Designer: Michele Puzzolante

Michele Puzzolante’s Solar Floating Resort Invention

Solar energy technologies such as photovoltaic panels could provide a third of the world’s energy by 2060 if politicians commit to limiting global warming. [source]

Designer: Michele Puzzolante

The majority of people do not get the chance to enjoy luxury yachting and world-class holiday resorts but, for those that do, there is no reason why environmental guardianship and splendour must be mutually exclusive. Responsible opulence is within Michele Puzzolante‘s plans for the future and the Solar Floating Resort will provide a entirely self-sufficient, non-pollutive solution to the holiday “good life”. The idea was based on industrial design (as opposed to traditional architectural beauty – although it has not compromised in this area at all) and therefore uses the most advanced construction methods and materials to ensure that the structure is as efficient as possible.

For example, the outer shell has both an outer photovoltaic skin and an inner one to capture both natural and inside artificial light to be used for energy across the “resort”. The gap between the two skins is a thirty centimetre vacuum insulation that ensures air conditioning is kept at peak levels and temperature control is as effective as possible. The body of the resort is made of composite balsa reinforced fibreglass, a mainstay in the naval industry, due to its incredible lightweight and durable nature. It is built to last, it is built to be transportable and it is built to be untraceable once it has left.

If you choose luxury, this is the kind of style that we hope you go for.

Click here to view the embedded video.

SFR reaches twenty meters in length, is designed for six people at sea and is ideal for living in marinas connected to front beach hotels or island resorts.

SFR sleeps six with a premium on privacy. The design calls for two single and two double bedrooms, each with private a bathroom. A large kitchen, a dining area, a lounge area and a pilot room complete the 110 m2 interior layout, treated in the purest Italian style. [source]

Designer: Michele Puzzolante

Designer: Michele Puzzolante

Designer: Michele Puzzolante

Images sourced from: mpd-designs.com / Yanko via LikeCool

The fourth post of the Back to the Futurist series is dedicated to Anab Jain. Previous in Series: Liam Young

Who is Anab Jain?

Anab is a designer, entrepreneur, TED Fellow and the founder of Superflux, a multidisciplinary design company based in London, UK and Ahmedabad, India. Anab’s passion is creating opportunities and building tools that can lead us towards new and desirable futures. She was educated in India, Vienna and London, and has over seven years experience in interaction and service design, research, filmmaking and speculative design.

Follow Anab on Twitter: @anabjain

Interview

Which futurists past and present inspire you and why?

Growing up India, and specializing in film at a design school started by Ray and Charles Eames, I have been hugely influenced by a number of notable image-makers and storytellers who worked to create radical visions of the future.

Some of the filmmakers who influenced me are Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film Solaris (1972) is a futuristic, fantastical journey into an impossible planet’s orbit – one of the most gripping cinematic narratives of the 1970s.

Still from Solaris

Solaris Poster

Brueghel’s painting ‘Hunters in the Snow’ as seen in Solaris

Another important inspiration is the avant-garde design group ‘Superstudio’, whose radical visions of a world devoid of architecture threw light on an economically wounded Italy in the post-war world. From their ‘Spaceship City’, a rotating wheel space station where sleeping couples are born, made to reproduce, and jettisoned from the craft at the age of 80, to ‘New York of Brains’, an apocalyptic image of the city as a giant cube filled with 10,000,456 human brains. Superstudio’s work brought much-needed critical thinking to design, and their hallucinatory visions could be seen to have prefigured work by Koolhas, Hadid, Schumi, and so on.

Superstudio’s ‘Third City: New York of Brains, 1971.

Jean Nouvel’s Expo 2002 Pavilion, Murtensee Switzerland, believed to be inspired by the Third City

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I draw a link between Superstudio and Austrian journalist Robert Jungk, inventor of the ‘future workshop’, whose 1954 book Tomorrow is Already Here began to take the future – and technology – seriously as an object of study.

From the here-and-now, one personal hero is Donna Haraway, a radical visionary observing the madness of the modern world from her perspective as a cyborg and self-described ‘quintessential technological body.’ From A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) to her work on companion species, Haraway writes about machines in all their forms, where and how they enter our bodies, and how our bodies disperse into networks penetrated by information feeds. In this world of messy hybrid networks that are part-human, part-machine, the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ seem increasingly irrelevant. Hers in a body of work that I find really ‘futuristic’. Another influence is literary critic and recovering biologist Katherine Hayles, whose work around ideas of the ‘posthuman’ is really interesting. Her 2005 essay ‘Computing the Human‘ was really inspiring, focusing on the shift from notions of the superman to the posthuman. Hayles and Haraway are both women who completely changed my personal approach to technology, and have continued to impact on the way I work with technology as both material and cultural construct.

Image from Little Brinkland. a project that explored some of the themes I mention above. This image shows a billboard advertising the services of ‘Luka, the wifi dog’. If our pets begin to develop a new kind of intimacy with networked technologies, becoming wanderers of hidden data, who will command and who will be in control?

Also from the present include Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation, Bruce Sterling, Anthony Dunne, Jamais Cascio, Noah Raford, Stuart Candy, Andrew Curry, Hugh Knowles, Julian Bleecker, Nicolas Nova and Scott Smith, many of whom I have been lucky enough to work with, as collaborators and co-conspirators.

What are the most challenging aspects of your work as a futurist?

From my own experience, it seems that much of the ‘futures’ work done by large organisations, while necessarily strategic, prioritises the intellectual over the experiential. They’re hot on the facts and trends, but less effective in considering what that might look or feel like ‘on the ground’, so to speak. Additionally, even among those companies are organisations who do want to tackle a 5-20 year time horizon for their activities, but are still conditioned by a certain aversion to risk. It’s very easy for them to commission and produce visions of the future that are glossy and seductive, but which fail to address the messiness, hybridity, and darker sides of our future.

In terms of challenges, then, the biggest task is charting a middle course between the two extremes – balancing criticality, sustainability, and broader social issues, while still funneling the (relatively abstract) trends into actual products and services that will be meaningful to a client and/or community.

At Superflux, we have tried to negotiate this balance through the practice of ‘design futurescaping‘, working with clients to explore their ‘unknown unknowns.’ We are interested in inventing new design methods that enable our clients to embrace risk and volatility and help produce a shared inventory of possibilities for new products, services, experiences, stories, and hybrids of these. Some of our work in this direction includes strategic design for the public sector, product and service invention, as well as system designs’ for start-ups and large organisations, and creating novel tools and practices for futurescaping workshops.

Mapping out the grey spaces between an ‘informal’ and an ‘illegal’ economy, for Pirates of the Danube

 And through our Lab project and teaching activities, we get an opportunity to explore some of these themes more rigourously. For instance, last year we lead a design workshop ‘Pirates of the Danube’ at Kitchen Budapest, in which the participants were challenged to imagine and engage with deviant economies on the River Danube. Rather then the assumed role of a designer who drives economic growth in industrial society, we asked them to re-imagine this role for a world beset by complex challenges and wicked problems. What happens when we move from serving corporate interests to the interests of the community? With the Danube as our anchor, the participants turned their attention to the spaces of informal and illegal economic activities; embracing the ambiguities of the neighbourhood, the street, and the black market. And the outcomes (in two days) were fascinating: from restaurants run by river pirates, energy creating playgrounds and offshore Patent Trading companies.

One of the teams discovered that an algae native to the Danube was high in nutritious value. Further research into foods growing in and under the Danube presented an abundance of possibilities.

Working with river recipes based on locally-sourced and foraged foods, they presented the project with a rather fabulous looking meal.

