History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
~Winston Churchill
The future will be kind to me for I intend to create it.
~The Sceptical Futuryst
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Towards a Sceptical Futuryst blogosophy, part III
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Why the language of design must enter law and politics (part two)
/Continued from a previous post.../
In law school, the first class I ever took was called Torts and the Process of Law. We were introduced to the arcana of "legal storytelling" (my term, not theirs) in which episodes of people's lives -- usually horrific, depressing, or bizarre, or some interesting combination of those three -- were boiled down, and their legal essence extracted for infusion into the body of common law. These are anecdotes with teeth: the moral of every legal story is its ratio decidendi, whose binding authority carries on down through years, decades or centuries of later cases. The 01932 case, Donoghue v. Stevenson, is one that stands out in memory. It was a landmark in the development of the tort of negligence, about a ginger ale bottle with a snail in it, which was served to a woman in 01928 and led her to experience a nasty bout of gastroenteritis. The key legal concept here, and countless others since, was that of "duty of care": a person will owe a duty of care not to injure those who it can be reasonably foreseen would be affected by their acts or omissions.
Now, this principle is well and good for products, like snail-containing soda bottles, which have a specific provenance, because any adverse consequences are traceable back to the source. This legal mechanism, the tort of negligence, can serve as useful negative feedback to make amends for and rectify negligently designed products, or manufacturing processes. But what about at a larger scale? What about legal or political systems themselves, and their emergent properties, their systemic consequences? There, it's difficult to hold anyone accountable, even in theory, let alone in a court of law.
Take war, for example. Trying to hold a specific government to account for the massive damage sustained in a military encounter, or the specific consequences for one person, family or even a whole group of people, is one strategy. And it's a strategy that some, understandably, seem very keen to adopt. But, whatever the merits of the argument against (say, the US administration's present entanglements in Iraq) might be; through the macroscope, this rather appears to miss the point, like the drunk who lost his keys in the dark but searched for them under the streetlight because the visibility was better. This government, like many others, is simply acting out what it is in its nature to do. (Of course, the governments themselves in any given conflict blame each other; but it's the logic of the pattern that's the problem, not so much the logic of the participants, which takes on the aura of inevitability once it's in train.) The key is not, then, ultimately to be found under the light of apparent motives, it's in the shadows -- of structure and the broad sweep of history -- where we don't usually think to look. The proximate reasons (of contemporary circumstance) are less significant than the ultimate ones (of big-picture history).
Cambridge law professor Philip Allott once gave an address in 01999, during NATO's bout with Serbia over Kosovo. (The paper, which I believe was called "Kosovo: A psycho-philosophical deduction", was unpublished, and I'm relying on memory of a handout my colleague obtained at the event, so some of the details may be off.) In any case, Allott's analysis of the situation was sobering. Looking past the details of that particular conflict, he was able to see it as "merely" another tragic entry on the extensive, ever-growing list of destructive military engagements dating back centuries, in which the interests of people as people are subjugated to those of an abstract political entity or goal. In short, he regarded Kosovo as a manifest instance, or symptom, of an international system-wide case of macropsychotic behaviour. Now, this concept does not appear to have caught on (I've checked several times, and down to today no variation of this term has never returned a single google hit, though that really ought to change).
To illustrate; George Orwell, in a 01941 essay entitled "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (see this collection, p. 56), may be cited in support of Allott's view of this decidedly odd situation -- in which we humans repeatedly find ourselves -- wherein apparently rational individuals can make decisions which are rational in the narrow context of their circumstances, but whose net effect is a pattern of mutual destruction that is decidedly sick.
Turning to a more current example, at John Rendon's talk for The Long Now Foundation on 15 July, "Long term policy to make the war on terror short", I posed the following question: At some point in the future, the concept of America's national interest, or indeed any national interest, evaporates into absurdity. How can we govern for that timeframe? Rendon's obtuse answer suggested either that what I had asked was unclear, or that he had missed the point (or both). In any case, this to me is one of the design questions that we would do well to apply in our rethinking of the political process; not just in one country, but in any, or all of them. How ought we to govern for the long term?
