Hawai'i: The Lost Years

Mandatory ration card for the ahupua'a (governing district) of Honolulu, O'ahu

Now that Hawai'i has come out of its self-imposed isolation, our view of the archipelago is changing. But much is still unknown about the period between 2032 and 2104, when outside visitors were banned and news from Hawai'i was rare. The discovery of Nestor von Hoepper's secret archive, detailing his journey and residence on O'ahu from 2069-71 sheds light on this era of mystery and misinformation. Von Hoepper's journals, drawings, and artifacts, which had remained hidden for decades, will certainly cause us to reinterpret the official history of the Hawaiian culture during this period.

~Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, 02108, "Hawai'i 2069: A Journey to the Dark Islands" [excerpt]

The von Hoepper collection of recovered Hawaiian artifacts is now open to the public thanks to Sally Szwed and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco

Personal journal of Mr Nestor von Hoepper (unpublished)

Top left: Flag of the Confederation of Hawaiian Republics, ca. 02070
The motto reads "Mai hehi mai ma luna o'u" (Don't tread on me)

User-modified cookware ("hubcap wok")

User-modified self-and solar-powered hybrid wireless telephone

Ceremonial bowl (kava and ayahuasca residue found)

Bottom right: Military uniform of the Army of O'ahu,
Confederation of Hawaiian Republics

The remarkable story of the Hawaiian islands' 21st century, told through the never-before-seen artifact collection of adventurer Nestor von Hoepper, can now finally be told.

A special exhibition, curated by Sally Szwed of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, will be on display in San Francisco until 20 September.

Thanks to Ms Szwed, as well as to the Wattis Institute, the Confederation of Hawaiian Republics and the von Hoepper Family Trust for their cooperation.

Related posts:
> Found futures
> Green Dragon
> It was the pest of times...
> "Hawaii 2050" kicks off

Findability features FoundFutures

Earlier this week I was interviewed by Peter "Ambient Findability" Morville for his blog findability.org, about working at the intersection of design and alternative futures. (I recently rediscovered and responded to a post he wrote over a year ago, in which he expressed an interest in the interweaving of user experience strategy and futures studies.) We talked quite a bit about the ongoing collaborative project FoundFutures which fellow futurist Jake Dunagan and I have been running since 02006, with the help of a stable -- if stable is the word for these people -- of brilliant designers.

The resulting post appeared today.

I'm grateful to Peter for initiating a really interesting conversation.

As regular readers of t.s.f. are already well aware, there's an orientation in these pages toward how design and futures thinking are being (and can continue to be) woven together. One of the biggest challenges in synthetic, generalist, or transdisciplinary inquiry lies in semantic mismatches, so that people discussing essentially the same phenomena using different terms may never become aware of each other's research or ideas. Traditionally this has been a boon to the academy, in that people could become well-known, admired experts in their respective fields without ever having to take into account the challenges of other folks using different terminology in the next building over. Increased connectivity of people and subjects are rapidly breaking down those walls (notably, via tag-based taxonomies which allow you to have your semantic cake and eat it, so things can easily belong in and be accessed via multiple, previously siloed, categories).

So these disciplinary and linguistic divisions both impede and enable new discoveries: each is a different perspective, a different way of perceiving or knowing the subject.

Swings and roundabouts, my friends. Swings and roundabouts.

Consequently each discussion around design and futures with someone whose experience brings them to the intersection from a different angle opens up new (that is, new to me) insights, search terms, and avenues of inquiry. Peter's principal areas of expertise are information architecture and user experience. Several of the links he included in his post open up frontiers I look forward to exploring:

> Victor Lombardi's thinking on "tangible futures"
> The EU initiative and report Design for Future Needs
> Nathan Shedroff and Davis Masten's project Postcards from the Future

Coincidentally, I'd scheduled a meeting with Nathan (an experience design expert) in San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and we enjoyed a highly interesting exchange of ideas, many of which took the form of trading isomorphic insights arrived at via slightly different avenues. Thus, the beginning of another promising thread in this effort.

The Great Design-Futures Conversation continues. All are welcome.

An artifact for the future

Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation.
~Rosetta Project website

The Long Now's Rosetta Disk | Photo by Kevin Kelly

On Tuesday evening at The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, we marked a milestone in a project conceived to celebrate and preserve linguistic diversity for the long-term future. It was inspired by the famously trilingual "Rosetta Stone", discovered by Napoleon's troops in 01799 at Rashid (which they referred to as Rosetta) in Egypt, and helped 19th-century linguists decipher hieroglyphic writing.

