Those who thought Muhammad Yunus would rest on his laurels after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, got it all wrong. Yunus and his Grameen Foundation are working hard to show us another lesson in making this world a better place, including a lesson in capitalism.

Basic idea behind Yunus’ next Big Idea is that capitalism does not work optimally because we see it too narrowly. Companies and their shareholders ought to measure their performance not only in terms of revenue and profit, but also in terms of social returns, of lives they saved or improved. We are not talking about another happiness index or a GDP alternative.

Like McDonough and Braungart’s worldchanging ‘waste=food’ philosophy which I blogged about last year, also Yunus’ philosophy makes economic sense to business people:

“It supports your brand, returns your capital, and you’re not going to lose money and you give your shareholders a vision of doing something good.”

Danone formed a joint venture with the Grameen Foundation to start the first ‘social business enterprise’:

“The yogurt Danone would make would be fortified to help curb malnutrition and priced (at 7 cents a cup) to be affordable. All revenue from the joint venture with Grameen would be reinvested, with Danone taking out only its initial cost of capital, about $500,000, after three years.

The factory – and ultimately 50 more, if it works – will rely on Grameen microborrowers buying cows to sell it milk on the front end, Grameen microvendors selling the yogurt door to door and Grameen’s 6.6 million members purchasing it for their kids. It will employ 15 to 20 women.

And Danone estimates that it will provide income for 1,600 people within a 20-mile radius of the plant. Biodegradable cups made from cornstarch, solar panels for electricity generation and rainwater collection vats make the enterprise environmentally friendly.

International organizations such as Unicef believe it may be such a revolutionary means of improving nutrition through a sustainable business model that it is watching closely – and may seek to replicate around the world.”

In an abstract sense, Yunus’ philosophy lines up nicely with the multi-perspectival approach often taken in integrative assessment and scenario-based futures studies (think: people, planet, profit). More practically speaking, it shows a win-win-win situation moving beyond the status quo.

BTW, Fortune magazine published another interview with the Nobel Peace Prize winner back in October.

Via Fortune Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In staring at the horizon to get a glimpse of tomorrow, it is all too easy to forget about those visionary minds in the past, with whom contemporary reality often still has to catch up. ‘a thousand tomorrows’ would like to put some of these fascinating people and their visions of the future back into the spotlight every now and then.

We start out today, on belgian soil with Paul Otlet (1868-1944). He has been called the founding father of ‘documentation’, now called information science, even one of the forefathers of the internet.

The lawyer Paul Otlet had an astonishing range of ideas and initiatives related to the organization of the world’s knowledge, including systems and new, at the time unexisting technologies which he envisioned and often pushed to see developed (examples included distance learning tools). Together with his friend and colleague, the Nobelprize winner Henri LaFontaine, Paul Otlet founded the Institut International de Bibliographie, later called the International Federation of Documentation and Information. Together they also founded the Union of International Associations which exists until this day, now with Anthony Judge as a main driving force behind the remarkable initiative. Among other things the UIA publishes the Yearbook of International Organizations, the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, etc. titles clearly resonating Otlet’s mindset.

One of Otlet’s most ambitious projects, was the Mundaneum, a huge institute in which he wanted to bring together all the world’s knowledge in one place, a place where to make invisible things, ideas, visible (see also here). He got in touch with LeCorbusier to draw the plans (link). It would completely alter the way knowledge was stored, retrieved, worked with. It would need to be placed in a world city, which he had ideas about how it should be, but no definite location. In fact there exist maps, projections of his plans in several major cities in the world.

For more information on the man and his ideas, Prof. W. Boyd Rayward wrote a wonderful biography on Otlet which can be read online (pdf) (see also Michael Buckland‘s Otlet pages). Be sure also to check out “Otlet and
Hypertext Visions of Xanadu“. Even more than using words, Otlet’s ideas are done justice by looking at his schemes and drawings. They show best his visionary mindset, his ever trying to push boundaries. Long forgotten, the internet both as a concept as well as as a technology has brought back Otlet and his ideas. My friend and former colleague Charles van den Heuvel, wrote an interesting article a while ago together with W. Boyd Rayward on Otlet, titled “Visualizing the Organization and Dissemination of Knowledge: Paul Otlet’s Sketches in the Mundaneum, Mons” (see also here).

Furthermore, what is left of Otlet’s legacy can be experienced at the current Mundaneum in the belgian city of Mons, an institute housing his huge collections of documentation and personal archives. The museum and archives, feature a scenography by the famous François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters, which some of you might know of their magnificent Obscure cities comic books. Schuiten recently also published a marvellous book on possible futures, titled “The Gates of the Possible”.
Last but not least, Françoise Levie made a documentary on Otlet’s life, titled ‘The man who wanted to classify the world‘. Also the dutch tv programme Noorderlicht made one, titled: ‘All the world’s knowledge‘ which can be viewed online. Theater Ad Hoc (see previous post) created a theatre piece titled ‘The humour and tragedy of completeness’ (in dutch) about the work and personalities of Otlet and La Fontaine.

update: Françoise Levie also published a book on Otlet recently, titled “L’homme qui voulait classer le monde”.