summ( )n

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!

Last October and good part of November the blog was not very active – but Summ()n was! We’ve done a large project for Philips Design (for their ‘external’ clients, as they call them, and I can’t tell the name as yet). The scope was only Dutch, but the spread was quite wide, we worked with a wide variety of people all over the country, and from different groups (social, occupational, different gender-and age-wise). Yet we hardly move from the office – the study was done mostly online, using Revelation online tool.

Lots of rich data, lots of insights – the great side of online research is that one don’t have to wait till the end of the ‘fieldwork’ to start processing and ‘digesting’ it, but instead they become actionable immediately during the study, feeding the creative process.

I was lucky enough to get into a very interesting gathering event last week, so called Future Sketching held by the Foundation biELAt (an agency facilitating the development of the cross-border ‘triangle’ region, with Eindhoven, Aachen and Luik (or Liège) in the corners. There is a very good website providing the details about the background and the process of this event, but however nice, the process pictures do not convey the real atmosphere of the event.

For me it started in a misty morning near Genk, at the former mine now converted into business and art center C-Mine; I was somewhat puzzled with the scope of the event, and also with the list of the participants (from more than 30 different regional businesses). The event was called ‘Open Innovation’. I’ve been to quite a few of those ‘open’ things in the past, and the majority of them were quickly turning into distrustful and mutually suspicious (thus, resultless) business gatherings, so I had a few pinches of salt in my pockets.

This one, however, was very different, and from the very beginning. I guess, the ambience played a big role too: all these heavy industrial machines didn’t support the usual blah-blah, but stimulated a rather practical, working attitude.

Plus, the whole moderation was also down-to-earth, sleeves-up and no-nonsense. But I think the most important was the presence of the so called ‘owners’ of the problem, the companies who did need to come up with something innovative, yet also who also understood very well that they can’t make it alone, especially in the current, pretty gloomy context. This all created a very energizing and stimulating atmosphere.

I know that ‘energizing’, ‘stimulating’ etc may sound as those obligatory buzz-words, and it’s difficult to express what was different this time. Perhaps, I can refer to my own feelings: I do like to take ‘creative’ pictures, but very rarely do it during the ‘business meetings’ of all sort. Here I managed to take dozens of them, and the whole atmosphere was on par with the best design workshops I’ve been in.

Also interesting was the ending of event: of course, there were project presentations, and well-deserved applause

but then there was also a very intense session, a true psychodramatic enactment of the ‘open innovation’ process with one of the (very brave, I should add) participant.

All in all, it was a great day, pleasant and memorable but also seeding a lot of future thoughts and actions.