Kevin Kelly explains:

During a Long Now field trip to a southwest archeological site, the idea of a modern Rosetta Stone came up — a backup of human languages that future generations might cherish. At a winter retreat in 1999 [make that 01999], Long Now board member Doug Carlston [link] suggested that for the parallel common text of this modern Rosetta Stone we should use the book of Genesis, since it was most likely already translated into all languages already. We hatched a plan to produce a 3-inch non-corroding disk which contained at least 1,000 translations of Genesis and other linguistic information about each language.

Following the archiving principle of LOCKS (Lots of Copies Keep ‘em Safe) we would replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world with built in magnifiers. This project in long term thinking would do two things: it would showcase this new long-term storage technology, and it would give the world a minimal backup of human languages. We thought it might take a year to do.
...
All this took eight years because [at first the] technology could not handle the size of our library, and there was in fact, contrary to our assumptions, no library of already completed Genesis translations. There was no central depository of language information, either. So in order to gather 1,000 translations of Genesis and related linguistic information for those 1,000 language, Long Now created the Rosetta Project. [link]

An earlier version of the disk has since 02004 been hurtling through space on the European Space Agency probe Rosetta, bound for a 02014 rendezvous with a comet where it is to be deposited and will spend the next several hundred million years touring the solar system. The completed Disk unveiled on Tuesday is, however, intended for a terrestrial audience. Kelly:

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: "Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation."
...
The Rosetta disk is not digital. The pages are analog "human-readable" scans of scripts, text, and diagrams. Among the 13,500 scanned pages are 1,500 different language versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, pronunciation guides and so on.

The disk distils and embodies a tremendous amount of effort and dedication on the part of many people. It's a remarkable technical, social and scholarly feat, and a thought-provoking piece of farsighted communication. (The closest parallel that springs to my mind is the 10,000-year nuclear waste warning concepts commissioned by Sandia National Laboratories.) It highlights a facet of futures thinking less frequently addressed (at this blog, at least), which has to do with designing a suitable historical archive (more prosaically, "data storage") for future generations whose specific circumstances are impossible for us to anticipate.

Characteristically for Long Now folks, the wonderful Laura Welcher, director of the Rosetta Project, even while announcing her team's marvellous achievement, keeps looking forward:

So… if the Rosetta Disk is a prototype and facet of the Library of Ages (companion to the 10,000 Year Clock), what goes into the fine print next?

Good question.

Where every day is career day

Images of Wannado City via About.com: Theme Parks

A look at Wannado City™, "America's first indoor role-playing theme park for kids":

Wannado City is a theme park the size of three football fields built in the middle of Sawgrass Mills, a shopping centre complex in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It is a kid-sized replica of a real city and the little ones behave like adults here.

They work, are (mostly) law abiding, put out fires and deposit their pay-cheques into an interest earning account at the State Farm Bank. Not in dollars, but in Wongas, the official Wannado City currency.
...
The value of money is very important to the inventor of Wannado City. "This city for kids should be as close to reality as possible," says Luis Laresgoiti, 41, a tall slim Mexican man who sets out his vision in a quiet, soft voice. "Money is the most important fuel in every city and every country – also in Wannado City."
...
Children three to 13 years old can choose between 120 different professions.
...
In addition, 12 sponsors and their logos give the children's work the stamp of reality. [...] The money that the kidizens (junior citizens) accrue is managed at the State Farm Bank, an American financial firm that offers insurance and bank services. 'Watch how your Wongas grow,' exclaims the bank slogan.
...
Hidden interests are discovered in Wannado City, says [mother Judy Odsess]. "Sarah didn’t know what she wanted to do, now she wants to go in to television." The state of Florida agrees. Schools are sending entire classes on school trips to Wannado City with the blessings of the teachers and the parents.

Judy Odsess also likes Wannado because it’s safe for her daughters. A security system inspired by the casino city Las Vegas takes care of total child protection.
...
In Wannado City no one is unemployed. The choice of profession is free and the middle class is intact. Outsourcing doesn’t exist. Wannado City presents itself as a city without any ideology.

~Peter Hossli, "When I Grow Up", Open Skies (reproduced at Hossli.com), 1 November 02005.

For those of us not blessed to live within an SUV ride of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, it's possible to get a sense of what the Wannado City experience might be like through a variety of home videos posted at YouTube, where one also finds that local TV news services have filed cooperatively infomercial-esque stories about the park (link). Since journalist Hossli interviewed its founder, however, some of the intended verisimilitude appears to have been traded in for unadulterated fantasy. Wannado City has lately been advertising a Jurassic Park-style "dinosaur adventure" in which "an era is reborn" and "mysterious creatures from the past are unleashed" (link). This move highlights the challenge, ubiquitous in pedagogically-oriented simulations, of blending education with entertainment: it's easy to lapse into excess of one or the other.

