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

Which better way to jumpstart the year than to have another look at personal aviation initiatives (see also earlier posts here and here). The online buzz seems to prove that not even a crisis can silence those dreaming about personal aviation vehicles (PAV’s): e.g. Mirror Image Aerospace’s Skywalker VTOL, the PAL-V. Urban Aeronautics‘ X-Hawk does away with the external propellors, after all a much lamented nuisance for VTOL PAV’s in crowded urban environments.

A lot of effort seems to go into VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) configurations, as can be seen in for example the video of this Buzz Lightyear-like low-noise electric VTOL PAV. Yet, there is also the Spiral Duct ESTOL Concept. NASA apparently also took inspiration from Transformers and shows how a car can be turned into a personal air vehicle (see video).  For more PAV-videos, check out NASAPav.

Although a few years old,  the article entitled “These legs are made for walking” (Discover Magazine) presents a concise overview of five visionaries and how they see beyond vehicles as we know them, first of all by questioning the assumptions underlying them today. James Kuffner (Head of Planning and Autonomy Lab at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University) for example asks “why wheels?”, his lab colleague Chris Urmson asks “why a driver?”. Brian Seeley (eye surgeon and founder of the CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flying Efficiency) Foundation, check out their blog here) shares thoughts on flying cars, while Robert Thompson (director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University) questions the US’ infatuation with gas-guzzling cars and conjures ecochic pint-size autos with moss roofs. Peter ‘X-Prize‘ Diamandis thinks about truly personalized cars, i.e. shape your own carbon-nanotube impregnated composite bodies.

Image: still from NASAPav’s video

Medicine and technology companies are working hard to restore people’s vision, hearing or other senses or provide artificial aids and prosthetics to replace them. Yet what about new or enhanced senses? The animal world is full of examples of how nature has endowed them with the most amazing ways of perceiving the world around them. Ants can see polarized light, starfish have their arms covered with light sensitive cells, pigeons can detect sounds as low as 0.1hz, some fish can detect L-serine (skin chemical in mammals) dilluted to 1 part per billion, a silkworm moth can detect pheromones up to 11km away and in concentrations as low as 1 molecule of pheromone per 10¹⁷ molecules of air, the platypus has electric sensors in its bill able to detect 0.05 microvolts, etc. (hungry for more? see here)

Several years ago Osnabrück cognitive scientist Peter König developed the feelSpace belt, a compass like buzzing belt (since then a hit amongst the DIY crowd), equiping people with a ’sense of direction’ much like birds have one. Users of the belt felt like the prosthetic became a part of their normal sensory apparatus. The trick lies in synesthesia (check out Terri Timely’s masterful video on the phenomenon). By making ‘the new sense’ talk to the old ones, the latter can translate its ‘feelings’ to the brain in a language the brain already understands; in the case of the feelSpace belt: touch.

The latest issue of the wonderful Good features David Pescovitz, BoingBoing editor and fellow futuregazer over at the Institute for the Future, explains the growing amount of research and development in digital synesthesia :

my colleagues and I have spent the last few months exploring the notion that “everything is programmable,” or will be soon. The idea is that emerging technologies—from pervasive computers to synthetic biology—are making it possible to program our bodies and our worlds to desired specifications. Increasingly, we are looking at the entire world through a computational lens.

Pescovitz pays homage to Paul Bach-y-Rita, the Mexico-born professor in neurobiology and rehabilitation who was a pioneer in the field of sensory substitution, who once said “We see with our brains, not with our eyes.” Pescovitz mentions several examples of digital synesthesia projects, such as: Wicab (founded by Bach-y-Rita) did amazing work on BrainPort, an attempt to create a vision prosthetic that translates images from a video camera into tactile responses on the tongue. “Users often report the sensation as pictures that are painted on the tongue with champagne bubbles.” In Tel Aviv is investigating ways in which cells in plants respond to light as a way to design “seeing skin”. Hello biomimicry!

Imagine a world of bodyshops filled with plugins and wearables to extend our sensory apparatus. To some a transhumanist’s wet dream, to others a mere natural evolution in the sense of media as extensions of man (McLuhan), to yet others yet another digital divide.

