Archive

Some months back I was asked to consider a handful of ways of being that help me do what I do as a futures-facing designer, product innovator, and creative technologist. Here is what I offered in reponse.

1. Look at the world with wonder and amazement

Olympic gold medalist Dick Fosbury looked at the high jump bar a bit sideways. Imagine him cocking his head sideways, looking around at the other athletes training, and muttering, “Right, let’s try this one backwards…” And then, the Fosbury Flop came into being. How odd it must have seemed at the time, as odd as it would be today to see someone jump the high bar forwards, scissor-kick style. Look at the world with wonder and amazement at its potential to be what you see it as, especially if it is other than what is expected. Every so often, see the world like a Dick Fosbury. (That’s what it is to be a futures-oriented designer.)

1. This isn’t a review, but it is a recommendation, with a proposal.
2. A couple months back I caught the author Richard Powers on Ezra Klein’s podcast.
3. They were digging in to Powers’ recent book “Bewilderment”. I listened, not intimately familiar with Powers although a dear old friend had sent me a used, thrift store copy (sending books to friends! super fun!) of his “The Overstory” and I was in the midst of some deep work with my company which was fully consuming and so the book sat on the bedside stand unread and then there was the move to the other side of town and now it’s packed somewhere in storage. Somewhere.
4. Anyway.
5. The Ezra Klein / Richard Powers conversation.
6. Man oh man, did that resonate.
7. Eh? What do you mean by “that”? What was “that” that resonated?
8. Well, firstly there was Powers describing reflections on his relationship to Silicon Valley through his time going to dinner parties in Silicon Valley where every party had two baseline topics: real estate and life extension technologies.
9. I mean..that’d be a great SNL bit mostly because it sounds about how I’d imagine a dinner party discussion up there to be anchored.
10. And secondly, the wonderful way Powers reminds us of the beautifully complex imagination and consciousness of a child.
11. I wonder if we are compelled at some point, maybe around the start of high school, to lose our ability to embrace a full-body sense of amazement and wonder. Maybe when we’re told things like “act your age” or “stop playing and act serious” or driven to consider a reasonable path towards becoming a serious professional in order to get on the rails to a life of a very particular kind of prosperity, against other kinds of prosperity, like a life of exploring unexpected possibilities.
12. One of the central characters in “Bewilderment” is an astrobiologist who studies minuscule signals from other possible worlds. He takes his son on trips to these planets and we join along. Short passages that feel like they come out of nowhere take us to somewhere else, where what it is to live and thrive is just on the edge of our own quite grounded sense of possibility.
13. “Bewilderment” sticks with me, which I suppose is what makes Powers such a noted author. What strikes me, now several weeks after reading the book, is how it reminds me of the power of the child’s expansive imagination and the importance of holding on to that — to be able to see irreducibly and without diminishment, possibilities for other kinds of worlds and ways of being, right here at home, on this planet. (Not Mars.)
14. If there’s anything to our climate future we need it is the expansive imagination not only to “see” possibilities but to represent those possibilities. Right now, as near as I can tell, we see the end — or escapes to unlikely off-world colonies. Our somewhat collective imaginary consciousness of the near future is roughly cyberpunk. We need a new basis — a new set of imagery (quite literally) that can weave its way in the imaginations of the still expansive imaginations of today’s youth.
15. When I had a bit more of the child in me than I do now, I was fully taken by the imaginary of that moments stories and images and Saturday morning “shows” and the Trenton flea market where you could find second hand Xerox 820 motherboards and 8” floppy drives salvaged from the areas labs — Bell Labs, RCA, Princeton University, etc. Building a launching Estes model rockets. Kitbashing Revell models of airplanes to make little plastic spaceships. Building a real flying saucer out of a hunk of metal and some cardboard with Larry Greenberg.
16. These kinds of experiences and some unexpectedly and profoundly encouraging mentors and friends shaped what I believed in and what I thought was possible.
17. Today, I mean — what do I know except what I know — my instinct says we need those sorts of ways of seeing and imagining and shaping a sense of what could be, of possibility, for the young’ns. Perhaps less about flying saucers and model rockets and a computational future, and a bit more about hopeful climate futures. I don’t want to say we shouldn’t fetishize space travel but maybe we shouldn’t fetishize space travel?
18. A few or four weeks ago, we (the Near Future Laboratory community), in a 36 hour sprint to create a proposal to LACMA — the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In a fit of realization, we emphasized the possibility of public engagement (really engagement with kids) on two things: “how to imagine the future”, and “how to imagine hopeful climate futures.” (The proposal is as peculiar and weird as you might expect. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just characterizing it as such because it feels childlike rather than a Microsoft Office document. You can see if here:LACMA Climate Futures For Kids
19. (Parenthetically, we are looking for support for this project to create richer youthful imaginations – so if you have any ideas or are part of an organization or institution or fund that has an interest in facilitating the creation of better climate futures please do not hesitate to contact me directly.)
20. What I had to give up on in order to believe that a program like this would do any good, was to avoid looking for a Silicon Valley / Industrial “solution” to our current climate future prospects. You know — only hoping for some miracle technology or some start-up banking on the bank to be had. I’m not saying that isn’t cool or useful, but we didn’t do things like get to the moon because some very clever engineers and program managers managed to build a gigantic rocket engine. We got there because a vision was created and young imaginations were filled decades before. (cf “Space Force: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space” — Fred Scharmen podcast episode coming soon!)
21. What I had to embrace in order to believe that a program like this would do any good was to remind myself that the human imagination, particularly that of the youthful consciousness, is the best existential survival guide we’ve got.
22. All of that said, you can listen to a digest of General Seminar 17 “Solarpunk” that is indirectly related to this issue of the newsletter.
23. Also, the Near Future Laboratory Podcast Episode N°30 — a conversation with the eminent and remarkable Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne is out now. We touch on topics quite directly related to these here — the imagination, how to work with adjacent possibilities, the practice within industry and academic contexts. Etcetera.
24. It’s all related. Finding ways to imagine futures better, teaching ways of imagining (or “futuring” as my pal Scott Smith describes it), and making the imagination something that we all recognize we have and we all exercise vigorously.
25. Let’s get to work!