The experiential learning idea behind the $40 million facility (a figure quoted in a TV news spot linked above) here is fascinating to me. Visiting kids get a chance to do "what they wanna do" (i.e., when they grow up), sampling any of 120 professions, meanwhile earning and spending in the Wannado City micro-economy set within the giant Sawgrass Mills Mall, the largest shopping centre in the state of Florida. It would be great to see some scholarly analysis of the educational attributes of this experience, but a search at Google Scholar for "Wannado" turns up only a few English-language papers, the main theme in which seems to be the use of RFID tags in patrons' wrist-worn tracking devices. Even putting to one side the Foucauldian surveillance apparatus at play here, and notwithstanding its claims to be a "city without any ideology", it's not hard to spot a distinct ideological bent mixed in with all the fun. Where some onlookers will discern valuable learning, or harmless amusement, others are sure to find consumerist indoctrination. Of course, all that depends on your politics: what's intriguing me from a futures perspective is that the role-play here recreates occupations that are liable to change radically, or even disappear, by the time these kids enter the workforce.

Whether or how this matters is an interesting question that goes to the heart of what we believe education is about.

My bias, of course, is that in times of massive change, to prepare ourselves and our children for situations that don't yet exist is at least as important as being skilled in existing ones. Which leads me to wonder about the prospects for role-playing and simulation settings that offer the opportunity to experience not only existing jobs (and animatronic dinosaurs), but also -- or instead -- ways of life that could exist in times to come.

Related posts:
> Today at Tomorrowland: yesterday's future

(Article via swissmiss)

Imagining Africa

Image via City of Cape Town official website

Over at sci-fi blog io9, Charlie Jane Anders has posted about an award winning short story by South African writer Henrietta Rose-Innes.  "Poison" recently won the 02008 Caine Prize, Africa's highest literary honour. An extract:

The cloud was creeping higher behind her back, casting a dull murk, not solid enough to be shadow. She could see veils of dirty rain bleeding from its near edge. Earlier, in the city, she had heard sirens, helicopters in the sky; but there were none out here. It was silent. Standing alone on the highway was unnerving. This was for cars. The road surface was not meant to be touched with hands or feet, to be examined too closely or in stillness. The four lanes were so wide. Even the white lines and the gaps between them were much longer than they appeared from the car: the length of her whole body, were she to lie down in the road. She had to stop herself looking over her shoulder, flinching from invisible cars coming up from behind.

It's a tightly written, evocative read (find it in full at The Guardian). A day after the award was announced, Rose-Innes spoke with the Saudi Gazette:

Asked whether she thinks "Poison" taps into the wider anxiety pervading the globe, while having a specific South African context, Rose-Innes replies: "I think it’s in the zeitgeist. There’s a trend towards apocalyptic images in popular culture at the moment...The world is a pretty anxiety-ridden place, although at the time of writing the story it felt like it was very much embedded in the South African situation specifically".

Apocalyptic stories have "a weird attraction; part of me is drawn to the idea of everything being wiped away and starting again anew." She was a fan of science fiction when she was younger and "it’s interesting for me that a lot of those classic science fiction scenarios seem to have been discovered anew by mainstream literary authors."

~Susannah Tarbush, "Disquieting metaphor for our anxiety-ridden times", Saudi Gazette, 14 July 02008 [see also the tanjara

Now, while the question of whether this story ought to be classified as science fiction sensu stricto may be debated by some, what's more interesting to me is that its success has helped focus attention on the state of the genre in Africa. The story caught my attention because yesterday, flying out west to San Francisco, I got around to reading an article by futurists Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic about a very similar topic ("Futures dreaming outside and on the margins of the western world", Futures 35(5), 493-507, June 02003: via IngentaConnect [subscription only]; via Metafuture). The authors make a case for broadening and diversifying science fiction, both in how we understand the application of the term, as well as in the number and variety of cultural perspectives presented through the genre. Through the former line of argument, they suggest that sci-fi equivalents exist in all cultures, even if they aren't visible or appreciated as such; while through the latter, they lament the actual dominance (presumably, in terms of both volume and visibility) of "western" science fiction.

