Theatre comes in many flavours and the Dutch theater company Theater AdHoc defies categorization in a lovely way. Join us on an inspiring trip through the mind and heart of its founder Jan van den Berg.

NB (Nik Baerten – Pantopicon) : I am sure there have been many attempts to characterize the kind of theater you and your colleagues at AdHoc have brought to the stage for many years now … “Experimental science theatre”, “Research theatre”, being amongst them. How would you describe what you do?

JVDB: I like to regard myself as an exploratory voyager whose expeditions do not necessarily lead to the blank spots on our planet but rather to the outer limits of our seeing and common sense. Driven by the motto ‘Reality is too interesting to leave it to the realists’ I visit scientists and scientific projects that demand the utmost of my imagination. Subsequently I make scenarios for theatre and recently also for film, i.e. dramatized stories about my expeditions and findings. Another way of characterizing what I do, could be: satisfying my curiosity in public, both through meeting experts ‘out there in the wild’ and by sharing my experiences in front of a live audience.

blueprint ©DigiDaan

NB: As you mention the arts-science link or perhaps also divide, it reminds me of the fact that this year we are celebrating the 50th birthday of C.P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture: “The two cultures” in which he describes the drifting apart of sciences and humanities as a major obstacle to solving the world’s problems. Although 50 years later, one could assert that it is still a very contemporary issue. As you are constantly crossing borders between the two, tell us more about how you view the ‘inbetween’ space between arts and sciences and the tension or perceived tension between them.

blueprint ©DigiDaan

I tend to think that, basically, the current tension, or division, in our world is not so much to be found between the worlds of arts and sciences (or between science and humanities) but rather between opposite concepts of space and time as such – and thus a pessimistic or optimistic mentality and attitude – and all the political, social, economical and ethical consequences coming with it – in whatever domain. Yet there is of course this major difference in the way in which arts and sciences consider the importance and necessity of proof and evidence for the assessment and appreciation of work. That is why I cherish the inbetween space as a sanctuary for the best of two worlds.

NB: Yet we also live in times in which the homo universalis attitude of artists practising science or scientists being involved in art  are crossing borders to the point one could say a new middle ground is arising – not unlike what Dave Edwards refers to as “artscience” for example. Being a Harvard professor, he also runs LeLaboratoire in Paris where artscientists meet and work on their experiments. You once embarked on a passionate journey to turn the amazing ‘cathedral’ of radio communication in Kootwijk (NL) into a creative retreat and laboratory for artists and scientists.  Is it still a dream of yours, whether as ‘Instituut Kootwijk’ or someplace else?

Instituut Kootwijk © Joep Lennarts

NB: Theatre science teaches us about the so-called 4th wall principle … the fourth wall being the imaginary separation between the onstage area and the audience seats, its opacity depending on the kind of interaction being established between players and audience. In which way do you vary the fourth wall in your performances? How does it change your story or the way it is perceived?

JVDB: In my performances there is absolutely no such thing as a fourth wall. During most of my performances, both on stage as in the audience the lights stay switched on. I want to be able to look my audience directly in the eyes when I tell them my story and create a truly here & now ad hoc atmosphere. I approach the audience as my guest. I welcome them, literally, and take them with me on our journey through the night (the show). This includes taking in account the particular circumstances (the beat & need & authenticating details) of each and every night. On top of that, live interviews with scientists and technologists are a regular part of my shows; dialogues between facts and fiction, between the reality of the theatrical and the theatricality of reality.

NB: You have travelled the world to visit some of the most amazing scientific experiments, labs and met some absolutely fascinating people. Tell us something about whom you met and how essential this interview deep dive is to your work?

JVDB: Meeting and interviewing scientists, both in their daily practice ánd live on stage, is crucial to my artistic work. This is mainly the case because my scenarios are inspired by their scenarios.

For example, meeting and interviewing J. Craig Venter (in 1998) while he was in the middle of his ratrace for sequencing the human genome first, gave my colleagues and me (1) far better one-liners than we ever could have imagined ourselves, (2) a unique insight (behind the curtains) in a revolutionary context at a historic moment in time, and (3) unique footage. In short: a thrilling, adventurous experience that inspired me to sometimes use all-American big statements and large gestures in order to make a story communicative and inspiring.

Majorana © Joep Lennarts

In this sense, penetrating 1500 metres deep into a mountain in Japan, as I did in order to visit a Nobel Prize winning physics experiment about which I wanted make a theatreshow, is sometimes not even half as exciting as drilling deep into an experimental mind.

NB: When dealing with the future, we are mostly dealing with stuff and situations which do not exist yet or are very abstract issues which are difficult to grasp, especially for people not – or only distantly – involved in their conception. This means we have to construct them, render them tangible somehow. How do you deal with this in theatre?

Zoom © Joep Lennarts

Zoom was – on all levels – one of the most complex and difficult projects I ever realized, because Kuipers’ experiment was almost beyond my comprehension and imagination. However I didn’t want to accept that, because I regard light as something which ‘belongs’ to all of us. And I was told that experiments like the one of Kobus Kuipers are about to mark a new era in communication technology and thus influence our nearby future. So I felt the urge and the responsibility as an artist to relate myself to it. But it was really difficult to get a grip on the material.

To keep the spirit high, my colleagues and I encouraged each other by saying: “of course we’re never sure of what we do, that’s why it’s called research”. But sometimes even that didn’t do it anymore. The breakthrough in our creative process was the  decision to stage a ‘sum over all possible histories’ of our understanding of Kuipers’ experiment, a simplified interpretation of the so-called ‘path integral’ as a dramaturgical hold, using all our theatrical means to tell the same story in all (our) possible ways. Parallel to Kuipers’ experiment (bringing light to a standstill) everyone in the ensemble developed a way to bring his/her own artistic means to a standstill; in music, dance, storytelling, stage- and lightdesign. Thus we tried to physically experience (ourselves) and creatively visualize (for our audience) what it means if Kuipers states that he does things (with light) ‘that are not supposed to be possible’.

NB: How do on the one hand scientists and on the other artists view your work? In which way do they respond differently?

JVDB: This last Zoom show, was highly appreciated by scientists and visual artists, though not as much by regular theatre audiences, alas. I think this has partly to do with the fact that what Theater Adhoc basically does, is telling and visualising stories about ideas and scientific experiments, rather than stories about the conflicts between characters and ego’s. This has turned our shows more and more into a kind of installation-like performance art, which is not necessarily a non-dramatic artform but much more a situational, poetic and delayed than the well-made conflict-based, psychological and explanatory theatreplays. We prefer to invite our audience to enter another domain of time and space and visualize what it might look like, beyond the borders of our naked eyes and our common sense.

Zoom © Joep Lennarts

JVDB: Personally, in terms of dreaming, I’m mainly interested in creating the ultimate storytelling situation and not so much in dealing with the latest technological possibilities. Which means that I’m focussing on ‘new ways to tell a story’ and on new forms of interacting with my audience. When I dream about that, however, paradoxically I always end up imagining very classical formats such as a symposion or a common room context. My nightmares are about so-called ‘events’ in which everyone can see for himself what one likes to make out of the flow of images, sounds, and mixed-media happenings that are vented upon the audience. At the same time I realise that it might be that such a borderless-intoxication-event is the ultimate and true consequence of what theatre has been after, from the very beginning of its existence; much more than my Appolinian approach of ‘the invisible’ and ‘the unknown’.

NB: Most of your performances aim for physics, genetics, information science … Indeed, discoveries within these fields have changed and are changing humanity and society in profound ways. Yet also within the humanities and for example economics changes are occuring which are absolutely revolutionary. Also in exploring the future we notice a similar gravitation towards science and technology when we probe them for events, developments, changes the future might bring which could possibly turn our world upside down.  Which are your motivations to place more emphasis on the (hard) sciences and technology and less on the humanities ?

JVDB: In my case it all started out of plain curiosity. Coming from a philosophical (humanities) background, I didn’t know a lot about the (hard) sciences and technology for a very long time. Then, for various reasons, I started to feel ashamed about the fact that I knew so little about the stories and the concepts behind the big discoveries of the last few centuries; that I hardly knew anything about the scientific insights and the technologies that are making our world, and shaping my own life within it, functioning the way they do. On top of that, I read an article by Frank Schirrmacher, one of the chief editors of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who stated (on the occasion of the sequencing of the human genome) that artists should regain their interest, their influence and their responsibility in the development of today’s major scientific and technological projects. They should do so not only on an aesthetic, a fictional and a moral level but also – and especially – on the level of research & development & decision making.

schoolbord © Joep Lennarts

NB: Theater is an artform which comes in many flavours and is part of just about every culture on the planet. Its form, function and appreciation varies depending on its context. But it makes me wonder: are there theatrical traditions elsewhere in the world that you admire and would like to experiment with? Are there themes – just as groundbreaking as but not part of Western science – you dream to assess some day, themes or developments just as fundamental in changing who we are, what and how we do things?

