COVID-19 can be heavily taxing on our mental health. Significantly increased internet use and overload of information are exhausting our attention and causing grave cognitive fatigues. Now may be the time to go offline and contemplate an unplugged future for our mental health.

While the value of data is rising, the loss of privacy in the digital era is becoming a reality. But giving up personal data requires trust: consumers need to be able to trust organisations to handle their data ethically and keep it safe from hackers, and other cyber threats – but also from the more obscure purposes organisations themselves might have.

The new presidential term in the US will have structural, long-lasting impacts on the global system, potentially shifting organisational priorities and operational environments.

Our team of futurists have created an interactive foresight radar with 50+ cross-industry trends, enabling teams to see the interconnections between different phenomena and collaboratively assess the implications of the election outcome from their organisation’s point of view.

As more and more consumers demand sustainable products, manufacturers and policymakers are urged to respond to their needs and change the current linear growth model. With the “Right to repair” movement and self-healing materials, we may soon witness products with a longer lifetime, and a rapid transition towards the circular economy.

Attitudes towards gender are changing. Consumers are no longer willing to buy into gender clichés that have been used to promote products and services for decades. To reflect this cultural shift, businesses are turning to gender-neutral design and advertisement.

Although wider culinary options are pleasing us, unhealthy diets are inviting chronic illnesses and various health risks. We are urged to eat healthier while the emergence of new technologies and ingredients are rapidly changing our food world. Would you change your diet if your doctor would prescribe the secret ingredient for a healthy life?

Even though much of the world has stood still in lockdowns, the geopolitical events have kept developing. The world is realigning itself, and the new order could be quite different from the one preceding it.

Imagine that you can buy designer clothes as cheap as £15 per item. But on one condition, they are for social media only.

Despite the pandemic, the larger trends in the transportation industry are not going away. The need for more environmentally friendly, resilient and comfortable ways to move around will persist and reassert itself after the lockdowns have ended.

Vanlife has been a growing trend among bohemian digital nomads for the past decade, but in the future when people start travel again, the romantic hippie vehicle might be increasingly replaced by ultramodern portable homes with more convenient facilities. And where the world once was an oyster for travellers, it is possible they will now be happy only with a slice of that: their local hoods and woods.

3D printing and Hyperloop may not seem an obvious combination. Still, they may help in easing the tight housing market and provide more flexibility and options to live in different sized cities.

What role will Artificial Intelligence (AI) have in the workforce? How will economies and capitalism change in the future? In our webinar, Sitra’s Leading Foresight Analyst Mikko Dufva and Futures Platform’s Content Director Tuomo Kuosa discuss these themes and more.