A few days after the end of Lift09, here is a first video which is actually a condensed of the short interview we made.
Only one question: "Where did the future go?"
And the answer from Nicolas Nova, Fabio Sergio, Daniel Kaplan, Remy Bourganel, Charles Nepote, Juliana Rotich and 5 other people we're missing the name so please don't hesitate and add it in a comment.
Lift Interviews - Where did the future go? from Axel Morales on Vimeo.
Thanks to all those who played the game.
Other videos are coming .... soon.
As a designer I’ve found really interesting the discussion about the role of designers in creating a vision of the future. Yesterday Patrick Gyger affirmed that we don’t have anymore a vision of the future, because we think we are living it. Indeed it is difficult to imagine the future, to predict it.
Matt Webb highlights how designers play an important role in reflecting and experimenting around the evolution of a product, of a service, of a system. But what are the tools in hand of designers to do that?
Anab Jain invites us to play with tomorrow creating speculative scenarios of possible near future. The visionary “Metromatics 21th century” scenario of Frank Beau or the “Carnivore domestic entertainment robots” shown by James Auger are examples of this kind of practice.
To imagine the future we also need to know what didn’t work in the past. Nicolas Nova suggests a design strategy based on failure. We need to spot and document failures in order to not repeat them one more time.
Some designers look at the prototype as a tool of conception, that leads to a more empirical design method based errors observation and progressive adjustments. Fabio Sergio believes that technology can actually be a material to sketch with. In this context the present becomes a sort of beta-version of the future we want to live in. In the picture above you can see an early prototype of a project where I tried to use a real plant as a computer input device.
So, let’s start to sketch our idea and let it grow. What we need is just a mixture of rationality and passion, of pragmatism and fantasy.
During the first intervention of this year LIFT conference, Patrick J. Gyger remarked that in the middle of the last century we were told that sci-fi literature was “extravagant fiction today cold fact tomorrow”. But if we look back at that time we can easily notice that the image of the future was more a kind of style, a leitmotif, rather than a real prediction. Examples of this stylish future are the bizarre architecture, glamour cities, flying cars.
Actually now we are living in the future of our grandparents. But the future seems to have taken a different form. Of course we’re still missing invisibility and tele-trasportation, but some of the concepts are here even if most of them have been realized without reaching their goals. That’s what Nicolas Nova calls “failures of Holy Grails”, inventions and products that didn’t success because of different reason: the technology wasn’t ready, they didn’t answer to any real need. For instance, the myth of the flying car inspired a lot of concepts like the “Airphibina” (1946) or the “Aerocar” (1949). They all failed because people didn’t really need a flying car. They just “wanted to dream about them”. Therefore in 2009 we can still see amazing old FIAT 500 running in the street instead of the flying taxi of “The fifth elemet”.
However, in Gyger’s opinion, today we’re living both the dreams and the nightmare of our grandparents. In one hand we’ve seen the dream of the tech-utopia become reality, we feel that we are living in THE future and we don’t dare too much to have a new visions of it. In the other hand we feel as living in dystopia, where technology is not longer a savior of humanity but rather the greatest threat, a danger to our private life.
We had this workshop yesterday; about designing future hybrid cities, we all split into groups on different topics such as, “endless energy city”, “ ambient city”, etc.
I ended up in the nomadic city group, and so right now I guess you must be asking yourself but what is a nomadic city ??...well, actually defining this was kind of the point of this workshop...And so we had this long brainstorming with so many interesting but very abstract question, it started by understanding whether we were talking about people nomadism through the cities or the city being nomad itself.
But even once you’ve chosen one of those path, it’s absolutely not an answer, it’s more like a hundred more question and so the brainstorming went on and on and on and on and I‘ve got to tell that I haven’t been focused from the beginning to the end.
What I know is that people had different conception of what makes a city, for some people it was about infrastructure moving through space and / or time, without border, this can basically be shop or other stuff with very short temporality ( imagine that every single shops , restaurants, institutions changed every month, continuously, how could you feel the belonging to a city, wouldn’t that be some kind of nomadism? The extreme example of that are some huge festival like The Burning Man, where a city emerge in a few days and disappears few days later.
Clive van Heerden is creative director of Philips ‘Design Probes’ program. The projects he leads there include amongst others the exploration of electronic textiles for emotional sensing and expression as well as electronic tattoos that transform with touch.
Philips Design Probes is a dedicated ‘far-future’ research initiative to track trends and developments that may ultimately evolve into mainstream issues that have a significant impact on business. Emerging developments in five main areas are tracked - politics, economics, environment, technology and culture. The outcomes of this ‘far-future’ research are used to identify systemic shifts, with the aim of understanding ‘lifestyle’ post 2020. The main objective of this program is to stimulate the discussion and register feedback, challenging conventional ways of thinking to come up with concepts to stimulate debate.
