In 1975 Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia (revisited by NY Times here), a novel which quickly gained cult status (see also video). Three years later, fascinated by the book, architect Craig Hodgetts (of Hodgetts+Fung Design) crafted a set of amazing drawings depicting some of the scenes and concept envisioned in the book, eager to produce Ecotopia for the big screen. Imagine retro-yet-ever-so-futuristic balloon generators over San Francisco Bay, solar-powered high-speed mag-lev trains, helium-filled mylar balloons to lift and orient a wind-powered generator, …

Callenbach said it right: “It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now, but without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.” 

Inspired by TheArchitectsNewspaperBlog

It might be considered old news in these twittery times, yet somehow it rises to foreground in today’s economic climate with a sense of lasting freshness and value. Students at the RCA’s Design Interactions department led by Anthony Dunne, carried out a fascinating design research project in collaboration with Intel’s People & Practices Research Group entitled ‘the future of money’. They explored new types of value and value interaction from a variety of perspectives, which led to some pretty thoughtprovoking and even poetic future views .

Imagine sensing how much e-money you’re spending. Or imagine a world in which interpersonal relationships and human interaction time are the new value-basis, or energy is currency. What if the favour bank would be our main way of exchanging products and services, hence value? Think about new relationships to money, virtual piggy banks, ethics/ethical trading, a liquid economy, live tissue for value, listening to your good and bad side as purchase advisors, gesture-based payment or counting rituals (a, b), 1 bankcard per personal value, consciousness enhancing money traces, miser pathologies in an e-money world, new controlling behaviors, complementary responsible-behaviour-currencies, mitigation management, identities as currency, new e-money rituals, a national fiscal health service, physical money as a luxury product, future money paradoxes, domestic economy,  country-company mergers, 

The world could use (a lot) more debate-stimulating ‘design massages’ like these, which assess topics from multiple angles in a tangible way, which ask questions, which dare to envision a world based upon different standards. Pantopical in nature, keep up the good work Tony, Fiona et al.!

We could have easily called this post the future of money, yet in a more profound sense the current financial climate and the questions it is raising are provoking us to rethink value and the systems we devise to organize processes related to it.

Heather Moore, User Experience Manager at Vodafone, recently launched the lovely public domain initiative KashKlash aimed at an open discussion to co-create our future value systems. The sharing economy, the reputation economy, the gift economy, the free economy, alternative economies, shifting balances between production and consumption, ways to replace money, etc. are all themes up for debate over at the website.

 

“We are envisioning a new world where today’s aging, less useful and even dangerous financial systems

are replaced by or mixed with more disruptive innovations and exchanges. Imagine yourself deprived of all of today’s financial resources. Maybe you’re a refugee or stateless. Yet you still have your handset and laptop and Internet and a broadband cellphone connection….”

 

Bruce Sterling proposes to explore 4 future scenarios, set up around 2 key variables: the degree of stability in exchange systems (ranging from a ‘confusing mess’ to ‘massive change’) & the state of communication technology (ranging from ‘old and broken’ to ‘the new cloud’).

Check out the stories of the scenarios’ main characters Big Mama, Greifswald, Rebel kids and Brixels.

Technology explicitly designed or employed in such a way as to alter people’s behaviour (in a sense, technology as a medium always does, interaction design for example makes extensive use of affordances for example) is making its way into consumer products in ever more subtle, even poetic ways. According to Wired …

“Ford and Honda’s next-gen instrument clusters feature trees (a vine in Ford’s case) that grow more lush as drivers learn to hypermile — the fine art of maximizing fuel economy. Leaves grow like crabgrass in springtime if you use a light touch on the accelerator and go easy on the brakes. Drive like Jimmie Johnson and they’ll wither faster than General Motors stock.

The idea, says Honda VP Dan Bonawitz, is “to help drivers improve their efficient driving skills by making the hybrid experience more fun and rewarding.”

The article also includes reflections by Clifford Nass, which some of you with a background in HCI or interaction design might know from the lovely book he wrote together with Byron Reeves several years ago: “The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places”

Reading such developments, one might be reminded of what B.J. Fogg once called captology, which led to Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology lab. Like any paradigm it can be used for better or worse, yet let’s be positive and imagine this kind of design thinking aimed at mentality changes applied to issues of sustainability, good citizenship, healthcare, etc. Imagine waste bins encouraging you to sort your waste, mirrors encouraging you to brush your teeth as you’re supposed to (no scifi any longer), …

Inspired by Wired

… ironing shirts, wasting energy, shortening the lifespan of your shirt’s cloth. The Swedish brand Eton shirts has developed a coatingless cotton-fibre which returns to its original shape after washing. In fact bodyheat is enough to iron your shirt as you wear it. The fibre responds to heat – not unlike shape memory alloys) – to maintain its form.

