I usually lead the design, prototyping and making of projects in the Superflux studio, and don't blog often enough, well... not at all, untill now. As a start, I thought I'd share a few recent photographs that we took of what we've been getting up to.
There isn't much revealed in these photos, as they are of work under development or NDAed. However, I'm hoping to share more behind-the-scenes work from the studio in the future, and perhaps even make it a regular feature of the blog. Well, I'll try.
On Bank Holiday Monday, 7th May, 'Start the Week', a popular BBC Radio 4 Show presented by Andrew Marr, invited Nick Harkaway, Simon Ings, Charles Arthur and myself to discuss some ideas around our collective 'digital future'.
We at Superflux are big fans of New Scientist's Arc magazine, and it was great to be discussing the space between design and science fiction with Simon Ings, Arc's editor. Nick Harkaway's book The Blind Giant is a great read, highly recommended, and he kicked off the session with some intriguing insights into our digital lives and individuals' powers of decision-making. Charles Arthur, the Guardian's Chief Technology Officer, talked about his new book, Digtial Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft, an incisive look at the way these 'stacks' operate, fighting for power, people, and that greatest of prizes: 'innovation'.
I really enjoyed Andrew Marr's take on our work at Superflux, and was surprised by his eagerness to hear all about our projects – from prosthetic vision and 5th dimensional camera to the synthetic bees. Following which, Charles reckons we should be looking into asteroid mining – next lab project, maybe?
In case you missed it, you can a listen to the podcast here.
Urban Times interviewed me for their ‘Back to The Futurist Series‘, in which I rant about Tarkovsky, Hayles, Haraway, urban brain-cubes, deviant globalisation, and ancient Indian UFOs. I also share some details from our previous projects and ongoing work, and finally what our dream project briefs might look like. But the fun bit was discussing the questions with the rest of the studio – it became an opportunity to think deeply about many of the themes we've been exploring for a while now.
Other futurists interviewed for the series include Mitchell Joachim, Noah Raford, Melissa Sterry and Liam Young. Thanks to Alexander and the Urban Times team for the opportunity to participate.
A detail drawings of an anti-gravitational 'aircraft' from ancient Indian scriptures.
For Team Superflux, the first few months of 2012 have (according to Justin) been a little like trying to land a large and particularly cumbersome aircraft, or dance the tango with a fridge-freezer. Wherever possible, we've been focusing on projects that support our core strategic vision, chipping away at a range of projects across experiential futures, design futurescaping, and various flavours of innovation.
As 2011 slid into 2012, we completed some exciting work for the strategy unit of the Prime Minister's Office, Dubai. Collaborating with Changeist's Scott Smith, we adopted an interesting and productive combination of design and foresight methodologies, to produce a dossier of materials that will inform future strategic work around a set of key social, demographic and economic trends in the United Arab Emirates.
Back in the UK, we have been consulting with Forum for the Future and Sony on their flagship FutureScapes project, which:
'brings together a range of expert thinkers, designers, futurologists, writers and ... the public ... to explore the opportunities and challenges of life in 2025, and to consider the potential contribution that technology and entertainment can make in shaping a better, more sustainable future.'
Working with an interesting and provocative group of stakeholders and collaborators, from sustainability, storytelling, and more traditional design work, we participated in a set of workshops, outcomes of which were developed by them into a set of scenarios to guide thinking around questions of ownership, innovation and sustainability. You can download the full report, which lays out detailed versions of the four futures, linking them to current drivers and weak signals.
As the workshops moved forward, some of the concepts were selected to be developed further. Over the last couple of weeks, team Superflux was commissioned to develop some concepts from one of these scenarios, finding hooks for a potential community and service ecosystem around the Internet-of-Things.
As a second stage of our collaboration with Dr. Degenaar and his team at Newcastle University on 'Song of the Machine', we have been focusing on the interaction and experience design challenges for their work around Optogenetic Retinal Prosthesis – relishing the opportunity to shape the technology as it develops. As of March, we are in the middle of a three-month research phase, pulling insights, conducting in-situ user interviews, and working on design concepts in partnership with the scientists and engineers at Newcastle, and the RNIB. All of Jon's efforts in putting our filming kit together are paying off now, as we go across different parts of the city and country on little film expeditions. It's interesting to be working at the intersection of product development and scientific research, and we're learning a lot as we attempt to balance the speculative, the functional, and the feasible.