Via Wired and Good

The Apollo mission gave us pictures of our planet from space. Finally we could behold our planet from a distance. We could look at it as an object on the table in front of us, within reach, and as we did our planetary awareness grew. Confronted with several planetary challenges now, our planetary conscience is now gradually shaping up as well. Aside from looking at our planet, NASA’s Earth Observation System (EOS) reads our planet through satellite data. Access to this information is a prerequisite for learning to understand our planet better. Now we can not only look at our planet, Prof. Shin-ichi Takemura’s amazing Tangible Earth project allows us to interact with our planet and the data emerging from it by touch.

In view of coming up with solutions to the challenges we are facing, sensing our planet has become sheer necessity. We increasingly do so in real time as well: within mouseclick reach we check webcams on the other side of the planet, we can download data from weatherstations around the world, etc.
Until recently, the sensing world was pretty much the playing field of NASA and the likes. The future promises to be more open in this respect (see  also open source efforts such as GSN) and consequently much larger – and since we’re talking data: more powerful. Years ago, in describing his wish of an Earth Witness Project, our fellow future explorer Jamais Cascio already pointed to opportunities opened up by the convergence between labs on chips, mobile phones and sharing networks to create an open global sensor network.

Now several companies and grassroots initiatives are preparing to put technology in the hands of citizens. Already we can deduce a lot of information from information we leak by the mere usage of our communication technology, as Carlo Ratti’s Senseable cities team at MIT shows us. Nokia’s Eco Sensor Concept plans to make us more active participants in the game. Imagine millions of always-on, networked tricorder-like devices sensing our planet : local data + networks + sensemaking = global intelligence. Hewlett-Packard is developing the equivalent of a globally distributed stethoscope (CeNSE) to monitor our planet’s health, and look to nanotechnology as an enabling technology. “The motivation for this work is realising and understanding the planet is sick and the disease is us.”, says Dr Stan Williams of HP’s Information & Quantum Systems Laboratory.

An often forgotten challenge is how to use tech already out there to turn them into sensors for our health and that of our planet. Think about the tech equivalent of using ‘useless’ bath-tub ducks which fell off a ship, to study ocean currents.

Le Corbusier once described the house as a machine for living in. Designer Eduardo McIntosh designed a whole series of such machines and called them Autonomous Living Units. His work was presented during the Future Cities: Past, Present exhibition at the d3 gallery in New York last month.

“Autonomous Living Units is a somewhat satirical project that stands at the intersection of the current housing crisis, the tendency of people in developed countries to live on their own and the trend of turning architecture into a consumer product. The project poses a scenario in which living units ( homes) have evolved into the most minimal yet visually alluring objects that can still provide for the basic needs of the 21st century human being. Because of the morphing of architecture into furniture, the Living Units could be inserted in derelict areas and ruined housing projects.”

Via Boite-a-outils

Until the end of September 2009, the Musée du Cinquantenaire in Brussels showcases Vegetal City, an absolutely fascinating overview exhibition on the work of Luc Schuiten, the belgian visionary architect, illustrator, author. Years ago Schuiten started working on his archiborescence vision on urban development, as an alternative future to look out for, a way out of the current-day unsustainable impasse.

Vegetal city is a vision of a transformed society driven by a quest for sustainability in which notions of biomimicry provide for a solutioning framework.

“We can’t carry on with individualistic attitudes which boil down to ‘I’ll just do my own thing and let the rest of the world go by.’ We need to change the way our entire society thinks in order to make it compatible with the rest of the world of which it forms part, and on which it ultimately depends.”

Schuiten understands the power of stories to convey his vision. As such he moves beyond the mere aspect of ‘visualizing’ what one means.

Check out the unique exhibition and/or the book.

Tabula rasa planning seldom leads to successful urban planning or ‘liveable cities’. History seems to teach us that organic growth is more successful, in part because the social tissue is given the time to grow along with its physical context and vice versa (for better and worse). Can one plan for organic growth or is it mainly an emergent effect which can only be assessed retrospectively? Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson believe one can and set out to show the world how. Together they devised …

“a strategy to develop informal slums into permanent urban districts through a process of gradual improvement to existing dwellings instead of demolition and rebuilding. Developed in Bombay, India, the Incremental Housing Strategy is intended to allow districts to improve organically without uprooting communities.”

Balestra had his first experiences in participatory design and construction in a project for a school and community centre in one of the slums of Rio, which was documented in the movie “Sambarchitecture“. Sara worked on a strategy to connect Stockholm, framing the future urban development as urban bridges between segregated suburbs.