It is abundantly clear that current political arrangements virtually preclude the consideration of long term consequences. Rendon called it "the tyranny of real time". His presentation (controversial as it may have been, and whatever suspicions motivated vocal interruptions from a handful of audience members) was essentially a plea from a strategic insider for the audience members themselves to explore and encourage governance and policy for the long term, a mindspace that appeared all but impossible to broach, for him and his colleagues, and others like them. Now, the fact that he offered his time, and his neck, to the audience, was admirable -- he was bold and honest enough to identify and attempt to address this structural limitation -- although he may not have done so to the satisfaction of all concerned. I think it's this limitation which encapsulates the essential challenge for redesigning governance; that is, law and politics, in our time.
Stewart Brand, who moderated that discussion with John Rendon, once wrote what can be read as one of the founding statements for the Long Now:
The Long Now's 10,000-year clock is the mechanism and myth at the heart of a mind bogglingly ambitious attempt to correct, or at least to begin to mitigate, a problem that is admittedly vast in scope -- it's civilisation-wide. It therefore represents the beginnings of a monumental effort to provide cultural reprogramming; macrotherapy. But at some point sooner or later, this species of inspirational culture-level intervention must, it seems to me, get down to brass tacks and lead to a tangible change in system parameters. A Clock of the Long Now is one thing. But can anyone imagine the institutional blueprint for a Politics of the Long Now?
/To be continued in part three.../
In law school, the first class I ever took was called Torts and the Process of Law. We were introduced to the arcana of "legal storytelling" (my term, not theirs) in which episodes of people's lives -- usually horrific, depressing, or bizarre, or some interesting combination of those three -- were boiled down, and their legal essence extracted for infusion into the body of common law. These are anecdotes with teeth: the moral of every legal story is its ratio decidendi, whose binding authority carries on down through years, decades or centuries of later cases. The 01932 case, Donoghue v. Stevenson, is one that stands out in memory. It was a landmark in the development of the tort of negligence, about a ginger ale bottle with a snail in it, which was served to a woman in 01928 and led her to experience a nasty bout of gastroenteritis. The key legal concept here, and countless others since, was that of "duty of care": a person will owe a duty of care not to injure those who it can be reasonably foreseen would be affected by their acts or omissions.
Now, this principle is well and good for products, like snail-containing soda bottles, which have a specific provenance, because any adverse consequences are traceable back to the source. This legal mechanism, the tort of negligence, can serve as useful negative feedback to make amends for and rectify negligently designed products, or manufacturing processes. But what about at a larger scale? What about legal or political systems themselves, and their emergent properties, their systemic consequences? There, it's difficult to hold anyone accountable, even in theory, let alone in a court of law.
Take war, for example. Trying to hold a specific government to account for the massive damage sustained in a military encounter, or the specific consequences for one person, family or even a whole group of people, is one strategy. And it's a strategy that some, understandably, seem very keen to adopt. But, whatever the merits of the argument against (say, the US administration's present entanglements in Iraq) might be; through the macroscope, this rather appears to miss the point, like the drunk who lost his keys in the dark but searched for them under the streetlight because the visibility was better. This government, like many others, is simply acting out what it is in its nature to do. (Of course, the governments themselves in any given conflict blame each other; but it's the logic of the pattern that's the problem, not so much the logic of the participants, which takes on the aura of inevitability once it's in train.) The key is not, then, ultimately to be found under the light of apparent motives, it's in the shadows -- of structure and the broad sweep of history -- where we don't usually think to look. The proximate reasons (of contemporary circumstance) are less significant than the ultimate ones (of big-picture history).