More recently on the Lab front, we've begun some initial scoping work for a European Union project bringing together the RCA, Science Gallery Dublin, Medialab-Prado, and a host of other partners, to contemplate potential applications of synthetic biology. We'll be contributing to the first stage of a three-year collaboration between science and design, working to design and develop concepts around the idea of 'mutant products', and the interaction of markets and (biological) mutation.
Odd weekends have been blocked out for work on Project SAM, as the core team race to get an initial prototype up and running as soon as possible. This has entailed an impressive work of mathematical wizardry from Tim Brooke, lots of tinkering and soldering from Mark Selby and user experience design flows from Jon Ardern, as we've knuckled under for a series of high-velocity sprints.
Somewhere in the mix, we found the time to write a guest blog post for PIVOT Dublin, applying some of our work on design futurescaping in an Irish context.
Out of the studio, the end of February saw Justin in Switzerland for Lift 12, pretending to be a journalist, and helping Nicolas Nova run a foresight workshop (on which, more to follow). Before heading back to the UK, he caught a train across the Franco-Swiss border to check in with urban futures kingpin Emile Hooge, who gave him an insider's look at innovation, politics and regeneration in contemporary Lyon.
In January, Anab represented Superflux at a seminar run by Demos to explore the implications of the new Communications Act, looking at intellectual property, licensing, and the role of the state.
In human resources, we are excited to have Patrick Stevenson Keating join Superflux as an Associate in February, spending few days a week in the studio working on a range of projects. We've also been joined by Superflux intern Raphaël, who'll be with us for the next few months.
Lastly, we're being kicked out of our post-collapse Liverpool Street HQ relatively soon as the building sale is being negotiated – so if you have any insider knowledge or leads on possible spaces, please get in touch.
As spring approaches, we are excited to welcome Raphaël Pluvinage, who will be working with us as a Superflux intern.
Raphaël is a product and interaction designer, currently in the process of finishing his studies at L'ENSCI in Paris. Having previously trained in industrial and interaction design, his work tackles the relationship between the virtual and physical, linking interactions and materials.
Raphaël's recent projects include a toolkit for urban design interventions, a reimagined Inuit sled, and musical jelly interfaces. Needless to say, we think he's going to fit in nicely.
As the wintery gloom begins to melt into spring, we wanted to share a quick round-up of our favorite videos from the past couple of months. We start with 'Timeless'; a fascinating video essay from hypercubist director Gabriel Shalom, Patrizia Kommerell and the fine folks at KS12.
Funky Venus mission concept from NASA's Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts programme. It's all about the nuclear-powered rover and solar space planes. Well (hypothetically) played, America.
'What is Next Nature?', an exciting talk from Dutch Renaissance man Koert van Mensvoort, focusing on the increasingly unstable relationship between nature and artifice.
From friend-of-the-studio Liam Young's 2011 summer jaunt to Chernobyl, Baikonur, and the depths of Central Asia, Factory Fifteen's creepy nuclear design fiction, 'GAMMA'. Posthuman urban remediation a-go-go!
From corporate romcom Other Peple's Money (1991), 'Larry the Liquidator' (Danny DeVito) gives a ruthless barnstormer of a speech about the relationship between financial capital and technological change. Shareholder capitalism!
To finish, we give you Carl E. Rinsch's atmospheric short 'The Gift'. Sinister Russians, motorbikes, and a ceramic robot: what's not to like?
For Superflux, 2011 was a busy year: new projects, practices and people. But alongside all of this, it was also a year of self-contemplation, perhaps instigated by work on our new website. Blending the diverse ideas and perspectives of the co-founders, associates, and extended network, we found ourselves mapping a core set of themes and interests; revisiting our past work and personal origin stories to find a more considered, deliberate way to move forward.
From this, we pulled a detailed and structured definition of 'design futurescaping' – something I first talked about at LIFT09, in Geneva, back in 2009:
'As fear and uncertainty grows, I believe that it becomes imperative for us, as designers, to play an important role in building these alternative possibilities. Our thinking, methods and skills can become a formidable force in the think-and-do-tanks of the near future, alongside technologists, scientists, economists and futurists, shaping a future that is habitable and desirable.'
