On August 2nd 2011, Dutch philosopher, editor in chief and journalist-commentator of NRCNext Rob Wijnberg published a tongue in cheek column entitled “A travel guide to Planet Earth” in the dutch daily: NRC Handelsblad. The same article was entitled “Lonely Planet” on NRCNext. In concordance with his statement on Planet Earth’s Media – i.e. earthlings blogging on whatever they read in newspapers – I hereby ‘blog’ his column (in translation) on ‘a thousand tomorrows’:

Planet Earth is located in one of the most isolated corners of the galaxy. Earthlings are known as hospitable, except to strangers. Please read this guide carefully before departure.

Journey: Between two and four million light years. Consider a jet lag.

Climate: The best time to visit Earth would be between 2011 and 2100. After that the tropical season will start.

Currency: The main currency on Earth is debt, a fictional currency based on which earthlings manage to maintain their non-existing wealth. Debts are the only currency in the universe that are being reproduced in case there are too many of.

Geography: Earthlings have divided their planet randomly into 196 countries. Free travel is permitted, unless you’re poor, hungry, or on the run.

Politics: There are two political movements on Earth: Left and Right. Left hugs terrorists, right breeds terrorists. Terrorists themselves are lonely lunatics who have lost their sense of reality.

Religion: There are two religions on Earth: Islam and anti-Islam. Muslims believe that all people are equal, except gay men, women and non-Muslims. Anti-Muslims believe that all people are equal, which makes them superior.

Points of interest: Earthlings were known for their cultural traditions, until the multiculturalists helped to kill the culture. The last bit was retrenched in order to save banks. The only remaining attraction is the Nationaal Historisch Museum in the Netherlands, which has on show a model of the Nationaal Historisch Museum.

Media: Most earthlings get their information from the so-called ‘Internet’. The Internet is a gathering place for bloggers who write about what they have read in the newspapers that day. In the newspapers of the next day, pieces of what’s been said on the internet are being published. In addition,  on Earth every year a thousand books on how the Internet causes people to read less and less are being published.

Hotspots: Greece is the place to be because of low prices. Expect a high credit card bill after returning home. The United States were supposed to be closed by now, but will remain opened until the end of the season -  (check usdebtclock.org for opening. Who wishes to visit Belgium will need to hurry.

Although Wijnberg mainly reflects on a future inspired by the present and currently ongoing events, he chose a format not unlike that often employed by futurists to shake people out of their perspective and look at the world through the eyes of a timetraveller or someone coming back from a long journey after 20, 30, … years time. The column shows how ‘distancing’ in either space or time is a powerful perspective-changing tool stimulating critical reflection.

The McKinsey Global Institute has recently published a report on Big Data , defined as “datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyze”. The authors expect that big data will play a significant role in having/letting businesses and governments operate in a more efficient and qualitative way, which, amongst others, should effectuate a more thorough relation between companies, institutions and consumers/the public, leading to innovation and economic growth. At the same time researchers emphasize the complexity of the interpretation of big data: new analytic software and specialized analysts would be needed.

One may well call Geoffrey West, physicist and former president of the SantaFe Institute such a specialist. Via reasoning inspired by metabolic processes West is developing quantitative, analytic, mathemitizable, predictive frameworks in order to understand how cities – complex social systems – work exactly. One of his findings is that, unlike other physical and biological processes cities do become more efficient: the bigger the city, the (exponentially) higher its production and wages. In cities, more patents are produced, they are more innovative …

Based on these findings the growth of cities is a positive trend. From the point of view of sustainability also major advantages of living in a city can be discerned. The impact smaller towns have on the environment are relatively high. Based on this understanding the Chinese government had hundreds of thousands of people move from the rural Ordos plains to the newly buit Ordos City. In “City vs Country: The concrete jungle is greener” Shanta Barley gives some more examples of why densification of cities should be supported:

• The carbon footprint of inhabitants becomes lower
• The scale of waste generation becomes substantial enough to be an efficient and economical resource for energy production
• It helps decreasing overpopulation since urban women have better access to family planning and birth control, often have better employment opportunities and have their first child later.

How would these insights and examples contribute to the ongoing debates on sustainability? One could argue that these developments support efficiency, no substantial change. By all means they clearly stem from a belief in or the need for technology to solve sustainability issues instead of finding new ways to bring more balance in the earth’s ecosystem (Medea vs. Gaia Hypothesis).

