Tangible futures

Victor Lombardi is a design strategist, consultant and lecturer, trained in journalism and music technology, and based in New York City. For a couple of years already, in his consulting practice and at his blog Noise Between Stations, he has been tracking the development of what he calls "tangible futures" -- a cousin concept to future artifacts, experiential futures, ambient foresight, and other ideas at the intersection of design and futures thinking that regularly feature here.

Borrowing an idea from my friend's old column at Salon.com, Mr Rheingold's Neighborhood, I decided to ask Victor four questions via email, which he graciously agreed to answer, after introducing himself...

Victor Lombardi: Stuart, thanks for inquiring about my work. I want to make progress in the world by making technology easier for people, and I try and accomplish that through design, business consulting, and teaching. Lately my focus has been creating educational materials for designers.

SC: How do you define "tangible futures", and what's your history of that idea?

VL: If I remember correctly, the term was coined by Christina Wodtke, a friend of mine. We were partners in a business design consultancy and were exploring ways of helping our clients manage more effectively through awareness of their strategy.

It was around then, in 2004, we saw other firms in our space delivering their recommendations as the proverbial binders of reports, and we didn't think this way of engaging managers significantly changed performance. We saw a lot of fascinating work in the field of futures studies that wasn't on the management radar at all. And we were aware of the work of people like Jeanne Liedtka, from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, who pointed out that strategy is too cognitive; it rarely exists outside of our minds. A purely cognitive expression of strategy makes communication and understanding difficult across an organization.

So we started to consider this problem through the lens of our design experience, asking, "How can we help managers *experience* futures and strategy so that it can more substantially be understood, shared, and acted on?" The working definition became: Tangible Futures are the output of applying design-fueled disciplines like visualization, drama, and film to represent futures and strategies.

Around this time we saw others like The Institute for the Future coming to similar conclusions and developing what they called Artifacts from the Future. This was validating for us.

SC: What are your favourite instances of tangible futures in practice?

VL: Here's two historical examples I love. Imagine it's the mid-19th Century and there are no skyscrapers, much less the giant city skylines we have today like in Manhattan where I am writing this. There are a plethora of issues in helping people understand what a future could be like when we live and work high above the ground. Elisha Graves Otis was responsible for communicating a key part of this vision, that riding in elevators could be safe. He accomplished this through performance...

...during P.T. Barnum's Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York, marked the first time Otis demonstrated his "safety elevator." The invention enabled elevators to travel safely up and down by employing a special spring device that locked in place automatically if the hoisting ropes (later cables) broke. Today's elevators, while far more sophisticated and safer, continue to rely on the same principle.

During the Crystal Palace demonstration, Otis rode a lifting platform up an open shaft. When he reached the top the hoisting rope was cut. The crowd gasped, expecting the elevator to come crashing down, but the safety device held fast. "All safe, gentleman, all safe," he announced.

from http://www.otis.fi/news/newsdetail/0,1368,CLI1_NID16925_RES1,00.html

Another facet of this challenge was helping architects, city officials, business owners, and citizens visualize what those buildings would look like, taking into account building designs, materials, and zoning laws. Hugh Ferriss illustrated these structures through dramatic perspectives and stunning lighting effects to communicate both the architectural details as well as the emotional effects such changes would bring.

See http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/avery/da/ferriss.html

SC: What role does this kind of practice play in a typical organisation, and how can it perform in an ideal situation?

VL: Organizations who do this now are the ones you already know about. The city planners in places like Dubai who need to plan decades into the future and do so by building physical models and simulations. And it's the companies that have already mastered the tangible aspect of this practice, design-dependent companies like BMW. For example, they recently created a concept car covered in stretchable fabric that allows the car to change shapes...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTYiEkQYhWY

As opposed to a product development concept that directly influences what is made in the near-term, this sort of vision concept connects the long-term strategy with the attitudes and practices of the organization. As officials from BMW said, "It is in the nature of such visions that they do not necessarily claim to be suitable for series production. Rather, they are intended to steer creativity and research into new directions."

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/06/bmw-builds-a-ca.html

As rapid prototyping tools become more accessible -- from software frameworks to 3D printing to video editing tools -- more people will naturally adopt them to tangibly express futures and strategies. But, as is so common in media today, individuals may widely adopt the practice before organizations do.

SC: Why do you think this concept has emerged now, and where do you see it going?

VL: Rather than re-invent the wheel, I'll refer you to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang at the Institute for the Future who blogged about five ways that their Artifacts from the Future are valuable:

1. artifacts reach some people who don't feel they have time to closely read long reports
2. their tangible, specific nature forces us to think hard about what we really believe
3. thinking about artifacts makes you think hard about the interrelationships of technological, social, economic, and cultural factors
4. the shift to artifacts reflects our own sense that design is going to be a critical strategic skill in the future
5. many of our clients actually make things. They already communicate with each other in a language of prototypes

http://future.iftf.org/2006/06/artifacts_from_.html

Many thanks, Victor, for sharing your thoughts with us.

