We sit down with Mika Ilari Koskinen, the lead designer behind Synapse, Futures Platform’s new agentic AI workspace for Futures Intelligence, to talk design philosophy: the choices that shaped the product, and why good design helps people cope with uncertainty. First in a series taking you behind the scenes of building Synapse.

Futures Intelligence is an integrative capability that brings different forms of future-related insights in one connected sense-making flow to turn them into shared, decision-ready understanding. It brings together different types of future-focused knowledge. Used in isolation, each has blind spots. Used together, they build a comprehensive picture of the possible futures ahead.

The future is a mix of what we know is coming, what we can anticipate but not fully see, what we overlook despite being right in front of us, and what blindsides us entirely. The Futures Intelligence Window maps the future across these four lenses: the known, the uncertain, the overlooked, and the unimaginable.

Before the world caught on, Givaudan was already designing the taste experiences of tomorrow. We sit down with Igor Parshin, Customer Foresight Lead at Givaudan to talk about how the company uses foresight to turn early change signals into the flavours that will define the future.

Roughly every 250 years, human civilisation undergoes a dramatic reset. They are moments where kingdoms rise and fall, economies shift, values are rewritten, and societies reorganise themselves at every level — political, economic, cultural, even existential. These aren’t ordinary historical moments but mega epochs, when all shorter societal cycles align and force civilisation onto a new path.

Defence debates tend to focus on firepower. But the most destabilising risks may come from something far harder to quantify: the fraying of social trust, the manipulation of truth, and the erosion of the middle class.

Militaries are adopting AI at speed; the real test will be keeping decisions accountable in an age of autonomous operations.

From biological markers to power structures, many variables shape how we understand the rhythm of societal change.

Across history, patterns of rise and fall, peace and war, innovation and decline seem to unfold in rhythms - some as short as a decade, others stretching over a century. Are there five, six, or even more distinct lengths to these societal cycles?

Complexity Theory as a Framework for Understanding Societal Transformation

What can generational theories tell us about this shift?

Every 50 years or so, according to Kondratieff wave theory, capitalist economies reorganise themselves around a new technological foundation, sparking the rise of new business ecosystems. Where are we now in that cycle—and what might the next foundation look like?