Lastly, tackling these ideas deeper into our own work, are have two ongoing research projects in India: Lilorann and Design for Elastic Cities, both explore the design of new tools and service models in partnership with local communities to combat and build resilience within the context of desertification and rapid urbanization.

Which recent developments in science, engineering and design do you consider to be the most significant to the future?

In our studio, we try to balance thinking about the future with making in the here-and-now, exploring the possibilities of new technologies while tinkering with laser cutters, 3D printers, and similar – getting stuck into the process of making prototypes for a wide range of projects.

The 5th Dimensional Camera, one of our projects, translates Everett's 'Many Worlds' theory of quantum mechanics into a tangible physical prototype.

So it should be no surprise that, from my perspective, the growth and democratisation of maker culture, and its impact on production and manufacturing, are something I’d be quick to mark as of huge future significance. My interest in this new ‘making’ culture is not restricted to fabbed jewellery, toys and printed electronics, all of which is fascinating in itself, but how this culture becomes a departure point to go into a whole new world of ‘making’: whether its building your own autonomous drones and synthesizing DNA in your bedroom, or even attempting to make your own satellite and create nuclear fission from scratch. This is a wave that’s just now starting to break, and although within our wider context of current economic models of production and consumption, these trends remain peripheral, the potential implications are huge.

Image from Korean artist Hojun Song's book explaining the finer points of building your own satellite.

When weak signals on the boundaries start becoming mainstream, where does that leave the ‘design’ profession? What impact does this have on supply and demand, on our economy? We are no longer going to be able to separate ourselves from these technologies, tools and phenomena, remaining detached – aloof – from the manufacturing and distribution processes. Where will we, as designers, makers, and futurists be best placed to situate ourselves?

One of our current project investigating some of these themes is ‘Mutations’, in which we’re looking at new products and services at the intersection of synthetic biology and deviant globalization – a murky world of illegal, informal and pirate economies, new patent laws, cross-border flows of technology and expertise, and home DNA printing. Both here, and elsewhere, it is important to remember that science and technology do not emerge in a vacuum, but condition, and are conditioned by the social and political context in which they emerge.

Images from a workshop at Science Gallery Dublin for project Mutations. A ‘synthetic biology tarot card reader’ designed by us helped designers, scientists and technologists create scenarios of the wider economic, political and social implications of the technology.

Images from a workshop at Science Gallery Dublin for project Mutations. (see above)

Images from a workshop at Science Gallery Dublin for project Mutations.

Images from a workshop at Science Gallery Dublin for project Mutations.

Are futurists catalysts for change in themselves?

(Just a disclaimer, I call myself a designer not a ‘futurist’ usually. But as is obvious, discipline boundaries are blurring and the overlaps are quite exciting for us as practice.)

Futurists do have the skills and ability to confront us with possibilities beyond of our everyday lived experience. Having worked with a range of communities and different kinds of participants, many individual hopes for the future are optimistic, but quite quotidian – providing good education for one’s children, taking a holiday in a certain location, or building enough savings with which to face tough times.

The role of the futurist is to provoke and disrupt, laying out maps of worlds we may not have otherwise imagined; to collide disparate trends; and to challenge received wisdoms.

Still, it’s easy to overvalue the individual practitioner as an icon or hero, known for a few signature projects or products. It may be a bit naff, but I hope we’re making a dent, however small, in helping people engage with the meaning and challenges of the 2010s – not creating a concrete road map, but widening perspectives.

Many of the most high profile futurists are men. Why are there so few female futurists and do you think it’s likely more women will enter the field?

While it may be more common for men to refer to themselves as ‘futurists’, there are many influential women whose work focuses explicitly on the future – Wendy Schultz, Heather Schlegel, and Danah Boyd, among many others. Then there are those who are exploring the edges of the future field, without necessarily calling themselves ‘futurists’, women like Fiona Raby, Natalie Jeremijenko, Paola Antonelli, and Vandana Shiva.

As the discipline shifts and changes, the kind of ‘futures’ work being undertaken will, I think, come to reflect a much wider range of experiences and skill sets, be that gender or otherwise. I believe that here diversity is a strength, something that helps you see clients’ blind spots and hidden assumptions.

Of the past predictions that never became a reality, which are your favourite and why?

Growing up, we were the only ones in the group of eight houses that had a telephone. Our neighbours would come and wait for their inter-city trunk call, and we’d spend long periods waiting and gossiping before the phone rang, leaving them to shout at a remote relative about home ownership, marriage proposals, and recipes for jeera aloo. This might make it sound like I’m really old, but this was the early 80s, and market liberalisation was still to reach India. It took 5-10 years to get a car, and our neighbour’s black-and-white TV gave me a view into a world of controlled government programming.

Within this context, our future was very basic and immediate – five years to get a car, two years to apply for a foreign exchange, and so on. At the same time, our long gossip sessions, comic books, and discussions were full of mythological stories featuring elaborate aircraft, anti-gravitational machines, flying saucers and space ships. My favourite vision of the future comes from this world, drawn from ancient texts which elaborated on the construction and use of airplanes.

Drawing and image flying machines from old comic book.

Drawing and image flying machines from old comic book.

Drawings of flying machines from old Indian scripture.

According to these works, people had once had access to flying machines called ‘Vimanas’ – a double-deck, circular aircraft with portholes and (often) a dome. It flew with the ‘speed of the wind’, giving forth a ‘melodious sound.’ There were at least four different types of Vimanas; some were saucer-shaped, others like long cylinders. The ancient Indians wrote entire flight manuals on ways to control the various types of Vimana, and many of these texts are still in existence today – with stanzas detailing construction, take-off, guidance for normal and forced landings, and possible collisions with birds.

In 1875, the Vaimanika Sastra, a text from the fourth century BC, was rediscovered in a temple in India. Written by Bharadvajy the Wise, it included instruction for the steering of Vimanas, precautions for long flights, protection from storms and lightening, and how to switch the drive to ‘solar energy’ from a free, limitless energy source.

This juxtaposition of the basic hopes of a community with a sense of fantastical so closely woven in the Indian culture, the distant past embedded so seamlessly into the present, and fantasy a part of daily life – this collision of ‘futures’ is the part of my work that excites me most.

Other interesting images for these flying devices from Indian mythology here:

http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/079/a/a/the_city_of_vimana_by_darkclass1-d3c3a2j.jpg

http://skannd.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/vimana-tripura.jpg

The future – dystopian or utopian?

Neither. Messy, unexpected, and increasingly complex.

In the past few years, we’ve explored a range of possible futures, from the dystopian business model of ARK-Inc to the hopeful, humane crowdsourced futures of the Power of 8.

Positioned as a radical and alternative investment company, ARK-Inc by Jon Ardern was a superfiction, envisaging products and services for a post-crash civilisation. ARK-Inc’s stable of products included a short-wave radio that, in event of a disaster, enabled encrypted transmission and two-way communication between other ARK members, a series of books that help mediate one’s response to disaster, and disaster tourism services that helped users adjust to the idea of a looming collapse.

ARK radio

Disaster Tourism

ARK book covers

When he started receiving emails from survivors of Hurricane Katrina, expressing their desire to join the ARK collective and contribute to the (fictional) investment strategy, the boundaries between fact and fiction began to blur. To move forward, he would have needed to embrace the legal implications of such a service and find ways to translate the ideas into services made in collaboration with the affected communities.

With Power of 8, I was keen to explore the possibility of creating optimistic visions of the future with a group of people who were not designers or futurists. I was hoping that in the face of the credit crunch, the participants might be excited to see how things might change for the better. Instead, our workshops revealed concerns about climate change and nostalgia for a simpler, ‘green’ world. While the participants were eager to think about how “fantastic technological innovations might still … save us from doom”, there was no choice but to reflect the ‘messiness of our present’ in the visions we were creating.

