Every year the Institute For The Future publishes a map of the decade (ahead). The 2005 version is not yet online, but I was delighted to learn, during my visit to Palo Alto this week, that Jason Tester, an alumnus of Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, is helping IFTF enhance its maps by the development of ‘artefacts from the future’. At Ivrea, the design of enticing representations of imagined futures was regarded as a core process, and a technique was introduced there by the English service designers Live|Work. Live|Work called their technique evidencing. One of the roots of evidencing, in turn, was the development by Tony Dunne and Bill Gaver of “cultural probes” at the Royal College of Art during the late 1990s (where the Live|Work guys studied interaction design). I don’t suggest that a linear history is playing out here – but every now and again in the chaotic blizzard of life one briefly glimpses tracks in the snow.