JVDB: I’m highly fascinated by the philosphy and the skills behind the art of walking in Japanese Noh Theatre. One of my ultimate future projects would be to try to tell a story with nothing more or less than (1) appearing on stage and being present for some time (just like that) … standing still … walking a little bit from here to there … and then telling a short story about a street in a small village, an intersection in the town nearby and the very end of the universe.

NB: What if you could and would really like to change something, to have an impact beyond art & entertainment? Which audience would you pick? What would it be like?

JVDB: Try to picture this: during my last year in highschool I doubted between applying for theatreschool or trying to become a development worker in a third world country like, for instance, Papua New Guinea. Now, I really don’t know if one can call that ‘an audience to pick’, just as much as I’ve got no idea at all, what and how it would be like if I would give it a try, but it would definitely change quite something in my life. Whether or not it will have an impact beyond art & entertainment, however, is to be doubted.

Majorana © Joep Lennarts

JVDB: I reckon my final frontier will be death. As it is for most of us, I guess. My ultimate challenge will be to face and grasp, as much as possible, the very moment of crossing the boundary from here to there – the everlasting nowhere – and see whether I can prolong that very instant a little bit by telling a short story; about a street in a small village, an intersection in the town nearby and the very end of the universe.

NB: Dear Jan, thank you so much for sharing.

Related posts:

1. street of the future

We invited Patrick to join us for an interview and share with us some of his thoughts on the way in which people envision the future.  Enjoy!

N(ik) B(aerten – Pantopicon): As was also made clear during several of the talks over at LIFT09, including your own, some of our most deeply engrained visual and conceptual connotations with the future – e.g. intelligent kitchens, flying cars, etc. – are about the dreams that never came through. To which extent is that a sad thing or exactly what attracts and thus drives us to explore and envision the future?

P(atrick J.) G(yger): Planning, therefore imagining the future, has of course always been around as a human trait (although this chimp here has surprised everybody). But if we stick to recent history, it is really after the industrial revolution that the notion emerges that the future has to be constructed as a better place (not really a place in time, as it is not defined as such). We know that the notion of progress in general is a recent concept, mostly when it comes to linking technological progress and social progress. Utopian thought and science fiction have been closely connected to this perspective, with works like Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1888). But where Bellamy’s future would bring social improvement to the masses, consumerism has tried to drive people to improve their own personal life (in the future) by the acquisition of new goods, just for themselves … So, really, there is no real embedded attraction to the future as a better place for me. It is a constructed cultural phenomenon.

So, is it a sad thing that past visions of the future didn’t happen? Well, I think they mostly did, but in a different form. And the problem is that dystopian visions of the future happened too. Basically, I think we really live in the best and worst worlds at the same time.

NB: What I meant was that it could be regarded as sad by some that our ‘first, top-of-mind connotations with the future are of the kind of things that didn’t happen’. That they didn’t happen as they were portrayed or didn’t happen as all is perhaps not even that important. What I do find interesting is that the ‘top 10′ things people shout when you ask them what they think about when you say ‘future’ are exactly those things.

PG: Indeed. That’s because people have been drilled to think in certain images, through advertising, TV shows, etc. I think, and/or simply tend to answer in terms of clichés …

NB: Perhaps one could say that these are the cases in which the imagination of a few overwhelms and blocks the imagination of others. Sometimes certain images prove so strong that for those who’ve come in touch with them, they becomes blinded by them and can no longer see alternatives. The Apple knowledge navigator comes to mind in this respect as do some of the figure-ground images from Gestalt psychology.

However, people like Alex Steffen, Richard Anderson & Peter Lunenfeld have all shared a plea to develop and discuss more optimistic images of the future. How do you look at the role of future images in challenging times like the ones we are living now? For those willing to draft optimistic futures, what would you advise them and for which pitfalls would you warn them?

PG: I think optimistic visions of the future are essential, because we need images and prospects that can help us define our daily actions in an environment that is rather complex, but also where we are pushed only in a limited amount of directions (forward, supposedly). But to me, it is essential not to imagine futures which simply have extra layers of technology on the top of our present. The future is not about addition, it is about choice. So the pitfalls are really on the one hand techno-optimism and naivety about how an information driven society would improve things, and on the other hand regressive utopian visions of going back to the country and eating products that we grow ourselves. It’ll be hard to navigate between those clichés and find an original perspective.

NB: What you mention is exactly one of the reasons why we try to stimulate people to think through different scenarios on the future, none of which will probably eventually materialize. They do however help to stretch people’s minds to think about alternatives, to question their assumptions, to assess the future from different angles and respect its complexity, many of which they or any individual group of people perhaps has any grip on.

PG: That’s absolutely brilliant and quite what I think is needed: to present people with vast possibilities, multiple scenarios and, well, choices somehow.

NB: I think you also point to the ways in which the broader range of socio-cultural, economic, ecological, political or institutional developments, intertwingle and shape reality, shape our future. In your opinion, do you think contemporary images of the future differ from so called retrofuturistic images in this respect? Do they cover broader grounds?

PG: Contemporary images of the future are maybe slightly more subtle than what we could see 50 or 70 years ago, or at least appear to be so. Current images might seem to cover broader grounds, but actually, most images of the future have to simplify the vision of what they represent in order to make them more striking and useful. Noone is interested in changes of small detail; as in utopias, authors ‘have to’ present us with radical transformations of our society. This was already the case 70 years ago, but they seem to be a bit more narrow than today mostly because they focussed – perhaps rather unilaterally – on consumer goods.

NB: When we look at the way in which most companies ‘broadcast’ their future visions these days, they still seem to rely heavily on product (hence technology) centric views of the future. Visual futurists like Syd Mead however emphasize the importance of the scenario when sketching images of the future, the dynamic context (socio-cultural, economic, political, etc.) shaping and being shaped by new possibilities and threats opened up by technological advances. How do you look at the relationship between the future and the context, drivers through which it is shaped?

PG: The reason why Mead’s visions were striking were because he understood the transformative power of products and technology. So, context is more than just that: it is central to the discourse. What we want to see changed are our environment, our societies, our interactions. Who cares about a new cellphone per se? This is the reason why we need different societal visions of the future. The idea conveyed by science fiction and advertising in the mid 20th-century that you can have a flying car in your garage or a robot at home, and that things will simply be better, really ought to be dropped once and for all.

NB: La Maison d’Ailleurs houses an impressive collection on the life and work of Jules Verne. To many people he remains the future thinker par excellence. What makes him so special according to you? Who are some of the most interesting future minds today according to you and why?

PG: The reason why Verne is very important is because he didn’t think that much about the future, but about the present: the dangers and the opportunities of technologies (but also political opinions, ideas, etc. in general) around him served as his main sources (his books almost never happen in the future btw). That is the lesson to me: in order to inspire people, to try and drive them into a future that can be of their choice, you have to be able to decypher the present.

Among the interesting future minds today, I could mention Nicolas Prantzos, Luc Schuiten, as well as many science fiction writers. People like KW Jeter or Norman Spinrad have influenced me a lot for instance. But most of these references are from 10 years ago. It is indeed easier to let some time pass by before saying who is important as a futurist writer …

What interests me in those examples and what I think are good futurist writers are two things mostly: the fact that they are daring and do not fear to present radical transformations of our society or wide ranging changes. But they are also about something else which is easy to explain but very hard to achieve: the ability to write an original development one step ahead of the current Zeitgeist. These creators I mention are fascinating because they present you with something not at all that radically different, but not exactly in sync with current trends either.

NB: From an aesthetic point of view, retrofuturism could be regarded a style featuring a specific way of looking at and depicting the future. If you let your mind browse your collection for a minute, could you give us a 2-minute rundown of how history dealt with the future in different ways? How would you describe current styles of artwork dealing with the future? What sets them apart from the rest?

PG: If we’re speaking about science fiction art, I think it has always been linked to the spaces explored by mankind.  In history, visions of the future represent the conquest of new territories for mankind: once the Earth is fully explored, science fiction depicts the exploration of the seas, travels under the earth, voyages in the air, then journeys through the cosmos etc. More recently, new virtual spaces and parallel worlds have been imagined as new realms of human activity … Current styles of artwork have left astronomical or space art a bit behind to try and depict those new parallel realities: computer environments, time-shifted societies (steampunk), etc. But what’s really exciting to me, is that technological progress has made new types of art possible, which question our reality and try to break current boundaries as science fiction does. Therefore, works of people like Stelarc really are the new science fiction art of the day …

NB: How important do you consider science-fiction, utopias and extraordinary voyages for people or humanity as a whole? Which function do they serve?

PG: I obviously think it’s very important  – otherwise I should get another job. What I like about those genres (or that genre, if we see it as one, as we do here at Maison d’Ailleurs) is that they are amazing tools: science fiction can really help us understand what is happening around us, but also what people thought was happening around them 50 or a 100 years ago. Science fiction is an exploratory device that lets us work on our present and reshape things in all possible directions, and in a very free and sometimes playful and entertaining manner too. It creates frightening or enchanting perspectives that can really inspire us to go (or not go) in a given direction. How successful science fiction has been is a matter of debate probably, but for me, the main function of the genre is to question reality by allowing us to take a step back and look at it from a skewed angle.

