Most of you will know Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries‘ project Massive Change with their wonderful slogan “It’s not about the world of design. It’s about the design of the world.” In a context of foresight and future studies this is a powerful reminder to people that the future is not an unescapable wave coming rolling in to wash over us, but something in which all of us can have a hand building it.

On November 18th Massive Change America and the City of Chicago’s Department of Environment are organizing a one-day symposium “Massive Change and the city: Global Visionaries Symposium”, a spin-off of the Massive Change : The Future of Global Design exhibition.

the symposium includes conversations by global visionaries including Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates Wikipedia; Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse; Dayna Baumeister, cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild; Stewart Brand, futurist and author of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Clock of the Long Now, and How Buildings Learn; Mary Czerwinski, cognitive psychologist and principal researcher at Microsoft; Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, and syndicated columnist; Gunter Pauli, founder and director of Zero Emissions Research Initiative of the United Nations University in Tokyo; and John Todd, biologist and leader in the field of ecological design.

Via MassiveChange

Theatre is a wonderful medium able to touch people at profound levels of experience. As such, it is also a fascinating tool to bring to life things which we cannot see, because they are intangible or because they simply not exist yet (think imaginary scenarios, possible futures etc.).

Our friends at Theater ad Hoc , to put it in their own words,

“make performances about invisible science – current developments in science that can no longer be seen by the naked eye. Developments that have a great influence on our comings and goings. On our near future. Take for instance elementary particles, the building blocks of matter. We are completely made up out of them, yet we can’t see them. What’s more, they behave entirely differently than we could ever possibly imagine. It’s food for thought: the building blocks of our bodies follow a different logic than we do ourselves.

Under the motto Reality is too interesting to leave it to the realists, Theater Adhoc tries literally and figuratively to gain insight into such invisible dimensions by unleashing the imaginative power of the arts upon them.”

Their research-theatre performances have covered topics such as genomics, elementary particles, classification, etc. Their current production is titled “Blueprint: thinking brings illumination”, and is on display, or rather to be experienced on several locations in the Netherlands these days.
It is an interactive installation for one or more visitors at a time, a blueprint for the visualization of the invisible, a sensory experience at the boundaries of thinking and seeing.

A few days ago I came across a (somewhat older) blog entry mentioning futurist, author, blogger, viridian designer, … Bruce Sterling‘s lecture at the California College of Arts, titled Design Futurism. Steve Portigal was there and blogged his notes on Core77.

Bruce talked about similarities and differences between design and futurism, and what they could mean to each other. He sees sustainability as a major overlap, common ground between the two disciplines/attitudes.
An EU project titled Designing for future needs also looked into what the two disciplines/attitudes could mean to each other (read: a lot), researching “how design techniques for envisioning the future can benefit EC decision-makers’ foresight planning and policy work” (and vice versa).

As some of you might know, at Pantopicon, insights, methods and techniques from (participatory) foresight, future and envisioning studies and those from design and design research go hand in hand. From a pantopical point of view, both mindsets, ways of assessing the world can be considered to share a number of characteristics, such as a 360°, contextualized approach, people at the centre, an important time/process dimension, thinking in terms of alternatives, visualizing/making ‘experiencable’ that which does not yet exist, etc.
Via: Core77 and Steve Portigal’s blog AllThisChittaChattah

Mostly, museums look back in time, yet sometimes they also glance forward, to what the future might or is about to bring (with of course a pinch of history on the side). The website of London’s fascinating Science Museum features “Neurobotics … the future of thinking?”, an exhibition exploring the fascinating world of neuromarketing, brain implants, neural connectors, etc. Think Kevin Warwick and other bodies and spaces where sillicon and neurons, hardware and wetware meet.

Long term perspective: forget about the sillicon … straight up organic, biological computing (e.g. CBCD, synthetic biology, …).

On November 17-18, the MIT Comparative Media Studies and the Convergence Culture Consortium are organizing a conference on the futures of entertainment (note the plural form).

“[...] the nature of what counts as ‘entertainment’ is rapidly changing. We are seeing the blurring of aesthetic and technological distinctions between media platforms, of ‘advertising’ and ‘content’ and of ‘creator’ and ‘consumer’. Futures of Entertainment brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture.”

The event will discuss trends and themes such as television futures, user-generated content, transmedia storytelling, fan cultures, social networking, the rise of mobile media, virtual worlds etc.

Speakers include Chris Anderson (Wired, The Long Tail), Kevin Barrett (Bioware), Danah Boyd, Alex Chisholm (IceCubedStudios), Jason Mittell, Caterina Fake (Yahoo), Ji Lee (Droga5), Michael Lebowitz (Big Spaceship), John Lester (Linden Lab), Paul Levitz (DC Comics), Diane Nelson (Warner Premiere), Rob Tercek (M-Forma).
Via the p2pfoundation blog

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.

‘Homo futuris‘ is a project initiated by the Unesco Center Flanders (Belgium), aimed at investigating the impact of scientific and technological developments on human life in tomorrow’s world. Think: designer babies, bionic bodyparts, mindupgrades, nanorobots to keep our bodies virusfree etc.
The project consists of a whole series of initiatives among which a festival, taking place at the cultural temple De Vooruit in Ghent from September 27th-30th. Central question there will be: “What will human beings look like in the future?”

The festival, with plenty of high-tech media installations, lectures, performances etc., also features what promises to be a fascinating debate between fascinating people:

• Prof. Christine Van Broeckhoven (VIB, molecular biology/biotechnology)
• Prof. Karen Maex (KULeuven, nanotechnology)
• Prof. Luc Steels (AI lab VUB)
• Henk ten Have (UNESCO, Ethics of Science and Technology)
• Robby Berloznik (Viwta, Flemish Institute for Science and Technology Assessment)
• Dirk Draulans (Knack) will be moderating the debate

We wish our futurist colleague and discussion partner Maya Van Leemput good luck with Homo Futuris. Maya is the coordinator behind the event; she recently also interviewed one of Pantopicon’s partners (Nik) for her Futurescales project (video presented at the Antwerp Museum for Contemporary Art on April 23rd 2006)