Forbes Magazine runs a special report on the future of our cities and the cities of the future. Several plausible futures pass the review: the future city as a third-world slum, as a surveillance town, ambiguous sprawl, multi-million megacities or ghost cities.

The Swiss city of Yverdon-les-Bains – where Diller+Scofidio set up their famous blur building during the 2002 Swiss Expo – features a unique museum, called La Maison d’Ailleurs (the House of Elsewhere), dedicated to science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys. The museum will soon also feature a Jules Verne Exhibition Space.

Recent exhibitions include the work of our visionary belgian Luc Schuiten (indeed, brother of), photographer Mario del Curto’s, the Blue Man etc.

The current exhibition ‘Entropia‘ features the work of Christian Lorenz-Scheurer (Swiss-born, attended art-school in Brussels), the illustrator/matte-painter/concept designer for movies such as Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix and Peter Chung’s The Animatrix, Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come and Alex Proyas’ Dark City.

Currently, (until October 28th 2007) there’s also a fascinating exhibition (incl. lecture series MundAgoras) on the topic of utopias going on at the Mundaneum in Mons (Belgium), titled Utopia, de l’Atlantide aux cités du futur.

Also in Belgium, at the Museum of Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels (until September 16th 2007), sixteen architects and urban designers enrolled at the renowned Berlage Institute in Rotterdam (Netherlands) share with the world their visions of Brussels as a European capital in an exhibition titled A Vision for Brussels: Imagining the Captial of Europe.

The MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning together with the Center for International Studies is organizing a vision competition and problem-solving project to envision Jerusalem anno 2050:

By bringing together Palestinian and Israeli scholars, activists, business leaders, youth, and others, it seeks to understand what it would take to make Jerusalem , a city also known as Al Quds, claimed by two nations and central to three religions, a place of diversity and peace in which contending ideas and citizenries can co-exist in benign, yet creative, ways.

The project uniting in a sense creative thinking, design thinking (hopefully not only top-down spatially) and futures thinking, is described as a challenge for all to move beyond today’s binary logics often employed to address and assess the city of Jerusalem. As such one might describe the project also as a search for ‘third alternatives’, an approach not uncommon in futures thinking.

Via Archinect

PBS recently broadcasted the first pilot of a promising new science show titled 22nd century. Only one of a series of three pilots of different show will eventually be continued. The website describes the show as follows:

“Ever wonder what the world is going to be like in the future? Will people routinely live to see their 250th birthdays? Will personal computers be smarter than us? (Or more personable?) Will machines shrink so small they can make repairs inside a human cell?

Science fantasy or futuristic nightmare? 22nd Century takes you to the forefront of technology and hears from people on the cusp of a scientific revolution.”

The pilot can be viewed as a video podcast. The first episode looks at a selection of fascinating technological advancements in neuroscience: brain implants for people with locked-in syndrome, cochlear implants (btw, in Frans Erwin Offeciers we have a top specialist in the field based right here in Antwerp), cyborg extentions, nano-wires to enter the brain from within, braingates etc.

The show highlights not only the technological and scientific advancements, but also possible social and other effects to which they might lead, albeit briefly. From a futurist point of view, it would be interesting to address not only the possible effects of technology on the social, cultural, economic, ecological, political aspects of our lives, but also the effects of developments within these areas on these scientific and technological (r)evolutions, i.e. an integrated, scenario-like view of possible 22nd centuries.

By including a few historical references to the origins of some of the ideas underlying the technological advancements or their possible effects for that matter, a show closely related to the concept of ‘time’ and with a (popular) scientific inclination like this, could gain in terms of depth, contextualization and understanding. For example, in the context of the ‘world wide mind’, think about McLuhan‘s global village or Teilhard de Chardin‘s noosphere or other concepts of distributed consciousness or intelligence etc.

Looking forward to next episodes …

Image from Physorg.com article “Researchers get neurons and sillicon talking”

Ask any filmfan to describe the future and many will – one way or another – refer to Blade Runner. The mastermind behind the Bladerunner imagery is ‘visual futurist’ Syd Mead.

Syd Mead worked as a designer for major companies such as Ford Motor Company, Philips and US Steel. Soon he delivered ‘futurist consultancy’ in the form of visual artwork for companies such as Chrysler, Sony and many others. Most of his medals however, Mead earned in the filmindustry working on large budget films such as Blade Runner, Tron, Star Trek – The Motion Picture, Mission Impossible III etc. as a conceptual artist.

