APPLIED FUTURISM
Building Futures
Futurist Nicklas Larsen explores how the future can be a source for hope, social innovation, and sustainable development together with pioneers in the field.
Q&A with Josef Hargrave, Associate Director and Global Foresight Leader at Arup Foresight, about shaping a better world through mindful engineering
Arup is a global engineering and design company working with most aspects of today’s built environment. It was founded in 1946 by Ove Arup, a Danish-English engineer-philosopher, with the aim of shaping a better world through total design and mindful engineering. Today, Arup employs close to 15,000 people across 35 countries, and has been involved in developing exceptional landmarks with projects in more than 160 countries, including the Sydney Opera House, Apple Park, CCTV HQ in Beijing, the International Finance Centre in Hong Kong, the Copenhagen Metro, and a variety of other ground-breaking buildings, spaces and city developments. We met with Josef Hargrave, Associate Director and Global Foresight Leader with Arup’s Foresight team, to hear about the role played by futures thinking in engineering, urban development and design, and to learn what factors shape our cities, and how to take account of the future when we build them.
Josef, how is futures thinking applied in architecture, design and engineering?
That is quite an interesting question Nick, and one of the things to bring up here is how the future influences investments in projects with very long lifecycles. Think about designing a new building, a new bridge. It all takes a long time to get from idea, to construction, to operation, with lifecycles that are measured in decades. So if we want to ensure that we create designs that are sensitive to future realities or changing futures, then we need to think about the future operational context of a project right from the beginning; changing demographics, lifestyles, user needs, climatic and environmental conditions, new materials, the impact of automation, and ultimately, the impact on future generations. It is important to ask what the future operating context will look like, and what that means for the decisions we take today. With the Copenhagen Metro, for instance, I know the team behind it thought about creating a network and spaces that would be resilient to future climate risks, while providing highly user-centric design and future adaptability of the asset, which collectively makes it the good piece of architecture that it is.
What do you see shaping our cities, now and in the future?
Cities are highly complex; they are living, breathing systems that are constantly changing in their makeup, their structure, and the people who inhabit them. So the ways in which a given trend will manifest itself and shape a specific city are greatly dependent on geography, the existing infrastructure, the level of diversity, and their overall maturity. This means that cultural patterns, urban mobility, public health, forms of housing and digital lifestyles will play out vastly differently from one place to another. So the context is highly diverse, but the trends driving change are actually very similar from one place to another. Adaptation to climate risk is one example: The flood risk and heat island effect will vary drastically from one place to another, but the fact that cities must respond and adapt to increased risk driven by climate change is the same everywhere. The key is to build the institutional capacity to understand, map and act upon such insight. How, when we invest in a new piece of city infrastructure, can we ensure that we think about future risk patterns and adapt the design accordingly? When we think about cities, we must always think about the starting point, and what the consequences are of that. However, there are also things that are a little less context-dependent, but equally important. User-centricity and experience, and the idea of inclusivity are massive topics in city development. Children and the elderly are the perfect indicators of what ‘good’ looks like.
…and what does that mean?
It means that if we can get cities right for children and the elderly, then we automatically get them right for everyone else. Or to put it differently, if kids or their grandparents are struggling to transit across the city space or to live a good life, then we know it is not a good environment for anyone else, either. It provides an integrated focus on the experience of cities and the global challenges that are impacting the lives of everyday citizens, and it is shaping our urban futures significantly, which I do not think it used to do.
How will emerging technologies and digital design impact the way we construct and understand the built environment, today and in the future?
Climate change, population growth, demographic change, rapid urbanisation and resource depletion mean that the world’s great cities need to adapt if they are to survive and thrive over the coming decades. And so we see an increasing interest in the role that information and communications technologies can play in creating the cities of the future. There is a whole array of technologies with the potential to bring great benefits to cities if they are used in open and collaborative ways. So-called smart cities could fundamentally transform the way that cities are governed, operated, interacted with and experienced. The key is to focus on outcomes, not on technology per se. What do we want to achieve or solve in terms of socio-economic benefits? Cedric Price (an English architect and influential teacher and writer on architecture, ed.) once said, “Technology is the answer, but what is the question?”, and this is exactly what we have to ask ourselves. Only if we fully understand the problems that we are hoping to solve can we ensure that we utilise technology in the right way. The way that Stockholm uses technology to manage and solve congestion, or the way that Rio uses technology to improve the efficiency of waste collection, are good examples. An outcome-driven approach is key here.
Can you give us an example of how technology is enhancing human labour in the built environment?
A great example here is Antoni Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona which he started developing back in the late 1880s. Arup was approached in 2014 by the Sagrada Familia Foundation to help with the remaining 40 per cent of the structural design — particularly how to produce the remaining six towers. In all the work on the final stage of Sagrada Familia a new generation of digital tools and digital fabrication approaches has been applied. The approach combines deep human knowledge of the structural variables in the towers’ form and position with algorithms that model the details and subtle variations of geometries in the design. Each component has been modelled in 3D and digitally fabricated to an unbelievable level of detail. Carefully-designed connections ensure that panels can be craned into place. They fit together like Lego bricks. These digital enhancements proved to be the best ways to make Gaudí’s design possible, and to build it in a realistic timeframe, and at the right cost. It would have been impossible to carry out without modern technologies, and now this spectacular cathedral is finally due for completion in 2026, about a century after Gaudi’s death.