A prototype for the ‘Beamer Bee’ or the ‘synthetic bee’ designed by biotechnologists entirely in their lab.

Beamer Bees installation

Scenario showing how children in Acres Green keep glowing bees as a bedside pets.

 Video of Beamer Bees via Vimeo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We ended up creating the framework of an alternate future ecosystem called Acres Green, illustrating the ambiguous relationship between the natural and the technological. In this ‘re-engineered ecosystem, prosthetic trees bear multiple fruits, synthetic pollinating creatures called the ‘Beamer Bees’ live amongst the radio waves, and robotic flocking clouds create microclimates, bringing rain to where it’s most needed.

Local communities use ham radios and other hacks to attract autonomous robotic clouds, embedded with ultrasonic sensors, to their gardens.

Working with these kind of projects over the last couple of years, we’ve sidled into an increasingly messy space – a world that combines the mundane lived reality of the present day with more curious and provocative elements, inspired by things like the Occupy movement, Bitcoin, unmanned drones, quantum physics, pirates, and biological mutations.

As science fiction author Charles Stross has commented, ’90% of [the future] is just like today, 9% is stuff that is on the drawing boards, and 1% is unutterably strange and alien and unexpected.’

Of your present and past futurology works, which do you consider the most significant?

The most significant parts of our work are those that have seen us getting ‘under the hood’ of the processes of invention and innovation; helping shape technology before it becomes a finished ‘product’. Working with scientific collaborators at Newcastle University, we’ve been helping shift their optogenetic research from the speculative to the much more tangible. From making ‘Song of the Machine‘, a short concept film, last year, we’ve begun working with visually impaired people, the RNIB and the scientists to design possible use case scenarios and soft applications, whilst building experience prototypes.

Three images showing how the virus is implanted in the patient’s eye, how the virus lights up dysfunctional nerve cells, and tests post-operations.

We explored the possibilities of this new prosthetic vision in a short film. This still from the film shows how the person with this technology might be able to see in the extended electromagnetic spectrum. For instance, he might able to see a white orchid very differently, with beautiful bright colours, as captured in the ultraviolet spectrum.

One might also be able to see in the far infra-red – for instance this car shows heat patterns that are not visible to the ‘normally sighted’.

This new vision might have ‘augmented reality’ more closely integrated into the prosthetic.

What is particularly interesting about this project is the unique combination of the biological / genetic insertion and optoelectronic technology – ultimately, it’s akin to plugging a scart lead directly into a person’s brain. When these new neural prostheses become part of our everyday lives, how will we communicate? What happens when our bodies are modified to better interface with machines? Difficult though it may be, we’re keen to explore these edge boundaries, lending a ‘human’ dimension to the new spaces carved out by new technologies and scientific development.

‘Song of the Machine’ Video via vimeo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And a project at Microsoft Research, around new notions of Machine Intelligence, ‘which has played a key role in shaping our current work around ‘smart devices’, robotics and ‘internet-of-things’, might be worth mentioning. (I’ll point to our essay New Companions with Alex Taylor and Laurel Swan, in this context.)

Prop for the ‘Living Radio’. an energy-autonomous radio designed to run on microbial fuel cells that can last indefinitely, providing they are fed with organic material.

What would your dream futurology brief look like? 

One of Superflux’s ongoing research interests is the confluence of deviant globalisation, critical design, emerging technologies, and (social) notions of risk. We have a particular fondness for film as a medium, placing a great emphasis on the powers of narrative and storytelling.

Combining these ingredients, as it were, perhaps our dream brief would be the conception and direction of science fiction film, or multi-part TV series. Something like … 3D printers and flying saucers in Dubai; a geoengineering experiment gone wrong in Mumbai; or the lives and loves of pirate biohackers on the river Danube.

If there are any creatively-minded millionaires reading, please, drop us a line!

It is now easy to love our selves as cyborgs, cyborg love is here, embrace it. The essential notion of Cyborg love is constructive transgression, a spreading out of our sense perception, into new domains of feeling. More than stimulating, less than exciting, slightly uncomfortable, the cyborg symbiosis we are moving into is an opportunity to expand our humanness. According to Amber Case who studies Cyborg Anthropology:

“It’s not that machines are taking over – it’s just that they are helping us be more human”

TEDTALK: Amber Case – We are all cyborgs now:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This emergent symbiotic relationship might represent a possible break with our proto emotional selves and a real opening to redefine our perceptual machinery.

It might be easier for some of us to accept a robotic firefighter, sand that self metamorphoses, or mechanical helpers that feed on organic matter (our very own waste!), but when these same robots become very similar to us the notion of us vs. them, will blur into nothingness.

Enter ECCEROBOT (Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot) a three-year project funded by the 7th framework programme of the EU (ICT-Challenge 2, “Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics”). The project has three goals: to build the first truly anthropomimetic robot; to find out how to control it; and finally, to investigate its human-like cognitive features.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Anthropomimetic robotics is nothing new, what is new however is the manner by which we learn, slowly but surely, to accept these as another form of us, humans. The fact is that, as we become more cyborgs and the more robots accumulate human like properties, the distance between these two forms of life decreases exponentially. The transgressive aspect enters the equation when we manage to leap across the ‘uncanny valley’ (a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori first in 1970):

“Mori’s original hypothesis states that as the appearance of a robot is made more human, a human observer’s emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the robot’s appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.” (Wiki-uncanny valley)

The motion to empathy is only an aspect of a larger shift in our interaction with machines, for when our minds can no longer distinguish the difference between man and machine, our emotional system will adapt accordingly.

Source: flickr.com/photos/lainyvoom

Beyond the, by now proverbial, consensual hallucination of cyberspace the enlarged domain of the metaverse allows us a glimpse into our futures. A future, already here, in which we will love both ourselves as cyborgs and our newly emerging companion androids and Gynoids. One of the most fascinating developments in this respect is the work of Japanese robotics creator Hiroshi Ishiguro, who recently unveiled his newest creation the new robot F.

Geminoid F serenades the crowd during Hong Kong’s “Robots in Motion 2012″ Expo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Can we love Geminoid F? My definite answer to this question is, if not Geminoid F then her next of kin or her descendants. Cyborg love and Robot love are two converging lines of emotional connectivity that do not come to usurp our ‘common’ state of affairs. On the contrary, as technologies of augmentation become more available, as hyperconnectivity increases and as robots become more life like, we are finally extending our family of beings to new domains.

Of course we will love these creations, we will love them for their beauty (created to fit our tastes) and their resiliency, for their functionality (created to meet our needs) and their otherness. But there is another reason for which I think we will love these created companions, lets call it, mental transportation. Like Hiroshi Ishiguro I believe that androids and gynoids will become our friends, companions, colleagues and lovers, as part of an extended cyborgization process. A process that is as natural as it is inevitable and inexorable.

In his book ‘Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships’ Levy states that: “Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans,” he further writes, “while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”

Rachel Replica from Blade Runner // Source: flickr.com/photos/blile59

Most of us will remember fondly the impressive character of Rachael in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, a cybernetic creature of immense beauty played artfully by Sean Young. In the movie Rachael is an advanced replicant prototype of the Nexus-6 generation, carrying implanted memories from Eldon Tyrell’s niece. What is important in the case of this representation is the sense of intimacy and tenderness carried over to the audience. Rachael transports us into a new world, that of a totally transparent human-replicant relationship.

Like all modern relationships, technology and sexual desire will play a major role in both adoption and implementation of cyborgs and androids. It is quite certain that the future human civilization rests with a new natural state of affairs one in which androids, gynoids, cyborgs and robots play a complex interactive game with us common mortals. This is good.

