DESIGN FICTION: Saints of the Regeneration
Vatican, 2044
Pope Theresa has introduced a new pathway to Catholic sainthood. In doing so, she recognises those who dedicate their lives for the protection and preservation of the Biodiversity of Life.
The new category, introduced in an official letter from the pope on Tuesday, is "one of the most significant changes in centuries to the Roman Catholic Church's saint-making procedures," the South China Morning Post reports.
Before the change, there were four categories that provided a path to sainthood: being killed for the faith (martyrdom), living a life heroically of Christian virtues, having a strong reputation for religious devotion and sacrificing ones life for others.
The process of becoming a saint begins after an individual's death. According to the Vatican's official stream, the new category has four main criteria:
The individual must freely and voluntarily dedicate their life to Biodiversity.
The person must show Christian virtues, before and after dedicating their life to the cause of Biodiversity.
They must have a "reputation for holiness" at least after their death.
They must have performed a feat or outcome in service of Biodiversity that was thought impossible or extremely improbable at the outset of their work.
Archbishop Marie Cannavaro, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for Saints' Causes, said that this is intended "to promote heroic Christian testimony in the face of the destruction of the Library of Life. It is recognition of the Church for the mystery of life in all its wonder and glorious detail."
The pope's letter announcing the new category is called "Scio omnia volatilia caeli," which is taken from this passage in Psalms:
"May the glory of the Lord abide for ever, and may the Lord rejoice in his works …
For every wild animal of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the air, and all that moves in the field is mine."
The first saint to be canonized through this new pathway is Saint Diogo Ribeiro of the Amazon.
St. Diogo was raised in the southeastern basin of the Amazon amongst the Amahuaca people that managed the forests and rivers of their homeland. He has been referred to as a “child of nature” who went often as a boy into the rainforest to make crosses out of sticks and to speak with God. At age 15, Diogo converted to Catholicism.
Diogo is the first indigenous Amazonian to be recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church and had been informally considered the patron saint of biodiversity.
Over the course of several decades, Diogo has planted and tended native trees and plant-life in the river basin of his birth which had been left entirely deforested and near-lifeless due to logging and ranching around the turn of the century. In his work, he faced extreme hardship, imprisonment and suffered violence at the hands of local government. His mission to "return the Amazon to God's vision" faced severe setbacks, including the intentional burning of the rewilded rainforest in 2026, the murder of his son in 2028 and the loss of sight in both of eyes in the same incident in which his son was killed. Despite these and many more challenges to the work of restoring the Amazon, Diogo continued his work until his death in 2037.
The Restoration project that he began alone is continued to this day by his daughters and grandchildren and is responsible for the preservation of over 26 species of bird, 187 species of insect and 912 species of plant that have not been recorded elsewhere on this planet.
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DESIGN FICTION: Ju’wasi School
DESIGN FICTION: JU'WASI SCHOOL
The following is the transcription of a personalised persuad archived from the metastream of a wealthy, bohemian mother based in Berkeley, California in October 2032.
The persuad promoted one of several schools offering year-long immersion with hunter-gatherer tribes as a means of assimilating indigenous Palaeolithic knowledge. Technical Ecological Knowledge and ways-of-being in the global population was increasingly viewed as invaluable in the education of a humane elite. The intention was to send children, sometimes with a parent, to live amongst a tribe so that they may maximise rate and depth of experiential learning.
The immersion programmes were the precursor to the Rewild Sapiens movement that later would see permanent residence of neo-hunter-gatherer families in American national parks.
The persuad's metadata notes the following stamp from the American Guardian of Generative Advertising. This was the third variation that the mother had viewed in the campaign. The emotive, and romantic language used was within the limits of 'acceptable performance promise'. The wording and imagery was generated from a model that was 65% based on previously consumed content and so deemed within 'acceptable limits of personalised persuad generation'.
-- -- --
[Cuts to first-person chase of an Eland across broken scrub]
You sit on the shoulders of millions of years of evolution.
