summ( )n

Survival Kit 2012 is not quite about the coming end of the world and how to better prepare yourself for it.  But there is something futuristic about it, too – under the slogan ‘co-creating the future’ Dutch fashion design/lifestyle magazine Code invites designers and other ‘creators’ to think together about what’s coming and what we can to about it.

There is, of course, a project website  (http://2012survivalkitproject.com) but there is not much there yet, the project just started, and as of now you will see only the ‘sample entries’.  Contra to the usual practice of these days the paper version of the magazine, however, already presents a few participants (aka contenders);   I will write a few separate posting about some of the projects I found interesting.

I found, in the latest issue of the National Geographic, a large material about Astana, the new capital of Kazakhstan. It’s less an article but rather a series of beautiful pictures from the city; it also has the striking title, Tomorrowland. 

I’ve never been to the new city, but all my friends tell me it’s indeed a mirage-like creation. There is a chance that I will go there later this year with a project (but I hope I can wait a bit, it’s -35c there now!

See more on either the magazine’s website or at the site of the photographer, Georg Ludwig.

Oh, I almost typed ‘co-computing’ But no, it’s still more or less conventional ‘co-creating the future’: The New York Times invited people to contribute with their predictions about the future of computers and computing (as well as to evaluate and comment on the predictions of others).

The result is an interactive – and growing – roadmap of the possible futures; I particularly like that it’s also a map of the ‘possible pasts’. Although this part is not open for contribution, and still invites to think what else would one add to these milestones.

According to the Credit Suisse’s latest study the major growth of consumption in the near future will happen in China and/or India; you also have more chances to meet people eager to spend in Brazil, Russia, Indonesia or Turkey – this is where the bank expect to see the highest growth of consumption in the near future.

I was obviously attracted by the title of the blog posting about the coming UK fair Kinetic 2012 – Art Fair of the Future. Part of the ‘obviousness’ is the combo of ‘art’ and ‘future’ – Summ()n is always interested in this area; but coincidentally I am now working on the presentation titled ‘Art and the Futures’, so I should find a lot of ‘food for thought’ in this event, to be held in London from 8th till 12th of February. Too bad I won’t be able to travel there, but at least they put a lot of interesting projects online, to watch and to learn from.

The image above is from the Daan Roosegaarde’s already classical installation Liquid Space 6.0. I am in fact somewhat surprised that they decided to use such an ‘old’ piece (old by the digital pace, of course). I remember seeing in 2009 already – see a small video I made in Rotterdam. But it’s a great project anyway, so why not?

I hope to write more small pieces about various artists and their projects, as I will be going through their website, and then throughout the tweets and the images of the visitors when they will start appearing.

We opened this blog as a temporary solution in 2010, expecting to advance to a more elaborate website soon. As often happens, the temporary solution became ‘eternal’, or at least stayed here much longer that we thought.

But finally the time for a redesign has come – we are getting a helping hand from a multi-talented web-designer Zaira Kulsariyeva aka 80211.cc who agreed to make our web-home more ataractive – and more useful! – to the readers (and who also earlier made a great enigmatic site for the aman-geld art project, in collaboration with the the “ultracool design studio‘ aextatic).

So, expect more clarity, better navigation, and improved readability soon. But also a more interesting and intriguing, more ‘summoning’ content, all in line with the spirit of Summ( )n!

Last year I was invited to talk to a delegation of the Russian scientists/entrepreneurs from the Skolkovo Foundation near Moscow (to my knowledge, it was their Nuclear cluster). Earlier in 2010 we tried to organize a somewhat similar study tour/game for the team from Skolkovo, but perhaps it was too early: the foundation was just established, and a trip to Eindhoven wasn’t perhaps among the top priorities. To my regret, my later efforts to organize such a trip faced an unexpected resistance from the possible local hosts: neither Philips people nor the guys from Brainport or the local city hall.

