Collaborative Networks and the ‘Five Regions of the Future’

Abstract : ‘Five Regions of the Future’ was written in 2005 by two Futurists, Joel A. Barker and Scott W. Erickson, before the rise of social media, smartphones, and the advent of Industry 4.0. They proposed a framework for technological development based around five ‘regions’: Super Tech; Limits Tech; Local Tech; Nature Tech; and Human Tech, which they called TechnEcologies. The paper examines how collaborative networks can either complement or potentially disrupt this framework and sets out some areas that could form the basis of future collaborative research in Barker and Erickson’s TechnEcologies.