On Friday afternoon, during the “New Frontiers” session, Clive will show us how to employ past technological failures to develop disruptive futures. For more information and to connect to Clive have a look at his LIFT page.
James Auger is a partner in the critical design practice Auger-Loizeau whose projects explore the role of technology as a mediator and modifier of the human experience in both contemporary and future societies. Their work has been exhibited and published globally over the past 8 years. He teaches on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art in London and is currently undertaking a design practice based PhD looking into the role of robots in the home environment.
On their explorations into design for the near future they explored technology’s effect on human culture, behaviour and experience. A tooth implant that transmits sounds over the jaw-bone, a phone that blocks all other peripheral sensory distraction or several prototypes to augment animals are just some of the examples.
During the “Design thinking for the future” session on Friday, James will talk to us about the role designers can play in shaping our technological future. Find more info on James on his LIFT page or discover his projects on his website.
Patrick J. Gyger is a Swiss historian, curator and writer. In the 1990s he specialised in medieval studies. Since 1999, he has been the director of Maison d’Ailleurs (the “House of Elsewhere”), a Swiss museum.
With it’s over 60,000 books and thousands of pulp magazines it houses one of the world’s largest collections of literature on science fiction, utopia, and extraordinary journeys.
In 2008, Patrick opened the “Espace Jules Verne”, a wing of Maison d’Ailleurs dedicated to Jules Verne and extraordinary journeys. In the early 2000s, he was one of the co-managers of European Space Agency’s ITSF study – Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications – a research looking into Science Fiction to find ideas for space engineers. His most recent book is “Flying Cars or, Memories of a Dreamt Future”.
Patrick, together with Nicolas Nova, will kick off the conference on Thursday morning with his talk in the first “Change” session. We are very much looking forward to his talk on “Memoires of a magnificent future”. Find more info on Patrick on his LIFT profile.
Jörg Jelden is a senior trend analyst at Trendbuero – Consultancy for Social Change, in Hamburg and Beijing. His main field of interest is centered around Network Economy: How will the rise of the internet change our society? How will consumer behavior change? How will we do business tomorrow? What will be new business models to answer the changes?
Together with Prof. Peter Wippermann he produces the Trend Day. Every year in May 600 decision makers come together to discuss the most important topics with international acclaimed speakers like Muhammad Yunus, Richard Florida, Daniel Nissanoff, Howard Rheingold, Jimmy Wales etc. In cooperation with Interone Worldwide Joerg established InsightBench, a semantic research tool to analyse digitally published opinions and texts.
During his stay at Trendbuero´s Asia-Pacific office in Beijing Joerg examined The Future of Fake. He tried to find out, why fakes are so succesful, what they do differently and what brands can learn from the fake industry. This will also be the topic of his talk during the Stories session on Friday morning. Sounds interesting? Learn more about him on his LIFT page or on Trendbuero.
Frank is a researcher and independent consultant specialized on new media. He currently works with the RATP, the Parisian Transport Operator, on the future of the subway. He will be speaking on love in the 21st century, more specifically about “metromantics”: internet messages about romantic encounters in Paris’ metro.
Why LIFT
It’ll be Frank’s first LIFT conference. Having only heard and read about the conference until now he still gave us a wonderful, detailed answer of what he believes LIFT stands for. He feels that a space, where people from all over the world get together to open-mindedly reflect and discuss technology and society is much needed. In the face of the challenges of our time: what can technology, the technologos, do for us and what does it do to us?
Listen in: “We’ve got googleface-tube-iphone-engine-maps-earth-streetviewer-socialgraphs-gps and an enormous amount of real time data about cities-friends-neighboors-theothersideoftheworld in our fingers, on the same screen. And so? And then? Why are so much people feeling so lonely in our cities, what can the Internet do for the housing crisis, or worse … for feeding people? Is it crazy to wait for technology to solve that, and to think that it’s only a question of time with the Internet as the next miracle of the happy global village? The Internet is only a camera. And its power lies more in what this new camera-micro-and-macroscope can bring to light about our non-changing way of life and beings than about the power of radical modernity. So, by discovering the naked world through the eyes of technology, what could we do?”
What Frank expects
Frank would like to share with fellow LIFTers, participate in a gathering that goes beyond technology, assist in the creation of a “campfire of exchanges”.
In the LIFT08 opening keynote, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling looked in his rear mirror to see the near future, and predicts a boring 2008.