NB: Most visions of the future we are familiar with have also been quite top-down in nature, in the sense that they have been drafted by ‘an author’, in most cases one individual. At the same time we acknowledge that the future is always the result of a complex pattern of interaction between different actors, different visions of what the world could or ought to look like. How do you look at visions of the future not drafted by an individual but by groups of people, by stakeholders in a future (e.g. of a company, a community, a technology etc.)? Any best practice examples that particularly fascinate you in this respect?

PG: I must admit I don’t know many examples of groups imagining the future, except maybe Archigram, but in their case, their project might have been a bit different from creating real roadmaps for tomorrow. I think descriptions of the future are naturally created by single people or a small group of them. At the heart of the reconstruction of society is the (egocentric) presupposition that your own values should be applied to everybody and that your world should be shaped according to your beliefs. It makes a collective effort in imagining the future quite difficult.

NB: At Pantopicon, we often look at images of the future created by science fiction writers or others as a way to help to stimulate debate about the issues they uncover. Presented as worlds built, the future becomes tangible. In view of the challenges we as a society are currently facing, which are to you some of the best debate stimulating futures our readers ought to know about?

PG: Ah! I wish I knew! There are many out there, from tech conferences to new media exhibitions. I’d recommend going to Transmediale (Berlin, Germany), Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria) and Utopiales (Nantes, France). These are events for arts, films and literature, but it is my favorite way to plunge into tomorrow.

NB: Why do you think so many people in the field are architects or designers? Is it that notion of leaving one’s imprint on history through the creation of something set in stone, which endures for generations? Or is it something about the way in which our built environment influences our behaviour, reflects or even shapes society? What do you think …

PG: It’s because they wear black, therefore are taken seriously, like priests or judges. Well actually it’s also because traditionnaly utopias are created through the transformation of urban landscapes. The best way to change people’s behaviour is to change how they live, obvisouly. And from the industrial revolution onwards, our way of life has been heavily dependent on the renewed possession of goods. Hence architects and designers play a central role in this …

NB: Which lines up nicely with the way Buckminster Fuller thought about changing the world: i.e. through changing the artifacts, the spaces surrounding people. One could say that some like Soleri, Fresco, Fuller, Niemeyer, … have tried to build their utopias …

PG: I am not sure they tried to build utopias. I think they are major figures because from the start they understood the limitations they would face and not try to impose their vision (unlike, say, Rev. Jim Jones).

NB: Which place do they occupy in the way we see the future according to you?

PG: They are essential, even when they fail. And they most probably (and perhaps hopefully) do so on a mass scale. They provide blueprints for our future, that we can choose to follow or not, or partly. They are a source of inspiration.

NB: Last but not least, how do you look at the future of thinking about and portraying the future?

PG: Great question! We can stop thinking about the future then we stop worrying about it. And given the world we’re in, I think we need to portray the future as, well, a magnificent future…

NB: Thank you so much Patrick. It’s great that inspiring places and memory palaces of the future like the Maison d’Ailleurs exist. Keep up the good work!

All images appear courtesy of the collection of Maison d’Ailleurs/Agence Martienne.

Related posts:

1. a history of the future in 100 objects

Futures, experiences, design … three core ingredients of what Pantopicon is all about. Three topics, each situated on a crossroads of disciplines. It is in this context that we are pleased to share with you our latest interview: an inspiring chat with Nathan Shedroff, chair of the Design Strategy MBA programme at CCA, information designer, experience strategist, author of “Experience Design“ and “Making meaning“, and many more things. What do futures studies & design have in common? How does he look at the power of experiences as catalysts for communication and learning? What are his views on the role of design in our current and possible future societies? 

N(ik – Pantopicon) As you know, at Pantopicon we spend considerable time and effort to render futures tangible, to make them ‘experiencable’. As such we aim to enhance the quality of reflection by stakeholders by allowing them ‘to feel their way around’ possible new contexts in which they might end up. We have learnt that both as a means to inspire future thinking and to communicate and discuss alternative futures, experiences add significant value to the process of participatory futures exploration and envisioning. In our opinion, powerful transformative strength lies in the various layers of meaning conveyed and perceived through an immersive experience. As such one could say that experiences are ‘created’ as ‘what if?’ tools. How do you look at using experiences as tools, as a means to an end (e.g. gaining insight, anticipating & preparing for change)?

N(athan) S(hedroff) Building experience as an educational tool isn’t so different than for any other purpose though it’s, perhaps, a little more important to consider the audience’s context since the material may be more unfamiliar and challenging. Everything we perceive is an experience so, fundamentally, it’s impossible not to create an experience. The difference between what you’re suggesting and much of futures work is done is simply about considering more of the dimensions of experience in the delivery. For example, reading a white paper or watching a video are still experiences. They’re just not as immersive as immersing audiences in scenes or environments in realtime. All have their place, however.

Artifacts from the future that relate directly to an organization’s business (whether part of the original future studies or completed in a second phase) can help support courage and commitment to innovation since the tangible attributes of prototypes helps leaders “see” examples of offerings and not merely imagine details between the organization’s current and potential strategies. It’s extra work but usually well worth it.

NS There is no one, right way to design or develop anything. To a large degree, it needs to reflect the culture – especially the innovation culture – of a company. What works for Phillips isn’t necessarily going to work for Carrefour and certainly isn’t going to work for Dyson. Future scenarios are often used as a way of confronting an organization’s leadership, purposely jarring their thinking. That works for some organizations and not for others. When it comes to integrating new strategies, different approaches are required, however. My colleagues at Cheskin found that there are five prototypical innovation cultures (see figure on the left) for organizations and some just aren’t ever going to innovate internally. This doesn’t mean that they can’t make use of alternate futures work or that they can’t deliver innovative offerings to the market, it just means they have to go about these in different ways. For example, in the case of the Innovation Outsourcers, the resulting strategies from appropriate scenarios might lead them to look for specific technology or companies to acquire in order to enact those strategies in the market.

NS I believe that there are certain recurring formats for experiences that are familiar and I believe that there are at least 6 dimensions of experience in which all experiences lie. Together, they create a very big space for different experiences. I built a taxonomy of experience many years ago, with help from some of my students, as a tool to explore the attributes of experience. I haven’t worked on it in almost 8 years, however. Cszikszentmihalyi has done an excellent job describing one state that people can move through an experience and I’m sure there are many more but I haven’t explored that.

Related posts:

1. design led futures
2. the futures that never were
3. a day in the life of a designer (surrounded by smart things), 2030 AD

Change often starts with a ripple before it turns into a wave washing over us. Spotting signals of change early – when they are still murmur on the sideline – often means a strategic advantage, if one can interpret the signal correctly, anticipate and act upon it successfully.

We dive into the world of weak signals together with Elina Hiltunen, a Finnish weak signals hunter and discuss both theory and practice in this fascinating realm of futures studies.

Elina was also one of the keynote speakers at the European Futurists Conference in Lucerne last October.

N(ik – Pantopicon): Hi Elina … As a weak signals hunter, could you briefly show us a hunting trophy of yours, an example of a fascinating weak signal you were able to capture recently and tell us something more about it?

E(lina) H(iltunen): I have an example of an interesting weak signal from Finland, where a college in Lapland is starting a course to educate people to become ‘elves‘, helpers to Santa. Everyone knows that Santa Claus lives in Finland. It is about time now to put an education system in place to train better elves. On the serious side: this elf course aims to train people to serve tourists that come to Lapland to visit Santa Claus in a better way.

NB: The field of futures studies and strategic foresight is littered with – what are to many people – ‘obscure’ concepts such as weak signals, wildcards, trends, discontinuities, perspectival shifts etc. … Without getting into a definition war, how would you characterize weak signals?

EH: Sometimes weak signals are confused with wild cards, which they are not. While wild cards are mostly dramatic, big events, weak signals refer to small, odd, strange events. I have defined weak signals as “signals of emerging issues” . In practice they can be news stories, observations etc. about technological or social innovations.

NB: In which way is your hunt for weak signals different from that of a trendwatcher, a coolhunter, etc. ? Are it the places in which you look, the way in which you look, what you look for, … ?

EH: I think that trend- or coolhunters are looking for changes that will happen within a smaller timeframe (nearby time horizon). Often they are also used for/by the fashion industry. In a way, weak signal hunting is similar to coolhunting. Looking at lead users is important to spot weak signals as well. However, when the time perspective is long and includes aspects of life other than fashion, lead users can be found in many different places. Lead users are for example also people who are enthusiastic about using the newest technological gadgets and who continuously want to (re)invent things. These people often create something new because of the thrill to innovate.

