I investigate emerging technologies, turn questions into experiments, and build prototypes to find out what survives contact with reality. My work sits somewhere between engineering, foresight, applied research and creative technology.
Future You explores how research around training, nutrition, recovery and prevention can become useful everyday decisions — without automatically turning personal data into somebody else’s asset.
Open the appAn experiment in moving technology foresight from periodic publication toward continuously evolving intelligence.
Read / download the case studyA research rabbit hole into the architecture behind intelligent machines: perception, simulation, edge intelligence, orchestration, safety, cybersecurity and human authority.
Read / download the researchResearch into speculative videogames, post-gender futures and whether commercial games can work as informal foresight artifacts.
Read / download the paperCollision Lab maps every pair across ten emerging technologies, separates real collisions from mere adjacency, and turns the interesting ones into research questions and things we can actually build to find out.
Enter the Collision LabGo far enough down the rabbit hole to understand the system, not just the hype.
Decide what I think might be happening — and what would prove me wrong.
A prototype, framework, model, experiment or occasionally an unnecessarily large research project.
Reality is particularly good at finding holes in elegant ideas.
I don’t build prototypes because every idea needs to become a product. Sometimes the prototype exists simply to answer a better question.
The work above is the evidence. These are the questions currently pulling the research forward.
What happens when machines start borrowing the logic of life?
Explore the series → 02What if the futures that matter most are the ones our current concepts cannot contain?
Explore the research →I started out engineering things that had to survive the physical world: engines, hybrid systems and vehicle prototypes. Eventually the thing I was trying to understand changed.
Today I work somewhere in the collision zone between engineering, emerging technology, foresight and experimentation.
I have no particularly convincing reason to believe this will be my final form.
The longer versionI’m an Italian engineer living in Germany, a futures researcher, serial learner and lifelong gamer with an inconvenient tendency to become deeply interested in things.
Sometimes those things become research. Sometimes they become prototypes. Sometimes they become a completely unnecessary 20-chapter investigation into Physical AI.
I’m generally happiest somewhere between “I have no idea how this works” and “I built something.”
I speak about emerging technology, AI, foresight, Physical AI and what happens when technologies that were developing separately suddenly start colliding.
Speaking & appearancesResearch collaboration, prototypes, emerging technology, speaking, strange ideas that don’t fit neatly into a PowerPoint category — those are usually good reasons to say hello.
hello@valentinacontini.eu ↗