But fortunately, someone managed to finally arrange such a trip, and to convince – at least some people from – the local organizations to attend such a meeting. (For the record, this someone was Ger van Zantvoort, from MeduProf-S, former Fontys International Projects. The event went quite well, with people coming from the TNO, the High Tech Campus, and even Summ()n.

I made a presentation about strategic innovation practices at Philips Design, and a bit about Summ()n’s projects; it was a bit weird to speak in Russian in the very middle of HTC, former Philips Research, one of the Philips’ most closed and secretive places of just ten years ago. Perestroika came even to the Netherlands. However, and because of the peculiar audience (i.e., Russian, not ‘future research’ professionals, and not even ‘innovation’ professionals yet), I had to adapt the story, and to start from some very basic things. At the same time, I couldn’t just present the cases either, and had to make a certain sense-making framework. This double pressure, to both simplify and condense eventually resulted in a very nice and useful scheme, or indeed a framework, that could be very useful for Summ()n and our partners/clients in general. This scheme reflects the changing nature of Summ()n itself, and at the same presents a new range of services we have been offering for some while already.

To explain it, I will have to also start from the basic things, basic components of thinking . As I was talking many times, the very concept of ‘future’, how it is understood and dealt with (at least, in the Western way of thinking), could be illustrated by a foggy road (we have many of such images here in the Netherlands lately).

The process of (business) development is seen as driving over a high-speed road, while sometimes having a foggy cloud ahead. Such a fog is obviously an annoyance, often a danger (imagine a sharp turn, or a car suddenly jumping from the mist); that’s why the business is ready to spend significant efforts (and money) to ‘clear the fog’, to hopefully gain more certainty about the ‘future’.
Interestingly, all these activities somehow doesn’t question a set of basic assumptions about the situation: about the ‘road’, the ‘driving’, the very ‘you’. It’s believed that the ‘future’ will basically be a very similar version of the ‘now’ (may be a bit brighter).

What you seek is a lens of some sort, a magnifying glass, a beamer that would highlight you this ‘bright future’, preferably before your competitors will see the same. The future is already there, just laying and waiting when you will come and pick it up. The world around won’t change; you won’t change either.

Needless to say, these are exactly the presumption we try to work (and overcome) at Summ()n, helping people to discover not only ‘unlikely futures’, but also develop the new ‘them’, new ideas and ways of thinking, and of doing things. We betted on ‘playing’ with the futures, and succeeded to run a few interesting projects in this directions. But the truth is, the play is only one component of the total set, and we had to incorporate few other to make the whole system work.

Referring to the earlier projects of Philips Design, I constructed this new diagram of ‘exploring the futures’ (aka developing the future I-s):

Notice that the ‘I’ here is placed in the very center of the ‘thing’. And the purpose now is not to ‘highlight’ the road in search of the ‘future’ laying there, but instead to develop a more complex, multi-dimensional I (=selves). This new complex, future-shaped (and thus future-proof) systems of selves emerges after looking into (and through) each of the useful ‘mirrors’, and then by integrating all these projections into on a new level of I.

PS: I am playing with this ‘mirror’ metaphor because of my long-term research into the mirrors (both their history, and the futures), but this specific insights came from the famous Chamber of Mirrors by Leonardo da Vinci. He believed that mirrors can help to a man not only physically see himself in such a chamber, but eventually gain a deeper understanding of himself, thus power to self-transform.

We thought about this project already last year, but didn’t have enough resources and time to start it, but it looks that we will be able to do it this time. The nickname of the project, Museum of the Future, may look just a tiny hair too grande, but the real name should be in fact Museum AND the future.

Many museums, especially the one of ‘contemporary art’ (or of the similar genres) claim that they *are* the future, or at least that they help people *see* the futures better (brighter), through the lenses of their visionary art/ists. Is it so? Or rather, how we enhance this future-shaping capacities of the museum – today and in the near future?

We wish all to our clients and partners a very merry Christmas, warm and relaxing holidays and a happy and prosperous 2012!