This is Issue 28 of the Design Fiction Newsletter and this is your commercial interruption.

Besides the Design Fiction Newsletter, I produce the Near Future Laboratory Podcast and by “produce” I mean I do just about everything to bring it to you and I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think it had some value.

If you find it of value too, I’d ask you to subscribe, rate, and support it. You can support this newsletter and the podcast over at Patreon.com. Such is a modest way of signaling that you find it of value and I genuinely appreciate that signal. (You can also offer me a cup of coffee!)

You’ll want to give a listen to the last episode in which Katie McCrory from IKEA breaks down the role that Design Fiction plays within the organization, and how we used Design Fiction to shape their annual Life at Home Report.

1. I was listening to a podcast with Neal Stephenson, who I guess is best pigeon-holed (because I’m certain he’s much much more) as quite a thoughtful, imaginative writer.
2. I think it was this podcast.
3. At one point in response to a question, Stephenson said that people are notoriously bad with statistics.
4. The first thing that popped into my head was agreement, and not just because fractions and math can be scary.
5. I think I felt that thought because futures boiled down statistical likelihoods with a number between 0.0 and 1.0 lack any kind of rich, fulsome, evocative acuity.
6. 0.0 - 1.1 doesn’t really activate the imagination to the point of feeling what it is to live within a possible future.
7. Stats don’t communicate experience quite as well as all the other mechanisms by which one can richly appreciate and excavate what it is to experience a possible world.
8. A day or two later, I listened to this episode of the same podcast. It was an interview with Philip Tetlock who’s, like..the “super forecaster” guy and who also gets introduced as “quite simply one of the world’s greatest social scientists.” (Ugh..I mean — nothing at all against Tetlock whatsoever..he seems like the kinda feller I could enjoy chatting with around the barbecue. It’s just frustrating that superlatives are used this way. They’re just not helpful. Maybe that’s just me..)
9. The episode was lousy with predictions, and rankings of great predictors, and insights on what makes a good predictor (and foxes.)
10. I’m not really into prediction. You know that if you’ve been following along.
11. Predicting things feels like a setup for bad behavior. It feels weird trying to anticipate what’s going to happen “next” or down the road. It’s hard to explain. It feels a bit like the phenomenon where you tell yourself something enough times with enough conviction that you are challenged to imagine anything else. Also predictions feel transactional. Someone wants that prediction in order to make a proposition bet on something happening and all of a sudden, it’s not about imagining possibilities richly, it’s about being right, whatever the heck that means. I guess it means placing the right financial bet on a possible outcome and reaping the rewards thus.
12. (Parenthetically, I’m super into riding bikes, especially on rough trails and gravel. You learn to avoid looking too hard at bits of the trail you want to avoid — rocks, roots, ruts, snakes — because if you look too hard at those things you want to avoid, you almost always end up going right into them. It’s weird. In aviation they call a similar kind of phenomenon ‘get-there-itis’ where you are so fixated on getting to where you originally intended to go that you don’t recognize that everything’s changed — really bad weather, for example — and you should begin to imagine other outcomes, like diverting somewhere safe.)
13. I think doing and relying exclusively on predictions can lead to get-there-itis.
14. There’s got to be a corollary in other practices. Like..are we in get-there-itis when it comes to Web3? Crypto? VR and AR? Geoengineering? Going to Mars?
15. I once asked someone to help me imagine what it would be to live in the VR future and they told me to imagine lines of people wrapping around the block of Apple stores worldwide.
16. 🤷🏽‍♂️ Good start, but we can do better and I’m enjoying mentoring folks to imagine with a bit more depth. What’s the VR future as represented by the first thing you touch in the morning? Or the VR future in the context of an older model refrigerator, or underarm deodorant?
17. Given a set of statistics about possible outcomes of a sports match-up, episodic police procedural, spy thriller, or even a re-enactment of a historical event — it is likely you’d rather watch and experience the lived drama of things rather than just have an human-enhanced prediction algorithm tell you the likelihood of various outcomes.
18. (That’s the same as saying that the overwhelming majority of drama and/or sports fans would like to watch the action rather than just know the final score. It’s the setup of countless jokes, if you need proof. You know the one — main character missed watching the game live and implores supporting actors to keep mum about who won and inevitably someone does accidentally and you know — cue laugh track.)
19. I’m way more of a visual and tangible imagineer. I need to create, see, or tangibly handle a vision of some near future in order to consider, ponder, discuss that near future world. Let’s make a possible world with a high level of acuity, even and particularly if it that possible world runs counter to intuition. Dive into it. So much more fun. Let’s paint an evocative, provocative, curious world of possibilities, showing multiple possible outcomes rather than declaring winners.
