N.A. Drescher

Films love predicting the future. Books have been imagining the future for a hundred years. H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley tried to envision the real world of tomorrow. So did James Cameron. Are these highly creative minds considered futurists? If not, then what is a futurist?   The answer, like most of futurism, is complex.  Let's dive right in. What Is Futurism? According to the dictionary, futurism has a couple of meanings. a) An adherence to the future; b) The study of the future and predictions about the future Both definitions are a little vague but that's the dictionary for you. They're also not entirely correct.  You see, futurism is more than movies and sci-fi books. It affects every major discipline, particularly in the sciences, but also in economics, politics, design, and even law.  Futurism is indeed the study of the future, but real futurists avoid making predictions. They look for trends and attempt to follow those trends through to their logical development. 

During a summer of intense global heatwaves, this particular day stood out.  It was hot. Really hot. Here in Ottawa, Canada's capital city of 1.1 million people, the thermometer surpassed 41 degrees centigrade with the humidex. That's hot. So it was on this scorching August day that I thought I would take my three-year-old daughter on a transit trip to the Rideau Centre. It's a large mall in the downtown core. After all, the buses, subway, and mall were all nicely air-conditioned. OC Transpo, Ottawa's transit authority, had different ideas. I quickly realized that Canada has a serious transit crisis. Because it's summer, my kids are out of school. We took my daughter out of daycare because face it, that's too expensive (a completely different issue I'll tackle another time). Thankfully we put our son in a day camp for two weeks. My wife was working full-time for the feds. It was just my daughter and I. Daddy and daughter time!  We spent the week hanging out.