Cambridge law professor Philip Allott once gave an address in 01999, during NATO's bout with Serbia over Kosovo. (The paper, which I believe was called "Kosovo: A psycho-philosophical deduction", was unpublished, and I'm relying on memory of a handout my colleague obtained at the event, so some of the details may be off.) In any case, Allott's analysis of the situation was sobering. Looking past the details of that particular conflict, he was able to see it as "merely" another tragic entry on the extensive, ever-growing list of destructive military engagements dating back centuries, in which the interests of people as people are subjugated to those of an abstract political entity or goal. In short, he regarded Kosovo as a manifest instance, or symptom, of an international system-wide case of macropsychotic behaviour. Now, this concept does not appear to have caught on (I've checked several times, and down to today no variation of this term has never returned a single google hit, though that really ought to change).
To illustrate; George Orwell, in a 01941 essay entitled "The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" (see this collection, p. 56), may be cited in support of Allott's view of this decidedly odd situation -- in which we humans repeatedly find ourselves -- wherein apparently rational individuals can make decisions which are rational in the narrow context of their circumstances, but whose net effect is a pattern of mutual destruction that is decidedly sick.
Can we imagine designing a way out of this trap? Seems like a worthy project, I feel. In my opinion, Allott's take on this is compelling, and its implication for the discussion at hand is this: macropsychosis requires macrotherapy. What would that large-scale, systemic solution look like? I don't have a definitive answer to that, but I'm pretty sure it's the right kind of starting point.As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are "only doing their duty", as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.
On cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty.
Turning to a more current example, at John Rendon's talk for The Long Now Foundation on 15 July, "Long term policy to make the war on terror short", I posed the following question: At some point in the future, the concept of America's national interest, or indeed any national interest, evaporates into absurdity. How can we govern for that timeframe? Rendon's obtuse answer suggested either that what I had asked was unclear, or that he had missed the point (or both). In any case, this to me is one of the design questions that we would do well to apply in our rethinking of the political process; not just in one country, but in any, or all of them. How ought we to govern for the long term?
It is abundantly clear that current political arrangements virtually preclude the consideration of long term consequences. Rendon called it "the tyranny of real time". His presentation (controversial as it may have been, and whatever suspicions motivated vocal interruptions from a handful of audience members) was essentially a plea from a strategic insider for the audience members themselves to explore and encourage governance and policy for the long term, a mindspace that appeared all but impossible to broach, for him and his colleagues, and others like them. Now, the fact that he offered his time, and his neck, to the audience, was admirable -- he was bold and honest enough to identify and attempt to address this structural limitation -- although he may not have done so to the satisfaction of all concerned. I think it's this limitation which encapsulates the essential challenge for redesigning governance; that is, law and politics, in our time.
Stewart Brand, who moderated that discussion with John Rendon, once wrote what can be read as one of the founding statements for the Long Now:
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.
The Long Now's 10,000-year clock is the mechanism and myth at the heart of a mind bogglingly ambitious attempt to correct, or at least to begin to mitigate, a problem that is admittedly vast in scope -- it's civilisation-wide. It therefore represents the beginnings of a monumental effort to provide cultural reprogramming; macrotherapy. But at some point sooner or later, this species of inspirational culture-level intervention must, it seems to me, get down to brass tacks and lead to a tangible change in system parameters. A Clock of the Long Now is one thing. But can anyone imagine the institutional blueprint for a Politics of the Long Now?
/To be continued in part three.../
Friday, July 21, 2006
Why the language of design must enter law and politics (part one)
I'm a designer and I want to talk briefly about the concept of design itself. Design is the first signal of human intention. As we look around at the tragedies that we see in the making, we realize that we have to ask: Did we really intend for this to happen? Is this something we designed?
. . .
Once you realize that our culture has adopted strategies of tragedy, perhaps it's time to have strategies of change.
First we have to start with great humility. We don't know what to do. We have indigenous traditions we can draw from, but we don't know what to do. If anybody has any problem with the concept of design humility, reflect on the fact that it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.
