We were delighted to take notice of another project which shares our passion for positive, optimistic futures! Our friend and much admired fellow design fiction future-storyteller Anab ‘Superflux‘ Jain was one of eight people (others included a biotechnologist, a policy advisor, a permaculturalist, an educator, a retired civil servant, an urban designer and an architect ) involved in a unique project which ran from June 1st 2009 to October 11th 2009 to imagine ‘optimistic futures’. Funded by the Arts Council England and Watermans Gallery, the Power of 8 was part of the London Design Festival 2009.  The magnificent 8 welcome you to Acres Green …

“Rolling orchards stretched beyond us as we wandered through the edible gardens of Acres Green. Spots of colour peppered the greenery and branches hung low with the weight of ripening produce. As we looked closer we saw that each tree was actually growing different varieties of fruit. What we originally understood as a tangle of different trunks was actually an intricate technological graft. On parting the leaves we found strange flesh-like prosthesis that seemed to bind limbs from different species together. We realised that to maximise harvests the communities of Acres Green were experimenting with augmented orchards and designing strange new natures.”

Check out the Power of 8 website to feed on more, nifty futurefood incl. pan-city feral cidre businesses, Beamer Signum Apis Melifera aka beamer bees, living hills, flocking clouds, etc. Well done, 8!

Image courtesy of The Power of 8

Which better way to jumpstart the year than to have another look at personal aviation initiatives (see also earlier posts here and here). The online buzz seems to prove that not even a crisis can silence those dreaming about personal aviation vehicles (PAV’s): e.g. Mirror Image Aerospace’s Skywalker VTOL, the PAL-V. Urban Aeronautics‘ X-Hawk does away with the external propellors, after all a much lamented nuisance for VTOL PAV’s in crowded urban environments.

A lot of effort seems to go into VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) configurations, as can be seen in for example the video of this Buzz Lightyear-like low-noise electric VTOL PAV. Yet, there is also the Spiral Duct ESTOL Concept. NASA apparently also took inspiration from Transformers and shows how a car can be turned into a personal air vehicle (see video).  For more PAV-videos, check out NASAPav.

Although a few years old,  the article entitled “These legs are made for walking” (Discover Magazine) presents a concise overview of five visionaries and how they see beyond vehicles as we know them, first of all by questioning the assumptions underlying them today. James Kuffner (Head of Planning and Autonomy Lab at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University) for example asks “why wheels?”, his lab colleague Chris Urmson asks “why a driver?”. Brian Seeley (eye surgeon and founder of the CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flying Efficiency) Foundation, check out their blog here) shares thoughts on flying cars, while Robert Thompson (director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University) questions the US’ infatuation with gas-guzzling cars and conjures ecochic pint-size autos with moss roofs. Peter ‘X-Prize‘ Diamandis thinks about truly personalized cars, i.e. shape your own carbon-nanotube impregnated composite bodies.

Image: still from NASAPav’s video

In the past months newspapers have been full of high profile people declaring how the automobile industries in Europe and the US have missed their window of opportunity to transform themselves. Critical voices are bemoaning lead positions lost to automobile companies in booming markets such as China and India, where the focus on hybrids and electric vehicles appears stronger.

So much emphasis is being place on not having the right new car line up to face the future that one wonders why so little attention goes to ‘mobility‘ as a system that needs fixing instead of merely ‘the car‘. Joel Makover - author of Strategies for the Green Economy - illustrated this beautifully a while ago in his blogpost entitled: Reinventing Mobility: It’s Not Just the Cars, Stupid! One could even assert that radical innovation efforts in this respect are hindered by government subsidies ‘to save the industry’ (cf. the argument: ‘too big to fail’).

We have seen cars running on electricity, on air, on algae, on acid, … yet they are still cars as we know them (no, we are not fishing forflying cars). And cars, no matter how nifty, pose certain problems … e.g. idle time storage (aka parking), they rely on heavy, expensive infrastructure subject to wear and tear (cf. roads), they tend to clog rather than swarm intelligently, they are driven by people – like it or not, we are a mitigating factor in terms of safety, efficiency, etc. etc.