It is good because a new space is being created. A space allowing for a broadening of horizons; an overarching space of potentiality, vital and natural. The relationship of human and machine, mind and electronics, evolving in tandem, is changing the concept of embodiment, enlarging it to encompass new realities. We are no longer alone in the family of beings. Transgressive love is our lot, through which we explore new forms of existence, new fashions of self-reflection. The tenderness we extend to machines is not a postmodern relativism but an actuation of our innate desire to merge with everything. To merge with all life, machines included.

I leave you with the amazing Demo-presentation by Quantic Dreams of their latest creation: Kara:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are we not falling in love with her? Soon Kara, and similar forms of life will be here, are we ready to extend our tenderness? To embrace the new members of an extended humanity, with warmth, with fondness and maybe adoration? It will take time, but I am certain that we will.

Pyramind Farm by Eric Ellingsen and Dickson Despommier

According to the Vertical Farm Project, by the year 2050 the earth’s human population will have increased by around 3 billion, and 80% will reside in urban centers. The project estimates 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than the area of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. The project asks;

 “How are we to avoid this impending disaster”?

Dr. Dickson Despommier

The man behind this project, Dr. Dickson Despommier, believes the answer is simple – farm vertically. Former Columbia professor Dr. Despommier (microbiology and public health in environmental health sciences), widely considered the “father” of Vertical Farming, has travelled the world advising governments and advocating for solutions to environmental problems. I spoke to him from his home in New Jersey. The interview was scheduled to run for around 30 minutes, however we spoke for over an hour and a half. The text below is an edited version of this conversation. His enthusiasm and drive is infectious, and in an already overcrowded, overheating world, what he had to say seems to make a lot of sense.

Read about The Virtues of Vertical Farming (URBNFUTR)

Interview

(Questions conducted by Pi James)

For those who have never heard of the concept, can you please briefly explain the main premise of vertical farming?

Very simply it’s hightech hydroponic greenhouses stacked on top of one another that grow food within an urban landscape.

[Read the rest of this Interview]

Source: flickr.com/photos/sergioaraujo

That we are intimate with the world is not news. That we have extended this intimacy to our tools is a reality; the idea that we are becoming cyborgs is already here.

There is nothing mysterious or futuristic about being a cyborg, part machine part biological organism. Using our smartphones to remember our appointments, a long list of telephone numbers, addresses and shopping lists is a cyborg activity. The extension and externalization of our memories in electronic devices makes us de-facto modern day cyborgs.

Deploying devices to upgrade and extend our insufficient neuro performance is only part of what we do as cyborgs. We use these extensions for training, for life tracking, for calorie counts, for sleep, you name it, there’s an app for that. But lest we forget, we also have our loves, our cares and our motivations to deal with, our desires both of the flesh and of our imagination. Also these are slowly coming into this symbiotic relationship.

The accelerated tooling times we are living in, allow us to gradually expand the notion of what it means to be human. For, make no mistake; we are far from being similar to our ancestors. A modern day, urbanized, cyberneticaly hyperconnected human, exists in a state of interdependence and sense extension, the like of which no one could have predicted.

We have a new relationship with technology, one we truly cannot extricate ourselves from, and this changes everything. Cyber technologies and information science have brought to bear, not a new tool but a new world with which to be intimate, a cyberspace horizon of potentiality that extends into the material world.

Source: flickr.com/photos/mtonic

What happens when these cyber-technologies, broaden our nervous system, into other nervous systems, weaving us with the emergent nervous system of the Internet?

Virtually Yours – Techno Desire and Virtual Sex

A plethora of new technologies offers us a wide swath to expand our sensations and emotions into, and our desires and hidden imaginary wishes. Virtual worlds such as second life already thrive, but a growing segment of virtuality is directed, how else? Into sex.

Red districts offering every conceivable sexual wish, from the Toy Slaves Brothel (NSFW), to Fantasy Escorts (NSFW), are here for the take. One of these virtual worlds, appropriately named Red Light Center, (NSFW), carrying the tag line: “EXPAND Your Fantasy”, is modeled after Amsterdam’s red light district and claims a few million users.

Now come the tough questions of course: “is it infidelity to have sex in virtual worlds?” when no ‘real’ sex has occurred? It is hard to come by numbers, but it does make sense that for many it will be considered as such, creating novel situations where the ‘competition’ is an avatar. The ubiquitousness of cyber sex virtual worlds is however only part of the story. It is still you, probably alone, clicking on a button, playing a game.

Enter Synesthesia, literally the coming together of sensation (from the Greek Syn- together and Aesthesis – sensation), a term, which may well denote that which we are experiencing and will increasingly experience as the electronic tools at our disposal evolve. Though the experience of Synesthesia is anything but common and is considered to be of genetic origin, its idiosyncratic nature is what makes it so convenient and adaptable to the extension of our senses via technology.

In fact new developments in haptic technologies, especially those involving vibrotactile feedback, will soon allow us to ‘really’ feel objects in virtual worlds, to feel, to sense and to enjoy the pleasures provided. Feeling the coldness of steel, the weight of a rock or the warmth of a body in a virtual world, is a revolution of the senses, the like of which we have not yet seen. For once the stream of impressions coming to our nervous system is no longer subject to the immediate, the possibilities open to our perceptual apparatus are limited by imagination only, and that we have abundantly.

Once the new mesh of Haptic and Synesthesia comes together the avatar of our own making, will be able not only to see, but touch, feel and sense remote objects to a fullness of satisfaction, that will practically overwhelm us. One of these technologies already available is offering products such as the real touch award winning male masturbator (NSFW), which pledges to be the future of adult entertainment, followed closely by the Mojowijo (NSFW) promising: “The motions of one device are transformed into vibrations in the other, literally allowing you to share the mojo with anyone, anywhere in the world.”

Though these devices are only the very beginning of what cybersex promises to be, a ‘real’ virtual alternative to common relationship, already their problematic implications abound. While Internet enabled sexual toys proliferate and multiple 3D online worlds offer everything from multiple partners, to every single imaginable fantasy one can have it is their descendents, which offer a real glimpse into the future.

The following is a fascinating excursion filmed, written, and edited by Tutsy Navarathna, NSFW but worthwhile watching. Navarathna: “This film is an investigation into the transformations that human relationships face when interacting in Virtual Worlds.
 Love and sexuality are on an important factor in any human relationships. However, what is new in Virtual Worlds is the ability to exercise those relationships without any real risk, external censure or imposition from an internal “super-ego”. (NSFW)

VIDEO – Meta sex:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The ever-present state of being a cyborg however is only a fraction of the story. The complete story we will know only in the fullness of time, today we will do well to look deep into our minds and ask ourselves what is it that we are becoming? What kind of human do we desire to be, and what is already available or is on the horizon for our use and transformation.

If online virtual cyber sex, extended via prosthetics, is the natural next step, then our evolution as cyborg beings is far from obvious. According to David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, not only is it the case that love and sex with robots is inevitable, but by 2050 the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots.

What happens when our emotional make-up is no longer a given and our sexual preferences receive a boost of new options never before encountered? What happens when our sensations can be amplified tenfold? What happens when ‘cool’ means- dating a Gynoid or Android?

To quote from Woody Allen:

“Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”

Cyborg Love will be the theme, for the next part of this series.

Source: Elie Ahovi // Click images to enlarge.

When I first stumbled across Elie Ahovi’s brilliant idea of a waterless washing machine, the professionality of the campaign made me truly believe this was on the market already. Imagine! A more time efficient and ecologically conscious solution to one of the most hideous household chores that many of us endure day-in-day-out. Imagine having the ability to throw any colour and type of used clothing into the same wash knowing that they will come out literally as good as new with no colour running. By using dry ice, the machine will also cut your water bill down, which is especially pertinent when we consider that our household bills are set to triple in 30 years time.