Many will remember instantly the many futuristic chrome-finished modes of transport designed by Mead, yet what really sets his work apart from other conceptual artists in the field is the meticulous way in which he pays attention to ‘scenario’. Every object designed, every event depicted sits ‘in context’. It is this integrative approach to visualizing possible future worlds and societies which continues to push the limits of (en)visioning and imagineering, separating his work from mere scifi or fantasy drawings.
Sentury and Oblagon are two books showing some of the futuristic worlds designed by Syd Mead. For those of you who’d like to have a look behind the scenes , check out The Gnomon Workshop’s DVD series on Mead’s work and techniques.

On a more biographical note, filmmaker Joaquin Montalvan recently created the documentary ‘Visual Futurist: the art and life of Syd Mead’. A few months ago, Jean-Eric Hénault over at CGChannel interviewed Syd Mead at his home residence. Check out the video here. Ballistic Publishing features another illustrated interview on their website.

Instead of thinking about the next year, let’s think a little further ahead. The Long Bets Foundation (cf. The Long Now Foundation) – like we do – wants to promote long term thinking. They invite people to place bets on the future (along with solid argumentation). All are invited to join the likes of Eric Schmidt, Ray Kurzweil, Paul Hawken and others and put their money where there vision/prediction is. Top bet for the moment is by Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, worth $20,000:

“By 2029 no computer – or “machine intelligence” – will have passed the Turing Test.”

Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of the best-selling book ‘The Long Tail‘, recently blogged about ‘living with no visible technology‘, pointing to the fact that technology has reached the point where it can be put out of sight, become background once again, whereas before it used to be foreground, dictating, consuming and constraining human space (physical and mental). We already blogged about related lines of thought in terms of calm technology, ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, pervasive computing etc., core strategies in many of today’s consumer electronics companies. Yet, the title of Chris Anderson’s blog post ‘living with no visible technology’ also triggered another brainwave.

In McLuhan‘s view of media and technology in general as extensions of man, there are a few things about the evolution of our extensions and where it is heading that are intriguing to say the least.

One aspect is that the unstoppable trend of miniaturization, ongoing since several ages, is coming to the point where its effects upon the proportional relationship with human nature will take on a whole new form. Once crossing the barriers of our senses, slipping below their natural radar, miniaturized technology makes for new opportunities as well as new threats to arise.

Think about the marvellous applications of nano-technology in the medical world, the opportunities opened up by the extreme portability of memory, promising developments in synthetic biology etc. The smaller things get, the more interesting and applicable they often become in a ever-wider range of domains. Last month, for example, the Israeli security department announced it will be investing heavily in nanotechnology in order to develop prototypes of new, small weaponry such as supergloves and bionic hornets within 3 years. The project is reminiscent of the Pentagon’s plans to develop a full scale cyber-insect army. The development of smart dust for both sensing and acting is on the research agenda for both civil and military purposes since several years. But also consider developments in the biochemical area, i.e. designer viruses, bacteriophages etc. In this case, like in any case of technology, there are benevolent uses and malicious ones.

As miniaturization progresses, many wonder about what will happen when the inability of our senses to warn us about certain human-engineered threats becomes pervasive? Among the main worries is that the further our technologies range, the further their reach into our world becomes in terms of distance, scale, number and autonomy, the smaller and less predictable their margins of error might become along with their ‘visibility’. The decrease of effort needed to operate many ‘small’ technologies, the increase of access to them, along with a much wider (often less predictable ) range and scale of impact (e.g. consequences of converging technologies such as the mingling of GMO’s with ‘traditional’ species etc.) raises questions of safety and worries of things getting out of hand much more easily. In other words, the veil of a perceived extension of control might increasingly obscure the loss of it. Scale can be a tricky thing.
How fragile we are …

Image shows the University of Berkeley’s robotic fly project

According to Prof. Stephen Hawking humanity will need to colonize space if it wishes to survive … itself. The risks of wiping out ourselves and our lovely planet, either directly through nuclear wars or designer viruses or indirectly because of environmental changes we are causing, are on the increasing side. As such, we might wish to start planning ‘the great escape’. A doomsday scenario … yet the worries triggering it are even on many optimists’ minds.

Space, the final frontier … we used to hear. Last week NASA shared with the world its plans to set up a permanent base (and launchpad for missions to Mars) on the moon by 2020. Travelling to the moon not only reminds of Jules Verne’s stories, but the idea of colonizing it is also reminiscent of the fascinating Dallas Barr scifi-comics, by Belgian author Marvano (in cooperation with scifi writer Joe Haldeman).

2020 … One might wonder whether the acceleration of change has moved in an opposite direction in terms of space travel. Of course, these are complex endeavours to be planned carefully, yet somehow in terms of ambition in timing there seems to be little resemblance to the adventurous halo of the sixties. There is of course the difference in sense of urgency and challenge between racing against another nation and racing against uncertainties of ‘our condition’ in general.

