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.

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!

Science writer Jon Turney is writing a Rough Guide to the Future (due out in Autumn 2009). He blogs about his fascinating writing journey at Unreliable futures. The flexible format of a tourist guide is ideally suited to immerse readers in a future(s) context. Turney’s guide aims to be a real guide to navigate possible futures and ways in which people imagine(d), envision(ed) and tell stories about them. The book will consist of three major sections. The first will sketch an overview of different conceptualizations of time. The second part will delve into problems and promises of the next decades and beyond. Last but not least, the third section will deal with the ‘big’, cosmic futures.

Turney sees every person as a futurologist. He emphasizes how the future is an inherent part of the human mindset and actively engaging with it is/ought to be a necessary aspect of everyone’s life. According to Jon – cheers – he/she who loses the capacity to imagine the future is not a human being to the fullest!

Keep up the good work Jon, I imagine many await the realization of the book to dive into the fascinating possible worlds of tomorrow.

Via la Repubblica delle Donne

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

Doom is so passé … and essentially does not get you anywhere. User experience evangelist Richard Anderson gave ACM’s Interactions an overhaul. The latest issue offers a fascinating read, including an article by UK designer Richard Seymour bearing the title “Optimistic futures”. In it he points to the potential, the role, the necessity and the responsibility of designers to dream and design bright, positive futures.

“Designers cannot be, by definition, pessimists. It just doesn’t go with the job. We’re supposed to be defining the future, aren’t we? [...] If we can’t see the world as a better place to live in, than what chance does anyone else have?”

“History tells us that before great business can happen, it first has to be a mission. And a mission starts with a dream. As designers, we potentially hold enormous power. And with it comes responsibility. Wield it imaginatively and wisely. And optimistically. Or f@#k off and do something less dangerous.”

Richard is not alone in his crying out for positivism in imagining and designing the future. We already wrote about Peter Lunenfeld’s notes on ‘the vision deficit’ (see here). Also, most of you are familiar with Alan Kay‘s well known “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. Yet the much needed optimism to design our way out of dystopia goes far beyond the designer. We seem indeed increasingly unable to draw up optimistic stories of bright futures in which it will be better to live and engage people en masse. Have Hollywoodian apocalyptic disaster movies numbed us that much?

The past years have shown many examples of how fear, doom-scenarios, dystopia, bad news, are powerful tools to move the crowds (see also Michael Crichton’s “State of fear”). The negative has a strong impact on the way we act and react. It must be that through times the growl of the bear left a deeper engraving in our brain to make us run, than that of the beautifully colored flower.

Also Alex over at Worldchanging notes the necessity and the difficulties of creating positive narratives of the future with the same impact as their dystopian brothers. He asked Bladerunner futurist Syd Mead what it would take?

“He paused for a second and said he thought it’d be very difficult, that catharsis is so important to people, and people are so terrified of the future, that you’d need some completely new vision of what the future will look like to even set the scene for a new narrative… and that is obviously no mean feat.”

Alex Steffen calls optimism a political act. Sir Karl Popper called it a moral duty. Yes, it is a must, because it gives that much more in return.

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

Guy Pieters Gallery in the coastal town of Knokke-Heist, Belgium, is currently (May 11th until June 2nd) host to a fascinating exhibition by the artist Jacques Charlier, entitled ‘Art in Another Way’.

Charlier, born in Liège (B) in 1939, masters a wide range of media, yet turned to good ol’ painting for this specific exhibition, which projects developments in current day culture and society into the future. Scenes in vivid colours against the night’s sky and with stars and planets as main actors, picture worlds many years ahead. The present and the future meet in clever ways on Charlier’s canvas, in what some might dub a retrofuturistic style.

Gene therapy, RFID, human cloning, climate change, teleportation, space travel, the year 4958, black holes, Planck’s wall, android love affairs, … they all play a part in Charlier’s artistic future(s) explorations.

For those of you in the neighbourhood, go check it out, it’s worth it!

PS. Don’t be fooled by the fact that all works are signed 2007. The artist envisioned and has been working on the exhibition as a whole for many years. He added the final touch to all the works in 2007, hence the signature date.