Let’s extrapolate such a development for a second: imagine a world in which no shirts need to be ironed any longer. Consequences: significant decrease of energy usage since irons no longer need to be heated, presses are no longer necessary, thereby also increasing the lifespan of the shirt since the cloth is spared from several aggressive interactions. Combine that with a waterless washing machine such as Electrolux’ Airwash system. In terms of saving the environment. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how energy- & eco-efficient the production of the special cotton fibre (and the rest of its lifecycle) is before we can truly assess its impact. From a socio-economic perspective however – like any technological development which renders human (inter)action obsolete – the no-iron cotton fibre – if used on a large scale – might put extra stress on or obliterate ironing shops.

On a higher level of abstraction: think of all the kind of products which nowadays, because of their systemic or material makeup, require labour (implying usage of all kinds of other resources) in order to remain functional, usable etc. Windows need to be washed, houses need to be heated or cooled, etc.

What if … changes at the material/systemic level of these products, which nearly all of us use, could make these ‘wasteful cycles’ of energy. If employed at a large scale, effects (both positive and negative) of these changes can often be exponential in nature as they work their way through the chain of reactions linked to the lifecycle of the product. They alter the system of their ‘ecology’, their context (whether bio-, techno- or homosphere). Glass can be self-cleaning, houses can go without or using a minimum of heating/cooling energy, etc.

“In this nearly 27 minute video Bruce Sterling, a leading futurist, speaker, columnist and science fiction writer, shares his vision on where mobile is heading. Preaching his story from a somewhat unconventional place, the pulpit instead of the stage, he managed to silence the audience. Check the video to see what he had to say to the Mobile sinners.”

Via MobileMonday

In preparation of the upcoming US presidential elections, now only days away, both WIRED and Monocle did the exercise and laid out the cards of their ‘dream’ cabinet … not necessarily of politicians, of people running for power by choice, but of individuals they see most fit for the job to solve at least some of the most pressing challenges that US society is facing. It would be all too easy to dismiss their move as technocratic dreamery. Times are achanging and systems of governance, leadership and societal problem solving are not immune to that.

It is an interesting thought experiment to ponder over the future of our socio-political systems, yet it is also true that the person who dares to ask ‘what comes next, after democracy?’ can be fairly sure to be looked upon in disbelief, fear or outright insult. We use the term democracy often lightly – and in the meantime do not always do justice to its complexity by dumbing it down to but the folk notions that fill the airwaves – as if the concept has remained the same since it was coined in the stoas and on the agoras of ancient Greece. The term has remained the same throughout the ages but what the complex denotes has changed and continues to change. To remain in sync with the dynamics of contemporaneity and those of times to come, systems (need to) change. Change does not necessarily mean that good characteristics of the current system will disappear (nor bad ones, sic) yet reinvention ought to aim for the best fit not on where we are but also in view of where we wish to go. So what are the images people have of the future of our socio-political and institutional systems? How far can we and do we dare to look ahead?

In times in which big, familiar ideologies are fading or have stopped reinventing themselves and the political landscape looks bleak, covered with visionless or populist rubble, in times in which change is fast, challenges are huge and increasingly exceed election cycles and national borders, imagine a future where perhaps not party-politics but projects to tackle challenges define the team and the dynamics of the game of governance and leadership, where not politicians but a diverse mix of people takes the lead , where management vs. innovation of the nation and its systems are perhaps two different games played by different groups of people, within different timeframes, where … There are many aspects of our current system that could be different in the future. A thousand tomorrows are possible for those who set their mind to it.

For those among you who still believe that little innovation can be expected to come out of Africa, check out AfriGadget every once and a while or catch up on Ethan‘s musings. It is a humbling experience, which forces one to see, realize and admit one’s ignorance with respect to the diversity of innovation throughout the world, especially in the less known – but often most stereotyped – corners of our planet.