What do you make of ‘cathedral thinking’? Pun intended.
Cathedral thinking concerns long-term projects and realised goals for the sake of future generations. In my view, it is a perfect metaphor or framework for what we are hoping to achieve with foresight. Analysing trends, understanding implications and developing a vision is one thing, but putting this into practice and deciding what it means for our decisions and actions today is quite another challenge. Good foresight does both, it clearly maps and understands the trends that are driving change, and then works with stakeholders to figure out what this means for making better decisions today — and thereby, like we see in cathedral thinking, making these big visions practical realities.
What materials are we going to build with in the future?
The built environment is extremely carbon-intensive. Think about steel, concrete, and glass: those are three core materials to design and build stuff, so of course materials play a massive role in that, and there are different ways of looking at it. We have been researching the future use of timber in building design and construction, which can and will be a challenging subject area in some parts of the world. In the UK we had the Grenfell Tower disaster, in which many people lost their lives due to the use and improper design of combustible cladding. Consequently, the debate around the expanded use of timber is quite complex and needs to be done with rigorous fire safety and testing in mind. But going forward, the potential of timber in the built environment is growing rapidly, from helping us to reduce the environmental impact of construction to providing new approaches to urban densification and prefabrication. It’s almost like going back into the past and utilizing a building material that has traditionally been used, enhancing it, and bringing it up to modern standards. What’s more, new uses and hybrid materials, such as bio-composites, are emerging. They could transform how and where we choose to build and improve the sustainability and resilience of our designs.
How will your work emerge in the wake of COVID?
There’s really a huge diversity of questions around COVID and how it’s shaping different aspects of the built environment. We are currently thinking a lot about how to rethink shopping centres and retail assets, because they are not taking any rental income now. So, how can you repurpose or retrofit existing spaces for the future; turn a shop into a co-working space, for example, or into an urban food production unit? There is a lot of talk about this being the new normal, but this is not the new normal. This is the transition to the new normal, and it will only emerge once normality returns, and then we must see how much sticks from the present time. Lots of people have now started to enjoy working at home, so the offices are largely empty. So the conversations and debates right now concern how much space we will need in the future. How many desks? How do we allocate space in the building? How much will be shared space versus private space? These very specific design questions emerge from this understanding of how the future might be evolving in terms of work and office buildings, but it applies widely.
Please tell us more about retrofitting for the future…
It is about repurposing buildings rather than tearing them down and starting from scratch. This is of course related to the broader concepts of the circular economy and the circularity of materials and components in the built environment. But in essence, it is about the reduction of existing materials, and a part of that solution is to stop tearing down buildings and instead start to think about how we can renew and revive them while retaining the embedded carbon. I could point to Hong Kong Post as an example here, the national mail service of Hong Kong. The challenge was the large number of incoming parcels, which were being hand sorted, because originally this building was mainly designed for handling letters. But with the huge expansion of e-commerce, the volume and purpose of the building had massively changed. We needed to envision this building in the context of the future of mail and parcel logistics, contextualizing impacts of logistics, market and the ecosystem at large. By moving from trends and drivers to benchmark innovations and very strategic implications, we can ensure that the building is fit for its updated purpose. As a side note, it brought some interesting paradoxes to light. The trend of digitalization, in which customer services are causing reduced volumes in mail, while at the same time the trend towards more e-commerce is causing increased parcel volumes. The recommendations that we ended up with here included climate-resilient structures and facilities, as well as flexible and expandable building structures that could be turned into an architectural brief that an architect or engineer could easily expand by certain volumes, or, with regard to health and well-being, build sensors for carbon emissions, pollutants and natural light into the architectural requirements for the building.
In what ways do you wish to see the impact of your work?
To me, it really centres around the idea of contextualizing implications and making sure that people can make practical use of the insights produced through foresight work, by influencing better decisions today. There is a particular quote by Elon Musk that says “I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities. It’s like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities — accelerate one thing or slow down another thing”. It inspires me to positively influence certain probabilities. We can’t predict the future, but we can influence how people think about it, and we can influence the decisions that people make, and hopefully to take a little bit better account of the trends that are driving their futures. We are often brought in to influence existing thinking that might be quite conservative or traditional, just to blow it open, and sometimes we even come up with wacky ideas that might not all be feasible, but at least it stretches the minds into directions that the given project team hasn’t gone into before. This is probably more important than ever, right?
Indeed, do you have some advice to your future self?
Like you, with Applied Futurism, I would aspire to bring the paralysing conversations about trends and futures down to how it is applied. This idea of going from abstract evidence about the future to tangible implications for today is essentially about turning trends and drivers into context-specific impacts. Understanding trends and spotting change is the easy bit. Anyone can go out there and point at trends like aging, climate change, etc. The hard thing is contextualizing change, so this is really what I always aim at in the projects I’m involved with. Change is constant and context is variable. And on a personal note: work less, play more. I used to travel a lot with work — like, really a lot. Last year was crazy, and with everything going on I think it’s time to be more at home now with the family, and time to build a different relationship with work. I believe that we as individuals must find a new form of balance in our lives.