Friedman already reminded us that historically speaking truly radical innovation is most unlikely to come from the regime players, the dinosaurs. So imagine IKEA building cars … is what design student Robert Larsson set out to explore in his concept vehicle. How about looking at the automobile industry as a major smart grid player. Or imagine a carmaker shifting to become a smart grid energy player. MeetSchwarmStrom or an ambitious network of mini gas-fired power plants for the home (goal: producing as much as two nuclear reactors within a year). Lichtblick and Volkswagen team up to … perhaps become a major future energy player on the smart grid market? With cars charging at home and charging or providing peak balancing to homes, offices, etc. (after all they spend the majority of their lifetime parked, +90% according to some).

Most of you will be aware of MIT’s Smart Cities project featuring stackable cars (like shopping carts indeed), roboscooters and mobility on demand services. Also Carlo Ratti’s Senseable City Lab at the same MIT looks into ways in which are cities and its users could become smarter, something of which also mobility could benefit in myriad ways. Check out the beautiful EyeStop (up for testing in Turin, Italy). In this respect, of course there are the major IT players looking into the role ICT could play in untying the knot we have gotten ourselves into, e.g. IBM’s intelligent transport. Yet mobility is not only about cars and their infrastructure, we tend to forget about walking. Take a step back and think about it: how much space in a city goes to car-related mobility – which means standing still most of the time and hindering human traffic – and how much is actually still people-space?

If you do wanna see a far-out car concept that could tackle some of mobility’s challenges, check out designer Ahmad Filiz‘s fascinating globule concept design for Peugot.

Most of us know about the water treatment capabilities of plants such as bamboo. Some might even already be using it to treat wastewater in their backyard. We were also taught in school that trees and plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, in other words they allow us to breathe. We also know that too much CO2 is not good for us: headache, shortness of breath, loss of concentration/focus, etc.

Radiator company Jaga (yes, the funky Belgians who built the Belgian waffle at Burning Man 2006) developed Oxygen radiators to keep CO2 levels in classrooms, offices, hospital & living rooms under control by pumping in fresh air. Turns out that opening up a window does not really do the same trick as air circulation needs a serious boost in order to pump up oxygen levels in a decent way.

Yet there is more in the air that we breathe than CO2 that we ought to worry about. People suffering from health anxiety might actually want to ‘link out’ before reading the next sentence.  Some indoor environments turn out to be 5 to 10 times more polluted with all kinds of toxic chemical compounds than the heavy traffic outdoors.

Kamal Meattle already gave us a few options in terms of plants to keep around our houses and offices in order to provide us with cleaner air to breathe. Now, meet Andrea. Some of you might have met her at Paola Antonelli‘s amazing Design and the elastic mind exhibit last year at MOMA NY. Andrea is a nifty little system designed to maximize the potential of using plants (take your pick: Spathiphyllum (spath or peace lily), Dracaena marginata (red-edged dragon tree), Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant) or Aloe vera) around your living quarters to help purify the air. It has been developed by Mathieu Lehanneur and Dave Edwards (Le Laboratoire) and has now been prepped for commercial release (October 8th, 2009).

How about a car version of Andrea? No, not for inside the car, maybe a plant-based skin with the same properties. Purify while you drive …

You must have noticed as well. The signals have been there for at least a few years, yet they are sounding ever louder. People are increasingly hungry for the real thing, the meaningful, to reaffirm not merely their uniqueness or personal identity, but also their humanity, their grounding, to deepen their experiences, to contribute to something beyond mere consumerism.

Urban farming is on the rise, DIY stores are buzzing with activity, eco-tourism is hot, slow food gains ever more adepts, homegrown fruit and home-baked bread taste for more … Is the economic downturn pulling our feet back to the ground? No, it might amplify things, but things started way earlier. Does the increasingly virtualization of our experiences, of our relationships with both stuff and people, make us nostalgic for more ‘human’, more ‘tangible’ times of direct interaction? Is the superficiality, the airiness of consumer culture making us feel lost? Are we longing to beat negative talk & hear-say with positive action? Trendwatchers say that – in large numbers – we are looking for authenticity, others call it ‘back to basics’, although there seems to be more to it than just another label. Some sociologists fear we are sitting on a timebomb, and refer to a growing gap between those able and willing to follow the ever increasing pace and demands of contemporary post-industrial society and those unable or unwilling to do so.

