Surveillance Supreme

This is a highly ingenious, widely viewed, and justly acclaimed near-future artifact, in video form, produced for the American Civil Liberties Union. It was released in 02004 as part of a campaign to raise awareness about surveillance, and over four years later, the flash version remains live at the ACLU website. The brief but effective clip warns, with humour relieving some of the deadly earnestness of its agenda, about the possible privacy-endangering implications of joined up databases containing personal information.

I'd seen this some time ago, but only a short while back did some research and found it to be the work of one Micah Laaker, designer of interactive experiences. Micah kindly agreed to an interview by email, to explore the story behind this excellent in-scenario fragment of an electro-panopticon future.

SC: So if you could first say who you are in one or two sentences, then...

ML: I lead a team of designers and prototypers on Yahoo!'s efforts to provide platforms and tools to 3rd-party developers and publishers. Since joining 4 years ago, I've led teams on our efforts around adaptive personalization, RSS, user registration, My Yahoo!, and more. Before Yahoo!, I led the design efforts of Island Def Jam Music Group's artist and label sites, wrote two books, designed and illustrated a paranormal trivia game, directed a hip-hop music video, and worked with clients like Stan Lee, Zagat, Disney Channel, and Sprint PCS. I herald from the great city of Omaha, NE, and am a fan of tiny houses, illustration, semantic metadata, cryptozoology, and information design.

SC: What was the story behind the ACLU clip?

ML: The ACLU Pizza Surveillance movie came from the good folks at the ACLU. I'd been working with them for several months on a number of infographics when they asked whether I'd be willing to come up with a visual storyline to better present a recording they'd made. To be honest, I don't remember the whole back story in terms of how they decided to record the awkward pizza ordering scenario.

I do remember that I received an MP3 file, and began sketching out 5 visual accompaniments to the piece. Most centered on the people in the story (the order taker and the gentleman caller), but one flipped the focus to the screen of the order taker. I wanted to try that one out, as (after about the 50th listen to the recording) I began wondering, "What is this lady seeing that she isn't saying to the guy?"

I'd like to think it was the little details (like the Nancy Drew book checkout, the suggestion of seeing his voting record, and his eczema inflammation) that won them over. But, after reviewing the different proposals, the ACLU centered in on this approach quickly, too. (I showed 4-5 screens for each approach with a paragraph or two about how the visuals would unfold.) They were (and continue to be) great to work with, and really let me run with the visuals and animations from that point.

SC: What kind of reception has it received, and what lessons have you been able to draw from that? How has it affected your subsequent practice as a designer?

ML: Aside from the MF Doom music video, the Pizza piece continues to be one of the best-received works I've tackled. It won honors in resfest|10 and the Media that Matters 5 festival, and was the subject of Jon Udell's (and others') examinations of how social media moves through the Internet. It's been very flattering to have such smart and talented folks applaud the work, although I largely believe I get far more credit for the piece than I deserve. (Again, the folks at the ACLU who came up with the original idea deserve the real credit; I'm proud of the way we worked together to package it in a creative manner and extend its implications through the animation.)

In terms of changes I've incorporated into my design process since, it's rather technique-oriented. The video was intended to playback only on the ACLU website. As I built the graphics, I wondered whether I should spend a bit more time building resolution-independent versions. Considering the amount of time I've since had to spend to rebuild the movie, and the requirements from all the festivals for high-resolution footage, I've learned to build (when at all possible) for dimensions and media larger than what the project requirements dictate... you just never know when those requirements might change.

Most surprising, though, is probably the fact that I then went on to Yahoo! to work on its personalization efforts, where we work to tailor the network's content and interfaces to match users' behavior. Not surprising, however, is that I have made a priority of providing users with the control then to delete such data in such interfaces.

SC: How does the clip "work"? (For example, how does communicating "in-scenario" affect the message?)

ML: The decision to focus on the order taker's screen helped us communicate the extent to which an individual's sense (and reality) of privacy could be eroded. Anything lost by not showing the caller or visualizing the specific elements discussed is overshadowed by the sinister details exposed to the viewer of the piece. In several instances, you can watch as the order taker browses through caller's personal information (as just about anyone would, should they be given such a dashboard on another person's info).