In the Incremental Housing Strategy, several simple housing typologies have been developed which can easily be expanded. In the meantime …

“Organic patterns that have evolved during time are preserved and existing social networks are respected. Neighbors remain neighbors, local remains local.”

In parallel with their project, the Indian government initiated a grant programme spending 4500€/family to upgrade their dwellings in slum areas (City In-Situ Rehabilitation Scheme for Urban Poor Staying in Slums in City of Pune Under BSUP, JNNURM).

An interesting take on sustainability, quality of life and another beautiful example of “designing for the other 90%” … or as Balestra puts it:

“After creating works for Rem Koolhaas at OMA/ AMO, Neutelings Riedijk, NL architects, and Thomas Sandell, I found it essential to search for the opposite experience: to work for the ones who cannot pay”

Via Dezeen

Triggered by the crisis-discourse on designing a systemic overhaul of our financial and economic world,  our futurist colleague Jamais Cascio, over at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, recently wrote an interesting blogpost on resilience economics. Undoubtedly inspired by biological/ecological systems, he imagines a world which is driven by our search for resilience. It counters the current logic of systems deemed “too big to fail” and features decentralized diversity, flexibility, collaboration, openness and tranparency (the many-eyes effect) etc. as core values. Even horizon-scanning, the consideration of possible alternative futures ahead is standard practice.

“The focus is on something entirely new: decentralized diversity as a way of managing the unexpected. [...] This comes at a cost to efficiency, but efficiency only works when there are no bumps in the road. Redundancy works out better in times of chaos and uncertainty — backups and alternatives and slack in the system able to counter momentary failures.”

The draft scenario is set in a post 2020 world.

Continuing our stroll through the growing landscape of corporate future visions, we re-stumbled upon Microsoft. Microsoft Office Labs put out a series of videos glimpsing ahead into the future of banking, retail, manufacturing and healthcare during the past few years, each time keeping a time horizon of 5-10 years in mind. Although the viewing experience is somewhat hindered by the low quality of the videos, check out some of their mixed-reality futures …

Health (2007) – Imagine a future where you can monitor your own health with smart, connected devices, your health team can share data seamlessly, and doctors are empowered with a view of health records across multiple sources – all leading to better, faster, safer, more personalized care.

Manufacturing (2006) – Imagine a manufacturing environment of the future where workers collaborate seamlessly across time-zones, predictive technologies automate processes, and sense and respond systems are connected across organizations, leading to better innovation, improved efficiencies, and more flexibility for customized products.

Banking (2005) – Imagine a banking experience where you’re always connected to your finances, banks are empowered to anticipate your needs, and transactions are seamless through predictive technologies – whether you’re in the branch, at home, or on the go.

Retail (2004) – Imagine a store of the future where you can quickly find and purchase everything you need; you have instant access to the product information you want; and the store can anticipate your needs and provide price and product offers in tune with your shopping history.

For those of you only out to get a quick glimpse, check out the montage.

Via Customer Experience Labs

 … is a motto we often use in our workshops as we try to pull people beyond the current day status quo, invite them to push the envelope when it comes to imagining or imagineering what the future might be like. Honda definitely pushed the envelope in many ways. They are now sharing their stories with the rest of the world through a series of short documentaries entitled ‘Dream the impossible‘. Their site currently features three of them, i.e. Failure: the secret to success, Kick out the ladder and Mobility 2088.

In the latter short movie – which shows a different way to approach the future as a company (see here for other examples) – Honda looks 80 years ahead into the possible future of mobility by posing the question ‘what might it be like?’ to some of their employees, but also some science fiction writers, urbanists etc. Honda does not present or push their image of the future, instead it awakens people’s fascination and imagination regarding the subject of mobility in a subtle, almost disarming way by triggering curiosity. Among the interviewees are Mitchell Joachim (urbanist, architect), Dave Marel (Honda Advanced Design Studio), Chee Pearlman (design editor), Guillermo Gonzalez (Senior engineer Honda Vehicle Design), Jason Wilbur (Honda Advanced Design Studio), Ben Bova (science fiction writer), Christopher Guest (film director), Scott Bolton (Nasa Juno), Yasunari Seki (Honda Insight), Orson Scott Card (science fiction writer), Darel Preble (chairman Space Solar Power Institute), Chuck Thomas (Honda Vehicle Safety), Jim Keller (Honda Vehicle Chassis Design), etc.

