Applied Futurism
Prototyping 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 Marcela Riquet Sabino, Innovation Director at the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janerio, Brazil
The Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro invites its guests
to imagine a more sustainable future through collisions of art, science, reason, emotion, and technology. Scenario’s Nicklas Larsen met with Museum of Tomorrow Lab Director and Head of Innovation, Marcela Sabino, for a conversation about how art can push imagination and provoke change.
Marcela, tell me about the Museum’s approach to the future.
The goal of the Museum is to create compelling narratives and impactful experiences to help us connect as people, as citizens, and as human beings — after all, stories and experiences are how we make sense of the world. The fundamental concept at the heart of what we do is that tomorrow is not a destination we arrive at — it’s a place that we continuously construct in the present. That is why everything we do at the Museum’s Lab here must be a physical or digital prototype, not a paper or a PowerPoint. In theory, everything is beautiful. However, when moving from theory to practice, that is when things get real.
How do you prepare the guests for what’s ahead?
The Museum always looks 50 years into the future and is organised around five big questions mankind has always asked itself: Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we? Where are we heading to? And how are we going to get there? Each of these questions is a section of the Museum. At the museum’s lab, we inspire our guests to move from simply being consumers to becoming creators through both high- and low-tech features and future scenarios. One day, we might be growing clothes from kombucha, sampling beetle larvae to determine the tastiest insects we can farm, or even thinking up new future professions. We did this with ‘Ofisuka 2068 — Imagining a future of work’, which was a provocation to move beyond the narratives of extreme automation and technological unemployment that dominate the headlines of today. We created an Ofisuka (Japanese for ‘office-home’), where hyper-creative and multidisciplinary projects are developed in the year 2068. In it, we suggested new speculative professions related to deep dream immersions and raw dream mining, among other things. At the Lab, there is no such thing as a typical day, and while our work is diverse, all our many projects and collaboration are guided by purpose.
What kinds of collaboration do you do at the museum?
We have our artistic residency, and this past year a focus has been on how to feed 10 billion people in the decade of 2050. As the result of a one-month residency at the Lab, Dutch food futurist Chloé Rutzerveld envisioned a new food system. With Chloé, we combined aspects of speculative design, science, and available cutting-edge technology with new ways of thinking to make the production and consumption of food of the future healthier, more efficient, and sustainable. To feed 10 billion people, we put the regular way of thinking about eating aside to start thinking about how we actually digest food and how we can use less land and different types of ingredients such as fungi and algae. The end results were little capsules with nutrient layers that are ordered after our digestion cycle. They taste and smell like the food that we know and love in Brazil. This prototype opens conversations on personalised or stricter diets and, if scaled massively, even holds potential to be used in the fight against poverty and inequality.
How does the Museum make sense of the pandemic?
We are doing livestreams on social media and have put out content on everything from making sense of the pandemic with scientists, creating donation campaigns for our most vulnerable neighbours, posting health information, to posting sustainable recipes. I also did a livestream on the Museum’s YouTube on the incredible innovations that are arising in this crisis. I spoke about how people, governments, and companies are prototyping in real time to change processes and business models — everything at high speed. These examples are scary, inspiring, and sometimes very funny — very much like our current time! The world changed completely in a few weeks and it will never be the same.
How did one of the main installations at the Museum come to focus on the Anthropocene?
The installation is six 10-metre-tall towers with digital screens inspired by Stonehenge showing how humans have become a planetary force impacting the Earth. The Anthropocene has not yet been approved as a geological era by bodies like the International Union of Geological Sciences but even at the time of opening the Museum, it was important to have a whole sec- tion dedicated to that theme given our ethical guidelines on sustainability — how we live with the planet, and conviviality — how we live with each other. I think it’s appropriate for Museums to be positioning themselves politically, and in that sense, we have decided to stop describing the phenomenon as ‘climate change’ — it’s a ‘climate emergency’!
In what way do you hope to see the impact of your work?
I see it through the eyes and reactions of our guests: how they are exercising their imagination and that our prototyping and exhibitions are powerful vehicles to make that happen. It’s funny, we can actually hear some of the reactions to our exhibitions downstairs from where we sit in the lab. Expressions like ‘oh my God, this would save my life’ or ‘this is disgusting, I would hope I’m dead before this era comes around.’ Either way, it’s fantastic because it opens people’s minds in a time where I think we have a crisis of imagination. Our minds have been colonised by dystopian Black Mirror-like narratives and to many, the future looks like the Terminator, Bladerunner, and Ready Player One scenarios. I’d like people to reflect and realise that the future doesn’t have to be the way that they see it today. This is why the Museum never does dystopias and why one of the core aims at the Museum is to create preferable futures.
What do you fear on the horizon?
More recently, I have been questioning, researching, and thinking about inclusion and bias. Technologies are not neutral; rather, they are born within the specific social and political worldview of their creators. Where and by whom are these technologies being created, and what does that mean for our increasingly connected world? The more algorithms control, the more these problems are being revealed. Recently, it has been found that some of the AI applied to future crime prediction was disproportionately biased against non-white defendants while wrongly categorising white defendants as low risk. In yet another case, specific attributes of faces were categorised as more or less likely to commit crimes. The AI systems are only as good as the input we train them on and how they have been designed, and that comes with real racial, gender-based, and ideological biases. If we continue to project current societal marginalisation onto our future systems, we will unwillingly negatively target entire groups of people. The implications of these developments are far-reaching for our democracy, for our society, and for our humanity. We must remember that technology is just a tool.
How do you address these issues at the Museum?
We have a project called ‘Hacking Mars in 2069’ coming up that has proved to be very useful in the sense that it helps us disconnect from our reality and imagine whole new societies and structures. As a part of this project, we have had scientists, governance experts, astrophysicists, and astrobiologists present their future Mars perspectives. One example relates to how AI is making critical information-based decisions including potential biases. A participating Lab guest of colour wrote to me afterwards that he was changed by this kind of connection to the future. He wrote: ‘just to let you know, I’m in the statistic of people whose lives have changed after the immersion in the Lab and now I am directly working with AI, let’s make this revolution happen!’, all from realising how AI will run our lives much more than it is today and how it was important that he be involved in making it more inclusive. We need more people participating, more diversity and different voices at the table, and I will do everything that I can to improve this, as we, and the AI community definitely haven’t figured it all out yet.
A piece of advice to your future self?
I’d like to remind myself that communicating and doing applied science at the edge is much like poetry. It’s like art because you must imagine a place that doesn’t exist, discovering new and unseen worlds. I would tell myself to make it a daily habit to flex the imagination muscle and to make space and time for creativity, and I need to take time away from devices. I’m inspired by the Japanese idea of nature baths as a way to quiet the mind. I think that the most creative ideas come from a space of stillness. A little bit of time away from the businesses of life lets us facilitate connections and new combinations. I think that’s really that creativity that I would like to explore more.
The world five decades from now will look radically different than the world of today, and much of this change is difficult to imagine. It is against this backdrop that the Museum of Tomorrow continues to stimulate debate about change and continuous transformation and provokes us to reflect on the consequences of our present behaviour.
