An annotated version of my talk on Designing the Future from dConstruct 2015 in Brighton, delivered on 11th September. The talk explores the danger with living in a Superhero-saturated culture, lessons we can draw from Interstellar, and expanded ideas on what Metadesign, designing ways in which design can evolve by itself, can be viewed and put into practice.
6. Most of my childhood
superhero knowledge
comes from here,
Hamilton Library
7. 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 2
Worldwide admissions
1978 20101990 20021982 1986 1994 1998 2006 2014
Spiderman
The Schumacher-Clooney
near-extinction event
Iron Man
Kenneth Branagh’s Thor
BatmanSuperman
Avengers: Age Of Ultron
Man of Steel
Superhero films
since I was born…
13. Metaphorical Parenting:
You’re a parent not just to children
But also to people you work with
Friends have have
Peers you know
Clients you create for
49. “In Earth's future,
a global crop
blight and second
Dust Bowl are
slowly rendering
the planet
uninhabitable.”
Source: Google Description
50. “Professor Brand, a
brilliant NASA
physicist, is working on
plans to save mankind
by transporting Earth's
population to a new
home via a
wormhole.”
Source: Google Description
51. “But first, Brand must send former NASA pilot Cooper and a
team of researchers through the wormhole and across the
galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind's
new home.”
Source: Google Description
73. Write two cards
with ‘popular
things’
These are
services you
ove, and why
you love them.
74. Then write two
cards with ‘broken
things’
These are issues
you, or others, have
with a particular
thing
75. Then in teams of four,
line up your eight
popular things, and
eight broken things.
You now have TEN
minutes to make EIGHT
startups - ‘popular
thing for broken thing’
76. Each person then takes ONE idea, finds a
partner from a different team, and pitches
them their idea for a minute. Then the
other person pitches back for a minute.
You have a minute to think about your
pitch again, then you find a new partner,
and repeat three or four times.
What happens is each idea either gets
better, or gets worse. They just don’t
remain UNKNOWN….
82. This guy is Dmitri
Mendeleev. He
invented (well,
discovered) the
periodic table.
83. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev published
a periodic table. Mendeleev also
arranged the elements known at the
time in order of relative atomic mass,
but he did some other things that
made his table much more successful.
84. To get to this, Mendeleev had created a card
deck with all the elements, their properties, and
the atomic weights on them.
On long train journeys, he played what he called
‘element solitaire’ - sorting through the cards,
exploring orders and connections… just finding
patterns in the individual elements.
85.
86.
87. What’s fascinating about Mendeleev’s table is not just
the correct order he found for KNOWN elements, but
the spaces his table had created.
These spaces allowed him to deduce that there were
other elements we had not yet discovered and should
look for. He correctly predicted five elements we would
discover, three of which were found before his death.
88. Dan Dennett
I thought about this in the
context of something else
Dennett brought out in his
book ‘Intuition Pumps’…
96. Scott Smith - @changeist
John V Willshire -@willsh
Laura Clèries - @lcleries
Andrew Colmenares - @colmenares
Christina Bifano
We did it in various ways
when we taught this
course in the summer
105. When we started working
together, Fraser asked “what do
you actually do…?”
(it’s a good question)
106. I’d just started exploring it more,
thanks to two books that two different
friends had recommended to me in
the same week, by the same author.
I like coincidences like this.
118. The slow
drift east
Cronuts
for lunch
S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
P5
P4
P3
P2
P1
In London, over
the last ten
years creative
company have
moved to new
buildings around
Old Street
You look on the
desks of these
companies, and
you can tell from
the foodstuffs
what is currently
fashionable
119. Look away from the line, and you see other more
interesting uses, often powered by technology
120. S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
P5
P4
P3
P2
P1
Lighting displays
based on actions
You can use fast
people actions
(sales,productivity,
noise) to chance the
look and feel inside
and outside of the
building through
lighting
121. S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
P5
P4
P3
P2
P1
The cultural judo
of iPads for all
Changing the way that
everyone accesses the
company in their
personal space could
created a massive
cultural shift nearly
overnight
122. S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
P5
P4
P3
P2
P1
This system view
allows us to think
well about the
sorts of problems,
and first initial
solutions, might
pop out from
thinking about
people and space
as a whole
123. We have a simple version we can quickly
sketch out as a tool for thinking…
124.
125. But we also needed a way to access the depth
of possibility contained in the system view
126. S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
P5
P4
P3
P2
P1
What could
we use to
populate each
of these cells?
127. “I just don’t think
your bookshelves
are trying to talk
to you, Murph”
Coop
128.
129. I spent a weekend dancing
around stacks of books, making
a physical representation of the
system of our practice
132. “The acquisition of books is by no means a matter of
money or expert knowledge alone.
Not even both factors together suffice for the
establishment of a real library.”
- Walter Benjamin
133. It’s not having the ability to buy
books, nor the knowledge of which
books to buy, that makes a library
161. A manifesto for leastmodernism
How can we do less? How can we have one client instead of
ten? Work with five colleagues indeed of five hundred. Find
customers who only want to buy once?
How can we have one car instead of two? Three bedrooms
instead of five? Buy two, leave the third where it is?
How can we do this in a day and not a week? Write one
sentence, say ten words, make one thing once?
How do we create the most value from doing the least we can?
More is less, more or less.
162. If you want to find out more
about Metadesign, please visit:
metadesigners.org