In general though, it seems that in spite of huge technological advances since the sixties, somehow the spirit, mindset and collective support of making the impossible possible (think space travel, think Concorde, …) appears to be much less present today. Can space travel jumpstart the dream factories again, or will the search for a sustainable world bring about worldchanging at a scale of ‘grandeur’ (Hawking and quite a few along with him see both as interrelated issues or drives).

Image by NASA

Visionaries and ‘envisioners’ do not only occur in history books. Some alive today work relentlessly, rigorously, step by step, on a day to day basis to bring their grand visions to reality. Some are more successful in this than others, some more utopian than others, yet all believers in the possibility of a better tomorrow and a clear vision of their own on how this ought to be.

Engineer, designer and futurist Jacque Fresco (born 1916), writes, draws, plans and constructs the future out of his home-based Research Centre in Florida. A child of the Great Depression, he is an everlasting optimist and strong believer in man’s ability to change the world, to change society, especially in view of today’s many challenges for tomorrow. With enthusiasm Fresco illustrates and shares his holistic visions of another tomorrow, of possible worlds ahead, worlds in which the economy is based upon managed resources instead of scarcity/money, where cities are designed to operate in a sustainable way, where man’s designs and behaviour are energy efficient, where automated and autonomous technologies are omnipresent etc.

Taking singularly, many of the man’s designs and illustrations are reminiscent of scifi-scenery. Set on a stage of their own, the designs, like the sketches, descriptions and visualizations of many visionaries, have the utopianist’s tabula rasa touch to them. Yet contextualized by Fresco’s texts, interviews, lectures, and beyond the technosurface there are a set of ideas and systems that range quite a bit further than their appearance.

The Venus Project, subtitled The redesign of a culture illustrates well Fresco’s scope and vision-span. It does more than talk about technologies over the horizon or utopian city design, digging into the larger societal fabric of Fresco’s vision on today and tomorrow’s world.

Award winning filmmaker William Gazecki recently created a film about Jacque’s life and ideas, titled Future by Design (DVD release planned for next week).
Be sure also to check out the other fascinating video material available online (e.g. here or Jacque’s mySpace page ).

What if man would disappear off the face of the earth? How would it change our planet? How long would it take before man’s traces would disappear completely? NewScientist looked into it in a recent article titled “Imagine earth without people”. The Times of London added a timeline chart, accompanied by Piranesi-inspired imagery. Reactions online show that many people are amazed by the speed of the whole process. This shows once again how perception of time and change and projection of such dynamics as we know them from the past (no, not only dinosaurs) on our present context, can often make us look at reality in a different light. Describing and visualizing ‘what ifs’ such as ‘a planet without humans’, may trigger some healthy reflection as well.
Experience learns that sustainability is a wonderful trigger and grateful subject for future thinking. As in scenario-building, often you need extremes in order to open up and sharpen up people’s minds, make it clear that you are describing a totally different context, etc. Yet, they are instrumental to a certain aim. If the aim of this thought experiment were to find ways to reach a preferred future in which man’s footprint(s) on earth is minimalized, one would be curious to explore other possible pathways to achieve this – as we all know there are -, alternatives to ones with an outcome being as apocalyptic as man’s extinction. This way, lessons learned from a thought experiment such as this could become a trigger and lead to strategies for action.

Our friends over at worldchanging.com commented along similar lines.

Via: NewScientist

Visionary leaders are scarce. Jan Kriekels of Jaga, the radiator factory, however, fits the description once put forward so eloquently in Apple’s Think Different campaign. He belongs to “the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently [...] they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire.”

A while ago, Jan & Co. launched Uchronians.org, which is, more than a mere meeting place, a benevolent virus set out to infect as many creative minds as possible, people daring to colour beyond traditional lines, to think of and work on alternative futures together … See it as an experiential time machine.
The term ‘uchronian’ is a time-variant of ‘utopian’, where place makes room for time, pointing at a state of ‘no time’. Uchronians was named after Uchronia, an installation made out of 150 km of timber with a floor span of 60 by 30 metres, and a height of 15 metres, built and burnt to the ground in Black Rock City, Nevada, at the Burning Man 2006 festival. It was a mindchild of Jan Kriekels and Arne Quinze.

PS. Jan Kriekels of Jaga was among the speakers at the enchanting C-mine site in Genk, Belgium on 29/09/2006 for the launching event of the Media & Design Academy’s Experience Design Lab, an initiative in which Pantopicon was involved as well.