So as an assignment, let's design an industrial system for world culture that treats nature as an enemy to be evaded or controlled; that measures prosperity by how much natural capital you can cut down, dig up, bury, burn, or otherwise destroy; that measures productivity by how few people are working; that measures progress by the number of smokestacks (if you're especially proud, put your names on them). It is a system that destroys biological and cultural diversity at every turn with one-size-fits-all solutions, requires thousands of complex regulations to keep us from killing each other too quickly, and while you're at it, produces a few things so highly toxic that it will require thousands of generations to maintain constant vigilance while living in terror. Can you do this for me? Welcome to the first Industrial Revolution.
It's time for a new design assignment.
Extract from William McDonough, " Designing the Next Industrial Revolution", Timeline #58, July/August 02001.
Futures and design are, it seems to me, natural bedfellows.
1. Design is predicated on deliberate choice between options available. If there's only one way for something to be, there's no scope for design. Designs can be -- are made to be -- adapted, improved.
2. Consequently, a design approach to anything encourages the taking of responsibility for what we can change.
3. Good design has creative, imaginative elements. It has aesthetic (what pleases) as well as a functional (what works) dimension.
We'll come back to these.
So, McDonough's central insight here is that unintended outcomes, once their tragic nature is acknowledged and understood, are as good as intentional -- not retrospectively, of course, but from that point on. Failure to respond to the consequences of bad design makes it a case of negligence by omission. Another way to put it is that if unforeseen negative consequences emerge, the fact that they were unforeseen is no good as a defence for sticking with the original strategy.
What does all that have to do with law and politics (advertised in the title)?
Well, McDonough implies that there's a systemic problem with industry which leads to the destruction (substitute "compromised integrity" if "destruction" seems too shrill) of the environment, among other ills. I think that's a sound argument. But as a student of political science, and a reformed (and repentant) one of law, these two domains are foregrounded in my thinking as a locus of individual and collective action. Design is the first signal of human intention, says McDonough. But industry, as he uses the term, does not denote a strictly designed structure, so much as an emergent set of practices, many of them accidentally pernicious. In contrast, as I see it, at a macro-social level human intention is nowhere more clearly signalled than in the effort to shape society directly through these mechanisms: legal and political processes. They are the principal method by which we collectively design our world.
What this means is that, to whatever extent our systems of law and politics are failing us, we have not just the potential, but also the obligation to redesign them. Lest I should be misunderstood to suppose too much, I should clarify that it also means there's a concomitant responsibility to try to ascertain the extent, and the nature, of that failure, which is naturally a big and contentious debate.
Returning to the three points above, then.
1. Design is predicated on deliberate choice between options available.
Politics is also about choice. I mean this not as a shallow "three cheers for choice", but as an observation that its fundamental function is the process of negotiating what's important, who gets what, who's in charge and so on, from among competing possible outcomes.
2. A design approach to anything encourages the taking of responsibility for what we can change.
Jumping up one layer from choice within the political process, to choice about the shape of political process itself: this too can change. Cast as a design issue, it's not an ineluctable given, but a system that can be ignored, repaired or replaced at will. This mindshift is sorely needed when "politics" appears to be disparagingly thought of as simply the nasty way things are and ever will be -- as in the realist school of political philosophy, which designates the nation state as the natural unit of governance.
3. Good design has creative, imaginative elements.
The language of design helps frame political discussion in a way that appears useful for accommodating both affective and practical aspects. It is in that sense congenial to the discussion of values, which are one of the primary bases of political difference, but which somehow strike me as wearyingly dull when addressed in those terms (Let's talk about values! Yawn. Enter stage left pretension and absolutism. Let's talk instead about what you want, what you respond to, what you love. What your community can do for you, and what you can do for your community. How your ideal would look, and how we could approach it.) At any rate, what politics as such seems to lack almost entirely, in the main, is creativity and imagination. Bring in the designers. Bring on the artists. McDonough's right: it's time for a new design assigment. Any takers?
/To be continued.../
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
On the scalability of small opportunities
I have been thinking recently about the mindblowingly complex issue of how to usefully map possibility space (the hyperdimensional expanse representing all the theoretical states things could take -- the way things could be -- through which we weave an infinitesimally narrow thread of lived reality by a combination of chance events and decisions). Yes, it's a tricky one.