Exaggerating, one could say that West believes that the closer one would bring people together, the better the ideas will pop up. However, West also realizes that with the pace of growth of cities, it will be hard for human kind to keep being innovative…

See also the New York Times Magazine’s article A Physicist Solves the City and a conversation with Geoffrey West on Edge.org entitled Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster .

Look at any megatrend overview and ‘migration‘ will be mentioned somewhere, somehow as a significant driver of change. The recent events in Northern Africa have made it clear once again that events of major socio-political and socio-economic change catalyze the push and pull dynamics of migration. The recurring images of sinking boats of African immigrants as they try to make it across the Mediterranean to the Italian island of Lampedusa in the past few weeks are a painful example of the challenges posed.

Félix de Montesquiou and Hugo Kaici – architecture students at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris – decided to give architectural shape to the migration debate and a world  in which illegal trafficking of people across the channel is cast in stone. In a neat piece of design fiction, they envisioned N.E.M.O. – the Northern Europe Migrants Organisation – an organization with headquarters disguised as a WWII bunker near the port of Calais in France.  N.E.M.O. would help customers migrate illegally from Europe to the UK.

Via Dezeen

April 4, 2011, was the launchdate of a new ARG (alternate reality game) entitled America 2049. The game is a 12-week episodic experience blending today’s world with a possible future world. The game fuels the debate on human rights issues linked to the thin line between the enabling aspect of certain identity-related technologies and the way in which they expose civil rights to abuse from both private and government sectors.

“In America 2049, the former land of the free has degenerated into the Divided States of America, where sexuality, religion, speech and culture are all controlled and restricted. On the upside: the entire population is on a drug  that inhibits aggressive behavior called SerennAide, administered automatically through the water supply. This has led to a decrease in crime rates, an increase in the population’s happiness, and has purportedly helped people to rise above their worst impulses.

Depending on where you stand, this is either a Utopian dream or an Orwellian nightmare. And it is up to you to decide where you stand: alongside the Council for American Heritage (CAH), or with Divided We Fall (DWF).”

Behind the game stands Fuel | We power change , a creative agency focussing on the non-profit sector.

A great way to render the future tangible and use an immersive experience to explore and trigger debate on certain societal issues. Fascinating also that different cultural perspectives are embedded in the devised storylines.

Via ARGN.com

In his bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki elaborates on the belief that given a certain problem or challenge, large groups of people will come up with better ideas and solutions than a small group of specialists.

Combining this principle with Bill Joy’s Law – “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” – companies are increasingly starting to mobilize crowds in order to come to innovative ideas. According to futurist consultancy Toffler Associates (40 for the next 40) “Technologies will not be developed in-house. Successful organizations will become adept at integrating large problem-solver networks, linking “answer seekers” with “problem solvers” across the globe to rapidly harness the brainpower of international experts.” InnoCentive is good example here.

Many multinationals recently developed platforms in order to collect ideas in the field of social and environmental innovation. See for example Toyota’s Ideas for Good, Sony’s Open Planet Ideas and Pepsi’s Refresh Everything. Undoubtedly contributors will come up with many fascinating ideas, but the real challenge in solving social and environmental issues might not be to come up with a set of innovative ideas itself, but to find ways oto motivate people to act upon them. As Richard Ashcroft puts it:

“Usually what drives me is circumstance, habit and short term reward. So the trick is to find ways to rewire my habits, change my circumstances, and make the rewards pull me in ways I want to go, and not in ways that are harmful to me. “

So it’s not only about understanding a situation, but just as well about being provided with incentives to solve a problem, to overcome a ‘bad habit’, let go of a temptation or do something about one’s laziness. In order to support one’s willpower and to increase one’s karma FrogDesign developed the temptd. This app, specifically designed in order to improve personal health, aims to build a community of supporters, as well as professional coaches and trainers, to support youth at moments when they need it the most: “Temptd makes even the smallest decisions meaningful as part of a game in which ‘players’ benefit from helping each other and themselves.”

So in the future we might not need (just) the wisdom of crowds, but rather the social pressure and the competition of crowds (Bill’s Law of Joy ;-)) in order to make the world a better place?