Source: Elie Ahovi // Click images to enlarge.

The dry ice evaporates into gaseous form and blasts into the materials to clear them of dirt – the reaction between the CO2 and the clothing’s grease breaks the dirt down on a particle level and whirls them at high speeds into nothingness. The gas is then stored and recycled after the wash is complete for use in future cycles, the dirt is sectioned into its own component which can be removed manually when full.

Source: Elie Ahovi // Click images to enlarge.

The concept is created to be applicable to life in 2050 and seems to be addressing issues that we all must face: how much water we use, how much electricity we use (the machine is battery-powered) and… how much time we waste on washing! There may be some initial flaws that may need ironing out, such as: how safe is it to have a levitated, high-speed, spinning ball near children and animals? Will the process of turning the gas back into dry ice be more energy intensive that the benefits accrued? What do you think?

Source: Elie Ahovi // Click images to enlarge.

Source: Elie Ahovi // Click images to enlarge.

[All images sourced from (and to see more images): Elie Ahovi] [Information via: Digital Trends]

The fourth post of the Back to the Futurist series is dedicated to Liam Young. Previous in Series: Noah Raford

Who is Liam Young?

Liam currently lives and works in London as an independent urbanist, designer and futurist. He was named by Blueprint magazine as one of 25 people who will change architecture and design in 2010. He is a founder of the futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today, a group whose projects explore the consequences of fantastic, perverse and speculative architectures and urbanisms. Probing the urban and ecological consequences of emerging technologies Liam also curates events and exhibitions including the annual Thrilling Wonder Stories program and runs the nomadic teaching studio the ‘Unknown Fields Division’ at various universities throughout Europe and Asia. Each year the division travels to extraordinary landscapes to explore the Unknown Fields between cultivation and nature and spin cautionary tales of a new kind of wilderness.

Follow Liam on Twitter: @liam_young

Interview

How would you define what you do as a futurist?

I am trained as an architect and I now run the urban futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today. At TTT we are interested in the history of futurology, exploring the fantastic and perverse visions of tomorrow not for the accuracy of their predictions but rather for the critical engagement that they offer with the present. Borrowing from the techniques of these speculative fictions we use narrative and the illustration of fictional scenarios as imaginative tools to explore the implications and consequences of emerging trends, technologies and ecological conditions.

As architects we span the gulf between the cultural and the technological, we are in a unique position to synthesise complex factors – social, technical, cultural, political, environmental – and to pose alternate scenarios. Architecture is typically such a slow medium however and we wanted to develop alternative strategies for how a designer may operate and alternative forms of projects that could play out with much more immediacy. So we have gravitated to the discipline of futures as we explore the idea of a think tank as a legitimate model for an architectural practice – a practice not built on buildings as endpoints but on speculations, research and futures as products in themselves. We are interested in the role of the architect and the futurist to define new questions, not just finding solutions to problems posed to us, but identifying new arenas for operation.

Where the grass is greener - Preflooded Wetlands Postcard. Image courtesy of Liam young

Are futurists catalysts for change in themselves?

Yes, but not in the way that one might typically think. The speculations of a futurist are never really about predicting particular futures, as author Warren Ellis notes, prediction is always just science fictions side effect, Sci-Fi is really about an exaggeration of the present. For example, George Orwell’s 1984 is in reality about 1948. The distancing lens offered by the speculative project to allow us to see the present in new and unexpected ways. We explore the imagination of future worlds as a means to understand our own world in new ways. The future isn’t what happens when a futurist imagines it and writes it down or makes a project. The future happens when someone else responds to it and wants to make a change. The future is a verb not a noun.

Which other recent developments in science, engineering and design do you consider the most significant to the future?

The sun is setting on our idealistic and preservationist views of the natural world. With the unfamiliar landscapes of robotics, bio technology, territorial industry and a changing climate we are beginning to encounter a new form of engineered nature that we are not yet able to categorise.

As well as Tomorrows Thoughts Today I also coordinate the Unknown Fields Division with designer Kate Davies. The Unknown Fields Division is a nomadic design research studio that travels through extreme landscapes to explore our changing relationship with technology and nature. Our annual expedition takes us to the ends of the earth exploring remote wildernesses and vast territories that have been remade through technology. We talk about our research sites as landscapes where we find the future in the present tense. These are the emerging landscapes of the ‘anthropocenic’.

What we have realized is that there is no real nature anymore, at least as we have culturally defined it. We have travelled to the amazon jungle and found it to be not a jungle but a large cultivated garden, to Darwin’s Galapagos islands and seen a fragile ecology now curated and conserved for tourists, and to the Arctic Circle, a contested territory of energy fields and new data infrastructures and to remote Australia where we have seen geology older than time completely reshaped by the machinery of mining. Nature is being redefined through technology and our culture will be shaped by our responses to these questions.

We must not continue to see technology and nature in opposition to one another and we must rethink our default conservationist position. What is required is a cultural shift and a redefinition or even a new word for the idea of nature- new design strategies and new designers for a new kind of wilderness. This is not to underwrite the hard fought battles already won by the conservationist movement, it is just to suggest that we need to be far more radical in our approach. To speculate on how design may play a role in developing new cultural relationships with the inevitable byproducts of industry, a changing climate and the anthropocenic world.

Unknown fields division 1km below the ground in Australia's Wiluna gold mine. Courtesy Liam Young

What are the most challenging aspects of your work as a futurist at the moment?

One of the critical questions we are asking ourselves at the moment is what do we do as architects in a near future where the dominant building material exists outside the physical spectrum. The infrastructure that drove the development of the city was once large permanent networks of roads, plumbing and park spaces but are now nomadic digital networks, orbiting GPS satellites and cloud computing connections. Cities are being planned around the speed of electrons, satellite sight lines and big data. Connection to wifi is more critical than connection to light. The city must be planned around the mobile phone not the automobile. Today we are much closer to our virtual community than we are to our real neighbours. This death of distance has created new forms of city based around ephemeral digital connections rather than physical geography.

These changes mean we must rethink the very core of what our profession is. It is true that there will still be physical objects and spaces that some sort of architect like character will have to engage with but this window of operation is becoming increasing narrow. To continue to define our work within this part of the spectrum will just lead to us becoming more and more marginalized and irrelevant. We think reimagining the architect as futurist and strategist is part of a necessary process of adaptation.

Of the past predictions that never became a reality, which are your favourite and why?

We find any image of yesterday’s tomorrows fascinating and useful. Futures should never be judged by which ones become a reality as they all offer a critical insight into the fears and anxieties of the time in which they were made. My favourite book is the Usborne Book of the Future. This is the book of my childhood. It was published in the year that I was born, 1979. It is a chronicle of the future I was promised. Back then the years 2000 and beyond were to be filled with flying cars, servant robots, space stations and moon beams. The visions from this book however, are more accurately readings of the culture and time in which they were written rather than any prophetic image of tomorrow. This imagined future tells as much about the dreams and anxieties of the 70’s and 80’s as any encyclopedia historical fact.

Usborne Book of the Future. courtesy Liam Young

The same can be said of the 1964 Futurama ride from the World’s Fair. It was an automated conveyor belt that took the audience through a world of future wonders and the marvels of a speculative landscape where technology and nature intertwine. Each visitor received a badge stating “I have seen the future” as a souvenir of this voyage through time.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is wonderful to see against visions from 1958 of the future of transport infrastructure in Disney’s ‘magic highway’ film.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What futurist project is inspiring you at the moment?