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Le Corbusier once described the house as a machine for living in. Designer Eduardo McIntosh designed a whole series of such machines and called them Autonomous Living Units. His work was presented during the Future Cities: Past, Present exhibition at the d3 gallery in New York last month.

“Autonomous Living Units is a somewhat satirical project that stands at the intersection of the current housing crisis, the tendency of people in developed countries to live on their own and the trend of turning architecture into a consumer product. The project poses a scenario in which living units ( homes) have evolved into the most minimal yet visually alluring objects that can still provide for the basic needs of the 21st century human being. Because of the morphing of architecture into furniture, the Living Units could be inserted in derelict areas and ruined housing projects.”

Via Boite-a-outils

Until the end of September 2009, the Musée du Cinquantenaire in Brussels showcases Vegetal City, an absolutely fascinating overview exhibition on the work of Luc Schuiten, the belgian visionary architect, illustrator, author. Years ago Schuiten started working on his archiborescence vision on urban development, as an alternative future to look out for, a way out of the current-day unsustainable impasse.

Vegetal city is a vision of a transformed society driven by a quest for sustainability in which notions of biomimicry provide for a solutioning framework.

“We can’t carry on with individualistic attitudes which boil down to ‘I’ll just do my own thing and let the rest of the world go by.’ We need to change the way our entire society thinks in order to make it compatible with the rest of the world of which it forms part, and on which it ultimately depends.”

Schuiten understands the power of stories to convey his vision. As such he moves beyond the mere aspect of ‘visualizing’ what one means.

Check out the unique exhibition and/or the book.

The Board of Innovation – an initiative by friends and fellow belgian bloggers Nick De Mey (see mouseover.be) & Philippe De Ridder (see openinnovators.net) – kicks off its 24 hours of innovation today: a non-stop marathon of innovation initiatives.

Organizations big and small, national and international will take part in this unique online event. On the playlist are among others our one-time neighbours of AddictLab & Materio, our friends from FlandersDC, trendwatcher Richard Lamb, the City of Antwerp, Sun Microsystems, VisualDimension, Umicore, IdeaMonopoly, Betavine, Symnetics from Brazil, UAMS, Pfizer, URDT from Uganda, and many others. Keep your thumbs up, as Pantopicon participates as well (see here)!

Update: see our contributions “5 what if teasers” and “10 ways in which exploring & envisioning the future empowers innovation”. Thanks Nick & Philippe, another job well done!

Tabula rasa planning seldom leads to successful urban planning or ‘liveable cities’. History seems to teach us that organic growth is more successful, in part because the social tissue is given the time to grow along with its physical context and vice versa (for better and worse). Can one plan for organic growth or is it mainly an emergent effect which can only be assessed retrospectively? Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson believe one can and set out to show the world how. Together they devised …

“a strategy to develop informal slums into permanent urban districts through a process of gradual improvement to existing dwellings instead of demolition and rebuilding. Developed in Bombay, India, the Incremental Housing Strategy is intended to allow districts to improve organically without uprooting communities.”

Balestra had his first experiences in participatory design and construction in a project for a school and community centre in one of the slums of Rio, which was documented in the movie “Sambarchitecture“. Sara worked on a strategy to connect Stockholm, framing the future urban development as urban bridges between segregated suburbs.

In the Incremental Housing Strategy, several simple housing typologies have been developed which can easily be expanded. In the meantime …

“Organic patterns that have evolved during time are preserved and existing social networks are respected. Neighbors remain neighbors, local remains local.”

In parallel with their project, the Indian government initiated a grant programme spending 4500€/family to upgrade their dwellings in slum areas (City In-Situ Rehabilitation Scheme for Urban Poor Staying in Slums in City of Pune Under BSUP, JNNURM).