But an interesting insight has arisen around the way unexpected "windows of opportunity" are made and used through the confluence of emerging technological affordances and good old fashioned ingenuity.
There are two nice examples which might help firm up this rather woolly notion. Both revolve around the time-honoured obsession with getting rich.
There are, presumably, many ways to make a million bucks. I spend considerably less time than I probably should exploring what those ways are, and like most people, considerably more of my time blundering across far less lucrative terrain. (Being a malnourished student, in fact, it's arguably more a matter of progressively discovering just how broad, wide and apparently inescapable the intersecting possibility spaces of poverty, chastity, and despair can be.) But there are others who have been emboldened and empowered by the increasing, vastly interconnected pools of supply and demand online; to great effect.
So the first example is of a young man in England who seized upon the clever notion of selling one million pixels of advertising space at one dollar each, with a view to funding his undergraduate studies in business management. (As far as I can tell, this is his own original idea, and although one might imagine it would be difficult to pull off more than once, that has not apparently deterred others from borrowing the business model: google million pixels for other examples.) Aesthetically, the product of this effort comes off like a Las Vegas nightmare. Conceptually, from a business point of view, however, it's sheer brilliance. The minimum purchase is a 10x10 block, costing $100, which is certainly rather small but is enough visually to serve as a practical, iconic hyperlink to the advertiser's website. The novelty is sufficiently great that people -- such as myself at this very moment -- catch themselves propagating the story for its sheer audacity, directing a widening audience back to the site, and thereby vindicating the whole scheme on the basis of increased returns via the Internet attention economy.
The second example is of a guy from Canada who has, through a series of bartering encounters, traded up from a paperclip to -- so far -- a house in Saskatchewan, during a period of one year. This progressive scavenger-hunt up the value chain has a touch of inspired lunacy about it which appeals to me a great deal.
Both of these Internet microbusinesses depend on the playfulness and novelty of the ideas, and on the disproportionate levels of attention that they have consequently been able to garner. There's a kitsch, Warholesque "fifteen minutes of fame" aura around the tales of both these entrepreneurial individuals -- but they're getting where they want to go, and everyone seems to be enjoying it, so more power to them.
What's interesting here is the fact that from humble beginnings, these ambitious one-man business propositions, buttressed and fuelled by media attention, have been able to connect their founders to sufficiently large audiences that the former has sold a million in pixels to several hundred advertisers (perhaps several thousand, I didn't count), and the latter has substantially increased the return on his investment through a series of "right trades" upward along the value chain. (Lots of little payoffs: get rich slow.)
So yes, perhaps their time could have been better spent in some respects, but that's not the point: these stories are groaning with the freight of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Internet culture. Spotting the right opportunity has long been a key to wealth, fame and fortune. The echo chamber of new media opens up large-scale successes to small-scale ideas. Of course, the postmodern kicker in all this is that what they're really selling is their own unlikely success stories, and by attending to them we make them happen, like clockwork. Attention is where the money is: tell a compelling story -- the story of the story you're telling -- and your fifteen minutes of fame could reward you handsomely. Which, to me, underlines that perhaps the most powerful elements in navigating our possibility space are the (distinctly analog) stories we tell ourselves about where we've come from, where we are, and where we want to go next.
But an interesting insight has arisen around the way unexpected "windows of opportunity" are made and used through the confluence of emerging technological affordances and good old fashioned ingenuity.
There are two nice examples which might help firm up this rather woolly notion. Both revolve around the time-honoured obsession with getting rich.
There are, presumably, many ways to make a million bucks. I spend considerably less time than I probably should exploring what those ways are, and like most people, considerably more of my time blundering across far less lucrative terrain. (Being a malnourished student, in fact, it's arguably more a matter of progressively discovering just how broad, wide and apparently inescapable the intersecting possibility spaces of poverty, chastity, and despair can be.) But there are others who have been emboldened and empowered by the increasing, vastly interconnected pools of supply and demand online; to great effect.
