Nesta is an innovation agency working for social good focused on some of the biggest challenges of our time, from health and inequality to the future of our homes and public services.
Each year it publishes future signals, the early signs of change that could shape everyday life in the years ahead.
What kind of world are people heading into in 2026?
Well, if 2026 is anything like 2025, there could be quite a lot of uncertainty, but we think what our signals show this year is there’s some really interesting innovations and ideas, many of which are positive.
An example of this is people-powered bus routes, which is being pioneered in Shanghai in China, where people can propose a bus route, and if they can get 15 or 20 other people to sign up to it, then the authorities will roll that bus route out.
This is part of a much bigger picture about much more flexible public infrastructure. An example would be in the German town of Bad Hersfeld, where citizens have been allowed control of street lighting. Rather than just all the lights coming on at the same time and all being the same brightness, citizens can control them. So if there’s a light just outside your window that’s bothering you when you’re trying to sleep, you can turn it down a bit. If it is a particularly dark night, you might be able to turn the lights up in the street.
So something that was previously quite rigid, like bus routes or street lighting, suddenly becomes something that can be powered by citizens.
What changes do you think people are most likely to notice in their everyday lives first?
One that people could really notice is pothole technology. At the moment, there’s a report that the RAC came out with last year where there were 6 potholes for every mile of county controlled roads in England and Wales, which is quite a lot of potholes. A colleague of mine was saying that it’s the one political issue that her mother really cares about, and some authorities are experimenting with technology to help solve that problem.
One example of this is where they’re combining graphene, which is a wonder material that was discovered around about 15 years ago. They got a Nobel Prize for discovery. It actually came from a really interesting source where they had sticky tape and got graphite from pencils and stuck it together and pulled it apart until they had a sheet of carbon, 1 molecule thin, which is actually 200 times stronger than steel and very conductive to heat, which when you combine that with asphalt on the roads, it makes them really tough. This has been successfully tried in the north-east of England and also in Essex as well.
What kinds of questions should we be asking about how technology is starting to shape life inside our homes?
Some people might be lucky enough to get new smart appliances – adding screens to things like fridges and to microwaves and washing machines. But there’s an interesting development in the United States, where Samsung in September 2025 started rolling out adverts on some of the screens of its fridges, and that brings advertising right into the heart of people’s homes. Although we’ve had advertising inside our homes before, on TV and on radio, it’s a bit different on fridges because people aren’t necessarily expecting it. And you can’t practically switch your fridge on or off in the same way that you can your TV or radio.
The same technology also offers benefits as well. Because these fridges are digitally enabled, they can do things like present calendars on the fridges and show the weather, or some of them even have cameras so they can see what food’s inside.
What feels like the next shift in how AI could shape decision making in 2026?
One decision-making shift can be illustrated by a signal of the country of Albania announcing the first AI minister, responsible for procurement and tackling corruption. The idea is, if you have an AI, then the AI won’t be necessarily subject to corruption, which my understanding is a bit of a challenge for Albania because I think this is one of the barriers to Albania joining the EU. There could be downsides to this because although I suppose you can’t necessarily bribe a computer in the same way you can bribe a person, there can be bias built in as well. Because these are trained on big, big data sets, and if those data sets don’t reflect the population, so if they’re trained on the behaviour of people like me, say, middle-aged white men, and actually they’re making decisions about, let’s say, Mediterranean young women, then it might not necessarily come up with the right answers.
When you look ahead to the year ahead, what gives you the most hope?
One of the signals that I find most helpful is the idea of data unions. At the moment, lots of our data isn’t necessarily directly controlled by us. It can be controlled by big tech companies or it can be controlled by governments, but people are starting to form data unions and data collectives and data cooperatives where they band together to control their data, which means that they benefit from that data. It’s a new way of controlling data in a way that empowers citizens rather than large corporations or governments.
Although we’ve got a world where there’s a lot of change – environmentally, politically, militarily – there can be some interesting solutions to quite practical things that can really benefit people in a day to day way.