This idea that the mundane task of ordering a single meal could expose extensive personal information has clearly resonated with a large viewing audience, likely because folks begin to see steps toward this future already. Whether via the request for your ZIP Code when buying batteries at Radio Shack or having your name announced to all around when picking up groceries at Safeway while using your club card, many of us uneasily participate in such exchanges and wonder if we're slowly being desensitized to the "master plan" illustrated in the video.

SC: What do you think these two fields of practice, futures (scenarios) and design, have to offer one another?

ML: Design is largely a process used to make something complex understandable and interesting. Whether text and image, interface, or tabular data, the source becomes far more engaging and meaningful after passing through this process. So, if by "futures" you are describing how to package and present possible scenarios of some yet-to-come moment or issue, design is clearly well suited for such a task.

By this, I simply mean that the design process can be useful to those looking to find meaningful ways of sharing their articulations of the future. Conversely, those in the practice of design generally enjoy thinking of "what if" situations, where the rules and dictates of everyday projects fall away; futures work would seem, in a similar fashion, complementary to design work and could provide inspiration for solutions yet to come.

SC: What other artifacts, videos, media (in any form) are you aware of that have this quality of inviting someone to "experience" a future?

ML: Hmm. Tough question. In many ways, what we did with the Pizza piece is really no different than film. We used a visual storytelling medium to walk the audience through a disturbing (and disturbingly possible) scenario... a scenario which, for all intents and purposes, is generally annoying already. (Who, after all, looks forward to giving up their credit card number to the underpaid high school student at the other end of the line?)

The staid answer to this, of course, is that video games would appear to run closest to this experience. Often set in the "first person," as is the Pizza piece, the game allows individuals to experiment with alternate (and some would say worrisome) behavior, and the in-game scenarios are often seemingly plausible. In other words, even when set in the future, many games leverage existing environments (such as specific cityscapes) and existing physics models to paint a realistic but alternate scenario.

In this case, though, the player of such a game is in control (to some extent) over which direction they head, whereas in the Pizza piece, we drive each viewer down the same disconcerting path.

Micah, many thanks again for your time.

Related posts:
> Permission Culture
> Future news-flash: your vote counts
> In memoriam

White House Redux

White House Redux Project 1342 by Brandon Shigeta (#2 in popular vote)
The presidential residence reimagined as a Disney theme park.

White House Redux, an international architecture competition, was launched in January this year by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and Control Group. The competition brief explains (the first page, mysteriously numbered p. 33, in the book):

Home of the world's most powerful individual. Universally recognized symbol of political authority. One of America's greatest tourist attractions. Nerve-center of the world's most complex communications system. The architectural embodiment of power.
...
The original White House design, by James Hoban, was the result of a competition held in 1792. ... What if, instead of in 1792, that competition were to be held today? What would a White House designed in 2008, year of election of the 44th President of the United States, look like?

An impressively miscellaneous set of responses was gathered, and made available via a project website, as well as an exhibition which concluded earlier this month at Storefront's space in New York City. From 487 projects submitted, with 42 countries represented, 123 of those concept designs (a quarter of all entries) have also found their way into a fascinating book, published in a limited run of 500 copies, which I learned about through BLDGBLOG. Mine arrived in the mail not long ago, and I had an opportunity to read it yesterday.

Physically, it's an odd specimen. About as thick as the O'ahu phone book, and alternating between sections of B&W printing and colour, it's printed on the flimsy stock that's characteristic of more ephemeral publications (comics, newspapers, telephone directories). The newsprint ink rubs off on your fingers, and thence, all too readily, back onto the shiny white paperback cover. This isn't your usual coffee-table art book.

Among the side-effects of having been assembled in what was obviously a bit of a hurry (shipping just over four months after the competition jury convened at the end of May) the book has no ISBN or edition notice, nor is there any sign of the advertised essay contribution of Storefront's Joseph Grima. The introductory 50-page photo essay, about the jury's day of deliberation in WTC Building 7, is unnecessarily long. However, to me it's interesting not only as a partial record of the production process -- which is nothing if not collaborative, all the way down -- but also, kicking off a 700-page tome, it is an example of the overall direction in which the work prefers to err, towards excess, low-rent generosity.