Several ideas make an appearance, e.g. seamless mobility experiences between home and our means of transport, magnetic levitation, flying cars (how could they not!), on foot, teleportation, dreams and nightmares of jet packs, hydrogen based mobility, satellites tapping solar energy in space, self-driving and self-navigating cars, control-free vehicles, stackable cars, vehicles charging via induction, transformers, etc. All interviewees somehow refer to two notions which drive us towards change with respect to mobility in the future: i.e. concerns about the environment and what we leave to our children, which options we leave open or open up to future generations.

In Kick the ladder, the theme could be described as radical innovation. The metaphor of kicking the ladder says a lot: kicking the ladder while one climbs ups the stakes, forces one to leap. Stepwise advancement is no longer an option. There is no way back, intentionally. No safety net, leapfrogging for a better tomorrow.

When Thomas Friedman talks about radical innovation or systemic change, he often refers to the fact that television was not invented by the people who invented radio, that the internet was not invented by the people who invented television etc. In other words, so called regime players are more often than not not the contexts out of which disruptive systems and thus big change tends to grow. Hindrances caused by legacy infrastructure, systems, business models, mindframes … are all part of this picture. Hence, often a fresh, back-to-the-drawing-table-start or tabula rasa approach – where by definition none of the latter is an issue – is an easier way to jumpstart a truly fresh innovation, a true reinvention. This is not only valid for products, services, media, infrastructures etc. but also for social, political, economic systems etc.

This must have been what the SeaSteading people thought as well when they recently started putting money and effort where their mouth is: why not create a new country if we want to change the rules by which we think society is supposed to work. Problem nr 1: all the land is taken. Well, why not take it to the high seas? The dutch were among the first to gain land from the sea, but that was adding land to an existing country. (The Netherlands lead in terms of exploring sustainable futures of living with water, see EcoBoat & TUDelft’s Floating City Research Programme). Sealand is another well-known example of declared independence at sea, yet through a man-made construction set apart from (although dependent upon the goodwill and tolerance) of a neighbouring country. 

The SeaSteading crew, led by ex-Google software engineer Patri Friedman and ex-Sun Microsystems’ Wayne Gramlich is aiming to create giant floating platforms on which to ‘grow’ new, independent societies. The seasteading people are using a startup,p2p, wisdom of the crowds like approach to mature their idea. 

“Friedman doesn’t just want to create huge floating platforms that people can live on. He’s also hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app. “You could roll your own government out of pieces copied from all the societies around you,” Friedman says. “Google set my standards for how fast something should grow. This has potential to exceed those standards—if we make one seastead, there’s room for thousands.” “

Although history shows little to no long-term successes of newly-created, blueprinted ocean cities (e.g. Operation Atlantis, The Republic of Minerva, Oceania city, etc.), this does not scare the SeaSteading crew as they move ahead and recently held their first, widely-attended conference to take their ideas to the next level and prepare for action.

Niemeyers’ Brasilia, Sri Aurobindo’s Auroville, Soleri’s ArcoSanti,  The Freedom ship, Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project, Vincent Callebaut’s Lilypads, … Seen other examples of fascinating utopian experiments in city- and society-building ? Drop us a comment.

Via Wired Magazine

Meet Oblong Industries‘ G-speak, an amazing gesture based interface à la Minority Report allowing ‘hands-on’ interaction between people and data. The resemblance is no co-incidence as one of Oblong’s founders – John Underkoffler, formerly at MIT’s Tangible Media Group – was one of the science advisors to the movie-team.

“The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.”

Some of the system’s features seem to build further upon early-day HCI projects at Frauenhofer (GMD at the time) in the 90s.

Set to go live July 2009, Amsterdam’s CityCargo is about to liberate the inner city streets of heavy traffic. Goods destined for shops & offices will be loaded onto a specially equipped tram via loading platforms at the edge of the city. In town, small electric cars will unload them from the tram at specific drop off points and run the last mile to their destinations.

Similar initiaves are already operative in cities around Europe and others are bound to follow (Belgian cities: take note and catch up, please). The CargoTram for example runs in Dresden and delivers parts to the Volkswagen factory, the GüterBim already runs through Vienna, etc.

What if these trams would also carry waste out of town? Or filter/clean city air while running?

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.

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.