Our modern lives are alien, cramped, caged. As humans we were meant for the wilds. We were meant to walk, to hunt. We grew to search forest and savannah for sustenance. We were meant to talk by firelight. We were meant to know our environment intimately.
Most of us know this to some extent.
We feel it when we sit for endless hours on front of our terminals, walk half-blinded by our VisionPros and Augcasts, slave away at repetitive and pointless busywork in the pursuit of abstract CØIN. Our ancestors did not know these irritants. They lived in worlds dripping with meaning - hostile and abundant in equal measure. Unforgiving worlds that challenged them to survive. And survive they did. Their lived experience was fundamentally different than ours. Fundamentally richer.
[Cuts to fire-talk, night roars of lion pride]
This is a world we have forgotten. This is a world we are slowly beginning to remember. As we quietly piece together the dream, recall what it was like to live in Nature, as Nature.
In ten years of psychological research we have discovered that individuals who immerse themselves with hunter-gatherer peoples go on to lead more satisfying, richer lives. Their experience, skills and connection to their deep past stays with them.
Most strikingly still, the younger the participant in our hunter-gatherer immersions the more positive are the lasting effects.
[Cuts to day-scene. Tool-building, group-talk]
Children's' worldviews and sense-making is heightened and most sensitive between the ages of 6 and 8. By placing children in hunter gatherer communities, they accelerate their acquisition of Technical Ecological Knowledge. Incredibly, they begin to learn and adapt new ways of survival, art-making and meaning-making in those worlds.
Hunter-gatherer societies are innately conservative. Innovation is a dangerous thing when survival is on the line. They rely on methods and tools that have survived the test of time; time in this case being tens of thousands of years.
Our modern children living in indigenous tribes, combine the best of traditional ways of being and modern day creativity, curiosity and idea-forging.
Alumni of TEK Path state that they come away with heightened understanding of the natural and modern worlds, a sense of change-making possibility, and agency. They score substantially higher for resourcefulness, resilience, grit and flow-finding than their peers.
These alumni are meaning-seeking, happy individuals who, without exception, have had major positive impact on their subsequent Pathways in adulthood.
Give your child the gift of deep human knowledge. Equip them with the survival skills and ways-of-being that held our ancestors together for hundreds of thousands of years.
[Interactive text overlaid on stream]
Overview
Your child will live for 12 months amongst a hunter-gatherer group living The Old Way, entirely off the land and in connection with nature.
As a student of TEK Path your child will be assigned a family. They will be cared for and treated as a member of the tribe. Your child will grow and be nurtured by their new families, and taught the Old Way in theory and in practice. Detailed immersive diaries of day-to-day life can be found on our metaspace and in the Immersive Documentary: Teaching New Ones Old Tricks.
Learn, practice, and rely on primitive and traditional living skills.
Travel as a hunter gatherer band, living off the land.
Learn competence and confidence in their ability to live in the wilderness with nothing more than simple tools they have made themselves.
[Auto-flow to new interactive text overlaid on stream]
Philosophy
Every man, woman and child should know deeply the feeling of complete dependence on the bounties of nature. Every man, woman and child should know hunger and hardship and how to survive them. Every man, woman and child should know the meaning of total self-dependence. They should have the confidence that self-dependence gifts them, and feel that throughout their being.
Every man, woman and child should have the opportunity to understand their ancestors at an experiential level, to connect with them via the acts that define our species.
Few of us ever depend upon our own skills and resources for our needs. We depend, instead, upon the manufactured items of our civilisation and live in fear of losing them. Most of us are less creative than we could be. Most of us are less resilient than we could be. Most of us are less connected to the living world than we could be.
A person who has lived off the land without the help of a single pre-manufactured item has gained a security-of-being unmatched by contemporary living.
Pre-requisites
TEK Path strongly suggests that students bring a high level of comfort in the wilderness and degree of competency with primitive survival skills. These skills can be obtained on the longer Field courses at TEK Path, or elsewhere.