Indeed, content wise, this is an embarrassment of riches. The quality of entries may be uneven, but the eclecticism is astonishing.

There are aerial, submersible, floating, inflatable, and underground White Houses in the mix. Many envisage its functions as going mobile or being dispersed, however systematically or haphazardly (and in ways fanciful, pragmatic, or symbolic) around Washington D.C., the United States, and the world. At the mischievous behest of this architectural swarm, the Presidential residence is uprooted, launched, buried, destroyed, rebuilt, renovated, redistributed, and repainted. It's reimagined as mall, museum, battleship, space station, farm, coliseum, zeppelin, forest, and theme park, and transposed to such diverse environs as Antarctica, the Moon, and Lebanon (not in the Middle East, but a small town in Kansas identified as the geographic centre of the lower 48). One entry envisions a giant plant à la Jack and the Beanstalk, for some future President to both inhabit and nurture, in downtown Manhattan. Another gleefully proposes a global centre of ice cream distribution. There are hypothetical White Houses made from blasting a huge rock slab; delicate bubbles; edifices rhizomatic and spongiform; quivering bionic blobs; and monumental phalluses -- literally -- which lie flaccid during peacetime but engorge and stand menacingly at attention in times of war.

Project 1386 by Fernando Molina and Paola Zini
The White House as harvest farm, embodying knowledge, nourishment, and shelter

Project 236 by Tom Marble and Ariel Hsieh
An article, dated July 02009, for the fictitious magazine "Retropolis", about the incumbent President delivering on a promise to make the Executive Branch turn a profit, by redesigning the White House as a mixed use hotel/retail/office space.

White House 2.0 (Project 1369) by Wayne Congar, Arrielle Assouline-Lichten
The White House as an immersive, Open Source information display space and hub of global political conversation

Project 655 by Jorge Rocha Antunes (winner popular vote)
The White House enveloped in an enormous glob of biotic jelly

Project 1463 by Yoshi Ogawa
The concept starts from an intersecting arrangement of the 13 stripes of the American flag

12 Cautionary Tales for a New World Order (Project 1485)
by David Iseri, Jefferson Frost, Justin Kruse and Laura Sperry (Second place winner)
A tribute to architectural firm Superstudio, with 12 alternative possibilities for the White House, each based on different cultural, economic and environmental scenarios. They are presented as snapshots of a book, some including in-scenario artifacts. This one puts the White House in Las Vegas, the new U.S. capital after "the Malthusian catastrophe of 2012".

The White Wing (Project 1414) by Ralf Arno Schormann and Alex Schulz
A helium-powered zeppelin with on-board environmental research laboratory.

The White House Show® (Project 248) by Joachim Seyer
Seyer proposes to split the White House in half lengthwise, rendering it an open stage in two parts, on which political figures perform nightly at 8 p.m.
[While this project is featured in the book, this particular "artifact" image isn't.]

To devour the book in a single sitting, as I did yesterday morning, makes for a heady kind of aesthetic workout, an exercise in navigating the wilfully abundant alternative premises of some anarchic, multimedia short story collection; stumbling between the pieces of a bewildering collage of imaginative gambits. This may be the first politically themed collection of "architecture fiction" (a Sterlingism which applies perfectly here), and it's fully as invigorating, frustrating and engaging as, say, a half day spent at the Tate Modern; or an end-of-semester presentation marathon for a massive and wildly divergent design class.

Reaching for a more immediate comparison, actually it put me in mind of playing the collaborative forecasting game Superstruct -- just when I was at risk of starting to miss it. (As a Game Master/Community Leader on that project, for me it entailed a regular process of sifting hundreds of user-generated proposals for hypothetical, collaborative organisations, intended to reverse the world's flagging fortunes, which formed the centrepiece of game that just completed its sixth and final week.) I wonder whether the resonance of that game with this book's contents may come from an emergent, shared aesthetic wavelength -- the look-and-feel of collective imagining, lightly moderated, of the early 21st century.