So the first example is of a young man in England who seized upon the clever notion of selling one million pixels of advertising space at one dollar each, with a view to funding his undergraduate studies in business management. (As far as I can tell, this is his own original idea, and although one might imagine it would be difficult to pull off more than once, that has not apparently deterred others from borrowing the business model: google million pixels for other examples.) Aesthetically, the product of this effort comes off like a Las Vegas nightmare. Conceptually, from a business point of view, however, it's sheer brilliance. The minimum purchase is a 10x10 block, costing $100, which is certainly rather small but is enough visually to serve as a practical, iconic hyperlink to the advertiser's website. The novelty is sufficiently great that people -- such as myself at this very moment -- catch themselves propagating the story for its sheer audacity, directing a widening audience back to the site, and thereby vindicating the whole scheme on the basis of increased returns via the Internet attention economy.
The second example is of a guy from Canada who has, through a series of bartering encounters, traded up from a paperclip to -- so far -- a house in Saskatchewan, during a period of one year. This progressive scavenger-hunt up the value chain has a touch of inspired lunacy about it which appeals to me a great deal.
Both of these Internet microbusinesses depend on the playfulness and novelty of the ideas, and on the disproportionate levels of attention that they have consequently been able to garner. There's a kitsch, Warholesque "fifteen minutes of fame" aura around the tales of both these entrepreneurial individuals -- but they're getting where they want to go, and everyone seems to be enjoying it, so more power to them.
What's interesting here is the fact that from humble beginnings, these ambitious one-man business propositions, buttressed and fuelled by media attention, have been able to connect their founders to sufficiently large audiences that the former has sold a million in pixels to several hundred advertisers (perhaps several thousand, I didn't count), and the latter has substantially increased the return on his investment through a series of "right trades" upward along the value chain. (Lots of little payoffs: get rich slow.)
So yes, perhaps their time could have been better spent in some respects, but that's not the point: these stories are groaning with the freight of the zeitgeist of early 21st century Internet culture. Spotting the right opportunity has long been a key to wealth, fame and fortune. The echo chamber of new media opens up large-scale successes to small-scale ideas. Of course, the postmodern kicker in all this is that what they're really selling is their own unlikely success stories, and by attending to them we make them happen, like clockwork. Attention is where the money is: tell a compelling story -- the story of the story you're telling -- and your fifteen minutes of fame could reward you handsomely. Which, to me, underlines that perhaps the most powerful elements in navigating our possibility space are the (distinctly analog) stories we tell ourselves about where we've come from, where we are, and where we want to go next.
Monday, July 17, 2006
Time too short at Long Now
Today is my last day in San Francisco. After two and a half months of life in the Bay Area, on summer break from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I'm flying back to Honolulu this afternoon, to prepare for the "Hawaii 2050" event we're planning for next month, and to resume my studies of alternative futures.
I have immensely enjoyed working with the Long Now Foundation, which during the short time I've been here has somehow turned a musty warehouse into a gleaming public exhibition space at Fort Mason; staged a group visit to the intended 10,000-year Clock site in the desert in Nevada; and hosted no fewer than three intriguing Seminars About Long-term Thinking (Chris Anderson & Will Hearst, Will Wright & Brian Eno, and, last Friday, John Rendon). Working on renovating Long Bets has been an educational and stimulating experience, and encouragingly, looks likely to bear fruit, in the form of an improved, deeper and more subtle design, before long. There are some other interesting projects in the pipeline which shall make an appearance here as their time comes. That mountain in Nevada has an uncanny track record of eliciting big ideas from visitors.
It has also been a very great pleasure to work, and socialise, with the exceptional Long Now posse led by Alexander Rose: Ben Keating, Chas Warner, Laura Buszard-Welcher, JD Ross Leahy, Simone Davalos, and others who have favoured the office with their presence from time to time. Presenting to the Board of LNF in mid-June was one of the very few official agenda-driven meetings that I have ever actually enjoyed. Their energy, alertness to connections, and quickness to alight on and explore new ideas was stunning. Some of the Board members I met in other settings, but they struck me in the same way. I look forward to interacting with these remarkable people again.