Bruce Sterling responded to my talk with a piece for Make magazine, and, though the design futurescaping of 2011-12 is a noticeably different beast to the open-ended practice I outlined in 2009, his comments are still relevant.
In the here-and-now, one of Superflux's key propositions is the organisation and delivery of design futurescaping workshops, as a springboard leading to work on strategy, invention and design. Usually, we would talk to prospective clients about these offerings directly, but given the uncertainties of the past year, we thought it might be a good idea to lay out some of our tools, best practices, and examples of our work.
WELCOME TO BLACK SWAN COUNTRY
Writing about 'Generation Flux' in Fast Company, Robert Safan hails a new era of uncertainty:
'From the rise of Facebook to the fall of Blockbuster, from the downgrading of U.S. government debt to the resurgence of Brazil, predicting what will happen next has gotten exponentially harder. Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?'
Over 2011, these kind of questions became increasingly common. As friend-of-the-studio Scott Smith noted, back in March, our 'sensibilities about the future are becoming pretty warped ... as extreme events and equally extreme hyperbole in between them confuse our ability to model possible futures well.' Anything is possible, with chaos and complexity increasingly accepted as the operating parameters of a 'new normal'. One way or another, we're in Black Swan country.
In this context, Superflux works with clients to explore their 'unknown unknowns', examining the space for new or alternative products, hybrids of products and services, and entirely new modes of business activity. Before taking a closer look at some of the specific details of this proposition, I feel it's important to clarify that when we talk about the future, this isn't something that comes at the expense of the present. Instead, the aim is to widen perspectives – challenging the tacit assumption that the future will necessarily resemble 'business-as-usual' – and not to provide next week's lottery numbers.
When we talk about the future, we are expressing our interest in the processes and dynamics that shape the present moment: in the tools and products we use, the things we experience, the ways we think about ourselves, and the world we inhabit. As Katherine Hayles notes in her essay, 'Computing the Human':
'Nothing is more problematic than predicting the future. If the record of past predictions is any guide, the one thing we can know for sure is that when the future arrives, it will be different from the future we expected. Instructed by the pandemic failure to project accurately very far into the future, my interest is not to engage in this kind of speculation but rather to explore the influence that such predictions have on our present concepts.'
With prediction off the table, how can we create, sustain and – ultimately – scale new products and services? What strategies play well with a wider environment of risk and volatility? How can companies and organisations engineer their ideas, practices, and values to meet the challenges and dilemmas of these uncertain times? Is there a way of doing business that's not fundamentally risk-averse, but risk-open?
One (rare) example of a company adept at long term thinking is Amazon. Jeff Bezos, the company's CEO, describes the organisation as a group of 'cultural pioneers', continually disrupting their own business model to ensure continual innovation. In an article for Forbes, long-form blogger Venkatesh Rao pays homage to Amazon's Machiavellian genius:
'The entire company operates with what you might call a game mind. Not a product-building mind, not a marketing mind, not a sales mind. The key to a great game mind is having a preternatural ability to figure out which game to play, against which opponent ... To have a game-mind is to be detached from the specifics of your business as it exists today. If you can look at your own roaring rivers of cash today with a dispassionate eye, not get attached to the great things you’ve built or achieved, and clinically ask yourself, what’s the next game?, you’ve got a game-mind.'
In his interview with Wired, Bezos expands on this mindset, explaining some of his unyielding focus on the long term:
'If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavours that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.'
STUBBORN ON VISION, FLEXIBLE ON DETAILS:
It could be argued that there are already several foresight and futures organisations producing trend and foresight reports for private clients. What, as a design studio, can we offer in the way of value? Where do our interests lie, and what do those who work with us – as clients or collaborators – take from the experience?
Team Superflux is a network of designers, strategists, makers, futurists, and technologists. We work with uncertainty, deploying a set of tools and methods that allow us to provide the maximum value for clients with a minimum investment of time and resources. For us, the 'game mind' of long term thinking is not radical, but a necessary part of doing business in the twenty-first century. It is a way of approaching the world, an ethical responsibility, and a capacity that lends your activities a competitive edge. Cast-iron predictions are impossible but, led by signals, forecasts and drivers, iterative prototyping can provide a unique springboard for invention and design.