In White House Redux there is of course a fair complement of half-baked ideas, but this is part of what makes it so stimulating; one is invited to sample an array of exploratory hors d'oeuvres -- earnest and satirical, critical and hopeful -- made according to any of 123 different recipes.

However, this great strength is also its great shortcoming: you don't get a full meal. The essay which brings the book to a close, written by ever-insightful BLDGBLOG curator Geoff Manaugh, runs less than a page. I found that after the whirlwind tour of visual and conceptual possibilities, I was hungry for more substance, insight, analysis. To drop the culinary metaphor for a literary one; the book read like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, with a superabundance of beginnings that all turn out to be loose ends, and nowhere to go from there. I wanted something to help me tie these disparate ideas together, to help connect original question ("What would a White House designed in 2008... look like?") to the startling multiplicity of orthogonal responses before me. Just what the hell is this revolution that seems to be going on in architecture, and giving rise to such a cornucopia? That query, or something like it, was what I had hoped a commentator more familiar with that subject than I am might address. Manaugh's all too brief gesture in that direction concludes as follows ("Speak Space to Power", p. 719):

How do we spatially respond or give shape to the political situation today? We can use architecture to diagnose and interpret the world -- risking the projection of our own fantasies upon such structures -- or we can use architecture to lay the foundations of future terrains no one anticipates.

By the end of the day, then, with nearly five hundred entries, White House Redux began to feel more like a genre in its own right, something between science fiction and political manifesto. But that is precisely the strength of architectural design today: it is literary and diagnostic; it speculates and narrates. Applied to icons of political power, architecture extends the imaginative reach of design into the realm of everyday possibility -- changing governments, minds, and nation-states alike.

I think he's making an important point. It does, very much, have the feel of a new genre, an experimental and potentially very fruitful type of work -- and play -- at the crossroads of futures, and politics and design (clearly not just "architecture" as strictly understood). "Architecture fiction" is part of it, as is "design fiction". Alternate reality gaming is getting close. What I call experiential futures is implicated here also.

The thing we're talking about here, the transdisciplinary theory-object at the centre of this developing conversation, is hybrid, serious-fun in tone, promiscuously multimedia, playfully transreality, and above all, potentially world-changing.

We saw another example recently in Bryan Boyer's speculative design for a new U.S. Capitol building. Although the crossroads we're looking at here is not always literally, institutionally political, it's always very political in the broader sense of having the potential to rearrange our perceptions.

Architecture of course does not have a monopoly on artistic licence, however, both as an academic discipline and a broader, cultural practice it certainly seems to promote fluency, or at least tolerance, across different modes of expression. (Spoken from the wistful vantage point of a doctoral student in a university department where much energy is expended deciphering and encoding theory.) As far as I can see, right alongside design, architecture is fast moving toward exploiting this more fully (here's another example). Back in July, I presented at a conference where design theorist Benjamin Bratton (one of whose architecture-related involvements is teaching at SCI_arc) pointed out that of the articles by Nicolai Oroussoff -- since 02004 the NY Times architecture critic -- half are about proposals rather than actual buildings. Architecture's comfort with the visual/experiential modes of exploration, coupled with its necessary familiarity with the speculative and the hypothetical, seems to position it ahead of a lot of futures practice for engaging a wider audience in the tricky enterprise of worldbuilding. What it doesn't seem to do so well, yet, is scenaric depth. Still, that can be learned.

In any event, the confluence of these practices seems to me to be edging towards making available not just an argument, but a visceral experience, of the malleability of reality itself. The essay title "Speak Space to Power" neglects the design strategy that is used arguably to greatest effect. Of course, architecture is a spatial practice, but that's not all it is, and that's not the dimension in which the contributors to White House Redux (or the kindred activities to which we've pointed) make their most important contribution.

It is what we might call alternativity -- a plurality of worlds, in terms not only of different futures but also of rewritten histories and presents -- that speaks to power in this work. Not space, but hyperspace; different universes, configurations of reality, possibilities. It brings them into our awareness here and now, not merely to say, but rather to manifest, with a panoply of visual, symbolic and rhetorical strategies: "Other worlds are possible. Now, here they are."

