summ( )n

Quantum Levitation

The latest issue of the Lapham’s Quarterly is nothing but future (still ‘the’ one, and without ‘s’, but a good start anyway). I wrote about this publications about a year ago or so, when they published the issue on games, and playing. But back then the content was not available online; this time the majority of the articles and other materials can be found on their website.

As always with the Lapham’s Quarterly, it’s a great collection of very diverse accounts – of writers and artists, of philosophers and scientists – who thought about this complex matter of ‘the future’. Often very paradoxical and unexpected, these stories and pictures are both inspiring and informative; but ‘informative’ not in a sense of updating about the latest ‘trends’ and ‘foresights’, but rather on the different ways of thinking about the future(s). Good food for thought.

Jonas Bendiksen – Rocket debris near the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan (2000)

Stefano Marzano is undoubtedly the ‘future’ man for me, and always was. In many senses it was him who, directly or indirectly, (hyper)linked me to the whole ‘future & design’ area. Of course I studied ‘future studies’ and ‘scenario thinking’ long before I heard his name, but it was his name, or rather a name of the book edited by him, Vision of the Future, that opened an entirely different meaning of the ‘future thinking’ for me. It was, in fact, not so much thinking, but ‘doing the future’, exploring, designing and making it, the discipline I learned and practiced for more than ten years at Philips Design, the company that Stefano was heading for twenty years.

He is leaving now, and the company will be lead by Sean Carney, but I guess it will be Stefano who will remain to be a symbol of the ‘futures’, and most importantly because he managed to ‘infect’ so many people with his passion, for people, for design, and for thinking and doing things differently.

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