Enter design futurescaping– the short tail of long term thinking. Embracing risk and volatility, we lever our existing expertise in foresight, design, and technology, to help prototype new ideas. Working with clients to produce a shared inventory of possibilities, we filter the relevant variables into a set of scenarios, prototypes, and experiences; allowing stakeholders to appreciate the full impact and workings of their proposals.
DESIGN FUTURESCAPING WORKSHOPS
We prefer to get involved early in the project cycle, working with the client to draft an initial brief. Previously, we've worked in areas as diverse as neural retinal prostheses (scenarios, invention and design), platforms for informal services in 'smart cities' within India, strategic scenarios for the future of Emirati families, and the invention of domestic product systems for the internet-of-things.
Within the frameworks of design futurescaping, we focus in on:
1. The uncertainties within the field
Identifying key uncertainties and drivers of change, we work with workshop participants to unpick interconnections and map the systemic properties of the field.
2. Existing business models and alternative opportunities
Without understanding the client's existing activities, it can be difficult to instigate a sense of 'risk-openness'. Behavioural change needs to be cultivated, with support from the upper echelons of the organisation. By comparing our map of key uncertainties and weak signals with current business models, we can start to plot a way forward – building a strategy that works with the client's existing structures, culture and values, focusing on manageable change in the service of long-term goals.
3. The range of stakeholders (broadly defined)
Who are the people who will be on the front-line of these new business models and strategies? Ideally, we like early involvement from 'end-users', and aim to include insights from a range of stakeholders: business leads, technologists, product/service managers, researchers, and even manufacturers.
STRUCTURE, TOOLS, PARTICIPANTS
Usually, we kick off with a two-day intensive workshop, lead by two members of the Superflux team; one of the co-founders (Jon or Anab), and an associate with domain-specific expertise (designer, technologist, futurist). From the client's side, we try to involve the key stakeholders and decision-makers, alongside anyone with relevant interests, or prior experience in the area under consideration.
We work closely with the client to prepare initial materials for the workshop – including maps, quotes, pictures, videos, case studies of existing projects, lego, and physical artifacts. These items provide an anchor for participation, allowing all the participants to get involved, regardless of their level of pre-existing knowledge. Though the precise combination of tools and initial materials depends on the nature of the client and project, we find this default structure works well.
Armed with workshop materials, we begin with a round of annotation as an icebreaker, getting all the participants talking, reflecting, and contributing to the 'flow' of ideas. As we reflect and cluster the materials and concepts, we begin to derive a set of questions, which – taken together – structure the scope and outermost boundaries of the project. At this stage, these questions are extremely important, creating the space for fresh ideas. By the end of the first day, we will have identified 2-6 key areas of inquiry.
By day two, participants have started to narrow down on the themes they want to explore in greater detail. Breaking into smaller groups, we draw on our design methods toolkits, turning these emergent themes and ideas into stories, sketches, prototypes and diagrams. We believe it's particularly important to involve the key stakeholders in the making and prototyping – processes that, by their nature, tend to highlight things that might otherwise be missed, surfacing hidden assumptions and legacy futures.
These rough, iterative prototypes can be seen as a way of turning 'uncertain / risky / invisible / speculative' ideas into something more concrete and tactile. Participants will use the outputs of their making to depict a set of possible near-future situations and narrative fragments. Where do these products and services fit into the larger business ecosystem, and the user's daily life? Is there anything we're missing?
By the end of the afternoon, a set of new proposals will have started to take shape, allowing the participants to grapple with the full range of factors and drivers influencing both their project and the environment within which they are operating. By the end of the workshop process, they are primed to begin thinking about immediate challenges, use case scenarios, potential sites of conflict, and longer term opportunities and threats.
DELIVERABLES:
Once we've finished delivering the workshop, we spend 2-3 days turning the final proposals into a set of documents for circulation – which could be a compilation of workshop insights, a set of micro-briefs and future project trajectories. The clients will often use these documents to develop further internal strategy and product development, conduct exploratory user or market research, or communicate the key concepts to other sectors of their organisation, external partners, and investors. While we are often involved in further design development activities, it is entirely possible that the clients will have taken from the workshop process whatever insights they needed to move forward.
If you are interested in finding out more, drop us a line, and we'll organise a chai and a chat!
As 2011 approaches an end, we were suprised to find that our project 'The 5th Dimensional Camera' had been included in a piece in Physics World – a universe away from Superflux's usual stomping ground! In 'Critical Point: Other-worldly Tales', Robert Crease investigates whether the appearance of parallel universes in art and pop culture have accurately portrayed the science behind the theory.