While there is science fiction in all cultures, it is only the west that has systematized science and fiction, made it into an industrial endeavor, and created a particular brand of literature called science fiction. [p. 500]
...
Taking a paradigmatic view, to assert that science fiction exists only in the west is merely to favor one particular form of a much wider endeavor. Science fiction thus should not merely be about the technological as defined in forward time but the creation of plausible future worlds from a range of civilizational perspectives. Science fiction is not just about debating the consequences of scientific progress. It is also about creating utopian or at least eutopian (the good not perfect) societies of
the future. [p. 495]

I can't help thinking that the term science fiction is itself responsible for some confusion here. As I've argued before:

If virtually all future stories, by default, are science-fiction, and popular discourse around future scenarios winds up being coterminous with that designation, then in effect the future has been colonised -- by an instrumentalist, technology-heavy "science" fiction. To put it another way, the narrowness of our culture's thinking about futures is reflected in the paucity of our vocabulary for stories that happen there. It looks like we have science fiction on the one hand, and the venerable literary tradition of utopias (etymologically: "no place") on the other. Which, analytically and practically, pretty much boils down to a choice between technologised nightmare, or nothing at all.

I find myself in agreement, then, with the drive to encourage elaboration and dissemination of alternative imaginaries, as prescribed by Milojevic and Inayatullah, even if I'm a little wary of "science fiction" as a label. The open-ended, pluripotent future with its endless possible settings and interpretations is an ideal place to call eutopian dreams into discussion.

Having said that, "Poison" is no cheerful portrait of a dream-come-true. Thematically, it wouldn't have been out of place in last year's groundbreaking alternate reality game, World Without Oil, which saw players around the world produce stories, in writing as well as other media, imagining the effects of an oil crisis on their lives. Also, with minimal editing, the action could be transposed to any number of other settings in Australia, Britain, or Canada (all places where I've lived) or the U.S. (where I live now).

This may be African science fiction, but the author acknowledges its roots lie in a global mood of apocalyptic anticipation which is grimly plausible almost anywhere.

So, while we may hope to find in African (or other) science fiction some kind of radical antidote to the limits of "Western" imagination; we may find instead that imagination is most appropriately located within individuals-in-a-context, not in monolithic cultures. In the interest of pluralism, I agree that to have many voices is better than to privilege a few. In the massively collaborative process of future-making, the variety of expression, through specific stories, ideas, and possibilities that play into and reinforce (on one hand) or challenge and undermine (on the other) is enormously important. But to be clear: the key question isn't merely whether a sci-fi story is "Western" or not in origin. It's whether (and how) it addresses, be it in endorsement or in dissent, the array of images of the future that we hold in our hearts and minds. I need scarcely add that "we" are many and varied, readers as well as writers.

No one can force anyone to think outside the box they live in, but given the opportunity, the future will irresistibly beckon to some of the people, some of the time, as a horizon of exploration: where today's impossible becomes a different normal.

Consequently, some African sci-fi is sure to look highly familiar. And some won't.

Kenyan writer John Rugoiyo Gichuki set an award-winning play Eternal, Forever in the year 02410, with the United States of Africa riding the cutting edge of technological advance. Gichuki says:

There is always cyclical development.

The British Empire was big. Now America is there. Maybe in the next 50 years it’s going to be the Chinese. Maybe in 100 years it’s going to be Africa.

A nice concept: Africa as cradle of posthumanity.

Related posts:
> The Darfur Olympics
> Colonising the future... on film
> Neill Blomkamp, visual futurist

(Thanks Rachel!)

Dreaming the home of the future

versus

A scene from PATH Concept Home video (part 3 of 4: "Flexibility").
Top: a scene from Disney Innoventions video

Following a post here recently about Disney's new Tomorrowland attraction, a different take on the same topic...

A "House of the Future," a concept of what tomorrow holds for cutting-edge living, usually tells us more about the dreamers than the dream.

In the mid-1950s, Disneyland, with the help of Monsanto, cooked up its "House of the Future," nearly all of it made of plastic... This was pretty radical stuff, but it was also a vision of living in the future that was based on extending our reliance on cheap oil into infinity.
...
This summer Disneyland opened a new version of living in the future in its "Tomorrowland"... Like the Monsanto house of 50 years ago, this latest Dream Home is a big ad.
...
All of our old habits cultivated in a gluttonous energy culture are given free rein in Disney's version of tomorrow. You can't make a move without consuming kilowatts. This Dream McMansion preserves the suburban model that $4-a-gallon gas has made into a nightmare.

If anything, Disney ought to change the story line: "This is how people in the most resource-consuming nation on Earth dreamed they'd still be living in the future without environmental and economic consequences."

There's another Dream Home out there. It hasn't gotten a fraction of the attention lavished on Disneyland, but it offers a future that we might actually be able to live with. Last year the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development unveiled its "Concept Home."

The ideas behind the home try to come to terms with the energy mess we're in.

~Michael J. Crosbie, "Real House Of The Future Is No Disney Dream", Hartford Courant, 3 August 02008.