TEK Path requires that all Hunter-Gatherer course applicants undergo a complete physical examination and receive their physician’s approval in writing prior to final acceptance on the course.
Students must be 5 years of age or older.
[Auto-flow to new interactive text overlaid on stream. Faces re-generated to preserve privacy]
Testimonials
“My daughter attended TEK Path when she was 7. It was the single most impactful act of her education and has made her into the kind, wise, young leader she is today. I wish I myself had taken the course when I was a child."
“The freedom I found walking back into our past - and later bringing that freedom back into society is indescribable. I look back at the year I spent with the Ju'wasi as the year that made me who I am, all that I could be."
“Not a day has gone by that I haven’t applied the skills learned at TEK Path. I am who am because of my time at TEK Path. I returned as an adult for another 18 months and have just enrolled our 6 year old son in his immersion for this coming September."
DESIGN FICTION: Alone with the Ancients
DESIGN FICTION: ALONE WITH THE ANCIENTS
Cambridge, 2036
The history boom just got boomier.
Of all the trends of the 2030s, perhaps the least expected is the sudden rise in interest of History. The rise itself surprising, the depth of interest and the activities associated with it are more surprising still.
Of course, people have always had an interest in their past and the twentieth century showed quite clearly that there was a healthy appetite for monetising that interest. In 2020, an airport bestseller on World War II, a trip to Rome or an evening documentary on the Vietnam War were commonplace. But your armchair historian generally didn't read the sources, they didn't engage in excavations. When they visited museums they were presented with 'the greatest hits', not the esoteric.
University of Cambridge is the latest in a string of institutions and museums to open up the historical back-catalog. The long-tail of original sources; the dry-stuff. And make that back-catalog available not only to the PhDs but to the public. And easily.
In 5 clicks on the university app, I managed to book a 30 minute reading time with Orosius: Historiae adversus paganos, an 11th century Saxon text. All for the princely sum of £25.
Arriving at the library, I simply walked up to the security gates and passed through (presumably facial recognition) and then was directed to a dark, storied reading room with a place marked out for me. The book had been transported in its case (more on this later) and was opened on Book III as I had requested.
When I sat down, the app talked me through the text - first giving context, then reading the page in Latin and finally a translation into English. A tap of a button and a precision robotic arm turned the page and the reading continued.
This is the stuff of dreams for me, a journalist, who regrettably did not study history in university. But it has always been an underlying, dormant passion of mine. To witness and experience this ancient text, on my own, in a quiet, sacred atmosphere was beyond what I could have imagined. It was spiritual. Words do not capture the experience; cannot do justice to this communion with our past.
Back in the Reading Room, when the session was over, the glass case was transported away, as if by magic, on a series of unobtrusive, ancient looking (but I'm reassured, very new) tracks. To be replaced with a series of official government communications from 1917 for the next pre-booked reader.
The Experience is a dramatic departure for the armchair historian. Put simply, it has democratised the study and relationship that the amateur historian has with their past.
Speaking with Dr. Martha Wilkes who leads the service, I later learned that prior to my session, fewer than 19 individuals had ever read Orosius: Historiae adversus paganos in person; each a scholar at the university. I was fascinated with this and wondered why so few? "History and historical artefacts are governed by a Power Law. Everyone tends to be interested in the same few subjects, the same artefacts. Most artefacts, like most books published, are very rarely read. And because of that, these countless, priceless documents and artefacts are (or were) stored for safe keeping." But that seems to be changing. Martha shared the app data for the three months to date, and the curve is flattened. The long-tail is fatter - more people are interested in the back-catalog.
The technology helps. One reason more people could not view old texts was that it required a librarian to search for, fetch and then guard the artefact while a reader looked on. "We can't let just anyone turn the pages, because soon enough, the pages would disintegrate, worn as they are by the travails of time." The elaborate track-system and robotic arms was the game-changer; referred to by staff as Gringotts after the bank in the original Harry Potter Movies from the turn of the century.