I believe that also in science, there are lead users. There, researchers are often the innovators, the lead users who constantly think about new solutions and thereby create the future.

In a nutshell: personally, as a weak signal hunter, I am very interested in changes about all aspects of life. Because I am an engineer, technology is especially fascinating to me. So I spot weak signals everywhere using my cameraphone. The Internet, especially blogs, remain among the most valuable hunting areas.

NB: Some would argue that the Internet is also a medium that – in bringing the world within reach – is also very much exposed to the ‘moment’, to fashion, the latest cool, the hype of the moment, etc. (cf. Digg, reddit, blogs etc.) which leads to the rapid inflation and deflation of certain ‘excerpts’ from society compared to their ‘natural’ occurrences in everyday social life. Is it always the best place to look for weak signals, or is careful observation in one’s direct environment sometimes a better choice, especially to get a more integrative, grounded view of things instead of mere loose bits and pieces of often ‘decontextualized’ information?

EH: This is a good point! In my theoretical new concept of the future sign (see below) I underline this when we are talking about weak signals. It is important to distinguish between what people are talking about (signals) and what is really happening (issues).

This means that while you can get a lot of valuable information from the internet and blogs (see Elina’s blog here), you do have to compare or match that information to reality, to that which is really happening. Yet still, I think that both the internet and reality as we live it in our daily ‘offline’ environment, remain important sources for future changes (weak signals).

NB: A (weak) signal is more than a pulse, it revolves around meaning. Let’s for a moment consider them signs instead of mere signals. The famous semiotician Charles S. Peirce used to say: “Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign”. How does the current theory and practice of weak signals take the whole process of sense-making, of interpretation etc. into account?

EH: Funny that you happen to mention Peirce! I have based my model of the future sign – which describes change more holistically than only focusing on signals of it – on his concept of a three dimensional sign (see Futures, 2007). Applying Peirce’s model of a sign to the future sign it has three dimensions: signal, issue and interpretation. In the future sign signals stand for the concrete form of a sign, the observation of the issue. The issue is the thing in itself and the interpretation is the sense made out of the issue’s possibilities for the future.

I have visualized the future sign as a cube where signal, issue and interpretation stand for various dimensions. The distance of the single sign from the origin of the future sign cube tells the strength of the sign.

An example of that was a major story in the Helsingin Sanomat (Finland’s main newspaper) about Hennes & Mauritz, the famous fashion retailer, which started to sell old clothes (with the price of new ones) under the “vintage” label. Only 1% of their shops were doing that. So from the point of view of the future sign the amount of signal (visibility of the signal) was huge (which makes it tempting to name this a weak signal). But the reality (the issue: only 1% of H&M shops did that) was small. To me the meaning of this for the future was unclear: will this be a bigger trend? I don’t know. So assessing this sign using the three dimensional future sign cube shows that the future sign is actually rather weak – because two dimensions of it were weak. The key point of future sign thinking is that sometimes there is great media attention regarding some issue, while the issue itself never becomes anything big. So be careful about hypes!

Dr.Kuusi and myself have further refined this idea. We speak about the signification process of the future sign in this article.

NB: There appears to be some debate in the foresight community about the status of weak signals, more particularly about the adjective ‘weak’. To some there is no such thing as a ‘weak signal’, there are but signals: either there is one, either there is not. To others, the strength of the signal depends on its distribution pattern (how much is it distributed and to whom) but measuring this turns out to be problematic. In that respect there are similarities with memetics and the propagation of memes throughout society, culture etc. How do you look at this whole debate?

EH: My article in Futures about the future sign tried to formulate an answer to the debate about the characteristics of weak signals. I think that it succeeded to clarify some of the discussion. Academically I prefer to talk about weak future signs rather than weak signals because the term covers more dimensions.

NB: If you come across something that qualifies as a weak signal according to your criteria, how do you dissect it so to say? In which way, with which goals in mind do you analyze it?

EH: I think that the point is not to try to analyze a single weak signal at all. The point is to collect a lot of weak signals and try to make sense out of them by uncovering patterns (trends) in/behind them. The key thing is to be open minded and not to use any filters in the early stage of the process.

Making sense out of a huge amount of weak signals is facilitated nowadays by community tools or text mining applications. I have been developing a tool called TrendWiki for that purpose together with a company called Data Rangers.

TrendWiki can be used in organizations to collect weak signals. The basic assumptions for the tool were: weak signals should be collected inside organization and every employee should (be able to) act as an antenna for future change. Hence everybody in the organization should have a possibility to collect and share weak signals. Also, collecting weak signals ought to be fun and addictive!

TrendWiki includes a toolbar which every employee can install in their internet browser. When they see an interesting webpage about some type of innovation, a new thing, they just click the button and add in a few details about the page. The signal is then saved inside the database, which can be browsed to search for specific kinds of signals by keywords, tags, dates or location of the signal. The tool also features wiki type pages where employees can combine signals into trends. The software itself also does this. With its textmining features you can analyze texts for various types of things, such as connections between trends and keywords etc.

NB: Is there something like a ‘signal to noise ratio’ in the study of weak signals in your opinion? How do you deal with it?

EH: The key thing is to try to understand the noise. Only then true weak signals can be spotted. In practice this can be done by deepening the understanding of the latest developments and by trying to pick up the same type of signal from various sources.

NB: Spotting weak signals is one thing, using them to a certain aim is another. Which value do they have in your experience, with respect to the needs of companies, governments, societies, etc.?

EH: Several companies and organizations in Finland have approached me with serious interest in weak signals. Today in Finland, weak signals are highly valuated as “key tools” to anticipate upon future changes in the business environment. I also wish to underline that they are an excellent means to be used in innovating towards futures (as in product development). For both I have developed tools for organizations.

NB: Yes, you did some fascinating work with your Futures Window experiments in corporate contexts. Can you tell us something more about what they were, how you went about them, what you learned and what surprised you?

EH: Futures Windows are about a method that shows weak signals in a visual way (e.g. images of weak signals) on big monitors within the physical context of an organization’s facilities. My original idea about the Futures Windows included a possibility for the employees to send weak signals to the monitors, but unfortunately I have not had the possibility to test that yet. Yet the ‘showcase’ part of the idea I have tested in a couple of organizations and the feedback has been very positive. In one pilot test about 80 % of the respondents said that they did get new ideas from the tool and about the same amount of the respondents wanted to have the Futures Window  in their cafeteria on a permanent basis.

I was positively surprised about the enthusiastic feedback. One thing that surprised me as well was that the lobby was not considered a good place for the monitor, because Finns felt too unsure about themselves to just be standing still and looking at the images, “doing nothing”. Instead, for brainstorming sessions, the tool was felt to be excellent!

NB: In a sense, in such a context, weak signals become like triggers for people which a) bring something to their attention that might have slipped below their radar (awareness) and b) make them think about it, e.g. “What if … this small change becomes something bigger?”, “What would it mean in terms of change within your context, effects on your products, your business, your policy?” As such they are also powerful tools for what we would call ‘mindstretching’. In that respect, what were your findings concerning how people picked up the weak signals? I assume also in your case, examples of weak signals often come from other fields/contexts than the one of the company is generally involved in. Did they sometimes have difficulties in picking up the message and/or translating it to their context?

EH: I think that the other key importance for weak signals is what you call the mindstreching. I underline that weak signals are not only good to anticipate upon the future but to innovate it as well. When I worked with the Futures Window within organizations I tried to show images that were related to something else than their core business, which they are already familiar with. I always tried to show images that were sometimes new and sometimes even shocking to them. I think that people have been really good in translating the signals to their specific context. They always seemed to find some link with both old as well as new issues, which I think is very positive. However, I also tried to link signals to their context, hence making it easier for them to see the possibilities such a future might bring.

For the Futures Windows I have provided the signals myself, according to my clients’ wishes. However, once my clients realized that finding weak signals is easy and even fun they want to do it themselves as well.

NB: At Pantopicon for instance, we sometimes take the underlying pattern of a set of weak signals and translate it into a series of possible ‘things or events/situations in the future’ closer to the context of the audience (e.g. future artifacts). Is that something you sometimes did or needed to do as well, i.e. to translate or ‘predigest’ the content depending on your audience for the signal to get through better?

EH: Yes, also for me this is sometimes a necessity. I do it like: what if this emerging issue (weak signal) would be something big in your business in the future. How would it change the way in which you operate?

NB: Now that we are discussing the Finnish context: interest in and research on the topic of weak signals appears to be especially high in Finland for the moment. How do you explain this?

EH: A couple of books have been published recently about weak signals by Mika Mannermaa and Sissi Silvan (CEO, Lollipop Management Consulting Oy Ltd) in Finland. For some reason the media have been interested in my work a lot as well. The exact reason is a mystery to me, but probably a red haired (reasonably) young lady talking about weird things concerning the future is something different and interesting to them?

When articles about my work on weak signals started to appear in some of the main Finnish news papers, companies started showing interest in the kind of work I was doing and started asking me to help them out with their futures thinking. I guess also writing my weak signals blog and column helped to raise interest in the topic.