Restated in terms of Dator's generic images of the future, we have in these two houses (Disney's and HUD's) a pretty clear contrast between two embodied future scenario types: "continuation" (business-as-usual) and "discipline" (self-restraint on resources).

I'm very sympathetic to the point that Crosbie, an architect and professor, is making: HUD's so-called PATH (Partnership for Advancing Housing Technology) Concept Home is practicable, sustainable, and ethical in a variety of ways that Disney's immersive advertisement for energy decadence isn't, and yet comparatively, the former seems to have been all but ignored.

What gives? That's a question the Crosbie piece doesn't discuss at all; in other words, why this unjust situation might be so.

Well, I'm currently reading NYU media prof (and recent HRCFS futures salon guest) Stephen Duncombe's book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. And I think it might help us out here (pp. 8-9):

Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belong to those who tell the better story.
...
If we want our ideas to lead and not trail the politics of this country, then we need to learn how to think and communicate in today's spectacular vernacular.

With that in mind, check out their respective websites (PATH; Disney) and take another quick look at the photos above. I know, I know, it's not at all a fair comparison -- the multimillion dollar dream machine going up against the the do-gooding public-private partnership -- but humour me. Words don't cost much to write; let's see how they look side by side. Here are the opening lines of the two projects' press releases:

HUD Unveils America's First Efficient, Sustainable, Affordable Concept Home

PATH Concept Home represents the New American Dream during National Homeownership Month

[6 June 02007]

Omaha, NE -- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development today announced the completion of America's first PATH Concept Home featuring more than 60 efficient, sustainable and flexible products and systems all in one affordable home.

HUD Assistant Secretary Darlene F. Williams speaks prior to the Concept Home ribbon cutting on June 6. She is joined (left to right) by Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey, builder Fernando Pages, and HUD Regional Director Macie Houston."With the PATH Concept Home, HUD has created a blueprint for the future of the American Dream by using innovative housing technologies that support our goals of sustainability, efficiency and flexibility in an affordable home," HUD Assistant Secretary Darlene F. Williams told the gathering of community and industry leaders. "June is National Homeownership Month and we are excited to showcase a home that is affordable to purchase, maintain and renovate as families and their needs change over time."

[link]

versus

IT'S THE HOME OF YOUR DREAMS! INNOVENTIONS DREAM HOME INVITES GUESTS TO EXPERIENCE THE FUTURE TODAY

New Tomorrowland Attraction at Disneyland Resort Combines State-of-the-Art Technology with the Latest in Disneyland Immersive Storytelling

ANAHEIM, Calif. - June 16, 2008 - Imagine a home so perfectly attuned to the needs of a family that it can anticipate and fulfill them, virtually without anyone lifting a finger. Now imagine that the home offers family members high-tech connectivity, not just with one another but with people, entertainment and information in the world at large.

Guests at Disneyland can soon do more than imagine it. Beginning June 17, the Innoventions Dream Home in Tomorrowland is bringing that world to life as a limited number of guests have the opportunity to preview the home.

[link]

So here's the Pepsi challenge, kids. Who's telling the better story?

Hint: Dream Home (Disney) vs Concept Home (HUD).

I feel a little bad saying it, but in this light, the attentional gulf separating the pair isn't all that surprising.

And lest I should be accused of overlooking or devaluing it, there is indeed far more substance, thought, rigour and ethical engagement in evidence in the concept home's presentation than in Tomorrowland's pile of eye-candy -- but that's just my point. In America today, the nutritious meal that doesn't taste good doesn't get eaten. (Yeah, thought that was a pretty neat analogy too.)

So, *brow furrowing, eyes narrowing*, doesn't Duncombe's dream prescription mean selling out progressive high-ground to crassly commercial ways of operating? In fact he's intensely aware of that risk, and notes (pp. 16-17):

Between arrogant rejection and populist acceptance of commercial culture lies a third approach: appropriating, co-opting, and, most important, transforming the techniques of spectacular capitalism into tools for social change.
...
The challenge for progressives is to create ethical spectacles.

If Crosbie is right, and the "House of the Future" tells us more about the dreamers than the dream, one of the things it may be telling us about the sustainability-oriented dreamers is that we're still learning to dream aloud in a compelling way. It seems to me that creating ethical spectacles that recast the -- perhaps necessary -- austerities of a "discipline" future as more "dream" than mere "concept" is where it's at, for building futures that are both practically inhabitable and aesthetically appealing.

That's where I'd prefer to live, anyway.

Related posts:
> Today at Tomorrowland: yesterday's future
> Sponsors of Utopia
> If they buy in, are you selling out?