An interesting take on sustainability, quality of life and another beautiful example of “designing for the other 90%” … or as Balestra puts it:

“After creating works for Rem Koolhaas at OMA/ AMO, Neutelings Riedijk, NL architects, and Thomas Sandell, I found it essential to search for the opposite experience: to work for the ones who cannot pay”

Via Dezeen

Archeology fascinates people, especially children. As they dig up stuff in the garden, their imagination runs wild as they fantasize about all kinds of stories from times past. As we walk the streets, as we use everyday object and live contemporaneity, most of us will have wondered at some point: will this still exist in a few centuries? or: what will future generations dig up from our times? which stories will they reconstruct around them?

Some craft special devices to survive the times. Timecapsules are popular among scientists, amateurs, children … More than merely preserving the past, they are  used to send a message to the future.

So-called future archeology works the other way around: we imagine a world of tomorrow’s making and imagine to dig up some of its artifacts. What might they look like? In which kind of world did they originate? Wired’s Found series is a good example of this approach, one we often indulge in as well at Pantopicon. We either create such artifacts together with people as a participatory design exercise during our workshops to render the future tangible or we craft some of our own  as triggers to shake people out of today’s constraint based reasoning patterns and plunge them into possible tomorrows.

As I was preparing some designs for a set of looking boxes to allow people to gaze into future scenarios, I somehow stumbled upon the fascinating work of the Swiss designer collective Postfossil. They describe the deeper ground of their work as follows :

“In an age of increased reliance on carbon emitting technology and a rapidly depleting natural resource pool, POSTFOSSIL address the question– How will we live in a post-fossil fuel age?”

As such they made a whole series of boxes – dubbed boîtes de l’avenir - to raise awareness about our age of fossil fuels as we move into a postfossil era. Click through and meet the beautifully crafted and inspiring Actioreactio, A Kiss Good Bye,  Ten Matches, Postfossilien, To teeter on the brick of collapse, Pandora’s Box, The Speaking Sun, Historical Landscape.

The boxes somehow reminded me of Joseph Cornell‘s artworks. Well done, Postfossil!

Continuing our stroll through the growing landscape of corporate future visions, we re-stumbled upon Microsoft. Microsoft Office Labs put out a series of videos glimpsing ahead into the future of banking, retail, manufacturing and healthcare during the past few years, each time keeping a time horizon of 5-10 years in mind. Although the viewing experience is somewhat hindered by the low quality of the videos, check out some of their mixed-reality futures …

Health (2007) – Imagine a future where you can monitor your own health with smart, connected devices, your health team can share data seamlessly, and doctors are empowered with a view of health records across multiple sources – all leading to better, faster, safer, more personalized care.

Manufacturing (2006) – Imagine a manufacturing environment of the future where workers collaborate seamlessly across time-zones, predictive technologies automate processes, and sense and respond systems are connected across organizations, leading to better innovation, improved efficiencies, and more flexibility for customized products.

Banking (2005) – Imagine a banking experience where you’re always connected to your finances, banks are empowered to anticipate your needs, and transactions are seamless through predictive technologies – whether you’re in the branch, at home, or on the go.

Retail (2004) – Imagine a store of the future where you can quickly find and purchase everything you need; you have instant access to the product information you want; and the store can anticipate your needs and provide price and product offers in tune with your shopping history.

For those of you only out to get a quick glimpse, check out the montage.

Via Customer Experience Labs

When Thomas Friedman talks about radical innovation or systemic change, he often refers to the fact that television was not invented by the people who invented radio, that the internet was not invented by the people who invented television etc. In other words, so called regime players are more often than not not the contexts out of which disruptive systems and thus big change tends to grow. Hindrances caused by legacy infrastructure, systems, business models, mindframes … are all part of this picture. Hence, often a fresh, back-to-the-drawing-table-start or tabula rasa approach – where by definition none of the latter is an issue – is an easier way to jumpstart a truly fresh innovation, a true reinvention. This is not only valid for products, services, media, infrastructures etc. but also for social, political, economic systems etc.

This must have been what the SeaSteading people thought as well when they recently started putting money and effort where their mouth is: why not create a new country if we want to change the rules by which we think society is supposed to work. Problem nr 1: all the land is taken. Well, why not take it to the high seas? The dutch were among the first to gain land from the sea, but that was adding land to an existing country. (The Netherlands lead in terms of exploring sustainable futures of living with water, see EcoBoat & TUDelft’s Floating City Research Programme). Sealand is another well-known example of declared independence at sea, yet through a man-made construction set apart from (although dependent upon the goodwill and tolerance) of a neighbouring country. 

