Stay ConnectedThe Near Future Laboratory Podcast is conversations at the vanguard of design, technology, futures, and culture, hosted by Julian Bleecker — founder of the Near Future Laboratory.
https://nearfuturelaboratory.com
https://julianbleecker.com
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Copyright: © Julian Bleecker
Back in May I had a conversation with Susanne Paech, the wife of pioneering computer artist Herbert W. Franke. Franke passed away on July 16th. He had just turned 96 in May. Franke was a true innovator, exploring with a pioneer's curiosity the ways humans and machines could collaborate to create unexpected work together. Before computer art was "a thing" and before it was at all obvious as to the processes by which one would create or collaborate with a machine, Herbert was pushing ahead. As with most innovators, it wasn't at all clear to those who had a firm grip on what could count as 'aesthetics' or 'art' that this was anything worthy of consideration. Nevertheless he continued to place value on these explorations and collaborations with everything from an oscilloscope to an Apple II and onward.
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This conversation is with Fred Scharmen. Fred teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning. He is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Fred's recent book 'Space Settlements' is his reflection on a 1975 program in engineering and systems design that was held at Stanford University, which itself resulted in a research report called 'Space Settlements: A Design Study'
Fred and the Near Future Laboratory recently collaborated on installations for the Museum of the Future in Dubai. They recently published a Medium article on the project called 'An Archeology for the Future in Space', which dives into the design fiction approach we undertook.
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Elliott and I discuss some meta topics related to speculative design generally speaking and design fiction, the way its practiced, taught, and received in academic as well as commercial contexts. We also discuss the map he created 'Unresolved Map of Speculative Design' which should not be taken as literal rather as a provocation and conversation starter to discuss (not resolve) the role, relationships, situatedness, and purposes of futures thinking and the futures mindset.
This map has been generative some others whose practice operates in the general space of futures design (https://blog.tobiasrevell.com/2020/08/05/box-006-gadget-realism/, https://futurehumanbydesign.com/2019/09/futures-thinking-and-design-thinking/) and recently I found it quite helpful for describing the 'Where' of design fiction in a conversation with a c-level executive who wanted to have a better sense of where it 'fit' alongside other practices within their innovation design teams. I discuss this further in the Issue 32 of the Design Fiction Newsletter.
Elliott P. Montgomery is a design researcher, strategist and educator whose work focuses on speculative inquiries at the confluence of social, technological and environmental impact. He is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, The New School, teaching in the MFA Transdisciplinary Design Program and across the School of Design Strategies. He is also the co-founder of The Extrapolation Factory, an award winning design-futures research studio based in Brooklyn. He was previously a design research resident at the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy as well receiving the Graham Foundation's Individual Grant and The Shed's Open Call commission. He holds a Master's in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art in London and a Bachelor's in Industrial Design from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
A conversation with Jonas Schmidt and Philip Linnemann from the design agency Kontrapunkt. We discuss the state of play around the broad collection of practices we refer to as speculative design, and their new futures tool, Kontrapunkt Futures: https://futures.kontrapunkt.com/
Philip also recently gave a TEDx talk discussing the concept of futures design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj63yLFBZdk
Kontrapunkt: https://www.kontrapunkt.com/
Kontrapunkt Futures: https://futures.kontrapunkt.com/
Simone Rebaudengo describes himself as "a designer?" He works at the intersection of tradition and unanticipated possibilities that are implicated in possible futures and adjacent presents.
Simone's early experiments with what an IoT world could (should?) look like involved a global networked web of kitchen toasters that playfully forced us to think about our relationship to appliances, and were the only toasters in the history of appliances to have a waiting list. Recently, his studio OiO contributed to the Dubai Museum of the Future project, an epic intervention to instill a very specific imaginary about space travel and space colonies as our future.
I caught up with Simone last week just outside of London, a fortuitous encounter while we were both working on a client project.
Julian Montague is an artist, designer, and illustrator. I first came across his work through his Instagram feed, where he occasionally features 'faux books, posters and record album covers. The playful nature of these speculations caught my attention, as well as the way they speculated, of course. It resonates with my own interests in uses of fiction in design specifically, and not just as an idiom of writing. Please consider supporting the podcast over at Patreon, and rate and write a review right here — wherever you happen to be listening. Your support really does help!
This episode of the Near Future Laboratory is an after action report with Camille MacRae about her experience of life on Mars.
Mars College is an educational program, R&D lab, and off-grid residential community dedicated to cultivating a low-cost, high-tech lifestyle, and Camille spent 3 months there in the desert earlier this year and took a few minutes to share her experience.
You can read more about Mars over at https://mars.college
And more about Camille here: https://camillemakes.work/Information
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Julian
Andrew Dana Hudson is an speculative fiction writer, researcher, futurist who's novel 'Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures' was just published. We get into a range of topics around ways of imagining possible futures, particularly around wicked and super-wicked problems where there are often no clear solutions, something he works through in 'Our Shared Storm'.
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This is a special episode of the Near Future Laboratory Podcast — a digest of General Seminar 20 which was on the topic of "METALABELS". So this episode consists of excerpts from that seminar, along with some commentary for context. Thanks to all the wonderful participants from that session!
Some links mentioned:
https://www.thecut.com/2022/02/a-vibe-shift-is-coming.html
If you dig this topic, you'll probably dig the Near Future Laboratory Discord community. Contact me at about joining the Near Future Laboratory in there.
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Want to find out more about General Seminar? Looking to bring General Seminar into your team or organization to help flex your imagination muscle and be a better futures thinker? Get in touch! https://generalseminar.com
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My guest Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell, AO FAHA FTSE is an Australian anthropologist best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technological development. She taught Anthropology at Stanford before being recruited to Intel in 1998 to build out their social-science research program in their advanced R&D labs. There, Bell and colleagues helped orient Intel to a more market-inspired and experience-driven approach, establishing Intel's UX competency and, indeed, introducing the viability of UX research within high technology. Together with Paul Dourish, she wrote the book 'Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing', an exploration of the social and cultural components of ubiquitous computing. In 2017 she returned to Australia, appointed as Entrepreneurial Fellow and distinguished professor at Australian National University's College of Engineering and Computer Science where she directs the School of Cybernetics and the Autonomy, Agency & Assurance Institute.
In our conversation I refer to her recent paper in the MIT Technology Review, 'The metaverse is a new word for an old idea'
I mention this short documentary “You’ve Never Been Completely Honest” by Joey Izzo. (Trigger warnings apply — read the interview with Izzo before watching to figure out if you really want to watch it.)
Genevieve mentions an audio recording of Gregory Bateson called "Versailles to Cybernetics" and a recording Stewart Brand made with Bateson and Margaret Meade that is in a kind of annotated transcript here: "For God's Sake Margaret!"
"Cybernetic Serendipity" is the exhibition she mentions curated by Jasia Reichardt.
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