20. And in that imaginative exercise, we learn to think through possibilities.
21. That’s the Design Fiction approach.
22. Just the facts - or just the stats - is simply too banal for me.
23. It leaves no room for actively engaging in outcomes, allowing the imagination to go big the way a really good story is able to do.
24. Statistics might be useful when bets are being placed on possible near future worlds. When one doesn’t care about the lived experiences of that world except insofar as one is attempting to place (typically financial) bets on outcomes.
25. And they might even be useful if they went along with a rich imaginary of that world that wasn’t just numbers, and wasn’t just prose analysis — but also with a visual story, like a photo book or picture postcards that came from that world, or some materialized souvenirs brought back from the imagination’s adventure in that world. And then, next to all of that material, there you can put your number between 0.0 - 1.0, along with a Yelp review and 5 star rating.
26. This is why we developed and evolved Design Fiction as a way of imagining possibility with rich acuity, rather than just predicting what will come next.
27. We really need to take our imaginations to the gym. Give them a good workout..develop a solid daily exercise regimen.
28. Got futures you need help imagining? It’s what I do. Get in touch.

1. For the longest time ever, the wheel has been rolling ‘round.
2. Perhaps for longer than the wheel has been around, humans have lugged around their stuff.
3. Going from one dwelling to another, whether to set out Kerouc-style to “find one’s fortune” out west, or just take a vacation, we’ve boxed up our belongings and brought them with us.
4. We’ve lugged stuff around. I guess that’s why we call those box-like things into which we’ve tossed them “luggage”, yeah?
5. I guess..
6. And what continues to amaze me or maybe now it’s just at the point of being a useful object lesson to deploy from time to time, is how long it took for that wheel and that luggage to come together and become the nearly ubiquitous “wheels on luggage.”
7. It’s truly worth remarking on, particularly because it seems so obvious in hindsight that the two things belonged together.
8. But, like..do we really get why it took so long to put wheels on luggage? I mean..it wasn’t until the 80s by some reckonings that the resistance to it sorta..broke through and started its trajectory towards cultural ubiquity.
9. All sorts of fascinating reasons and anecdotal case studies describe the reluctance and the necessary conditions. Things like affordable commercial airline travel, or even the ubiquity of leisure travel would be necessary.
10. But I’m less interested in the business case study type of thing.
11. I’m more interested in how one can set out to do something that today seems so incredibly obvious, but was also once ridiculous and nonsense.
12. By some accounts, it was an artist named Alfred Krupa who slapped wheels on luggage, presumably to cart around his art supplies.
13. Of course if you know me, I’m much less interested in the question of who/what was first to do what and when.
14. I want to appreciate and learn how to foster a highly intuitive, productively creative consciousness that can look at the world a bit askew, luxuriate in the nonsense seen, and find the paths that lead thence to beautiful, unanticipated, unexpected outcomes.
15. How can we foster an imagination of that sort? One that would put wheels on luggage?
16. “Get those wheels off of that luggage Krupa. Act your age, for goodness’ sake..”
17. Some types of psyches can’t help but turn some peculiar vision of nonsense into something meaningful. The intuition leads. The rational waits patiently — or maybe tortures the intuition, goading it to make some sense.
18. It’s not surprising to me that someone with the consciousness of an artist — high intuitive, willing to do something ‘zany’ (i.e. unanticipated, unexpected, startling, peculiar, odd, different, etc) may have been suited to doing something as crazy as putting wheels on luggage at a time when such was not done.
19. To resist rational, reasonable, sensical norms, well — that’s hard. It hurts. There are any number of land mines along the way.
20. Risking lack of acceptance — of ideas, the fruits of one’s intuition and imagination. That can hurt.
21. Vulnerability. Sharing an intuition or imagination is never risk-free and can lead to all kinds of nastiness.
22. Fear of, or the invocation of embarrassment, can take someone fully out of the creative game.
23. Embrace the wheels finding their luggage. Let your imagination — your intuition — lead you unexpected places.
24. Your intuition and imagination are showing you in their own peculiar, unstructured, psychedelic way what wheels on luggage feels like, which is different from all the other rational decision-making criteria that are otherwise fetishized by the step-wise procedures for design and creativity.
25. Learn how to attach yourself to that imagination.
26. Exercise it.
27. Become friends with it.
28. Give it a place, and a time to chase a ball and play.
29. Don’t reason with it. Don’t rationalize it.
30. Build. Create. Explore.
31. Make worlds that make sense to themselves, and forget for that play time if they make sense otherwise.
32. Ignore your imagination and your creative soul will be put in peril.
33. Our imagination is how we create new possible near future worlds.