NB: Indeed, your work seems to have led to an outbreak of ‘the weak signals virus’, not just in Finland but also elsewhere.

EH: Oh, you think so! That is great!

NB: How do you see the future of weak signals?

EH: The future of weak signals is good as long as there is the future. I am now very much involved in the TrendWiki tool and many companies in Finland have shown interest in it. There seems to be a “weak signal tool gap” which TrendWiki appears to be helping to bridge. So based on the strong signals of today I see the future of weak signals a very prosperous one!

NB: Do you have any dreams or nightmares for the field?

EH: A nightmare would be for people to take anticipating the future too seriously in organizations, as well as for them to trust and rely too much on numbers.
As for dreams, I would like to see for people to have more courage, to be more child-like, also in companies: i.e. to be curious about little things, to ask silly questions and do things differently and definitely play more as well! As a mother of two small kids I am a continuous target for difficult questions and I do not know the right answers. “Why do we have the fork in our left hand and the knife in our right one?” Questions such as these are really good as they challenge our traditions and make us innovate!

Related posts:

1. future of sustainability
2. smoke signals
3. UMPC future

Enjoy!

N(ik – Pantopicon): Writing ‘a day in the life of’ a fictional somebody’ is like undertaking a journey during which you crawl into the skin of somebody else and force yourself to sense what-the-future-world-might-be-like from their perspective, through their senses, walking in their footsteps etc. How did you embark on this journey? How did you go about it? What was it like?

I(rene) P(ereyra): The initial thought was to blend Tom’s personality and my personality into a single person. She became a woman, with a young daughter (as Tom has). There are hints of Tom and I throughout the story, from the people she twitch-mails with (which is like a 2030 version of twitter), to the places she frequents, to the job she has, to the interests she has that show through her blog-cons. People who know Tom and I well, can tell she’s a bit of an extension of us, or our ideal selves perhaps.

T(om) K(linkowstein): There was a previous project, A Networked Designer’s Critical Path, 1990-2090, that I created with others, showing an entire life of a designer and the networks she becomes involved with over that life. I wanted this new diagram to be the same person, but just one day when she is forty years old in 2030, with lots more detail, lots more intimacy, as if tapping into the dense cross-talk between her and her smart things.

N: If I did not miss anything, the designer whose life you describe 2030AD remains nameless. Through the description of her day, we get to know a lot about her actions and technological interactions, but – although we know she has a little daughter – rather little about who she is as a person, her inner, emotional world. How do you see this dimension of her life with respect to the context she lives in, the day and surrounding world you describe?

IP: This is an interesting question, and something that has come up from other people as well. The ambiguity of the project (the title alone says it all, is it about her, or is it about her smart things?) allowed us to not focus overtly on her personality. “A designer” could be anyone. You find out she has a daughter, and her partner/boyfriend/daughter’s father is in India for the Bollywood film festival that day, but other than that, who she is, or what her motivations are, remain open.

TK: We actually considered a large part of the content of her day to be highly emotional, but the (deliberately selected) engineering-like aesthetic of the graphics means the reader has to work hard to get at those details.

In our imagined future, the character’s desires are turned into action with the help of smart things. Her Bizzcard tells her the probability of seeing the next door neighbor’s new puppies, it arranges for her to meet new people on the hypersonic flight to Honduras, and helps her exchange personal information during a late night flirty encounter through a sensor augmented handshake.

N: When you mention ‘her desires are realized with the help of smart things’, I cannot help but remember the many discussions I used to have about the notion ‘smart’. ‘Smart’ from an engineering stance (‘I made a cool thing that can do a lot of cool, useful things’) is not necessarily ‘smart’ from a socio-cultural, economic, ecological etc. point of view. e.g. taking away desires or fulfilling them instantly, making battery-driven toys, … All media, especially of the information and communication-related kind, they all have effects beyond their immediate context of ‘utility/usefulness’, patterns of life are changed, economies, politics, etc. There are positive but also negative impacts. For example, many people wonder about the robustness of our world, its resilience (one driver for more nature-inspired systems) as we become ever more dependent on technologies, others worry about societal change, social cohesion etc. How do you look at this? Did it influence your work? After all, as extensions of man, new technologies also mean new responsibilities.

IP: Depending on technologies is fine with me, providing it’s the right kind of technology, and it supports a sustainable lifestyle/cycle. It’s just a matter of re-thinking what technology means. A lot of designers today are moving in the right direction, asking the right questions. Green design for example is incredibly popular right now, and it feels like designers finally understand the responsibilities they have to society.

For me one of the most interesting ideas/developments is the idea that something can be made to be up-gradable, rather than discarded. If I look at my lifetime for example, the amount of gadgets (cell-phones, walk-man’s, disc-mans etc.) I have discarded is astronomical. Unfortunately, today’s economy relies heavily on this “buy-buy-buy, new-new-new” attitude, so the more interesting question to me is, if we actually do manage to move into a cradle-to-cradle society, where things are re-used, or upgraded, how will it be supported politically, and economically? We have the technology available, the idea is there, designers are working around the clock, but the powers that be haven’t figured out how to shape society’s needs and desires around a sustainable economy. Technology is miles ahead of politics right now, but then again, it usually is.

TK: I agree with Irene: technology, commerce and social constructs have all evolved at a breathtaking pace. Politics is still waiting for its Vinton Cerf.

Design and engineering inventions like smart things will not bring heaven on earth but we work in a profession of endless iteration and eventually will get rather close.

N: Being designers, I cannot imagine you have not wondered about possible or interesting breakdowns, errors, not so ‘smart’ things that could happen, surprises … I’m curious to hear what popped up in your minds in this respect. Is there a blooper or critical version of the map ahead perhaps?

TK: The sheer kick of introducing oneself to an intriguing stranger encountered by chance or facilitated by predictive technology as in our diagram, will always outweigh the nuisance of lost luggage on a hypersonic flight to Honduras.

IP: No, no blooper version. But we did discuss what some of the problems might be. The main ones being: privacy, and the breakdown of technology. Our lives today are already controlled a lot more by technology, than let’s say 30 years ago. People used to be afraid to buy stuff off the Internet, and reluctant to give out any type of personal information.

These days however, Google has your whole life on their servers, and social networking sites allow total strangers an intimate look into your life. Your pictures, your correspondence, your likes, your dislikes, it’s all out there for everyone to see, and it’s all stored on some company’s giant server. We seem to be okay with it because what you get in return is worth giving out some personal information for. It seems like the question of what privacy really is, or would be in the future, is an interesting one.

N: The future is filled with uncertainties, which allow it to pan out in different directions. As a matter of fact, you mention ‘what-if’ scenarios as an output of one of the gadgets in your designer’s world (and other occasions). Did you consider multiple futures yourselves? If so, which approach did you take in order to develop your future scenario, which forms the basis of your day in the life of a designer anno 2030AD? In case you developed more than one scenario, on which points did they differ and how did you make your eventual choice/selection?

IP: First we thought about how things had changed in our own lifetimes. The fact that we are from 2 different generations (Tom being born in the 50’s, me being born in the 80’s), gave us an additional perspective. Tom and I spoke a lot about some of the things/technologies that have changed in the past 23 years, but also about what had remained the same. Email and the Internet came, the phone stayed but also morphed into cell-phones. Television remained, but Tivo revolutionized it, things like this. It allowed us to project what might happen if current technology trends continue.

TK: I actually started the process by doing something I’ve always wanted to do: I took a zero gravity flight (really!). Having appropriately sampled a life with what may become a common occurrence in the future, Irene and I met several times to sync up our ideas. I spent the next six months stealing an hour here and there at cafes and such, writing the definitions of the 84 imagined technologies, the specifics of the designer’s goings-on in the USA, Honduras and virtually with comrades in 119 countries and the moon. There was also the buzzy back and forth between her and her smart things, informed by readings on the Kurzweil AI site, Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, and others. Once the personalities of the people and the purposes of the smart things were set, the project seemed to write itself as if assisted by our auto-assembling storyteller.

N: The ways in which the technologies alter or enhance your designer’s life are mostly left open. They are not ‘explained’, which I believe helps to keep the experiential distance between the reader and the designer in your ‘story’ small, enhancing believability and immersion. It is left up to the reader whether to look at technology-enhanced life in terms of threats or opportunities. Was that a conscious decision? If you reason through some of the socio-cultural, economic, ecological, political/institutional consequences of developments that you describe, interesting questions pop up. I am sure they did also for you: which were some of the questions they raised for you that got your head spinning?

IP: We tried to imagine a hopeful future both in the large socio-cultural sense and in a personal sense. Maybe it’s because Tom and I are both incurable optimists, but we imagined a future where sustainability becomes a part of everyday life (her smart house closely monitors energy consumption for example), a future where chefs are collaborating with Foodex (a future version of Fedex), for the “everyone eats well program”, a future where fabrics are created from crops, things like this.