The examples show once again how scarcity and constraints can be powerful drivers of change and stimuli for high-impact innovation. Now that modern communication technologies are taking over even the poorest and most remote corners of our planet, leapfrogging legacy systems of the West, their effect can be multiplied, scaled up more easily. Such endeavours show the immense potential of human creativity, no matter who you are or where you are born. We often block our own creative pathways, by looking for excuses: ‘it can’t be done unless we find a way to raise 30 billion euros’, ‘if only we were a multinational-sized company’, ‘it is impossible with the government organizing and/or orchestrating it’.

Of course, there are challenges which cannot be tackled using a cartwheel and a piece of rope (if you did get nuclear fusion to work in your basement using just that, drop us a line), challenges which do require large budgets, advanced organizational structures, etc. Yet all too often we use these arguments as but excuses in order not to ‘be truly creative’ & ‘try something’, ‘do something’, … In our spoiled context, it is easy to sense fear setting in as we realize that there is perhaps more to lose than to gain from trying. Risk management can be a killer as much as risk itself.

Massive change in terms of an increase in quality of life at personal & community levels can be but one mind and one pair of hands away. The driven individual is a powerful catalyst for change. Therefore, think again when installing elaborate innovation strategies before liberating the minds of individuals and breaking the shackles of their creative initiative.

For about two years already we have been a core partner in setting up “Plan C”, a transition management experiment in Flanders, aimed at catalyzing the societal shift to a world in which materials are managed in a sustainable way.

In a long term oriented participatory process seeded by OVAM (the Flemish Public Waste Agency) and guided by Pantopicon, Resource Analysis & the Center for Organizational and Personnel Psychology a possible future for sustainable materials management in Flanders was envisioned. Smart, creative, entrepreneurial minds from knowledge institutions, business and industry, ngo’s, government agencies etc. formed new alliances and have been smashing heads and hands together to come up with opportunities for radical innovation and structural change. 5 transition teams self-organized into 5 themes:

• closing the loop: cradle2cradle & beyond
• waking up society: towards a behavioral change
• at your service: from products to services
• tailored materials: making ‘making’ different
• sustainable plastics: towards a new basis

Each of these teams has defined a series of experiments they wish to set up and conduct in view of catalyzing structural change in the way deal with materials.

On October 15th, the current Plan C network members (60-80 heads strong) launches its vision, presents its experiments and invites fellow smart, creative and daring heads and hands to join in at a network-mindsstorm event in Mechelen (Belgium) (note: meeting will be in Dutch).

Spread the word and do join in!

Forget microfilm, here is the nanobook. Together with the Nano Imaging Facility of Simon Fraser University , artist Robert Chaplin created the world’s first nanobook “Teeny Ted from Turnip Town”, measuring a mere 69 x 97 microns. And yes, the book has an ISBN number.

Nanotechnology is not only inspiring many artists and designers, also the scientists and technologists are starting to see the potential of art and design to catalyze dialogue between the labworld and society at large. In similar fashion, the belgian nanotech player IMEC teamed up with our friends over at AddictLab a while ago. The project, named “in.tangible/scape.s” aims to bring the fascinating yet often obscure world of nanotechnology to life through art and design, a wonderful way to breathe life into yet nonexisting futures. An inspiration book on the results of the joint research project is under publication.

Together, both partners also set up NanoDesignAwards, of which the first edition will take place in 2009.

Microsoft moves to patent technological means to enhance or enforce good manners on people with respect to their ways of using technological devices. Think of it as the digital ‘service’ equivalent of the no-smoking sign. 

First it was the family, the home where children received their basic education in terms of norms, values, good and bad manners. Then it became the school’s job. Now technology steps into the equation as well …

Let us hope that people find more poetic ways and means of getting the message of good manners across than showing a dialog box message on the screen of your electronic gadget. Will your cell phone whisper to you “don’t shout”? or increase the volume on the other end so you don’t start screaming in the first place? Context awareness of technology is one of the – if not the – primary prerequisite for smart behaviour. Linking social values to the concept of smart is one way to enhance user experience not merely for the user but also his/her surroundings (human/natural/physical. It is important to note however that these values are often culturally defined or biased.

For those interested in more experimental/poetic ways to influence people’s behaviour when using for example mobile phones, check out IDEO’s Social Mobile Phones ’shock-therapy’ project by Crispin Jones & Graham Pullin.