Related posts:
> Object-oriented futuring
> Cheap prototypes, valuable insights
> Design fiction is a fact
> Where futures meets experience design

Human Lust Inducing Virus

I just got back from two weeks on the mainland United States, including my first real exposure to The South.

It was a terrific trip.

But more on that later. For this, my first post of 02008, we might as well pick up where we left off last year -- with Howard Rheingold in Honolulu, and close encounters of the oddly futuristic kind.

There was what I half-remembered as a future artifact anecdote, about which I couldn't quite recall enough to muster a coherent question over dinner on Rheingold's last night in town, in his 01988 work Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes. It's out of print and not digitised yet (sigh) so I had to wait for a hard copy from the library to refresh my memory.

Today I found it, in the article titled "Saturday Night with the Technarchists", Rheingold's eyewitness account of a characteristically earth-shaking show by the pyrotechnicians at Survival Research Laboratories. But the bit I'd wanted to follow up wasn't about SRL. His story concludes thus (pp. 45-46):

As soon as I unpried my fingers from their grip on the chainlink fence and turned to leave, someone whose face I didn't see handed me a small matchbox-sized container. I shook it. Nothing rattled. I looked at it, noted that it was a clever kind of flyer of some kind, and put it in my pocket.

The next day, when I reached in my pocket, looking for something else, I pulled out an unexpected object. It was a matchbox, made of flimsy cardboard, covered by a photocopy of a scanning electron photomicrographic image of a gang of viruses. Printed notices covered four sides.

I held the box up to the light and took a close look at one of the two broader sides, which said: "HLIV -- Human Lust Inducing Virus -- developed by OK GENETIC ENGINEERING to solve an important world problem -- what to do when he/she just wants to be friends. IMPORTANT -- OK GENETIC ENGINEERING has no idea how this product will effect [sic] the ecological balance in Northern California. DO NOT OPEN THIS BOX without reading the warning on the back!"

I turned it over. The proclamation on the other side said: "WARNING -- OK GENETIC ENGINEERING has not received permission to release this organism from NIH. We used a Stanford patent without paying the license fee, and we do not know how to file an Environmental Impact Statement. We are distributing HLIV free. Please make your own decision whether or not to release these organisms."

I read the message on one of the narrow sides, where the match-striker would be, and it said: "This box contains at least 220 HLIV virions in culture." On the other narrow side: "OK GENETIC ENGINEERING -- J.P. Malloy, Pres. -- 'Quality Clones Since 1984.'" I opened it. Inside, a neatly typed label, glued to the bottom of the matchbox, said: "uh-oh." It was like getting a message from an apollonian evangelist on the way home from a dionysian rapture.

I keep the box on a shelf, near the coach where guests sit down in my living room, and use it as an observational instrument. Not one person has failed to open it.

Feeling intrepid, I googled "human lust inducing virus" and got six hits, which led me to the website of Judy Malloy (J.P. Malloy, Pres.), "a magic realist who works at the conjunction of poetry, hypernarrative, and information art" -- and the person responsible for the boxes of "HLIV". Her 01988 article in Leonardo about this work requires a subscription I don't have, but a version on a currently inactive page of her website is available via an Internet Archive copy dated 3 June 02001. (Isn't the web great?)

To gather the information for the projects discussed in this paper, I formed my own research and development companies. Not only was it easier to acquire vendor information as President of OK Research, OK Genetic Engineering, and Bad information, but also, by becoming a part of the subject myself, I was able to look at and describe it as an insider. In the way court painters became a part of the court, I have tried to become a part of the technical community.

Such was her ingeniously subversive starting point, described in the introduction. The following comes from her description of the OK Genetic Engineering project -- quoted verbatim; only the ellipses are mine. (For the record, a brief outline of this project in more or less the same terms also appeared in the Winter 01987 edition of Whole Earth Review.)

As President of OK Genetic Engineering (1983-1985), I collected information about genetic engineering research and development. I used that information to make a series of reports and products -- small reproducible combinations of words and images that were distributed as free handouts or by mail.
[...]
In the first months, as publicity for the project and to find out how people feel about genetic engineering, I drove a company car [...] with "OK Genetic Engineering - Quality Clones Since 1984" painted on its side panels. [note that it was actually 1983 when the car took to the streets of Berkeley] Typical reactions were: "Can they really do that?", "What's that stuff you do that begins with a 'C'?" "Do you have any jobs?"
[...]
OKGE put out three products and five reports. The products were HLIV (Human Lust Inducing Virus), SH gene (Shrinkage Hormone Gene) and NFD bacteria (Nuclear Fuel Devouring Bacteria). the five reports dealt with various aspects of the biotechnology industry. Some used slogans from the information. Others were based on my personal experience as president of OKGE.
[...]
I distributed over 400 [handmade] boxes of Human Lust Inducing Virus and had quite a few favorable reports about its efficacy. It appears that most people do not worry about disturbing the ecological balance when it concerns a product they feel they really need. I know of only two people who choose not to open the box. One, a rock musician, was motivated by environmental concerns. The other, a gentleman in his eighties, said that he was old enough to know when he had enough of a good thing.