We thought it would be nice if your house woke you up with a coffee smell, or if you could travel from Maine to New York City on a hydrogen electric train in 30 minutes, or if your Bizzcard (organizer) would alert you if there are people in the vicinity you know, or people you have something in common with and would be interesting to meet.

Someone did however leave a comment on my blog that they loved the project but that it scared them a little… haha… It’s understandable, but this was never our intention.

TK: As the complexity of her day evolved, in the back of my mind was whether such an intense, experience-packed, frenetic life, with so much travel, people, stimulation and technology could be sustainable? (I sincerely hope so.)

N: You opted for a very schematic, map-like form factor to represent a day in the life of your designer, almost like a ‘report’ printout of one the technologies supporting her. What was the reasoning behind this choice? Were there alternatives you considered, like for example a more diary-like approach or a storyboard in which gadgets or their ways of usage are visualized in context?

TK: In the early 1990’s, I acquired from an aerospace company, a dense, poster-sized, CAD-created flow chart, containing hundreds of lines and circles. It speculated on the next hundred years of space travel. Whomever I showed this to became absolutely mesmerized in a way I had never seen with slicker work done by professional designers. That’s how a poster done by an engineer on a CAD system became our model.

In our diagram, the reader gets a gut impression with a quick glance at 20 large circles containing her major activities on this particular day. Spending more time (it takes 75-90 minutes to read the whole thing–about the same as to watch a full-length film), is rewarded with a peek into a highly detailed record of her hundreds of encounters during this 18.5 hour period with colleagues, students, clients, serendipitous strangers and smart things.

All the text is in capital letters, so the price of admission is high; you have to really want to read it to get through it all.

IP: We never really considered illustrations or images because it could very easily take on the appearance of a current design fashion, and we wanted it to appear timeless.

Since I was the one (physically) designing it, and I am obsessed with order and detail, my greatest concern was that all the connections should make sense. Tom has a more ethereal design sensibility, and I’m much more of a nuts and bolts type of a designer, so in the end we compromised and met somewhere in the middle.

N: How did people respond to the prospective of living a day as a designer like that in 2030 AD? How did people behave around your map and what were the fascinating comments your received?

TK: They giggled at the young daughter’s 100-Languages-Barbie. They pointed to the large “call-outs” intended as a guide to good living in 2030 (“I Practice Creative Simultaneity”). They traced over the connecting lines and text with their fingers as if it really was a message from the future that somehow landed in their inbox.

IP: The people who took the time to read it and understand it were really amazed by the amount of detail, and the organization of the information. One person contacted me to ask if they could have a printout to hang in their office to inspire the young designers to think outside the “trendy-design-box”. Some people were baffled and maybe a little intimidated by the content, and some people misunderstood it and were left unimpressed by the design sci-fi aspect of it. We really got a mixed bag of reviews.

N: At Pantopicon, we use ‘a day in the life of’ as a technique in order to lower the level of abstraction of the future, to force people to change perspective and feel their way around a possible new context, to make the future tangible, to fleshen it out from the inside out. It is a technique which is explorative as much as it is communicative in nature. As such it can serve as an output as well as an input for futures exploration and envisioning exercises. Do you see your work as something you would like to build upon further or do you consider it a finished ‘artifact’ of the future? Suppose you would see it as a stage in a larger process, what would you see as possible follow-up steps?

IP: We never spoke about “what’s next” while we were working on it, but now that it’s finished and we’ve received such positive feedback, we’re going to discuss what might be an interesting follow-up to this project :-). Her story, or any story on the future of design, naturally lends itself to many visual explorations.

TK: I’m not certain what other media would work better at this point (I’ve become leery about slick visuals), but I’m pretty certain we will hear more from this character. Perhaps a closer look into one of her projects, maybe more on the way her inner and outer life converse, connect, support (and conflict?) with her smart things.

N: In which way did ‘spelling out’ a future day in the life of a designer, change your views on the profession of a designer or the role of design in society in the future?

TK: Having it all there in front of me, seeing a whole day at one glance, albeit with the exaggeration of an imagined future, made sharper something I’ve already noticed beginning to happen: a move away from specialization towards orchestration.

IP: We spent a lot of time reading and researching smart thing technologies, which neither of us knew too much about before we started this project. Bruce Sterling offered some insights and advice, and to me, one of the most interesting things about smart environments is that they have the potential to radically change consumer-culture as we know it.

If we can access the totality of a product’s information (like the road it has traveled, whether it was made by child labor, if it’s sustainable, etc.), marketing and advertising, as we know it today, will become obsolete.

Through smart-thing technologies, a product’s information has the potential to be more whole, honest, real and complete than some slick ad slogan ever could be. This will radically change the role of a designer. Getting to the truth about products, rather than distracting the consumer with shiny colors and slogans will be inevitable then.

N: Technology changes notions of human, social and personal identity. As human-centered design – or life-centered design since we increasingly also include the natural world – addresses humans in ever more inclusive ways, taking into account an ever broader range of human characteristics (e.g. genes, movement, emotion, relationships, health/ biology, spirituality, etc.) technology changes face, leading to new modes of interaction, new ways to experience products and services, new ways to experience the world. If you close your eyes and project yourselves way ahead, beyond 2030, what do you see?

IP: For me it’s really hard to look beyond 2030, and make assumptions of what might be, since everything we thought of for the diagram were projections, or continuations of current technologies. We both agreed that 23 years is just the right amount of time to imagine a possibly realistic future without getting too sci-fi-ish, or unrealistic. The project was not so much about a Jules Verne type of imagination of the future, but more of an idea generator for actual future technologies.

TK: Hideous? Hypnotic? Pious? Voluptuous? The choices of the future will be more choices. Cosmopolitanism to the power of 10. If we lived as long as the stars, what would we look like?

N: You were in two to write a day in the life of one person. I can imagine you did not always agree about the ways in which the day in your character’s life would progress or unfold. Did you experience this to be a schizophrenic experience or how did it influence the result?

IP: Tom and I both trust each other’s opinions, so there was never really a battle going on about content. Once we had set the initial story direction, everything that followed was a combination of our ideas for the future. Tom for example is interested in Space exploration, and I’m interested in sustainability, and both those things made it in her day. Since the day is made up of units, it was easy to have an equal say in the content without having to agree on every single word.

TK: In the beginning, we had different tastes (Irene: more tech; Tom: more concept) and rhythms (Irene: short meetings; Tom: long gab sessions). Our invented designer mediated away our differences.

N: Were there dimensions in your project you would have liked to explore further?

IP: It would be interesting to try to actually make one of these technologies happen. I think there are many great ideas for the future in this diagram that would be a great addition to everyday life. Since you have to imagine/envision something before you can actually create it, the hardest part is already done… I would love to move into the actual production of some of the less farfetched ideas.

TK: What would Shakespeare create for this world?

Related posts:

1. a day in the life of a designer (surrounded by smart things), 2030 AD
2. design led futures
3. 2019 according to Microsoft

Michel is a versatile man: innovator, editor, philosopher, serial entrepreneur, filmmaker (together with Frank Theys he made a 3 hour TV-documentary titled: “Technocalyps: the metaphysics of technology and the end of man” ), … A few years ago he left his home country Belgium and now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, which researches, documents and promotes p2p practices.

P(antopicon – Nik): Michel, for many people P2P (peer to peer) equals software tools such as Napster and Bittorrent. Their view is limited to the world of filesharing, music and film industry related lawsuits, illegality, kids fooling around with technology and ending up in trouble. Yet, then there are people like yourself, who see in the paradigm behind the term, the seeds for a new world. With which terms do you associate P2P? In other words, what does the paradigm signify for you and how does it reach beyond the merely technological?

M(ichel)B(auwens): P2P filesharing is just one instance of the more general peer to peer dynamic. I define peer to peer as the ‘relational dynamic at work in distributed networks’. As such it can apply to a network of computers, as in filesharing, where all sharers put their computers together so that each can have access to each other’s music, but also, and this is more important, to a network of people.

It is important to notice the difference between a decentralized network, where power is split into a number of large pieces, and where the network is characterized by obligatory hubs; and a true distributed network, where the “agent”, human or computer, is free to undertake his relationships. In the latter we have a bottom-up process without coercion, and this is really what we understand under peer to peer.

This dynamic expresses itself in our new technological infrastructure, the internet as end to end network, the Web 2.0. as read/write medium, where everybody can participate as an autonomous publisher. It expresses itself in our organisational infrastructure, through the new ways of bottom-up collaboration. Both are happening because of deep changes in how people relate to each other, how we learn and know about the world.

All this expresses itself in 3 important and new social processes: peer production, the process of producting things in common; peer governance, the process of managing such common projects; and peer property, the new institutional frameworks we are inventing to protect such commons from private appropriation.

P: Indeed, while the online world facilitates p2p action, the effect of it moves beyond the online-offline screen into our daily physical world. When you speak of ‘peer governance’, do you see it as limited to ‘governing’ peer-produced projects or can you also see a new generation of political systems based upon its principles? How would those look like according to you?

