The Future Starts Here ..... fabulous time at this excellent exhibition at the V&A. It features four areas; Self, Public, Planet and Afterlife with 100 exhibits posing questions and describing some amazing solutions.

Apparently, more than 2 billion people on the planet have no recognisable address. So now there's a neat solution, every square metre can be identified with a unique 3-word code. Everybody is reachable. And there are crowd-funded bridges, DIY prosthetic aids, tree-antennae, hopes and dreams for Aleppo, floating state-less cities, planes that provide internet connectivity for remote areas, the 8000km Great Green Wall and security apps that link families. There is far less trust with governments and globalisation and far more hope and creativity in crowd-funded solutions. And there's Antanas Mockus, mayor of Bogotá, who decided he needed to be a super-citizen, fulfilling a concept from a think-tank of sociologists and anthropologists (why oh why do we not listen more). His super-hero cat suit and cape became a symbol of change as he went around the city doing what he thought ordinary people should do. And he was responsible for “intervening in the civic dna of the city”. (see extra)

As ever, there are more questions than answers. We are devising robotic aids to serve as companions (we're losing the knack, the will or the where-with-all to do it ourselves) and there's a constant drive to live longer, to preserve ourselves and our experiences, and create avatars to inhabit and grow our social footprint after we’re gone.

At the end of the exhibition there's a digital response-gathering form which revealed that, according to those who have taken the test, the future is in far brighter, more optimistic and more creative hands with our U25s than with the “informed-pessimistic” folks like myself.

So, whether through crowd-funding or cat-suits the future really does start right here right now.