Related posts:
> Architectural time travel
> London after the rain
> Design fiction is a fact
> Dreaming the home of the future

The future of yesterday

Literally.

Detail from an illustration in Mechanix Illustrated, November 01968

IT'S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper -- which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page....

~James R. Berry, "40 Years in the Future", Mechanix Illustrated, November 01968, reproduced at Modern Mechanix blog, 24 March 02008

So begins a speculative "day in the life" article published exactly forty years ago, in the same month Nixon won the U.S. Presidential election, and the Beatles released the White Album -- and set precisely yesterday, 18 November 02008.

We don't tend to deal much with retrofutures here at t.s.f., partly because others do such a good job of covering them already (such as the blog linked above, and Matt Novak's Paleo-Future). So I don't intend to analyse this in any detail. But if you're interested, read the original (using the page-image reproductions rather than the transcript below them, for a better sense of the original). And see whether we agree on the following two points...

1. To me, the magazine ads are more interesting than the article itself. The garnish trumps the dish. These incidental, textural details of the past seem to afford, or betray, at least as much insight into the passage of four decades than the content which squarely addresses it. (This is not, however, a criticism of the author or publication: the piece was written for the audience then, not today.)

2. There's something weirdly counterintuitive about the inexorable way a specific future date and time, however far away it may be, eventually rolls around. Recently I've been reading about how our minds process time, and I see a connection here to what psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman call Construal Level Theory [pdf]:

The greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events (high-level construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and incidental details of the events (low-level construals).

Or, to render a similar insight in more poetic terms, I'm reminded of a lovely, humbling haiku in Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now (composed in reply to one by poet Gary Snyder, p. 1:64):

This present moment
Used to be
The unimaginable future

Related posts:
> Lost futures
> Today at Tomorrowland

(Thanks, Josh Judkins! | via Rocketboom)

Permission Culture

This video is a future artifact, designed to evoke a possible future for copyright. The scenario it manifests is an increasingly ubiquitous, invasive and granular regime for policing intellectual property -- leading ultimately to what we've called "Neural Rights Management".

A number of us in UH-Manoa's Department of Political Science produced it for fun, with Jake Dunagan at the helm, and a budget of zero, for a 48-hour film competition in Honolulu at the start of March 02007. I posted the final edit at YouTube shortly after that, so it's been online for about 20 months, gradually accumulating a little over 1000 views -- waaaay back in the long tail of online video content, some instances of which attract millions of viewers in just a few days.

Just after midnight on 1 November, I received this automated email from YouTube:

Dear futuryst,

Video Disabled

A copyright owner has claimed it owns some or all of the audio content in your video Neural rights management, Hawaii-style. The audio content identified in your video is Pretty Brown by Elvin Jones. We regret to inform you that your video has been blocked from playback due to a music rights issue.

Replace Your Audio with AudioSwap

Don't worry, we have plenty of music available for your use. Please visit our AudioSwap library to learn how you can easily replace the audio in your video with any track from our growing library of fully licensed songs.

Other Options

If you think there's been a mistake, or you have other questions, please visit the Copyright Notice page in your account.

Sincerely,
The YouTube Content Identification Team

This was interesting, for a few reasons.

One. Before this I had not, at any point, actually been aware of the name or source of the piano piece. With just two days to organise, shoot and edit the film, locating a suitable instrumental accompaniment to this playful IP riff on the MasterCard ads had been delegated to our friend Noah, a music lover and himself a musician. All I knew, as I worked on the final edit the following week, was that he'd come through with this great find, a match with the jaunty tone of the video. The YouTube email was helpful in this respect: now I know the music was cut by jazz drummer Elvin Jones, half a century ago.

Two. I'd been only dimly aware of the scope of YouTube's efforts to police copyrighted content. Certainly I knew that entire TV shows or movies, brazenly posted at user-powered video sites, had raised the ire of media companies, who in response have been becoming more aggressive about deterring copyright infringement. What I hadn't realised was that teams of people and/or robots had begun scouring the back catalogue for one minute long, zero-budget video clips with miniscule audiences, searching for unauthorised music in their soundtracks, and sending midnight emails to announce the suspension of said clips.

