Lessons from the Future

Artefact’s Gavin Kelly on what’s beyond thinking outside of the box

Houses made of meat? Soft cars? 3D printed food? Invisible computers? What do all of these things have in common? They are all different visions of our collective future, and they were all shared at the most recent Association of Professional Design Firm’s (APDF) Leadership Exchange in New York City.

The APDF is a rather loose-knit community of design firm owners, whose mission is to provide a forum for firms like Artefact to share ideas, report on how our business is doing, and learn from each other. We dedicate one of our quarterly meetings, the Leadership Exchange, to envisioning the role of design in the future. When I joined the APDF board last year, I took on developing the program for this year’s Leadership Exchange. My goal: invite speakers and design sessions that would provoke us to think beyond what is immediately possible and challenge us to imagine the Future.

Prototyping the Future

Brian David Johnson, Futurist, Intel

Brian has a pretty cool job. He gets paid to think, write and talk about the future and to challenge the people who sign his paycheck at Intel. More specifically, Brian imagines a future that is seven to ten years out as a way to anticipate the challenges and opportunities that future may offer. Central to Brian’s talk, called “Prototyping the Future,” is the idea that by the year 2020 we will reach the point where “compute moves to zero.”

As we look back over the past 40 years of computing, we can see the reduction in volume over time, from the mass of the mainframe to the ultra-portability of mobile devices today. By extrapolating this trend out to the year 2020, we can expect computing to all but disappear and become truly ubiquitous. This will have a profound effect on all of us, and when (not if, when) this happens we can expect computers to literally become part of the fabric of our lives. This is what is driving today’s wearable computing revolution.

Johnson argues science fiction offers us a wealth of ideas about new technologies and devices. Good science fiction also raises the questions about the social impact and outcome of the technology. And we, as 21st Century Designers need to be brave enough to ask ourselves these questions. After all, isn’t Google Glass only a step away from the “lighthoek” invention of sci-fi writer Ian McDonald?

Mosquitoes and Lasers

Pablos Holman, Inventor, Intellectual Ventures

With his funky glasses and forward fashion sense, Pablos looks like he just arrived from the future. He calls himself an inventor, and his job at invention marketplace Intellectual Ventures, is to investigate wildly radical solutions to some of the earth’s biggest challenges. Some of the projects on Pablos’s plate include a fission reactor powered by nuclear waste, a machine to suppress hurricanes, as well as a way to combat malaria. Regardless of what the challenge he is trying to tackle is, Pablos and his team at Intellectual Ventures have a unique approach – start with thinking differently about the problem before you think about its solutions. The result is often unexpected. Take, for example, the malaria problem. Traditional approaches such as mosquito nets are low cost but in a way they are quite restrictive. Pablos’ team tackles a different aspect of the problem – the way mosquitos move.

Using lasers, the system Intellectual Ventures invented vaporizes the wings of mosquitos, essentially neutralizing them as a threat. His talk reminded us that radical thinking often inspires revolutionary ideas. When we allow ourselves to think free of assumptions, we empower ourselves to overcome conventions.

The House of Meat

Mitchell Joachim, Co-president, Terreform ONE

Some people push the boundaries of what is possible. Some people challenge your expectations and assumptions. And some people simply blow your mind. Joachim and Terreform ONE are on a mission to create a revolutionary urban habitat, where the goal isn’t to simply minimize our impact on the environment, but to actually have a positive impact on the environment. During his one-hour long presentation, Mitchell blazed through an amazing array of thought-provoking images and projects including soft cars, stackable cars, houses grown from trees and even a house made of meat:

Shelters composed of meat cells can be grown in a lab where tissues, skin, and bones replace insulation, siding, and studs. For windows and doors, Terreform ONE envisions sphincter muscles that can open and close.

While some of the ideas seem, well, a little crazy, many of them have been proven out through small-scale prototypes. These prototypes hint at a feasible and viable solution, so long as we start to think a little differently about our goals and our approaches.

The Future of Design Business

Mosquitoes and meat houses? What does all of this have to do with the business of design? Why should any of this matter to the design firm owner who is struggling with more real and immediate challenges? It matters because we all need to take an active role in creating our own future, be it career, personal or business. And what we learned from all of these talks is that we don’t have to think outside the box, but rather imagine a whole new box. Each of these talks showed us that we have to not only think differently about the solution, we have to think differently about the problem. We have to set for ourselves different goals that are more ambitious and will allow us to have a more significant and positive impact in the 21st century.