How Does Cecily Sommers Know What You'll Be Doing Next?

To most of its readers, Make magazine is a quarterly full of brainy amusements, a DIY guide for geeks. But to Cecily Sommers, its debut a couple of years ago was a clue.

Make has included articles on how to “hack” your computer mouse and turn it into a robot, how to build your own high-definition video recorder, how to turn your car into a Wi-Fi hot spot, and how to make your own printed-circuit boards at home. Sommers hasn’t done any of those projects, but she looks at Make with interest because it points in a direction she believes we’ll all be heading: inventing and producing our own stuff.

We’ll be able to create “all kinds of materials, some of them living,” when rapid prototyping is combined with other technologies, Sommers says. She tells about research being done now on medical applications of inkjet printers. Cell suspensions—“bioinks”—replace conventional inks, and as one layer is printed on top of another, the cells bond to form living tissue. Adaptations of this process will enable us to “print” our own food. We’ll be able to print clothes, too, made of smart fabrics that can change color or warm or cool us. The dissemination of “personal fabrication” technologies is already underway, she notes. The Fab Labs project of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been distributing prototyping systems to economically disadvantaged areas where people are using them to start microbusinesses.

Push was a leap of faith when Sommers was trying to build her reputation as a brand-futures strategist. "I just kind of said, 'Ta-da! I got something to say, you wanna come hear it?'"

Sommers is piecing together clues like these in preparation for the seventh annual Push conference that she’ll host in 2009. (“Push” is a shortening of the tagline, “Push the future in new directions.”) She already knows that the theme will be “Make: Believe” and the program will cover “innovation, creation, morality, and world views.” She hasn’t invited presenters yet, but if past conferences are an indicator, they could include activists, researchers, diplomats, social entrepreneurs, and performance artists.

First, though, Sommers needs to finalize plans for this year’s Push conference, “Superpower,” which takes place June 10 through 12 at the Walker Art Center: four half-day sessions on geopolitics, energy, demographics, and media.