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.

The Board of Innovation – an initiative by friends and fellow belgian bloggers Nick De Mey (see mouseover.be) & Philippe De Ridder (see openinnovators.net) – kicks off its 24 hours of innovation today: a non-stop marathon of innovation initiatives.

Organizations big and small, national and international will take part in this unique online event. On the playlist are among others our one-time neighbours of AddictLab & Materio, our friends from FlandersDC, trendwatcher Richard Lamb, the City of Antwerp, Sun Microsystems, VisualDimension, Umicore, IdeaMonopoly, Betavine, Symnetics from Brazil, UAMS, Pfizer, URDT from Uganda, and many others. Keep your thumbs up, as Pantopicon participates as well (see here)!

Update: see our contributions “5 what if teasers” and “10 ways in which exploring & envisioning the future empowers innovation”. Thanks Nick & Philippe, another job well done!

In 1970 the futurologist Alvin Toffler published Future shock … a book about signs of the time and of times ahead, times in which the (increasing) speed of scientific and technological progress oversteps the pace of the human heartbeat. It becomes too much for many to digest and a sense of discomfort rather than techno-enabled comfort sets in.

Few people remember – hey, I wasn’t even born yet – that in 1972, a documentary version was made of the bestselling book, narrated by Orson Welles. Although over 30years old, there remains a contemporary relevance to the story being told. Some might even see a few parallels between “the future shock” phenomenon and “the singularity”.

Sit back and enjoy the movies (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

Via Smashing Telly

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

Archeology fascinates people, especially children. As they dig up stuff in the garden, their imagination runs wild as they fantasize about all kinds of stories from times past. As we walk the streets, as we use everyday object and live contemporaneity, most of us will have wondered at some point: will this still exist in a few centuries? or: what will future generations dig up from our times? which stories will they reconstruct around them?

Some craft special devices to survive the times. Timecapsules are popular among scientists, amateurs, children … More than merely preserving the past, they are  used to send a message to the future.

So-called future archeology works the other way around: we imagine a world of tomorrow’s making and imagine to dig up some of its artifacts. What might they look like? In which kind of world did they originate? Wired’s Found series is a good example of this approach, one we often indulge in as well at Pantopicon. We either create such artifacts together with people as a participatory design exercise during our workshops to render the future tangible or we craft some of our own  as triggers to shake people out of today’s constraint based reasoning patterns and plunge them into possible tomorrows.

As I was preparing some designs for a set of looking boxes to allow people to gaze into future scenarios, I somehow stumbled upon the fascinating work of the Swiss designer collective Postfossil. They describe the deeper ground of their work as follows :

“In an age of increased reliance on carbon emitting technology and a rapidly depleting natural resource pool, POSTFOSSIL address the question– How will we live in a post-fossil fuel age?”

As such they made a whole series of boxes – dubbed boîtes de l’avenir - to raise awareness about our age of fossil fuels as we move into a postfossil era. Click through and meet the beautifully crafted and inspiring Actioreactio, A Kiss Good Bye,  Ten Matches, Postfossilien, To teeter on the brick of collapse, Pandora’s Box, The Speaking Sun, Historical Landscape.

The boxes somehow reminded me of Joseph Cornell‘s artworks. Well done, Postfossil!

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.

At the recent LIFT conference in Geneva, Patrick J. Gyger, director of La Maison d’Ailleurs – the museum of science fiction, utopias and extraordinary voyages – in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, took us on an inspiring trip through the history of the future. Patrick is a historian specialized in medieval studies with a huge appetite for the way people envision  possible future worlds. Among many other things, Patrick was one of the co-managers of the European Space Agency’s study on Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications – a research and educational project looking into science fiction to find ideas for space engineers.

We invited Patrick to join us for an interview and share with us some of his thoughts on the way in which people envision the future.  Enjoy!

Read more …

Often we hear from people and tell others that when discussing the future, we should involve children and young people as stakeholders in the future as they are in a sense the future. One could see such a tendency as but another testimony of an evolution towards a societal model in which the young are those we turn to to innovate,  to make decisions, to lead as ‘older’ people are considered increasingly out of touch with the new worlds (e.g. new technologies, new ways of using one’s social network, new values, etc.). At the same time in many countries of the industrialized world we are dealing with an ageing population.

In tribal society, the elders were the undisputed decisionmakers, as those worshipped for their wisdom. They could rely on multigenerational experience and understanding. In the knowledge society, we tend to forget the step of wisdom, which is at the lonely top of the ladder starting from data, to information, to knowledge. Hence we are losing important knowledge, wisdom concerning systemic changes. This has little to do with the past being no guarantee or guide for the future, yet everything with the often intangible metaknowledge about systemic change, of seeing clarity in complexity.

Photographer and director Andrew Zuckerman turned to some of the elder beacons lighting our past, present and undoubtedly also future and created The wisdom project. In one of the many fascinating portrait-interviews, at a certain point Jane Goodall says:

“It is awfully sad that with our clever brain, capable of taking us to the moon, we seem to have lost wisdom … and that is the wisdom of the indigenous people, who would make a major decision based upon: how would this decision affect our people seven generations ahead?”

Do take a moment to check out the trailer to this wonderful piece of art (or here and here for a look behind the scenes).

