Futurecasting 2030
Futurecasting Hitachi's technology roadmap to 2030 through research, strategic design, and a narrative film exploring tomorrow's world.
The Brief
Hitachi engages in a wide range of research activities, developing life-changing technologies across industries. The central question for this project was: how will those technologies be realized in products and services by 2030, what will the user experience look like, and how must Hitachi adapt to a changing world?
Research and Findings
The engagement began by identifying major technological changes to society by 2030 with direct implications for Hitachi. Key themes include:
- Concepts of ownership shift from owning products to subscribing to services
- Less hardware, fewer personal devices
- AI-driven cloud services with personal AI assistants
- Migration to blockchain and VeinScan for personal identification
- Convergence of data and energy
- Smart Grids and 5G Mesh Networks
- Transportation operates more like a SaaS network
- Increase in remote work
- Most medical services delivered remotely
- Interfaces shift from GUIs to NUIs (touch, gesture, voice, & neural)
- UIs move away from buttons and menus to Interactive Data-Objects
The Film
The team — Interactivism (futurecasting and design), Idean (creative direction and film production), and Cave (visual effects) — translated these findings into a narrative short film. The story centers on Anna and her AI assistant Nicolai navigating daily life in the 2030s: interacting with smart surfaces, riding autonomous vehicles, coordinating fleet management, connecting to smart grids, performing remote maintenance work, and accessing advanced medical technology. The film gave Hitachi’s leadership a vivid, concrete vision of where their technologies could take the world.