Writing about the 5th Dimension Camera, Crease comments:
'The 5th Dimensional Camera is more cerebral than the vicarious pleasures of “Store of the worlds”, the dazzling complexities of Anathem or the slapstick comedy of Family Guy’s multiverse episode. It is aimed more at the intellectual pleasure of puzzling out what it would be like to have technology to let us see evolving worlds not our own. But all applications of parallel worlds in artistic and popular culture have one thing in common: they have nothing to do with science, but with human life.'
Meanwhile, in Postscapes' Internet of Things Awards 2011, the video from 'Song of the Machine' won a People's Choice Award for the best individual work of design fiction. 'Electronic Countermeasures', a drone project produced in partnership with Liam Young and Eleanor Saitta, won the People's Choice Award as the most popular networked art project.
For us at Superflux, Postscapes' Awards provided a wide-ranging compilation of recent projects from a field that it's often hard to pin down – a useful tool to help us orient ourselves, and an opportunity to expose our work to a more general audience.
Through October and November, Superflux has been humming along in a contented, cheerful kind of mood – with the occasional glimpse of that much-sought-after state of 'flow'. Though some of our projects must remain hidden behind the studio cloaking device, we thought it was about time for another round-up of our activities.
Anab and Jon are recently returned from Belgium, having been at MAD in Genk, running a cross-disciplinary student workshop on Design for Human Enhancement.
Attempting to unpick the consensus visions and 'shiny corporate future' of genetic modificiation and human prostheses, Anab and Jon used the work of several artists and designers to locate these emerging technologies in a wider social and cultural context.
Back in London, we discovered that our work on Song of the Machine had landed Anab a profile in Kyoorius, a high-end Indian design magazine with a satisfying heft.
Elsewhere, we were invited by Cynthia Smith, curator of the Design for the Other 90%: CITIES exhibition to shared some of our thoughts, resulting in a guest post on 'India's Elastic Cities' on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Blog.
Our collaboration with Dr. Patrick Degenaar progressed into its next stage, as we worked on a series of design proposals for the retinal optogenetic headset. Working with the talented (and extremely versatile) designer Patrick Stevenson-Keating to produce a 3D prototype, we were impressed with the finish and quality of the final printed object, which Dr. Degenaar and his team are using in their presentation to prospective investors. Its exciting to see how a project moved from the Lab to the Consultancy, providing an excellent opportunity to flex our making muscles, and get our hands on a tangible, material output.
And in terms of making and prototyping, Tim, Mark, Jon and Anab continue to make good progress with Project SAM on the Lab front, we made a significant breakthrough during our recent hackday. Hopefully, we'll have something tied up by early next year, so more on this as soon as we can.
For much of the last couple of months, I've been out of the studio, representing the company at a couple of events in London, and, more generally, swotting up on design and foresight.
Back in the summer, we were invited by Dr. Wendy Schultz to present some of our design fiction and futures work at the Association of Professional Futurists' V-Gathering, an 18-hour web conference unfolding (virtually) across three continents. With the rest of the Team Superflux out of the country, I stepped in to fill the gap, pitching a talk with the title, 'My Radio Prefers Bacon: Adventures in Speculative Culture.'
Catching a train up to the APF's pop-up media centre at the The Futures Company's London HQ, it was a great opportunity to hang out with Wendy, Andrew Curry and Victoria Ward – experts in their respective fields. A recording of the talk is now online, bookended by Andrew's introduction and a round-table discussion on design, foresight and notions of 'plausibility'.
The following week, I headed up to the Architectural Association for the London half of Thrilling Wonder Stories 3, where I was shown an Italian magazine by Bruce Sterling, caught up with an iPad-wielding Carolina, and watched live amateur taxidermy. Like you do.
A few days later, I dropped in on the AA for an afternoon crit with the crew from Unknown Fields, many of whom will be hitting the wilds of Alaska for the winter solstice. Though still early days, it was really satisfying to see the students starting to engage with contexts, technologies and ideas. I left unit convenor (and Thrilling Wonder Stories co-organiser) Liam Young about to commence a marathon car journey from London to Eindhoven, where he would be playing drone-wrangler.