And so, while I'll continue to be involved with Long Now's work, and contribute from a distance across the Pacific, it's with mixed feelings that I leave these fine people to their 10,000-year devices. I'll be back to San Francisco at the first opportunity.
Meanwhile, thanks to all who made this the exceptional experience it has been, professionally as well as personally -- you know who you are.
Carpe Millennium, my friends.
I have immensely enjoyed working with the Long Now Foundation, which during the short time I've been here has somehow turned a musty warehouse into a gleaming public exhibition space at Fort Mason; staged a group visit to the intended 10,000-year Clock site in the desert in Nevada; and hosted no fewer than three intriguing Seminars About Long-term Thinking (Chris Anderson & Will Hearst, Will Wright & Brian Eno, and, last Friday, John Rendon). Working on renovating Long Bets has been an educational and stimulating experience, and encouragingly, looks likely to bear fruit, in the form of an improved, deeper and more subtle design, before long. There are some other interesting projects in the pipeline which shall make an appearance here as their time comes. That mountain in Nevada has an uncanny track record of eliciting big ideas from visitors.
It has also been a very great pleasure to work, and socialise, with the exceptional Long Now posse led by Alexander Rose: Ben Keating, Chas Warner, Laura Buszard-Welcher, JD Ross Leahy, Simone Davalos, and others who have favoured the office with their presence from time to time. Presenting to the Board of LNF in mid-June was one of the very few official agenda-driven meetings that I have ever actually enjoyed. Their energy, alertness to connections, and quickness to alight on and explore new ideas was stunning. Some of the Board members I met in other settings, but they struck me in the same way. I look forward to interacting with these remarkable people again.
And so, while I'll continue to be involved with Long Now's work, and contribute from a distance across the Pacific, it's with mixed feelings that I leave these fine people to their 10,000-year devices. I'll be back to San Francisco at the first opportunity.
Meanwhile, thanks to all who made this the exceptional experience it has been, professionally as well as personally -- you know who you are.
Carpe Millennium, my friends.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Futures audio tours: Wrap your present in the future
I recently alluded to "future-oriented art/design/communication, a topic that has preoccupied me much of late but about which I haven't written a lot in this forum". One really interesting project along these lines has just taken a major step closer to being realised. Yesterday, Jake and I were delighted to learn that our proposal for immersive futures using audio (an experiment in what Jake likes to call "ambient foresight") was awarded a grant, enabling us to plan for a release of the first such effort early in 02007.
Below is a copy of the press release post we put on the Hawaii Futures website:
Vive les futuribles!
Below is a copy of the press release post we put on the Hawaii Futures website:
/Step into futures/
The Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies is proud to announce that it has been awarded one of ten "Bright Ideas" grants to pursue an innovative experiment to encourage future-oriented community discussion. The successful proposal is for downloadable future audio tours, a concept developed by Jake Dunagan and Stuart Candy, graduate students at the University of Hawaii's "Manoa School" of futures in the Department of Political Science.
The "bright idea" in this case is to record guided audio tours of Honolulu's historic Chinatown, intended for playback on portable mp3 players. However, instead of the conventional emphasis on the past and present of landmarks and events in the area, these stories will highlight alternative possible futures. Participants will be able to guide themselves in an immersive experience that takes "the future" out of the abstract, and encourages foresight and responsibility toward future generations in Chinatown, Hawaii, and beyond. The hope is that, with the increasingly widespread use of portable audio devices, this creative use of the medium to provoke deeper thinking about future possibilities will spread to other communities, with tours being produced and translated into multiple languages, and other people being encouraged to generate their own "guerilla tours" of alternative futures.
Recipients of the "Bright Ideas" award, in the amount of $4000, were selected from a field of over 130 applications. The Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies is also involved in coordinating the futures-oriented community event "Hawaii 2050" for the State Legislature on August 26 this year.
Vive les futuribles!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)