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How did you become a futurologist?
I wrote a book that had future in the title and acquired the job title at that point. To begin with, I actively tried to dismiss it. Even today the only place that I use it is on the blog ‘The accidental futurist’, I don’t think I use it anywhere else. I’m happy for other people to use it, because it polarises. I wrote Future Files back in 2006, and it was about the future so people assumed that I was a futurologist. It makes me squirm to this day but it’s the best explanation that I can think of. You could just as easily describe me as a writer, strategist, scenario planner... you could say all sorts of things.
What inspired you to write this book?
Nothing, I was asked to write it. Originally I was writing about innovation - my deeper background is in innovation and creativity. My father is a physicist and my mother is an English art teacher. I went to Australia with nothing to do and set up a publishing company writing about innovation. People loved it but commercially it was a disaster. I was chatting to a teacher once, and he said I should stop writing about innovation, it scares people, and should write about trends. I said I didn’t really know anything about trends and he said just look for groups of ideas and call them trends, so I did that and people got much more interested. So I started writing about trends, and to do that you need to look at where it has come from, and where’s it going to, which then gets you into the future space. I started speculating about where things might go, and that got me an email out-of-the blue from a publishing company asking if I’d like to write a book.
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