We might, according to Jane McGonigal, need to find a way to motivate gamers – which seem to be perfectly able to effectively collaborate in order to achieve personal and communal goals – to apply their skills in the real world instead of in the virtual world. Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR foresees that in the next decade the framework in which the motivations and how we actually influence people’s behavior is being decided upon. I’m curious what external forces might drive me in the future…

Image by MrToledano

I guess we all often wonder why most political decision-making still seems to be informed by relatively short term thinking, 4 years ahead (end of term) or in many cases even shorter. In August 2010, Long Now member Rony Kubat, wondered the same thing. His question led to Penn Schoen Berland Research organizing a survey, polling +1000 people in the US, and +200 Washington DC ‘elites’. As could be expected, most people noted that they believe it’s necessary to look further ahead (4-24y). Yet, when asked how far ahead politicians are thinking according to them, an overwhelming amount considers them stuck in their 4y term. As one reader noticed, 4 years was the minimum they could select and probably to high a threshold even.

Yet the poll also shows something else, i.e. that in general, people don’t seem to think that it’s worthwhile to think a 100 years ahead.  We know however, that certain big, complex problems or challenges such as climate change, geopolitical/-economic powershifts, etc. affect future generations decades down the line. All too often and all too easily, one hears: “by the time effects become visible or unpleasant, technology will have evolved sufficiently to deal with it” or “people will have adapted to it” … One only needs to look back in history to see a different pattern. When the sense of urgency is not there or long term thinking is not part of one’s most basic, most grounded perspective on the world, it is hard to convince people.

When Jane Goodall said “The indigenous people used to ask ‘how does this decision affect our people seven generations ahead?’”, although she referred to the past, she reminds us of a principle lightyears ahead of most of today’s ‘leaders’. The subtle difference between knowledge and wisdom …

The thought experience of “seven generations thinking” applied to politics, policymaking and societal leadership would be worthwhile however. How would it alter political priorities, decision making in general, the very notion of leadership? How would it affect the dynamics of our society?

Growing vegetables in your rooftop garden, soil+crop-leasing contracts with local farmers, vertical gardens, school gardens, … urban farming takes many forms. Amsterdam, Chennai, Detroit/Flint, Johannesburg, London, São Paolo … six cities exchanging ideas and experiences in the area of metropolitan agriculture. From 28-30 September 2010 the first Global Summit on Metropolitan Agriculture was held in Rotterdam (NL).

The event, and the MetropolitanAgriculture.com learning network as such, are an initiative of TransForum (& Reos Partners), a project-cluster partially funded by BSIK money which concluded its 5 year long series of activities at the end of 2010. TransForum focussed on the sustainable development of dutch agriculture in relationship to its urbanizing context.

The MetroAg Innoversity set out with joint scenarioplanning workshops “explore the opportunities for Metropolitan Agriculture based on contextual characteristics, assets and challenges in each city”, inspired by input from stakeholder interviews within participating cities. Later on, groups were formed to incubate ideas and draft prototypes. The summit gathered experiences and insights gained and looked ahead as how to scale and create enduring projects and processes.

At the occasion of the Summit, Jan Kees Vis, programme director of Unilever’s division of Sustainable Agriculture, used three words to sketch the pillars of his image of the future: “The right to food, ethics, metropolitan agriculture”. In the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, the company commits “to source 100% of [their] agricultural raw materials sustainably by 2020.”

Via Ventiquattro

Spotted some time ago … NASA and DARPA have freed up some budget ($1.1 million) to envision what a 100 year starship could be like (see article). According to NASA Ames director Simon P. Worden we could be on the moons of Mars by 2030. Check out his conversation with Peter Schwartz over at the Long Now Foundation.

Considering distance and travel-time, first missions will most likely be one-way only. Transporting first settlers, implies the need to turn our destination into somewhat of an inhabitable context for human and terrestrial life. According to Prof. dr. Dave Wilkinson, we might learn from the way in which Darwin succeeded in ‘terraforming’ Ascension island in the middle of the Atlantic about 160 years ago.