MB: I see peer governance in the narrow sense, as the way that peer groups and peer production projects are governing themselves; these are self-constituted groups that are following a logic of affinity, and they operate as distributed networks. The crucial characteristic of distributed networks is that agents are free to act and create relationships; this also means there is an a priori consensus of what needs to be done, so consensus, i.e. the participants deciding together on what must be done, is more easily achieved. Since there is no outside actor that can coerce them, it is the most logical way to decide. However, in decentralized (as opposed to distributed) networks, central power has been divided up in hubs, and these hubs set the rules, so that agent is much more constrained. My argument is that society as a whole is not a distributed network but a decentralized network, with various groups following a logic of hegemony, and without a priori consensus of what the goal of society is. So, while we have direct self-management in peer groups, this seems quite impossible to achieve for society as a whole; so in society we need forms of representational democracy.

In the future though, I think that the space of autonomy of self-constituted peer groups will increase even further; taking a lot of the political space now taken up by democracy; and secondly, that democracy will be reformed to more peer-informed, that is, partnership-based, forms of governance. I expect democracy to be informed more and more by multistakeholdership (of course it can also evolve in a negative way, towards more authoritarian forms). I think it is no secret to anybody today that democracy itself is in crisis, not just because the system has become so beholden to corporate interests, but even if this were not the case, people need and want more autonomy in their lives. They do not merely want to vote for whom represents them every few years. They wish for autonomy in every field of social life, including production and the economy, not just in politics.

P: There is a lot of talk these days of so called ‘fab-labs‘, laboratories where any person can email their design, have it fabricated on demand and shipped back to them. At the same time, an increasing number of people is getting into micro-economic activities, sometimes even based on barter-systems and services-exchange. Examples include small communities of people getting together to grow their own vegetables again or jointly create artworks for each other. Others include communities exchanging information and services/solutions helping them in dealing with everyday troubles ranging from fixing the kitchen sink, finding a babysitter, getting an ad-hoc secretary for a few hours to having a cook for one’s romantic candlelight diner. How do you look at these developments in relationship to p2p?

MB: The emergence of P2P dynamics depends on two related factors: abundance, and distribution. Our society is characterized by an abundance of intellect, by an abundance of productive resources (computers), and a growing abundance of cooperative resources. In some ways, p2p, which is based on volunteer labor might be seen as wasteful, but because it is an abundant resource, such wastage is not problematic. It allows almost infinite experimentation and forking of processes, which is one of the reasons why many conflicts are unnecessary, since alternatives can be tried out.

Distribution is the other side of the same coin: if a resource is distributed, it can be used in tiny marginal fragments: so a great number of marginal resources still gives abundance. This is the way that Skype can build the largest telecommunication infrastructure of the world, initially without any capital of its own, because every user contributes a fragment of his computing power. Thus, if we can distribute resources such as capital, instead of having it centralized or even decentralized, we’ll have more enablement of P2P.

So your examples, such as the fablabs, I see them as promise for the near-future, but more important is what already exists today in terms of deskop manufacturing, P2P-based exchanges, and the like. They show that in many ways our society is objectively creating such distributed resources. But again, I want to distinguish the pure non-reciprocal, (not based on direct exchange), from the reviving of the gift economy that you are describing in our examples. The trends are related, they are both based on sharing, but still distinct. In a gift economy, I except something rather direct in return, it’s a tit for tat exchange, but in peer production, I contribute freely, and don’t mind about who is using the result of the collective work. Of course, individuals do get value in return for their participation, but it is not a direct exchange.

P: As technology and community appear to be two core elements in p2p culture, how central is the ‘human factor’? To which extent do you see it related to efforts to create a more sustainable society (in the broad sense)? While examples as the ones mentioned earlier definitely show an increase in self-organization and autonomy, do you see these new trends as linked to or part of p2p culture?

MB: P2P could always exist in small communities, in tribal times say, or in the interstices of the later hierarchical civilizations, wherever people could join in small groups, without the presence of an outside coercetive force. But even then, they were constrained by scarcity in the natural and social world. Technology enables this to happen on an unprecedented scale, because the universal web and internet enable the global coordination of a myriad of very small teams. So, we’re not loosing any complexity and gains from hierarchy, there is still global coordination possible, while enabling people to work in small groups where they can decide together without coercion. As for community, I’m not a mystic on community, I see it as the most natural thing to do when there are no constraints. But the new communities, though they may revive some forms of localism as well, are essentially based, not on tradition or interest, but on the logic of affinity, so they are creating a quite different world.

As for sustainability: to the degree that we can achieve real costing in the physical economy (natural capitalism, living economies, real free bottom-up markets instead of distorted anti-markets dependent on corporate welfare), and achieve a throughput economy (we only take as much out as the natural world can regenerate itself); to the degree that we liberate ourselves from survival anxiety (as described in the world values surveys of Ronald Inglehart), people then naturally move to postmaterial expectations and desires. P2P will be the dominant mode to fill those intellectual, cultural, and spiritual needs, and the success of our life will be judged increasingly in those terms, as they already are for many of us.

P: This reminds me of something once described by a friend and ex-colleague of mine, Rishab Ghosh, who studies open source development communities and their economic context and models. To a certain extent, the hierarchy and functioning of that model is based upon reputation: you engage in coding something, spend your time, inventiveness and skills on it (cf. abundance); your peers notice and judge the progress of the project, your contribution and basically give you a ‘reputation’, which propells you up- or downward in the community. One of the effects is that most of these projects are or start out outside of the monetary economic model, but the reputations they generate give people(‘s skillsets) visibility and credibility to the point where they are contacted for industry jobs. As such, they create in fact a shift in the economic chain where money and monetary values enter the value creation system only at a later stage. Hence two essentially economic worlds touch, a non-monetary and a monetary one. (note: Several years ago, in a book titled: ‘The hacker ethic‘, Pekka Himanen, at the time one of Manuel Castells‘ collaborators at Berkeley University, described related mechanisms and value systems).

How do you see the economic impact and dependencies of p2p culture and activities in this respect? In which ways are they changing our economic models?

MB: I agree with this analysis. As I said before, when I call peer production ‘non-reciprocal’, I do not mean there is no exchange, just that there is no tit for tat exchange. All volunteer freely and contribute what they want or can and it is a positively anti-rival process which promotes free usage. But there is a ‘generalized exchange of value’.

First, as Ghosh said, participants gain 3 forms of ‘Capital’: knowledge, relations, and reputation. But on a higher ethical level, passionate production reaches a level where the giving is actually the receiving, so there is a mixture of ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ motivations. There’s a hierarchy of engagement and of different systems which cater to it: from doing something merely for oneself, but profiting from the presence of others (swarming), to systems were post-facto sharing is a value added benefit ( del.icio.us and social bookmarking), to projects explicitly based on sharing (Linux, Wikipedia).

Generally speaking, we have to acknowledge that peer production is both immanent within capitalism, it is part and parcel of cognitive capitalism, though it creates a new model of ‘netarchical capitalism’ which is no longer predicated on copyright and the creation of artificial scarcities to get monopoly rents, but on enabling and exploiting participation. This is in fact the model of most Web 2.0. companies; the creators create the use value, but the companies attempt to gain the a posteriori created monetizable exchange value. This of course creates some issues of equity: should the users, the creators of value, share in the benefits of monetization?

P: In light of current discussions (and some ongoing since a long time) concerning the bottom-up and top-down balance-seeking in p2p systems (cf. wikipedia), many people wonder about strengths and weaknesses of the p2p model. What is your view on this? How do you see p2p’s future in this respect?

MB: I have only a very general comment to make in this: we have yet to discover precisely which mix of hierarchical and participatory elements is the best, and they may differ according to different contexts and phases in projects. James Surowiecki has described the precise conditions for when the Wisdom of Crowds approach is best, i.e. a pure system without experts. In other cases, such approaches will have the same lowest-common-denominator effect that we see with mass media television, and it will crowd out quality, i.e. the Digg effect. The key is that the relation between the modernist concept of the expert, who commands the passive citizen-recipient will be replaced by a model which does not abolish expertise, but distributes it. So that the expert system can enrich themselves through bottom-up collective wisdom, and bottom-up participatory projects, such as Wikipedia, can be enriched by experts, such as attempted by the Citizendium project. The key is the transformation of leadership, from a practice that constrains participation to maintain privilege, to one that sustains participation. Hierarchy still exists, but in order to promote and sustain participation, rather than to undermine it.

Look at the internet, where the centralized DNS system nevertheless promotes and renders possible a billion-citizen participation, or the web, still largely runs as a client-server model, but nevertheless enables autonomous publishing. Important criteria: is the leadership voluntarily chosen or accepted, or not. If it is the case, then the leadership, the maintainer of peer projects, are entirely co-dependent on the participants.