Three. The film we made, intending to warn about overzealous copyright enforcement, has been blocked due to overzealous copyright enforcement. I relish such ironies as much as anyone, but even though the video makes the point in a fun way, the kernel of the scenario is quite serious. This development for me is not, then, a welcome one. In his excellent and extremely important 02004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig gave us a language for understanding what's at stake in these questions:

[W]e come from a tradition of "free culture" -- not "free" as in "free beer" (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" -- a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
...
[The] rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased. The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history -- between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission -- has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture.

~Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, 02004, original emphasis. [The top quote is from the Preface, p. xiv in the print edition, or para 9 in the online/html version; the lower quote is from p. 8 in print or para 49 online.]

I don't mean to argue with those who would point out that the copyright in "Pretty Brown" persists, or that it was used in the video without anyone paying a licence fee (we didn't have any money for our 48-hour effort, but of course, neither have we earned anything from it). I'm grateful for the opportunity to tip my hat to Elvin Jones, and his brother Hank on piano, for a great little tune (that I've had stuck in my head periodically for the last year and a half). However, I don't currently have time to re-edit the video, and frankly, remain puzzled as to the argument for doing that.

So, in the meantime, internauts everywhere; for however long or short a time, enjoy.

This post is dedicated to my modest but seemingly forlorn hope for a Free Culture -- somewhere out there, an increasingly imperilled and improbable future.

[Below, for the record, are our original credits, now vanished from YouTube together with the video.]

In the future, experience itself could be regulated on a user-pays basis... A short film from the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies (HRCFS). Produced for the 48-hour "Showdown in Chinatown" short film challenge in Honolulu, March 2007. The theme was "the last chance", required line of dialogue "...of course you are...", and a tree and a car were required props.

The newlyweds - Amanda McCann & Lorenzo Rinelli
Concept - Stuart Candy & Rohan Kalyan
Director & cameraman - Jake Dunagan
Co-director - Rohan Kalyan
Editing - Aaron Rosa & Stuart Candy
Music provided by Noah Viernes

Related posts:
> Futures video clips from HRCFS
> In memoriam
> The Darfur Olympics

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

Guerrilla futurists combat war on terror

The Iraq War is over, Bush has been indicted on charges of high treason, the PATRIOT Act is to be repealed, the economy will be restructured, and public universities are now free.

Film at eleven.

Image via Gawker

I awoke this morning to emails from two New York colleagues about a marvellous and painstakingly planned guerrilla futures intervention today in the Big Apple.

A "special edition" of the New York Times has been produced, to convey, through a detailed set of carefully crafted articles and advertisements, a near-future scenario in which progressives' dreams for the United States have all come true. And 1.2 million copies of it have been distributed for free around the city by a network of volunteers.

Alongside the print edition, a counterpart website has been launched where all the stories are available in full. Both paper and electronic versions are rendered impeccably in the newspaper's signature style, and are dated 4 July 02009 (Independence Day next year).

In scale, this is certainly the most impressive guerrilla futures campaign I've heard of, and I heartily congratulate all those concerned for pulling it off. (It seems -- according to Gothamist, citing Gawker -- that the volunteers were assembled via becausewewantit.org and the effort is being attributed to the Yes Men, guerrilla performance artists supreme, whose astonishing Dow Chemical/Union Carbide interview on BBC World was previously featured here.)

Now, we can expect that some disgruntled newspaper recipients or onlookers may accuse the folks behind this terrific intervention of leading people, shall we say, up the garden path. Such accusations will be missing the point.

Adopting the Times dress is not about hoaxing people; it's a way of calling authority to the vision. As well as being a proprietary media business, its actual status in our media ecology as an authoritative source of news, an idea which belongs to everyone even if the newspaper itself does not, is recruited to lend verisimilitude and weight to the cause.

As Jake Dunagan and I were recently discussing in another context, one of the many devices which makes the Orson Welles classic Citizen Kane so successful is its intermittent cutting to newspaper headlines that help tell the story. (Now, like any novel and effective cinematic trope, this has since become cliche, but this original fictional biopic application, referencing newspaper's authority to help put a frame around plot points in the biography of a larger-than-life newspaper tycoon, makes perfect sense.)