Before leaving, I asked Martha who uses the service and why. "Mostly it's amateur historians. Students too. It's changed how historians view and do history. We're already seeing an explosion in publications as a result of more people having access to these artefacts. The floodgates have opened and with it our knowledge of the past is blooming. We're seeing a lot of the gaps in our knowledge filled in - small details and bits of detective work that were unnoticed or not covered before. That's something wonderful".
What about non-historians? "Well, there's some interest from the general public - mostly from areas that are close to popular interest - specific dinosaur bones, arrows, swords - that kind of thing. One interesting feature is that the archive is now searchable. Previously you would have simply visited a museum and wandered through the exhibition, with things popping out to you as you went. Now you ask the questions. You define what you're interested in seeing. You want to see the axe that beheaded Anne Boleyn? We can point you to that. How about the clothing of someone living 6000 years ago in the south of England, and contrast that with the clothing of someone from 600BC? We can show you these things, on demand."
It makes history more immersive, more conversational, more queryable. More reactive to the curiosities of an individual. There's less wading through what's not currently interesting to you as a person. Of course, we had a lot of that with images and the metaverse ten years ago. But the physical aspect makes a real difference. "The physical aspect is what makes this so exciting. It is what makes it really."
In fact, of the 3,456 sessions that have been booked to date, 412 of them have been for Focused Artefact Mindfulness. A practice of sitting in the presence of an object from our past and meditating on it. That's not an entirely perfect description. Brian Foxe, a well known mindfulness influencer and onetime historian specialising in ancient Egypt, describes it as "being fully mindful in the presence of talismans from our shared, deep past. Breathing in the air and atmosphere of all those lives that went before us, that tie us to this present moment." Surprised at the numbers of people practicing this, I wanted to understand why. Brian Foxe described it as a deep-seated human urge to connect with our ancestors, with the tapestry of life and living that went before us. To connect us to that. And you know, it feels good. You should try it."
I haven't tried it yet, but I did do a bit of research of my own. The literature is equivocal in showing a significant, resilient rise in measures of well-being, life-satisfaction and spiritual connectedness for those who practice Focused Artefact Mindfulness. Those results appear to persist for at least 3 months after a session. More, if the session is done with an artefact from a topic that is 'of personal significance'.
Some have replaced their Sunday religious service with trips to the Reading Room; group rooms are also possible.
Food for thought. And one for the next visit.
This is part of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.
DESIGN FICTION: Colour of the Year 2034
ANNOUNCING THE PANTONE COLOUR OF THE YEAR 2034
PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW
A New Pantone Color Whose Vitalising Spectral Weave of deep greenery and rich earth browns is symbolic of the complex hope of growth.
EARTHGLOW is a dance of deep life-giving greens and rich browns of the clay beneath us. It is a swaying spectrum of the tapestry of life. EARTHGLOW evokes the deepest past of our shared ancestors as they walked the forests and plains of the Paleolithic. EARTHGLOW is the colour-space from which we emerged. It is the first days of nature's green revival to the final days of autumn’s golden fall. The richness of EARTHGLOW connects us to a time when we walked with nature and asked her to nourish us. It is a deep breath into where we've come from.
EARTHGLOW is the colours of our forgotten past. Our lineage as children of nature. It is a meditation on the long and winding paths our ancestors have taken to reach the shores of the present day. It is an acknowledgement and thank you to the world around us and the world since damaged. It is a call of hope to regeneration. It is a rallying cry of rewilding and redefining a human future that places us once more in communion with the breathing earth.
A shade of conscious quiet celebration, EARTHGLOW is also emblematic of vitality and the gentle relentlessness of growth.
PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW is a new departure on how we name and index colour. It is not a single hue but a spectrum of gradual, complex varieties woven together in the dance of growth.