Yes, drone-wrangler. Specifically, wrangling the drones of 'Electronic Countermeasures' – an interactive installation for GLOW, Eindhoven's annual festival of light art. Superflux collaborated with Liam (TTT), Eleanor Saitta and Oliviu Lugojan-Ghenciu to bring the project to fruition. Here's the blurb:
'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. In this context the Electronic Countermeasures explores the design and manufacture of a flock of interactive autonomous drones that form their own place specific, local, wfi community and pirate file sharing network. Drifting slowly above the water of Eindhoven’s parks the fleet of modified quadrocopters perform a balletic aerial choreography as their soft glow reflects in the canal below.'
In the end, we only lost one drone to the canal. Not too bad.
In the background, I've been slowly chewing my way through Stuart Candy's PhD thesis, which, taken in light our recent work on design futurescaping, is sparking some interesting thoughts and realisations. A couple of excerpts really stuck out. First, on the relationship between design, politics, and futures:
'To both design and politics, futures affords some tools to crack open times-to-come as a far richer domain for discussion. It also offers the holistic systems-thinking and temporal reach that are necessary to move beyond ideology-driven argumentation about ‘the (singular) future’ into more systematic and multi-dimensional exploration. Politics, in its theoretical aspect, gives futurists and designers a sensitivity to power relations and a range of conceptions of the good and the just at the social level, and in its activist aspect, represents a tradition of exploring and concretely operationalising these ethics in the world. Designers give to futures and politics practitioners a much-needed dose of communications acumen and facility with media, along with a fusion of aesthetic (used here in the narrow sense) with the pragmatic; a necessary equilibrium between form and function.'
And then, on the role of the futurist and the speculative designer:
'Whether the task involves confronting residents of an historic urban district with the unexamined possibility of local businesses being ousted to make way for national chains and the juggernaut of ‘gentrification’; or suggesting to tourism industry representatives that the still-inchoate Hawaiian sovereignty movement may one day soon lead to a rejection of United States occupation and a re-establishment of the traditional ahupua‘a as an ecologically aligned unit of governance; or urging Korean authorities to contemplate the possibility that a much-feared downward trend in population may provide unimagined advantages in the long run (all these are examples of projects I’ve worked on), the future provides a mainline to many matters about which people care most, and thus contains keys to a critical adjustment of perceptions and sensibilities.'
This de/colonisation of the consensus future is something we've been seeing a lot of in the last couple of months, from Anab's participation in Sony's FutureScapes project (blending social justice, sustainability and consumer electronics with a surprising amount of success), HSBC's sudden interest in foresight, or Demos Helsinki's community-mediated backcasting for SPREAD 2050. Wherever the conditions are right, long-term thinking and futures methods seem to be taking root, even if it involves reinventing the wheel.
And looking ahead at the level of the studio, the second week of December sees us joining friend-of-the-flux Scott Smith on a week-long trip to Dubai, where we'll be working on a super-exciting secret project. Jon has been working to get us ready for an epic film shoot, preparing and testing the gear, whilst both Anab and Jon have been working on project strategy, style and aesthetics. Though I can't speak for the others, I'm literally vibrating with anticipation.
Though we've been reassured that she's now back on the grid, Carolina was last seen in a forest in Dorset, and before that, Ecuador, where she was wrangling a giant digital waterfall as part of her work for Nexus Interactive Arts. When all our feet are back on London asphalt, Team Superflux will be in crunch mode, working on projects, prototyping, and big-picture company strategy for the year ahead. We look forward to catching up with you then.
At the end of last week, my TED blog interview went live. It was a lot of fun to do, and my answers reflected on the philosophy behind our design practice, using details from some of our projects to expand on our aspirations for the future. Its quite a long piece, but I hope you enjoy the read.
Following the interview, I hosted a 'live conversation' on the TED site, prompted by the question:
"As unmanned drones, algorithms and prosthetics blur the distinction between man and machine, what, if anything, does it mean to be human?"
I was unsure as to how this live conversation would unfold, as it was only publicly announced just before we kicked off and was scheduled to run for an hour. After about 15 minutes, responses began flooding in, which was a real surprise. Site traffic was so high, in fact, that the conversation was extended by an additional half hour. I was typing furiously, trying to respond to as many people as possible, fielding challenging comments and questions. It was a great experience, and a lot of fun!
Here's the full thread, if you fancy checking it out.
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