Institute for the Future records
Scope and Contents
This is an all-paper collection consisting primarily of internal reports but also includes architectural blueprints and public-facing publications. It spans from 1964, four years before the official founding of IFF, to 1973, 5 years after its founding. IFF’s main focus is between five and fifty years into the future, so at the latest date within this collection, their predictions, on average, would have expanded to 2023 at the latest. These boxes contain many reports related to the founding of the organization. Much bureaucratic documentation is featured as well. There are tens of many reports, papers, and working papers that are all numbered, though we are missing several. The connection between IFF and Wesleyan University is also readily apparent in the majority of the documents in the collection.
Dates
- Creation: 1964-1973
Creator
- Institute for the Future (Organization)
Conditions Governing Access
Collection is open for research.
Conditions Governing Use
University records - Copyright held by Wesleyan University; all other copyright is retained by the creator - In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted
Biographical / Historical
The Institute for the Future was an organization founded in 1968 and is dedicated to evaluating long-term trends in various sectors of public life. As their brief description document indicates, this research includes “the impact of science and technology on society, urban problems such as housing, welfare, public health, and education, new societal institutions for urban reconstruction, global engineering, and so on, the availability and development of material, energy, and food resources, and public order, domestic and world-wide, …” It explains why it is a fundamental organization and why it is essential for present actors to keep a close eye on the future, as IFF stated that the rate of technological change is moving at a pace that we are not currently able to keep up with as a society. They say that in order to control our world, we need to have an idea of what direction we are headed in.
Extent
2 Linear Feet (4 hollinger boxes)
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
The Institute for the Future collection consists of documents related to the proposition and founding of the futures organization Institute for the Future (IFF at time of founding; modernly referred to as IFTF).
Arrangement
The collection is organized by type of document, starting with general planning/founding documents, followed by the labeled working papers, then papers, then research reports, and then a few other extraneous documents. They are ordered within the boxes by date (month and year), with documents closest to the front being the oldest and documents closest to the back being the oldest.
Subject
- Wesleyan University (Middletown, Conn.) (Organization)
- Institute for the Future (Organization)
- Title
- Institute for the Future records, 1964-1970
- Status
- Unprocessed
- Author
- Fully processed by AP Didier '26; earlier inventorying and processing done by Erica Ciallela and Sonya Sternlieb
- Date
- February 11, 2025
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
- Language of description note
- English
Repository Details
Part of the University Archives Repository