to permit brands to connect their online and offline profiles using facial recognition.

This data, alongside connected smart screens around the shopping centre, is used to design immersive, personalised experiences, for art and adverts.

In some areas, tech companies have bought or leased public spaces; here retailers face rigid controls and high rents in return for improved services and security. Street furniture offers many incentives to purchasing behaviour; free wifi and phone charging from solar lights, modular pavements that provide light up directions to a pop-up store that your purchasing profile suggests you’d like.

While companies have invested heavily in improving consumers’ experience; tills and stocking are highly automated. Automation frees up staff to provide more personal support to customers, especially those with dementia or disabilities. Where staff aren’t available, robotic assistants and chatbots support people to navigate and access spaces. Shop designers make accessibility and inclusivity a priority.

But retailers are operating in a context of increased awareness and resistance to surveillance. A social movement for slow shopping grows, turning away from ultra-convenient apps to community ownership of cafes, pubs, post offices and more.

People are concerned about where products come from and go to. Shoppers use affordable handheld devices to check for toxic residues or whether produce is mislabelled. This allows allow more shoppers, especially sustainability campaigners and influencers, to check goods at point of sale for quality.

Less wealthy high streets see less investment. But businesses and public services have come together to develop and design innovative solutions to slowing sales and squeezed budgets. This sharing of space requires clever service design.

Solar charging

Street light with

USB port and

seating. Photo

courtesy of EnGo

3-in-1

Surveillance

capitalism

Photo courtesy

of Harvard

Business Review

Fishy business

Affordable

handheld devices

powered by

advanced analytics

can make it

possible to check

whether produce,

such as fish, has

been mislabelled.

Photo courtesy of

Dolly Faibyshev.

DESIGN SKILLS

Designers of smart products may not

be adequately served by regulators

who struggle to keep pace with rapid

development, and so will need develop

quality control and standards if they

are to retain public trust.

AI might automate shopping

experiences but in response people

want human relationships and

immersive experiences

Empty shop spaces are re-used for

social purposes requiring the inclusive

and accessible design for space, and

designing mission-driven or social

purpose retail

Urban planning in 2030Overview

Planners in 2030 face the practical challenges of interpreting

growing stores of data from an increasingly smart, connected

environment, and managing the intersecting and

contradictory demands of different public services who are

themselves serving the complex needs of aging populations.

But they also an existential threat from those data-driven

companies who are keen to press the case made by

Sidewalk Labs; that in an era of AI and automation and

responsive, smart cities, planning is unnecessary.

Increasingly, planners find themselves making the case for

the need for planning itself, and the need for community

consultation and expertise.

Despite this, communities have real power through

cooperatives and tools designed to centre their rights and

ownership of data. This has grown from the grassroots in the

face of increasing financial pressures on councils and access

to smart tools that connect crowdsourced ideas.

Such tools also that connect local knowledge with open data

on land ownership and legal chatbots that can smooth

bureaucratic tangles. This has allowed planning departments

to support communities to quickly identify underutilised

spaces and develop licensing for temporary uses.

Data is a big part of everyday work and AI modelling has

improved drastically. It is easier to see the long-term impact

of investments.

Sidewalk labs

Since 2017,

Sidewalk has

been drawing up

plans to develop

one Toronto

neighbourhood

“from the internet

up”. Photo

courtesy of the

Financial Times.

Image analysis

The Advent of

Architectural AI.

Photo courtesy

of Stanislas

Chaillou,

Harvard Grad

School of Design

DESIGN SKILLSPlanners have a critical role to play not just

in solving the practical challenges of a

more complicatedly interconnected smart

city, but in the ongoing broader debate

about who owns and runs public spaces.

Planners will need to be able to track

and incentivise profitable and

healthy behaviours, and public debate will

arise about the ethical and responsible

ways to do so while avoiding bias and

without entrenching and exacerbating

existing inequalities.

City map

Renno Hokwerda

The Changing High StreetTimeline: Changing High Street trends from pre-1950 to the present day

Clockwise

1. Traditional butchers

in the family for 90

years. Via Maldon and

Burnham Standard

2. Out of town shopping

in Hereford. Via Philip

Halling.

3.Sainsbury’s local

via Sainsbury’s online.

4. Highly automated

Ocadao warehouse in

Erith, U.K. Via Ocado

and Wired.

5. Tesco loyalty card

for tracking individual

spending habits via Life

Hacker.

6. Food and groceries

in Woolworths in the

1950s. Via Woolworths

Museum.

Impact of the changing High Streeton communities

Data-driven decisions have steered investment towards wealthier communities, or those who are more visible.

Each of these changes leave traces –sometimes gaps or scars.

In the UK, millions of people live in food deserts – where no supermarket has seen fit to invest, and where there is little access to fresh produce.

Empty shop fronts and malls are costly to adapt – e.g. turned into zombie survival experiences.

High streets provide social capital in the heart of communities, they need to offer something that online shopping/shopping centres offer.

Pre 1950:

Small, independent

businesses, local

markets

1950s:

Supermarkets

1970s:

Out-of-town shopping centres

and new geo-demographic

systems for investment in

particular areas

1980s:

Data-driven marketing:

Consumers divided into

20-30 distinct groups

1990s:

Data-driven marketing:

Individual families and

consumers

2000s:

Data-driven marketing:

Individuals tracked across

location and rapid growth of

online shopping

2010s:

Focus on customer experience,

next day delivery, subscription

services, automation, robotic

warehouses and tailored metro/

local supermarkets

2020s:

The end of the high street

as a retail space, with

accommodation and public

services returning, and retail

intertwined with our lives

2030s:

??