I’d like to add the scheme of my friend John Heron here, who describes the evoluton of hierarchy and participation as follows:

“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:

1. autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;
2. narrow democratic cultures which practice political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;
3. wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;
4. commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavor.”

Heron adds that:

“These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

1. Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;
2. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;
3. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;
4. The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor”

P: Taking into account a wide variety of perspectives is at the core of Pantopicon’s philosophy. You have travelled a great deal, worked in many different places and contexts, and currently live in Thailand. In which way do people look at, engage in or deal with p2p on that side of the globe? Do you notice cultural differences of perspectives on p2p or is it a ‘flattened/flattening’, global(ized) phenomenon, approached in the same way more or less everywhere? Where do you see it heading in the near and longer term future?

MB: A very interesting question. My trip to Thailand made me discover a country that is very steeped in ‘authority ranking’, one of the four intersubjective modes described by the anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, and which was also dominant in the European feudal times. The average Thai person will rank you very explicitly according to status, with everbody being a pi or a nong to each other (above or below), according to a complex set of criteria involving age, gender, income, power, etc… Thailand is also still in majority a rural country. Obviously such a different cultural set-up will have both advantages and disadvantages. I really like the extended family, I live with one with my wife, and we have our two mothers and ten people in the home, but personally dislike the patron-client relationships which dominate both politics and even the capitalist system. But at the same time, they are of course more and more influenced both by the formal egalitarian demands of political democracy, and the new ways of being exemplified by creative and digitally-enabled youth.

My prediction is that peer to peer will have a much harder time to penetrate, but that on the other hand, if they accept and act on it, the possibilities for leapfrogging, i.e. starting from the very new without having to pass through a long modernist/industrial period, are substantial as well. Blogging is definitely a very big thing in China, and gaming is a very big thing in Thailand. Both of them are instrumental in co-creating more participative mentalities.

P: You have touched upon a wide range of dimensions or facets of p2p, such as the social, technological, economic, ecological, political. What about that other deeply human dimension, i.e. spirituality? Do you see, perhaps further down the line, p2p having an effect upon that or is it already doing so perhaps?

Just a little anecdote on my part: I remember at some point, in one of our FFWD>> events at Pantopicon, where we invite people to project a theme-related situation today 20 years ahead into the future and show us what it looks like, the theme was religion. One of the entries showed the 2005 image of somebody with his head on a book titled ‘the book of truth’, while the 2025 image showed that same setting, only the book was titled: ‘the book of truths’.

MB: I’m not a technological determinist. This means that though I aspect that technology has a key role in enabling certain social practices, it is also itself already an effect of other changes. I often summarize with a series of difficult words: the P2P revolution is predicated on deep underlying changes in ways of being and relating (ontology), in ways of knowing (epistemology) and value constellations (axiology). These have to do with our fundamental positioning in the world and are therefore spiritual changes. It is these changes, and our particular social interests, which dictates what kind of technology we are choosing to develop, but once developd, the technological practices also change us.

Each of those aspect would warrant a separate development. Your anecdote is absolute significant. It is indeed the move from modernist objectivism, through which we can observe the world objectively, towards an intersubjective multi-perspectival or even a-perspectival epistemology. We now recognize that each of us has his/her own perspective, and that truth is best approached by combining and comparing perspective. There is still room for objectivity, but we have learned to look at ourselves while we look at the world, because the facts that are chosen are themselves the results of perspectives. Many of the new P2P-based tools, such as the Web 2.0 developments, enable precisely that, to look at the world from somebody’s else’s perspective. You see it also in the shift to tagging and folksnomies, which are supplementing hierarchical categorisation imposed by a third party. We are also moving from another modernist presupposition, that we are all separate individuals having to be socialized through institutions, to a recognition that we are eminently relational beings, always already embedded, and needing tools to build and construct our own connections. Purely spiritually, we are now ready for an autonomous search for truth and meaning, no longer based on authoritarian religious interpretations, but on intersubjective searching in peer groups. In terms of learning, and in terms of the search for meaning, we are seeking to confront us with the insights of others.

All of this is already there, and we are moving from the deconstructive phase of postmodernism, to a reconstructive phase in the peer to peer era. To use the metaphor of the mash-up, i.e. the possibility of recombining data and applications from various sources into a new project: this is what we are now doing with ourselves. The Great Cosmic Mash-Up, is not just postmodern fragmentation, but rather recognizing that our multiple facets can be recombined with the potentials of others, into new unities, and it is so that we are building ourselves, through our contributions to the common. That is what is giving us our identities and reputation, as well as meaning, in the new world.

P: What are according you the most fascinating examples of p2p’s state of the art?

MB: I believe that the best way to discover specialized peer to peer applications in a particular sector, is to browse to the del.icio.us tags I have been using to monitor such developments.

For example, in the field of education, one of my latest tags is on the service Note Centric, for collaborative note-taking in class. I would describe the shift in education as ‘learning from each other’, as the ability ‘to know the people who know’ and can help you on the way.

In the field of spirituality, (see also participatory spirituality), I particulary recommend John Heron’s methodology of Cooperative Inquriy and his latest book: Participatory Spirituality, a Farewell to Authoritarian Religion. The basic idea of peer to peer spirituality is that spirituality is co-created, not a thing out there to which only the right authority gives you access. In cooperative inquiry you decide to undertake a particular research methodology together and you report to each other what you have experienced.

In scientific publishing, you may want to look at the Open Access Movement and initiatives such as Open Access Central. Open access insures that scientific knowledge is shared by all humanity, scientists and non-scientists alike.

P: Now, when you personally look ahead, could you describe to us how a person’s day would look like in a full p2p world ?

MB: I’m not so good at concrete imaginings. I would just like to summarize it like this: imagine that you would have a unconditional basic income that would give some freedom to periodically take a sabbatical for learning, or following your passion. Imagine that you could then live from this passion, in cooperation with others, and could work on it on your own rhythm. Imagine that you feel safer in your life, with a much denser networks of friends and relationships, that you can activate to get things done. Imagine that such process would not be hindered by the market or the state, but supported and enabled. Imagine that the poor and the feeble would not just be exploited by those from a position of strength, but treated as partners and that we would develop fair trade practices. Imagine that the market would pay the real value from the things it exctracts from nature, and treat nature as a partner, and not just as a dump, and that we would restore the biosphere to its former glory. These are a few of the better things that would happen to our lives, in a peer to peer informed economy and society.

P: With this image in mind, which are according you the main obstacles or threats on the road to the realization of such a p2p future? Where can it go wrong and what would that mean?

MB: I see three possible scenario’s for the future development of peer to peer.

In the first one, P2P is a subsystem of the market, which continues to dominate, and people would move regularly from the market to the P2P sphere, according to their possibilities, much like in the Middle Ages, people would move to the Church, or in South East Asia, where they could move in and out of the Buddhist Sangha, but supported by the whole community. The problem with this scenario is that the destruction of the biosphere would go on unabated, so I do not believe it is a realistic scenario.

The second scenario, is that the old forces win the game, and prevent the emergence of P2P, by inserting DRM in our machines. In essence, we get some kind of information feudalism, and a significant loss of property rights for the mass of the people. All the goods are only accessible through stringent licenses. I don’t see this scenario as likely, but it is a possibility which is well described in Jeremy Rifkin’s The Age of Access.

Finally, in the third scenario, P2P becomes the core of the system, responsible for the most important postmaterial value creation, in combination with a reformed market (divorced from the destructive aspects of capitalism) and a reformed state. It is the preferred scenario from my perspective.

The second scenario represents a win situation for the rentier class that lives from the artificial scarcity created by copyrights. In the first scenario, the winners are the netarchical capitalists, who live from the value creation of the users. In the third scenario, civil society and its commons emerges as the most important beneficiary of society.

P: In which ways are you p2p-ly active in your own on- and offline life?

MB: I try to practice and experiment that what I study and promote. The P2P Foundation is itself a peer project, which produces a knowledge commons on peer production, with teams of volunteers on which I’m co-dependent. And we gain knowledge, reputation, and relations from our input in the commons, which we can then put to work in our consultancies or lecturing. Passionate production is very rewarding, but at the same time risky. I had to accept a significant downsizing of my income, but it is amply rewarded by the richness of postmaterial values I am receiving from it: spiritual enrichment through sharing, my extended family in thailand, freedom from alienation in work, constant learning, etc.

P: Besides p2p, which are the other developments that fascinate you when you think about the future?

MB: I must admit that I’m pretty obsessed with P2P, but of course, I see it as a trend which encompasses the whole of life, so I actually have to be interested in pretty much every area of society. P2P is not the answer to problems itself, but rather the process through which better answers can be found. So if there are challenges in society, my interest goes to the people trying to find more participatory and open processes so as to find better solutions.

P: What a wonderful way to end this interview. In a sense it closes the circle, as it aligns itself beautifully with the way in which we at Pantopicon try to help people and organizations address and assess the long term, their future(s). Thank you so much for this fascinating discussion, Michel!

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