The SeaSteading crew, led by ex-Google software engineer Patri Friedman and ex-Sun Microsystems’ Wayne Gramlich is aiming to create giant floating platforms on which to ‘grow’ new, independent societies. The seasteading people are using a startup,p2p, wisdom of the crowds like approach to mature their idea. 

“Friedman doesn’t just want to create huge floating platforms that people can live on. He’s also hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app. “You could roll your own government out of pieces copied from all the societies around you,” Friedman says. “Google set my standards for how fast something should grow. This has potential to exceed those standards—if we make one seastead, there’s room for thousands.” “

Although history shows little to no long-term successes of newly-created, blueprinted ocean cities (e.g. Operation Atlantis, The Republic of Minerva, Oceania city, etc.), this does not scare the SeaSteading crew as they move ahead and recently held their first, widely-attended conference to take their ideas to the next level and prepare for action.

Niemeyers’ Brasilia, Sri Aurobindo’s Auroville, Soleri’s ArcoSanti,  The Freedom ship, Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project, Vincent Callebaut’s Lilypads, … Seen other examples of fascinating utopian experiments in city- and society-building ? Drop us a comment.

Via Wired Magazine

The Rotman School of Management dedicates its winter issue (pdf) to wicked problems, a concept not unknown to futuregazers. Jeff Conklin of the CogNexus Institute once characterized wicked problems as follows:

1. The problem is not understood until after formulation of a solution.
2. Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
3. Constraints and resources to solve the problem change over time.
4. The problem is never solved.

Aside from an interview with him, the magazine is chock-full of insightful articles on topics such as Confronting the World’s Most Important Strategic Challenges: The End of Oil, Strategy as a Wicked Problem, Peter Senge et al. on The Next Industrial Imperative: The 80-20 Challenge, Creativity, Improvisation and Organizations, The Designful Company, IDEO’s Fred Dust and Ilya Prokopoff on Designing Systems at Scale, Managerial Algorithmics: Thinking Strategically About Thinking Strategically, Artistry for the Strategist. Muhammad Yunus shares his ‘point of view’. There are Q&A’s with Prof. William Duggan on strategic intuition, reverse brainstorming etc., with Prof. John Broome on the ethics of climate change, with Prof. Sarah Kaplan on the origin of our cognitive frames, with Nigel Cross on the differences between abstract and concrete thinking, with Prof. Lucy Kimbell on the importance of a ‘design attitude’, with Prof. Dolly Chugh on the human foibles of bounded willpower, bounded awareness and bounded self-interest, with Prof. Ingo Walter on new alternatives for microfinance institutions, with Cary Fowler on protecting the world’s food supply via the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Prof. Heather Fraser shares insights on tackling wicked problems in healthcare.

In other words: an issue to devour.

Buckminster Fuller among others was a firm believer in changing society and people through changing the stuff they use. In similar ways, the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara – among others – wondered about the psychological effects of his buildings on people. The psychological and social impact of our designs in general and the built environment in particular, on ourselves and our behaviours is a fascinating theme indeed. Yet, watching some of today’s architectural and urbanistic interventions one can only wonder whether or to which extent the architects behind them have taken such considerations into account. Pondering the future of society, of living in a place, living, working and playing together, etc. as such, begs for a closer look at these subtle yet complex relationships.

‘Building happiness: architecture to make you smile‘, was recently published by Building Futures, the future oriented think tank of the Royal Institute of British Architects, which aims “to create space for discussion about the needs of society from our built environment and, consequently, the built environment professions in 20 years and beyond.”  

“Led by Ed Blake, “Building Happiness” was a project that aimed to use the best research and anecdoctal evidence from across a wide range of disciplines to identify and analyse the most important drivers in the field. How do we construct happiness? What components make for a happy building or space? How do we measure and quantify this response? is it possible? Who is responsible for it? can it be built in?”