1. I once heard — so it’s hearsay and anecdotal, but maybe useful as a provocation — that one of the unique qualities of human consciousness is an ability to imagine as if things were otherwise, or other than things are. That is, we have a unique ability to imagine change.

2. Is that true? Is it unique? Or is it hubris, because a human is likely the agent that said, or wrote such a thing? It certainly is self-satisfying to imagine that we’re a species, and uniquely advantaged over all the other species.

3. But, does it even matter as to its truthiness? Maybe it’s just helpful, but not so much as a point of argumentation, but more as a provocation to ourselves. An opportunity to do something special, perhaps world-changing. Perhaps world-saving.

1. It’s been a minute.

1. I heard the most simple and resonant description of integrity the other day.

Hoagie at the helm of Blue Boat. Adrian in his beach lounger.

1. I’ve been told that the reason someone will do something without being paid with, you know — dollars and stuff, or some other sanctioned fiat currency — is because they themselves receive some kind of ‘psychic payout.’ When we’re paid to do something the traditional way, we feel recognition that we are valued enough that someone is going to exchange some “folding money” (as my dad used to call it) for a commitment of our time, intellect, creativity, muscle power, etc. The higher one is paid in folding money, the more we are signaled that we are valued. The more we are valued, the more we are meant to be content to do the job.

For the past years, the outsized narrative of DAO [Decentralized Autonomous Organization] as an alternative to venture capital dims the light of its much more profound, and much more interesting potential — a fluid, programmable, modular social network that is by design global, transparent, and collaborative. DAO has the potential to become a new frontier of belonging, to create a new species of collective characterized by the alienation of trust from the ownership and control. Calvino, who in his dreams manifest a desire to “possess” a version of NYC, can extend such private desire to a more tangible contribution. DAOs can become a meta-layer on top of the idea exchanges of the world — a second home for those eager to make strides towards their goals, and know that the way to get there is not by oneself, but in a collective.

It’s helpful to consider that much (all?) of what we know about the world comes from observation. It’s been said that we are sense-making critters. Our brains are able to take inputs, make meaning, and take action with the aid of opposable thumbs. We observe, interpret, act.

Despite the 90s VHS-tinged title art of my beloved ‘X-Files’, if there is any truth out there, it is on us to determine what it means through observation, discussion, debate, disagreement, and, for better or worse the inevitable and occasional fisticuffs. (Is it that fist fights or worse break out when beliefs in what is true and right are challenged?)

James Bridle wrote a remarkable essay some years back called “The New Aesthetic.”

1. The whole NFT thing? It’s like standing between different worlds.

1. Somewhere in Holland in the mid-17th century, a time machine was invented. Or it may have been a teleportation device. This is how it happened.

As I see it, there are two unspoken principles undergirding work to create better, more habitable near future worlds.

“You don’t go to [Shakespeare’s] Macbeth to learn about the history of Scotland. You go to Macbeth to learn what a man feels like to have gained a kingdom and lost his soul.”

