7. Cluster
Dividing technologies into movements and trends
At this point, the research team has a curated selection of technologies following the project's standards, an d this technologies are the starting point to create innovative narratives. However, to write reliable stories, it is mandatory to not only look at each technology separately, but to associate them with multiple layers across cultural, social, economical and political dimensions.
In order to help our researchers and editors to construct these complex narratives, we've developed a process to organize technologies using clusters. There are two types of clusters in our current methodology:
Trend Clusters
Taxonomic Clusters
Divide technologies by resemblance regarding their industry (e.g: agriculture) or technological field (e.g. Additive Manufacturing).
Divide technologies by the movements they might create in the future, which are affected by political, economic, social and environmental drivers with reflections in the social sphere.
Once the type of narrative is determined, the technologies should be agglomerated through lists on TDB. At this point, the clusters do not need a permanent title, but keywords to separate them by categories. To ease this process, please keep the following tips in mind:
Always start describing the cluster which you are more acquainted with;
Check for external reports to compare possible narratives;
Remember:
Every cluster must have approximately the same number of technologies;
4 to 7 lists are ideal for most projects.
After dividing technologies into clusters, researchers and editors should start developing their narratives while refining their technology selection. During this process, redundancies are likely to appear, which can be fixed with merges between technologies, and also gaps of research, which demand further exploratory work.
TDB Tutorial
How to divide technologies into different clusters
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