As an architect and urbanist I am really interested in the processes of the Occupy movement at the moment. I think it is one of the most interesting things going on in architecture and futures right now. It is exciting and relevant to this conversation on speculative fictions because in a way it is a movement that is also about prototyping new cultural strategies as a form of provocation. There is no distinct agenda or demand but the currency of the process is the instigation of a dialogue and the conversation that is initiated in and around the camp. It is about politicizing a generation that has been systematically neutralised by trying to present a new way of operating, not as an act of anticipation but to shake up the way things are. Futures work is in many ways about prototyping and these camps are a form of prototyping culture, prototyping new rules for a new model of living in relation to resources and capital.

Occupy camp outside St pauls. Photo by the guardian. Courtesy Lia Young

The future – dystopian or utopian?

At Tomorrows Thoughts Today we are interested in the idea of ‘productive dystopias’. Perhaps TTT cofounder Darryl Chen explains that idea in this film:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Of your present and past futurology works, which do you consider the most significant?

We are currently developing the next iteration of our ‘Electronic Countermeasures’ project. For the skies above the city we have built a drone flock that drifts into formation to broadcast a local file sharing network. Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm they form a pirate internet, an aerial napster, darting between the buildings.

These drones fly off and hover above the city, and create ad hoc connections and networks in a new form of nomadic territorial infrastructure. They are their own place specific, temporary, local, WIFI community- a pirate internet. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere. Impromptu augmented communities form around the glowing flock. Their aerial dance and dynamic glowing formations give visual expression to the digital communities of the city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Electronic Counter Measures. Courtesy Liam young

It is the latest in a series of works that we have developed that explore emerging forms of urban infrastructure. We have also designed a flock of artificial clouds that can be called into position with high frequency signals to create tailored microclimates.

Artificial cloud network. Courtesy Liam Young

And the Specimens of Unnatural history project is a series of speculative biotech robots that perform as a near future infrastructure of biological pest control.

Specimens of Unnatural History. The Electric Aurora. Courtesy Liam Young

Specimens of Unnatural History. The Electric Aurora Flock. Courtesy Liam Young

What would your dream futurology brief look like?

At the moment we are really excited by the potential of moving into concept design for film. Popular media is potentially the most exciting vehicle to widely disseminate ideas about the future. Before the media became the form of self-display that it is now it was actually a platform. As designers and futurists we can co-opt these tools and strategies from film and fiction to instigate debate and discussion about emerging conditions to a wider public audience.

It is something we are developing for an exhibition in the Netherlands at the end of the summer. We are bringing together concept artists and special effects engineers to collaborate with ourselves and other technologists and scientists to collectively develop a critical vision of what the future city could be. Through cinematic techniques the exhibition will develop a miniature model cityscape, the props, miniatures, stories and virtual spaces for an unmade sci fi film.

Who is Noah Raford?

The third post of the Back to the Futurist series comes Noah Raford. Noah received his PhD on long term planning and strategy making during times of systemic change at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He now works as a Foresight and Innovation Advisor to the Prime Minister of the UAE, writing his dissertationHe also has over 12 years of experience as an urban designer and city planner, providing design-led strategy advice and policy support for governments around the world.

Previous in Series: Melissa Sterry

Work from the Dark Lens series by Cedric Delsaux.

Interview

Which futurists past and present inspire you and why?

Some of the best futurists out there today are the oldest and the youngest. Guys like Napier Collyns and Kees van der Heijden are seminal. Their generation are the ones who introduced and popularized scenario studies over the last 30 years, and many of them are still around. Most have long since retired, so are far more free with their wisdom, insight and attitudes. They’re like the grand wizards and some groups like the International Futures Forum or the folks at Oxford have really been able to provide an amazing platform for them. Wherever you are, go find a grand wizard of futures work and prostate yourself before them, now. You won’t regret it.

Next, you have the mainstream commercial service firms; most of whom were brought up under the Shell / GBN regime (for better or worse). GBN dominated the futures field for the last 20 years, which produced some amazing results and positive steps forward. They did the hard work of making futures relevant and saleable to the mainstream world. While this brought legitimacy, it also locked out a lot of young players and kind of stifled innovation for an entire generation. There are notable exceptions, of course (Andrew Curry at the c, sole traders like Wendy Schultz, Hardin Tibbs or Barbara Heinzen, or firms like NormannPartners). But most of the commercial service firms are selling recycled pablum these days, especially the big management consultancies.

Finally, you’ve got all these amazing new, young thinkers pushing far beyond this restraint. They benefited from all the groundwork that GBN and others have laid, but are also able to incorporate new tools, new cultures and new attitudes in an amazingly sophisticated way. Folks like Aaron Maniam in the Government of Singapore, the Superflux crew in London, Stuart Candy at ARUP, Scott Smith at Changeist, the guys and gals at IFTF in Palo Alto (and their alums, like Alex Soojun-Kim Pang), etc. All of those guys are incredibly design savvy, doing incredible work, and have a remarkable sensitivity to the enthographics of power. It is just a joy to see them in action as well, since they’re all so eager and capable of pushing beyond mainstream design work in truly innovative ways.

Superflux: 3 Posters publicising insights healthcare and enhancement at VCUQatar, Doha. Source: http://superflux.in

What are the most challenging aspects of your work as a futurist?

The hardest part about working in future-facing policy or strategy is that, at the end of the day, no one really wants to hear what you have to say. D.H. Lawrence once wrote that Mankind uses belief to put “an umbrella between himself and the everlasting chaos [of the world].”

“Gradually,” he wrote, “[Man] goes bleached and stifled under his parasol. Then comes a poet, enemy of convention, and makes a slit in the umbrella; and lo! the glimpse of chaos is a vision, a window to the sun.”

Painting of Cassandra by Evelyn De Morgan

Clients invite us in to breach their umbrella, yet work assiduously and unconsciously against us doing so. And even when they do want to hear what you have to say (that their industry is doomed, etc.), they rarely listen. It isn’t because people are cowardly or stupid, it is because almost anyone in a hiring position is themselves severely constrained by what is discussable within the cultural confines of their organization. Organizational inertia and the pull towards short-term political acceptability is so powerful that even a perfectly reliable crystal ball would be held dubious. Put another way, most clients only want to hear what they want to hear, but what they are willing to hear is often not what they hired you to discuss. And thus, the futurists dilemma (a.k.a. the Cassandra Complex).

In the end, futures work is rarely about accurate prediction. It is almost always about staging a useful intervention which encourages discussion of the most challenging aspects of the present. Skilful futurists know this, and that is why the best experiential techniques and design-based approaches can be so useful. The best futures projects take on difficult subjects of today, cast them forward, then reflect them back upon the present in order to make them discussable, now. Done well, this can play a powerful educational role. Done very well, it can be transformational.

Which recent developments in science, engineering and design do you consider the most significant to the future?

In his essay, “The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be“, Jamais Cascio argues that most futures practitioners focus too much on technological trends and changes. I totally agree, a point well illustrated by Andrew Curry’s wonderful thought experiment, “The 1910 Time Traveller“. So aside from a few major possible techno-industrial or ecosystemic shifts, the most significant developments will be social. This includes who is in power, how we distribute resources, how we govern ourselves and organize our economies, and what we consider normal, profitable and desirable. Lessons from complexity science, social phase transitions, and history give us some idea about the mechanics of these transitions, but shed relatively light onto their content.

Will the future be crowdsourced? flickr.com/photos/ausnahmezustand

What expertise and tools are critical to your trade?

People, people, people. In so far as this work is almost entirely about understanding and working with human perception, basic human intelligence collection is the single most important tool of the trade. This includes a powerful emotional and social component. You need to know who are the actors, how they feel, what they think and how they might respond in concert to various events and situations. Good futures work is far more emotional and social than it is analytical, although of course social analysis is by far the most difficult kind.