One - What Happens In Vagueness, Stays In Vagueness

The delicious gooey center of Design Fiction is what you get when you take on a mindset such that the work of doing Design Fiction is not external to the possible outcomes. In other words, you’re not collecting a bunch of inputs and cobbling them into some vague, not-fun-to-read package of some sort — a PowerPoint or summary report. One significant objective of Design Fiction is to translate insights and such into some form or archetype and to do so with an exceptionally high level of verisimilitude and acuity.

Design Fiction or Science Fiction?

In most instances I can think of, science fiction is more than simple dramatic storytelling about the future. It is often allegory through which the present state is refracted back to us — an assessment of who we are as individuals and as larger social formations. It’s a step removed from direct reflection as one might find in essays about our present day culture, politics, daily life and so forth.

A Cornell Box I Made Out Of Algorithms

I’ll keep things brief this week as my brain is all filled up with reading our manuscript and I already begged our lovely whip-cracker crackerjack editorial shepherds with a three day extension to final-final stuff and they’d probably look at me with wonderment that I wrote 3000 words for a newsletter but somehow couldn’t find time to read and wordsmith the . (There. I cleverly and surreptitiously settled the ‘what’s the title’ discussion.) Definitely a sideways-eye-narrowing emoji should go here, on behalf of my friends and colleagues working on the project.

But before that, I want to mention that Nick presented the closing keynote at the IKEA Digital Days conference last week from his studio in Oakland. He spoke about setting the right conditions for creating grounded and actionable design futures. Design Fiction, (as you know) can play a huge part in that, and Nick explains how it fits in a broader corporate approach. It’s got a modest 30 minutes runtime — which is just long enough to watch whist luxuriating in your chaise, consuming a proper hand-held sandwich.

And-also I want to mention that in this recent newsletter I mentioned the work of Professor David Kirby and his important book “Lab Coats in Hollywood”. Through exquisite timing, is a conversation with David, which I would encourage you to listen to as it ties things together and you can hear about the diegetic prototype straight from him!

This week was a bit of a highly generative and exciting few or four days here at the Near Future Laboratory’s Distributed Global Headquarters. You see, there were some diverts and distractions, the most exciting of which is we have the nearly final draft of The Manual of Design Fiction in our networked hands. (And sign up on that link there to get on the special list!)

A Design Fiction Breakdown

There’s a wonderful Design Fictional moment, done with a kind of subtlety and incisiveness that implicates the residue of a possible episteme in which the Algorithm is the central mechanism of our relationship to the world, and to ourselves.

Rewind to Westworld, Season 3, Episode 01 at around 43:50.

“In The Matter of Everalbum and Paravision”

1. The Issue

Q? Or The Algorithm?

1. Fear and Despair

In the film ‘Bird Box’, based on the book of the same name, humans are driven to such a degree of despair that they take their own lives when they see the shadow of their consciousness — the thing they most fear. They may even take a few people down with them along their path of self-destruction. The transformation to homicide-suicide is stark, to put it mildly — and one of the more frightening things I’ve seen on screen without just seeing a more typical, gooey, slimey monster show up on screen.

Heeeyaaa-Zing-Paapowww!

1. Fiction’s Critical Function

Fiction serves a critical function, which is to reflect the experiences of living in a world as if we were a part of that world. Fiction models life like a kind of simulation of possibilities, compelling us to consider, reflect, surmise, and inhabit. We immerse ourselves, to varying degrees depending on our affinity and interest in the fiction, in these fictional worlds and those worlds submerge themselves, sometimes quite completely, in our consciousness.

The Fosbury Flop and the power of unanticipated, optimistically contrarian perspectives to make creative work “creative” in the sense of genuinely audacious, distinctive, and worthy of double-takes. The story goes that Dick Fosbury looked at the high jump from a different perspective. He had the audacity to jump differently - backwards, appropriately enough — rather than the front-facing scissor kick, which now looks quite awkward and ungainly. The shift from a previously accepted normal to a farm-fresh and new way of seeing, making sense of, and being in the world often has this effect, when we stop and wonder — “What took them so long to put wheels on luggage, anyway?”

One - The Nikon F vs The Telephone

A blind spot in modern user-centered design is the difficulty in handling the ‘unintended use case’.

One: Consider the Diegetic Prototype

What was that box of breakfast cereal doing in Minority Report, anyway? A sci-fi film set in the future? And breakfast cereal?

One - The Future As An Email Attachment

Have you ever gotten one of these emails? Where the future is zipped up into a PowerPoint deck and then sent around in an email with the expectation that the recipients will open and read it and then become excited about what they see?