From a ‘what if?’ perspective, a 100 year voyage raises interesting questions, especially when they extend beyond the technological realm: How will ‘grandchildren’ born in space, who have never seen their ‘home planet’, think about ‘their mission’? How will they relate to ‘Mother(planet) Earth’? What would be needed to keep people focussed on a multigenerational mission and live peacefully and in good physical and mental health within a confined space? How could/would their society develop? Which plants, animals and terraforming equipment would be sent along? The challenges are manifold (see ‘Mars is hard’).

Image courtesy of NASA

Most of us see gender as either male or female. Nevertheless for years, people have argumented for and against the introduction of a third option for people biologically or socially belonging neither to the male nor female group. Years ago, Prof. dr. Anne Fausto-Sterling  conducted a provocative thought-experiment distinguishing between as much as five gender categories: male, female, merm, ferm, herm.

In Nepal’s latest national census, people will have three options when compiling their form (see article).

The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) said this is the first time census forms would grant the option for transgendered people to list themselves as something other than male or female.”In the past, we only had two sections under gender, as male and female,” said Bikash Bista, director of the department.”With the new provision, the third gender will also be able to acquire citizenship.”

Sexual minorities moving beyond the traditional gender duality are often wrongfully portrayed as ‘recent phenomena’. In the fashion world, which has a history of androgynous models, Marc Jacobs’ latest shoots (by photographer Juergen Teller) for example, feature Andrej Pejic, a highly androgynous male model featuring in both male and female shootings. In many cultures ‘third gender’ history goes back for centuries, millennia even (see Wikipedia).

Thinking in terms of possible futures, one might ask oneself: how would the future look different in a world with multiple recognized gender classes? How would social relationships change? Which products and services might cater to the needs of people belonging to the different groups?

Photo of Andrej Pejic via models.com

Social media, location-based services, anywhere-anytime internet access etc. offer major opportunities for mass-sampling people’s moods, sentiments and emotions.

In October of last year, Facebook started correlating status updates of their (US) users with the Gross National Happiness Index. Later, results from the UK, Canada and Australia were added to the mix. According to a recent article in Fastcompany:

“Facebook demonstrated that the vast historic record of status updates is a potential goldmine of information that could easily be raked through by sociology analysts keen to work out when it’s best to deliver an advert for particular products, or perhaps even to promote a particular political message.”

Indeed, sentiment analysis as the game is called (see also here), is not only interesting for artists and gadgeteers, but also for businesses and public institutions.

The concept is not new, in 2001, webdesign meeting point k10k.net launched Moodstats, a webbased effort to enable people to share their moods. Yet, now that our physical and virtual action patterns are becoming increasingly intertwined, applications like iPhone app Glow enable anywhere, anytime, sentiment sampling.

In most current applications, people are still required to express their mood, emotional state etc. Language processing algorithms can help to analyze this data. The next step is obviously to have emotion sensing technologies (e.g. Philips Design’s VIBE) reading, interpreting and allowing us to communicate our emotions directly. Imagine your t-shirt changing color depending on how you feel, for example.

Image by Glow

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

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

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

Image courtesy of The Power of 8

As car manufacturers shift away from oil and towards electricity to power our future vehicles, a new race is on. The target this time: lithium, basis for the lithium-ion batteries to be found in everything from electric vehicles, to mobile phones, cellphones, laptops, anti-depressives etc.  The place: Chile (for now), Bolivia (next) … The salt lakes near Uyuni in Bolivia are believed to contain an estimated 28 millions tons of lithium, or 90% of the world’s reserve according to experts. The car industry currently runs on 16.000 tons per year. As the production and demand of electric cars ramp up, the demand for lithium is expected to be anywhere between 54.000 and 500.000 tons per year. At such rates, estimates of shortages starting from as early as 2015 are no exception as automobile, pharma, ICT and many other industries will be fishing in the same pond for the same type of fish.

Although lithium is no fuel (it is not consumed through usage) and lithium-ion batteries ‘can be recycled’ (note: they do contain substances harmful to the environment in case they should end up in landfills and pollute water reserves) other worries arise concerning the socio-economic impact of lithium mining activities in the aforementioned countries.

On a more fundamental level – a more philosophical one if you wish – nature and history teach us that monoculture is generally a bad idea (cf. resilience). So whether we like it or not, we need to (re)learn to think in terms of a mix, of diversity once again.

Image courtesy of PeriodicTable.com

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

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

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

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

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

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