Of your present and past futurology works, which do you consider the most significant?

Most of my work is not public domain, so unfortunately there isn’t much I can share. I am proud of the Oxford Future of Cities Scenarios, because the knit together so many social, political and ecological strands into, what I think, are a fairly compelling set of issues for urban centers in the future. What I like most about these is, contrary to the majority of “urban futures” projects you see, technology plays a relatively small role. The real seismic shifts occur in the social and economic dimensions, which as we all know are rarely so cut and dry as many scenario axes suggest. The other great think about them is that all three scenarios already exist around the world, now (sometimes even in the same city!). So the future of cities is going to be more about what mixture and mash-up of these archetypes you are likely to find; another fact which I think makes them more useful for designers and policy-makers.

I am also proud of my PhD research on crowdsourced scenario platforms. Adding scalable, web-based social intelligence to the scenario planning process is one of the major the next steps in futures methods. How that will look is still an open game, so my research on what I call “large scale participatory futures systems” is among the first steps to document and make sense of these innovations.

The future – dystopian or utopian?

Both. It’s passe, but Gibson was right; “The future is already here, its just unevenly distributed.” There will be no eschatology, not totality (and most likely, no Singularity). It will be as it has always been; a messy, muddy mix of ecstasy and agony. That said, the next decade or two will likely offer far more extreme examples of both than we have seen in our lifetimes. Maintaining the emotional and psychological ability to function in these extremes is becoming an increasingly important skill (see Graham Leicester and the work of the International Futures Forum for some of the best work on this).

Of the futurists using Twitter, which do you recommend following?
Justin Pickard @justinpickard
Jamais Cascio @cascio
Bruce Sterling @bruces
Anab Jain @superflux
Andrew Curry @nextwavefutures
Wendy Schultz @wendyinfutures
Stuart Candy @futuryst
Zhan Li @thezhanly
IFTF @iftf
Chris Nelder @nelderini
Nils Gilman @nils_gilman
Scott Smith @changeist
Deviant Global @deviantglobal
Vinay Gupta @hexayurt
Anthony Townsend @anthonyiftf
Jake Dunagan @dunagan23

Who is Melissa Sterry?

For our second interview in the Back to the Futurist series, we interview an old friend of Urban Times Melissa Sterry. Melissa is a futurist and design scientist specializing in emergent and future sustainable innovation in the built environment, design, manufacturing, materials, publishing, media and communications.

A PhD researcher at the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research group at the School of Architecture, Design and Construction at the University of Greenwich, she is developing The Bionic City™: a sustainable smart city it transfers knowledge from Earth’s ecosystems to a blueprint for a metropolis with resilience to extreme meteorological and geological events. A Visiting Fellow and Assembly member at University of Salford, Melissa is a Visiting Lecturer and Guest Critic at universities including the AA School of Architecture. A member of the scientific committee of the International Bionic Engineering Society, she is published in over 50 international titles, including Sustain magazine, of which she is an editorial board member.

A director of Earth2Hub.com she was the founder of catalyst for rapid innovation in sustainable design NEW FRONTIERS™. An inductee of the Global Women Inventors and Innovators Network Hall of Fame, Melissa has been the recipient of several national and international awards including the Mensa Education and Research Foundation’s International Award for Benefit to Society 2010 for exceptional commitment to enhancing intelligence which benefits society.

Follow Melissa on Twitter @melissasterry.

See previous Interview with Mitchell Joachim.

Melissa Sterry on Earth 2 Hub

Interview

Which futurists past and present inspire you and why?

Buckminster Fuller, 1972-3. Wikipedia

Arthur C. Clarke, Buckminster Fuller and Leonardo da Vinci, each of which was a polymath extraordinaire who combined equal parts intellectual and creative genius with hands-on practical skills. The original thinker doers, all three of these individuals didn’t just imagine it, but made it too. While many futurists can ‘scenario build’ using models, relatively few have the combination of technical skills required to assess the practicalities involved in taking an idea from paper to reality. While it’s true that building some of the very most futuristic concepts is beyond humankind’s current capacity, the best futurists will generally be able to mentally walk through the build of an idea, working out the how’s, what’s and why’s – using this process to discern between what will remain science fiction and what could become science fact.

Which recent developments in science, engineering and design do you consider the most significant to the future?

Modern civilization is essentially built on the assumption that the Homo sapien is the most intelligent of all species, not only on Earth, but Universally. This human-centric perspective of reality perpetuates the notion that everything, near or far, is humanity’s for the taking.

Reality check – the known Universe contains an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, which sit in a cosmic soup abundant in the building blocks of life. “Life finds a way”, said the character of Dr. Ian Malcolm in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. We now know that life can thrive in places we once considered inhospitable, including the sides of hydrothermal vents, the Earth’s mantle at depths of 2.2 miles below and the ocean floor at depths of 7 miles deep. Life has the capacity to freeze and unfreeze, to survive fire, radiation and even, in the most extreme known case, to survive a direct asteroid impact, as illustrated by a species of bacteria that thrives in the crater’s such collisions create. Add to this the fact we now have the technology to uncover potentially inhabitable Earth-like planets like Kepler-22b and the penny drops that we’re almost certainly not alone.

School textbooks teach children that humanity’s evolution has followed a neat and orderly growth curve that sweeps in an upturned arc along the X-axis up the Y-axis. Not so. A growing international collection of archeological finds illustrate a very different past – one that involves Homo sapiens – the last remaining member of the bi-pedal hominid family, facing challenges of truly colossal proportions, including such phenomena as super eruptions that caused volcanic winters lasting several years, dramatic shifts in climate that led to sea level rises of up to 70 meters that re-shaped coastlines worldwide, droughts so severe they brought entire civilizations to their knees and Ice Ages that forced migrations of continental proportions. We’ve also realised that not only are challenges of such proportions relatively cyclical, but that a good few of them, notably eruptions on a scale of VEI 6 and above, are statistically speaking, possible any time herein.

Futurists draw from historical evidence to imagine worst case scenarios.

A field of science that I’m particularly interested in involves bringing together archeologists, paleoclimatologists, paleoseismologists, paleovolcanologists and genealogists to exam the possibility that ancient stories, that are classically categorized as ‘myth’, may in fact relate to real, not fictional events. Through interdisciplinary research projects, enabled not only by wide-ranging expertise, but also by state-of-the-art sensory and computing systems, we are now able to turn back the clock and, with the help of CGI, recreate the past. When anthropologists and cognitive scientists come to the table we can start to make sense of ancient belief systems and practices, such as the possible origins of worshipping deities.

These and other relatively recent scientific discoveries are reframing the context of our existence – our place in time, space and the Universe. Our consciousness is expanding from local to national to global, from the here-and-now to deep time, wherein we no longer make decisions at the individual-level, be that a person, a company or a nation, but instead make them at worldwide scale and within an historical context. However, our ancient ancestors looked above and beyond events at a planetary level: to the furthest reaches of physical and metaphysical reality. Any and all discoveries that question humanity’s fundamental understanding of its existence are significant, be it that they relate to our past, our present or our possible future, because these are the foundations of our emergent reality; paradigm 2.0.

Futurama's popularity indicates how futurology has taken hold of modern culture. The cartoon depicts a the world in the retro-futuristic 31st century. Screenshot of Credits.

What expertise and tools are critical to your trade?