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

In their Big Ideas section, McKinsey’s Quarterly taps into the themes of growth & innovation. In times of economic downturn, crisis, extreme market challenges … the mantra to ‘innovate or die’ sounds louder than ever. André Andonian, Christoph Loos and Luiz Pires address the big picture in Building an innovation nation, Amar Bhidé takes a closer look at Where innovation creates value, Alberto Alessi talks about Cultivating innovation, Hayagreeva Rao looks at Market rebels and radical innovation etc.

Succesful innovation depends on how much your innovation efforts are in tune with your changing environment and the challenges these changes pose. On What Matters, McKinsey addresses some of the major challenges (clustered thematically) businesses need to assess when aiming for a succesful future. As such, they look into biotechnology, climate change, the credit crisis, energy, geopolitics, globalization, health, innovation, internet & organization and turn to some of the brightest minds in these areas for reflections on the world of tomorrow.

To mention but a few of the interesting reads to be found on the site: our friend John Thackara points to The innovator next door, Juan Enriquez looks at How biotech will reshape the global economy, Eric D. Beinhocker and Jeremy Oppenheim talk about Building a postcarbon economy, Stephen S. Roach wonders about new times After the era of excess, Andy Grove and Robert Burgelman assess An electric plan for energy resilience, Jacqueline Novogratz looks into Innovative business models for the poor, etc.

 … 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.

Liberman & Trope, two researchers from the Departments of Psychology of Tel Aviv and New York University respectively, recently published an article in Science magazine, entitled “The Psychology of Transcending the Here and Now” .

“People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others’ experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of information. We review research showing that there is considerable similarity in the way people mentally traverse different distances, that the process of abstraction underlies traversing different distances, and that this process guides the way people predict, evaluate, and plan near and distant situations.”

Robin Hanson over at OvercomingBias reflects upon this fascinating topic in his blog articles Abstract/Distant Future Bias and A Tale of Two Tradeoffs. Check them out!

Via TheLongNow

Like any truly disruptive technology, the web changed the world in myriad ways. Can you remember times before the internet? Surely the medical world can. Before the internet the amount of patients showing up at the doctor’s with a binder full of ‘mediknowledge’ downloaded from the internet and demanding answers, challenging the knowledge of the expert, was definitely smaller than in today’s world. For a long time medical and pharmaceutical knowledge was the domain of a select group of people and organizations. They were the one and only point of reference. This has all changed. As access to specialist information and specialist tools increases, many of the walls separating the medical world and the rest of us come tumbling down.

In the ‘old’ model, research in terms of diagnostics or cures, was – and often still is – ruled by the cult of numbers. Many rare diseases are considered too costly in view of limited statistical impact, hence considered ‘economically  uninteresting’  to investigate, leaving groups of individuals with rare diseases or developing countries out in the cold. 

Wired magazine tells the story of Hugh Rienhoff. Reminiscent of Lorenzo’s oil, the article shows the admirable and moving quest of a parent in search for an explanation for his daughter’s genetic problems and the difficult relationship with the inner culture of the medical world as he pursues his journey. Rienhoff launched a website mydaughersdna.org to share his experience with parents fighting the same battles, exchanging insights gained, problems encountered, etc.

The medical and pharmaceutical world is changing … from within and under the influence of outside pressure. Increasing numbers of individuals start their own research journeys thereby co-setting the agenda, the pricetag for full-genome sequencing is falling, increasingly medical cases are being documented in – many times open – online shared databases (e.g. DECIPHER) leading to exponential increases in insights gained, pharmacogenetics promise the arrival of truly personalized medicine, previously specialist lab technologies are coming within reach of individuals.

Like with any opening up of previously closed ecologies of information, there is the issue of quality of information and interpretation on which ‘knowledge’ depends, the spectrum with on the one end experts, on the other quacks. Could a p2p model work in the medical world? Especially in complex areas such as genetics it already is leading to massive change. Could a more open model of knowledge exchange benefit the medical profession and humanity in general? Surely, there are advantages to be gained, yet also requiring new mechanisms to be put/grown in place and new challenges to be tackled.

Yesterday’s news headlines put cancer in pole position as the primary cause of death in the Netherlands. Amongst families of cancer-patients, the frustrating question of ‘why on earth, with all the amazing technological capabilities we have and the dozens of daily new insights gained, do people still need to die of cancer?’ is like an ever-returning mantra. To some in the field it’s a lack of knowledge which prevents us from major progress, according to others the paradigms by which we investigate cancer, describe it, categorize and treat it are flawed and we are in desperate need of a paradigm shift.

A recent cover story in Wired Magazine “The Truth about Cancer“ urges to increase efforts in detecting cancer early instead of trying to fight it later. Early detection could increase survival rates to 90% according to some. 

TechnologyReview looks at new developments in treatment – which could be classified as regenerative medicine - which train the body to recognize the killer cells as cancer and trigger the immune system to fight them off once again.

“One of cancer’s cleverest tricks is its ability to hide from the immune system. A new approach to cancer treatment called immunotherapy could spare patients at least some of the grueling battery of chemotherapy treatments by retraining the body’s own defenders–the cells of the immune system–to recognize and destroy tumors. Now researchers at Harvard University have developed a simple way to do this inside the body: a polymer implant attracts and trains immune-system cells to go after cancer.”

The fight against cancer or for knowledge about it, does not only take place in medical labs or our bodies. The known or presumed influence of environmental factors on the occurrence of cancers, also leads to efforts to geotag cancer occurrences and correlating their spatial spread with other layers of knowledge using GIS systems (e.g. NCI, Turkish effort)

Image courtesy of National Cancer Institute