No one addressing more than the most cursory scrap of attention to the actual content of the articles will fail to notice that they are fragments of an "impossible" dream, even if a profoundly noble one: the wholesale transformation of U.S. political culture. Post-election euphoria notwithstanding, the kinds of change described in the "special edition" don't tend to happen overnight, if at all. But the paper quite deliberately calls precisely that into question -- why not?

Similarly, Professor Steve Duncombe recently said in his presentation at HRCFS on Dreampolitik:

These impossible dreams open up a space for democratic participation in the process of imagining the future, which also offers the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the present... for people to imagine, 'why not?', and 'what if?'

This Dream Newspaper is, to use Duncombe's term, an "ethical spectacle" par excellence.

Here's an in-scenario video about the campaign, also from the Times SE site:

Again, kudos to those who orchestrated this highly thoughtful, lovingly detailed, and timely piece of future-jamming. The sceptical futuryst doffs his virtual hat to you all.

Update (19/11/08): On Monday, my own copy of the New York Times Special Edition arrived in the mail.

It brings me so much joy to hold in my hands that it's almost embarrassing.

The difference between hearing about or seeing images of an impossible object, and experiencing it tangibly, is immense.

There's a colour-printed cover; National, International, Business and New York sections; political cartoons; and reports announcing massive legislative and social change around topics ranging from bicycle lanes to corporate criminality. The details in content, graphics, and layout of the 14-page publication are thoroughly splendid -- starting with the slogan "All the News We Hope to Print" on the header. It is, in short, a beautifully wrought artifact of the near-future.

The Yes Men's hallmark "identity correction" strategy is everywhere in evidence: the U.S. government recall notice for all gas-powered cars; advertisements reflecting drastic changes of strategy (or heart?) by companies such as oil giant Exxon Mobil and diamond merchants De Beers; a contrite farewell from pro-invasion columnist Thomas Friedman; and a Corrections section addressing repeated editorial lapses of judgement on the part of the Times itself.

For those unfamiliar with the strategy I mean, the following comes from a book manuscript about the Yes Men's infamous WTO intervention [pdf]...

As many readers will know, "identity theft" has become a major problem on the internet: scoundrels intercept personal information like your date of birth, residence, and credit card numbers, then have all kinds of fun at your expense.

What we have done is the opposite: we have found people and institutions doing horrible things at everyone else's expense, and have assumed their identities to offer correctives. Instead of identity theft, identity correction.

~The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization, 02003, p. 6.

Their future newspaper manages to communicate sincere, blue-sky idealism not through earnest moralising or shrill propaganda, but through wit, irony, political satire, and the indisputable thereness of the physical medium whose mantle and idiom it borrows. A preferred future performed, with aplomb. Injected into everyday life, 1.2 million times over, for your consideration. This is one hell of a feat.

Even better, it strikes me as being part of something bigger, of which the Obama campaign and election was a more formal signal. That is, a coming of age, in terms of self-awareness and tactical savvy, of the American left. An answer to the call made in books like Don't Think of an Elephant and Dream.

But this particular effort deserves to be recognised as a landmark, an ingenious, street-level dissemination of one particular vision for American politics. It was a normative intervention more powerful, interesting, and just plain fun (why not, dammit?) than any number of pamphlets or TV advertisements; as outrageously ballsy as calculatedly logical. And one repaid handsomely in the true currency of human communication: attention. "The amount of media coverage the Fake New York Times stunt received was staggering. It spread to news outlets all over the globe like wildfire." (Urban Prankster, 14 November 02008)

It's true that these newspapers have been fetching quite a bit on eBay over the last week, but my copy is safely in the archive. One piece of a laudable future-jamming effort of unprecedented magnitude, which -- and I mean this in the most flattering possible way -- I hope will be outdone, many times over, as soon as possible.

I'm extremely grateful to Steve Duncombe for sending it (our man in NYC, who helped arrange the intervention). Thanks Steve!

Jim Dator catches up on next year's news

Related posts:
> Future news-flash: your vote counts
> Manifesting vision
> Tomorrow's headlines
> Dreampolitik
> Found futures

(Thanks Jason and Victor!)