Expansive real-time knowledge across one’s particular fields of expertise ranks at No. 1 in my list of critical skills and tools. I believe that knowledge should not only comprise technical skill, i.e. a fundamental understanding of science, design, engineering, technology and economics, but also robust historical knowledge, so as to be able to contextualize current and possible future events. Facilitating that knowledge requires outstanding research skills and an extremely curious, inquisitive and committed nature that persistently drives one to dig deep into subject matter. The ability to rapidly solve problems and puzzles is likewise key, because this is what enables one to quickly and seamlessly spot connections between events that may span different epochs, continents and disciplines. Creativity is paramount, as are strong communication skills, both written and verbal, because an inventive, innovative and expressive mind is required to visualize and communicate events that may happen in both the near and the distant future. Beyond this connectivity is key, in particular the support of a global expertise network that one can draw upon to participate in futurism projects.

From a technical perspective there’s a fair amount of lingo, theory and methodology to futurism, so if you’ve set your heart on a career in the field I advise a course of study, be it formal or informal. However, if you’re feeling blinded by science, remember that there are no hard n’ fast rules to the discipline, in that you can apply all the terminology and process you like, but, if when all’s said and done you have no natural talent for it, you’re wasting your time. On the other hand, if you’re bursting with enthusiasm for the future and know you can spot a potentially world-changing trend at several hundred paces then go for it, because now, more than ever before, humanity needs to think long and hard about the road ahead.

Are futurists catalysts for change in themselves?

That very much depends on which futurist you’re talking about. Some futurists have little, if any real impact on the future, while others have a truly profound impact that radically shifts thinking in one or more sectors. Generally speaking the futurists who act as catalysts for change in themselves are thinker-doers that go beyond merely speculating on future events and actively build new inventions and innovations. How the thinker-doer futurist manifests his or her work varies from doing so physically (i.e. running a future-led design, architecture or media studio, as does Mitchell Joachim) to conceptually (i.e. by writing science fiction and/or science fact works for the publishing and film industries) or a bit of both. However, in all cases, the most influential futurists have the capacity to endow others with insight into possible future scenarios that involve not one, but a chain of events in order to manifest.

Of the past predictions that never became a reality, which are your favourite and why?

Many a futurist has visualized future cities endowed with flying vehicles of one variety or another, be it cars, airships, jet packs or spaceships and, as I suspect many others do, I often imagine how wonderful it would be to fly from A to B. However, in reality I suspect the advent of flying vehicles, particularly privately owned ones, would spell havoc – havoc for birds unable to cope with vehicles crossing their flight path, havoc for councils, businesses and homeowners as flying vehicle pilots flew wherever the fancy took them, under-hindered by the infrastructure required for ground-level transport, amongst other adverse scenarios. While a range of emergent technologies in other fields could possibly mitigate such problems, all factors considered, an alternative solution such as the Maglev, is probably a more practical solution, though not nearly as exciting as a flying car!

Many of the most high profile futurists are men. Why are there so few female futurists and do you think it’s likely more women will enter the field?

While I’ve never previously given the question of why there are so few prominent female futurists much thought, I strongly suspect the same driving forces that result in under-representation of women in positions of authority in other sectors, is applicable here. However, women are becoming increasingly prominent in the field and I see the future of futurism being gender-balanced, because when it comes down to it we girls can do ‘geek’ as well as the next guy!

What do you think is the most significant futurist prediction of the past 100 years?

It’s a close call, but on balance I’d say satellite telecommunications, as envisaged by Arthur C. Clarke in 1945; a technology which has enabled up-to-the-minute tracking of meteorological, ecological and geological events worldwide, while simultaneously providing us with access to communications in even the very most remote of places on Earth, not to mention supporting the ilk of GPS navigation systems for every genre of transportation system. Where would be without satellite communications? Personally, I’d probably be lost without my SatNav!

Of the futurists using Twitter, which do you recommend following (aside from @urbnfutr)?

Michio Kaku @michiokaku

Popular Science @popsci

Gerd Leonhard @gleonhard

Rohit Talwar @fastfuture

Patrick Dixon @patrickdixon

Rachel Armstrong @livingarchitect

Radical Future @radicalfuture

Cindy Frewen Wuellner @Urbanverse

END.

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Watch the full Earth 2.0: Initialization.

Who is Mitchell Joachim?

Joachim once said:

“The ideas that we proffer are based on off-the-shelf existing technologies. We just change the solution-bases and do things that aren’t necessarily as obvious. We don’t have a problem with thinking about science fiction – in fact we actually embrace it.”

To kick-start the Back to the Futurist series, we interviewed Mitchell Joachim, futurologist, and leader in ecological design and urbanism. The passionate and off-beat Joachim is Co-Founder of Terreform ONE, the official laboratory and non-profit design group that promotes green design in cities. He also runs Planetary ONE Partners and started Terrefuge, the Ecological Design Group for Urban Infrastructure, Building, Planning, and Art. Joachim is on the faculty at Columbia University and Parsons, was once an architect at Gehry Partners and Pei Cobb Freed. He also once pioneered a house made out of meat.

Media Coverage

“The 100 People Who Are Changing America” – Rolling Stone magazine

“The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To.” – Wired magazine

“[a visionary for] The Future of the Environment” – Popular Science

“Best Invention of the Year 2007″ – Time Magazine (for his Compacted Car with MIT’s Smart Cities)

Joachim's Fab Tree Hab Village: 100% Living Habitat Prefabricated with Computer Numeric Controlled (CNC) Reusable Scaffolds to Graft Trees into Shape. Source: archinode.com

Interview

Which futurists past and present inspire you and why?

One of my favourite futurists is Antonio Sant’Elia. His images of movement in architecture are simply iconic. The extrusion of mobility systems to the surface of buildings made mundane circulation seem radical.

What’s your favourite work by a futurist?

From Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne because without it NASA would never have had the cogent vision to land on another planet…or rather moon.

What are the most challenging aspects of your work as a futurist?

Telling people I’m not making predictions or promises. I just speculate in great detail.

Which recent developments in science, engineering and design do you consider the most significant to the future?

Geo-engineering and Synthetic Biology are the future technologies to watch for designers. Working very big (at the scale of a continent) or very small (cell level) is where the action is.

Of the past predictions that never became a reality, which are your favourite and why?

Jet Packs! What other form of mobility could possibly be more exciting? Maybe teleportation….

The future – dystopian or utopian?

Both off the mark– it is “Eutopia” the original meaning is good place not no place. Eutopia is vital because it creates a best case solution to real world problems, not an incremental compromise we often see as an answer.

Schools teach History. Should they teach ‘Futurology’?

Not really.

Of your present and past futurology works, which do you consider the most significant?

Our Brooklyn Navy Yard Project, Super Docking, was completed in conjunction with some of the Partners in Planetary ONE.

"On an urban industrial site in Brooklyn, New York, Super Docking imagines a self-sustained working waterfront as a center for clean industries that are incubators for new technologies. The designed landscape is adapted to local climate dynamics and is outfitted for a living infrastructure to seamlessly connect land and water." Source: archinode.com

"Overhead of Navy yard. The project interfaces the historic dry-docks, which are retrofitted into five distinct research and production facilities; massive 3D digital prototyping/ scanning, replicable test beds for studies in limnology and restorative ecology, freight delivery of raw materials and finished goods, automated shipbuilding, and phytoremediation barges for CSO (Combined Sewer Overflow) issues. The surface of the site mitigates architectural space and river flows." Source: archinode.com

Awards

He’s been awarded the Moshe Safdie Research Fellowship, the History Channel and Infiniti Design Excellence Award for the City of the Future. His project, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. Winner of the Victor Papanek Social Design Award sponsored by the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the Museum of Arts and Design in 2011. He earned a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, M.Arch. Columbia University, and BPS SUNY at Buffalo with Honors.

See more of Joachim’s amazing works: archinode.com

Joachim at TED.com

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