A marvellous bit of interactive art that seems suitably ahead of its time, in topic and approach alike, for 01983. It also has an air of future-shock therapy about it -- and raises an ethical dimension that I haven't yet discussed much here at this blog, but which does require further attention. Malloy reflected on this aspect of the HLIV experiment some years later, during a 01997 interview on the WELL:

[I stood] on the street corners in San Francisco in appropriate/inapproriate outfits and hand[ed] out containers of "Human Lust Inducing Virus". Lots of people wouldn't think it was art, but nevertheless might be interested in the concept of whether or not to open a container that clearly stated it could be harmful to the environment but contained something you might want.

It really doesn't matter whether the recipients of the HLIV thought it was art or not. What matters is the hopefully the work stimulated them to think about how far they would go in the use of a genetically engineered product. However, it was also clear - whether they thought it was art or not - that it was a performance of some kind.

If instead, I had choosen to address the subject of lust by hiring actors to go into bars and make dates with people they met and then behave in certain ways. I could have designed an interesting experiment. I could even have put people in a similar position as the HLIV did, but the HLIV was hypothetical - stimulating people to *thought*. If I did the work in real life, I could trigger behavior that I would have no way of predicting and - unless it was made clear to the participants *in advance* - I might be effecting other people's lives in ways that could have serious repercussions, ways that I might not be able to envision.

I can see that someone might think this was art. That's the problem I think we all need to look at as our work begins to cross these boundaries. There is an uncomfortable similarity between work that is designed to interfere with someone's life without that person's knowledge and the thinking behind Nazi genetic experiments.
[...]
In my hypothetical HLIV bar situation, it might be ok to do this if I talked to the participants before hand and explained exactly what I was doing even though I'm aware that this could slant the results. Otherwise, even if they guessed that it was a work of art because the theatrical nature was apparent, they might misunderstand its intent or be sensitive in some way I couldn't foresee to this alteration of their environment.

Now, the extent to which ethics figures in the manifestation of disturbing futures does depend, I think, on the extent to which people could reasonably mistake them for facts. In FoundFutures:Chinatown, for instance, we were careful to label all the most prominent bird flu artifacts with future dates -- a decade away, in order to "stimulate people to thought" (to paraphrase Malloy), yet without inviting panic (witness the Boston bomb scare in 02007), or unflattering comparisons to Nazi genetic experiments.

Rheingold's loungeroom guests, like Malloy's other subjects exposed to Human Lust Inducing Virus, may have been unperturbed by the "warnings" perhaps because the matchboxes spoke with an artistic or satirical voice, a parody of the presumably stentorian tones of virus distributors. (But what do I know, I've only read about them.)

In all, I do find myself wondering how to gauge responses to future artifacts more systematically, aspiring as I do to an understanding grounded in something more solid than speculation as to how encounters with embodied futures really affect what people think. This, coupled with the ethical issue, makes for a pretty lumpy methodological soup.

I also wonder how the experiment with "Human Lust Inducing Virus" would fare these days.

And I wonder where I can get some.

You might think of it as paradise, but Hawaii can be such a lonely place.

Mars Products

The three shops opened their doors to the public at ten A.M., on the tenth of March -- in local time and day. In New York, the letters spelling out MARS PRODUCTS had been displayed for eight days, and a good deal of curiosity had been aroused, both among the public and the press. But until actual opening, no information had been offered.

During those days, four objects had been on display in the shop windows. No doubt the reader of this précis has seen or examined these objects, each of which stood upon a small crystal display-stand, framed in black velvet, for all the world like precious jewels, which in a sense they were. The display consisted of a clock, an adding machine, an outboard motor and a music box...
[...]
This advertisement was hardly the first word in the press concerning the Martian shops. Already, every columnist had carried an item or two about what was, without question one of the most imaginative and novel publicity schemes of the space age.

Futurist colleague Howard Rheingold, in Honolulu with his family last week, drew to our attention a 01959 science fiction short story by Howard Fast (01914-02003) called "The Martian Shop".

Fast, a versatile, prolific, and politically conscientious writer, was at one time a member of the American Communist Party and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He may be known to movie buffs for Spartacus, a novel which he started writing while serving three months in prison for contempt of Congress, and on which the Stanley Kubrick film was based.

Anyway, the work we've been doing with public installations of future artifacts reminded Rheingold of the story, a nifty account of the intriguing, sudden appearance of luxury stores showcasing Martian technology in Tokyo, Paris and New York. Fiction, yes, but a tale of proto-future-shock therapy nonetheless (or so I'd like to think).

The full text of "The Martian Shop" can be found here. It's well worth a read.

Thanks, Howards!