Via ArsTechnica

Honda already came up with its Puyo, begging to be touched, featuring soft curves & soft materials. BMW’s design guru Chris Bangle takes it a step further and developed Gina (Light Visionary Model), a smooth concept car covered in stretchable fabric (on top of a metal wireframe) able to shapeshift on demand. Headlights appear in a smooth motion when needed, doors open like curtains being pulled back/draped, …

“the Gina consists of a flexible ‘skin’ stretched over a metal wire structure enforced with carbon fibre. It allows the driver to change the shape of the car ‘on the fly’ – the rear spoiler can be raised, for example, while the rocker panels can effectively be bodykitted out.

It’s a similar story on the inside, where the steering wheel and instrumentation sit within the centre console and slide into position when the driver pushes the start button.”

The blob meets the car. Seamlessness, smooth morphing/shapeshifting … imagine being able to decide not only the shape of your car and change it yourself, but also its shapeshifting behavior or the characteristics (e.g. stiffness, colour, ) of the material itself. Could smart cars – as body and skin become ever more flexible in design – anticipate upon impact when a collision becomes unavoidable and shapeshift into a form optimized to minimize damage? Fascinating.

Via TopGear & Dezeen

On the basis of co-creation and open innovation ideas the Dutch Favelafabric launched the “Future of entertainment” initiative. Aimed primarily at young digital natives, they decided to set up a three-stage system to involve the core user group of their yet to be designed online music service in the conceptualization of it.

Stage 1: How do you experience (finding & getting, playing & experiencing, organizing & sharing,  creating & promoting music)?

Stage 2: What are your ideas on … ?

Stage 3: Best ideas

An incentive system dubbed Sharepoints, allows the top 100 most (pro)active contributors to take part in the profit of the new service (total of 5% of profit generated in first 12months after launch or 1m € max. to be distributed proportionally among top 100). New ideas/experiences, voting other ideas, giving feedback each allow contributors to earn Sharepoints.

$100.000-$60.000 today (in 4 weeks time), maybe $5.000 (in 24h) by the end of the year, possibly $100 or less by 2012. That is how much it will cost to sequence your full genome.

Low price means high accessibility. Full genome sequencing will be the 21st century’s blood & urine sample. Your ‘personal map’, your ‘personal risk profile’, your ‘personal manual’ for the price of 10 music albums on iTunes. It takes no genius to see the far reaching consequences of such a development in terms of both possibilities as well as responsibilities.

Complete Genomics and BioNanoMatrix joined up to make it happen … fast!

The method and technology developed by BioNanoMatrix is able to sequence long strands of DNA, up to 2.000.000 letters in length currently and rising, and looks at physical location as well as sequence information at the same time, saving loads of computational time as well. The method and technology is being enhanced now to allow for much longer strands of DNA.

“Further speeding up the process with novel chemistry and advances in nanofabrication, the companies will develop a device that can simultaneously read the sequence of multiple genomes on a single chip.”

Via NextBigFuture

Why can’t you plug a version 2.0 component into your car to replace that 1.9b or why can’t you exchange a diesel engine for a gas one? Why can’t you do that? Because it wasn’t designed as such: neither the notion of car-consumption, nor the car itself.

Several collaborative car design initiatives are seeking to redesign the car: to make it smarter, make it cleaner, make it cooler.

We already wrote about Markus Merz & Co’s OScar a while ago, but also check out the Society for Sustainable Mobility’s Open Source Green Vehicle Project, aka Kernel with its modular (nearly) ‘hot-swappable’ design. Or have a look at the Vehicle Design Summit‘s goal to collaboratively build a plugin-hybrid, low-cost, 200-mpg four seater for the Indian market. Also the big boys are in: Sabic‘s set up C,mm,n, an open-source car project ran by 3 three technical universities in the Netherlands. Then there is always the (Progressive) Automotive X Prize Foundation putting $10 million on the table for any team that comes up with a practical mass-producable car getting at least 100mpg (see also here).

As one can notice most initiatives focus on energy (if not fuel) efficiency, some also focus on materials, while few take a full 360° view on production, consumption, waste cycles etc. They are all still counting in gallons, the cars still look like ‘todays cars’. This both means that the threshold for people to switch to such a ‘car’ will be low, yet it also shows how the traditional concept of a car as we know it remains unaltered, hence raising the question as to where the real long view lies. Radical innovation is needed and efforts in this direction thus ought to question deeper lying assumptions of what a car is, could and should be.

Via FastCompany
Image by OSGV