Nor is it stationary, fixed. Instead, PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW is dynamic. Like life on this planet, it is changeable and always changing. Each of the colours in this new Bio series (B) are defined not by a single fixed colour but by the range of possibilities bounded by the growth process of a specific living organism. PANTONE 0001B EARTHGLOW was chosen to lead the series as its spectrum captures the natural greenery and clay hues that decorate our planet. It demonstrates a rich mix of greens and browns that vary widely and subtly with changes in climate , soil chemistry and season.
-- -- --
ABOUT PANTONE COLOUR OF THE YEAR
The Pantone Color of the Year selection process requires mindful consideration and trendsource understanding. To arrive at the selection each year, Pantone’s colour oracles at the Pantone Color Institute™ comb the world looking for new colour influences and muses. These can include the natural world, the dreamlabs of material ecology, the cyber-ghettos of the metaverse, emerging art, flickering-fashion, all areas of design, as well as new lifestyles, virtuestyles and ideascapes. Influences may also stem from new technologies, materials, textures, and the rich palette of cosmic photography. For 34 years, Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in industries, including metaverse, fashion, material ecology and industrial design, as well as additive product design and generative AI seedspace.
This is part of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.
DESIGN FICTION: Citizen Oak
DESIGN FICTION: CITIZEN OAK
Milwaukee, 2031
Mason Brint is unrepentant.
His handlebar moustache curls in contempt as he spits out the words in dry Mid-Western. "What I did was a god-given right, and you assclown tree-huggers are insane if you think it isn't".
Mason Brint is unbending.
He will not backdown. He will not admit his guilt. And so he sits behind the plexiglass screen in blazing orange overalls. Thick fingers grip black phone. Thick eyebrows overhanging fuming black eyes.
Mason Brint is a murderer.
Convicted. He committed the crime; said so himself. But he doesn't believe murder is a crime. Not unless the victim is a person. And this victim, this citizen of the United States of America was not a person. His victim was 326 years old, though spritely enough. His victim was Old Addler, a 326 year-old Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa). One of the oldest old growth trees in the Mid-West. A living being with the same rights as you or I. A national treasure. 'Damn good timber'.
"If I'm a murderer then I come from a long line of murderers. Proud killers too. Brints, or the O'Malleys, or Smiths, all the way back to the Civil War, we've been tree killers and handsomely rewarded for it. And we're suddenly murderers. Give me a f***kin' break, man. This is some insane Nazi s**t.”
Strong words, made stronger still by the fact that Mason Brint will join Old Addler in the afterlife at 2pm on Friday 9th May this year. He's sentenced to death by chemical injection. A fate he could have avoided by admitting guilt and voicing remorse for his actions. He could still. But he will not.
Brint's words have struck a chord with working class America; he's the latest in long line of eco-martyrs to grace our screens. His dry, no-nonsense language; his Mid-Western drawl, his man's man appeal have made him a rallying point for the tens of millions of working class conservatives who think the environmental movement has gone too far. No tree is worth a man's life.
But we've seen this all before. We saw it with Harley Rowe-Smith, with Josh Federling, with Frank Mackay. All serving life sentences for tree-felling.
Brint will be the first to face the axe for his crimes against a citizen tree.
— — —
Addendum: Two months after this piece, Mason Brint's execution was acquitted and the US constitution amended to forbid the death penalty in cases of humans against nature.
Addendum II: 7 years after this piece, Greg Volks an extremist anti-environmentalist and anarchist was charged with the destruction of the Solana Nature Reserve having purposefully started a forest fire that destroyed 4000 hectares of old growth forest. He received a sentence of 8 years in federal prison. Two days after his release he was murdered.
This is part of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.
DESIGN FICTION: Karma Off-setting
DESIGN FICTION: KARMA OFF-SETTING
Munich, 2031
Deutsche Insurance has re-issued its famous and somewhat controversial insurance product, Pay It Forward, for this coming year. The product which has been described by its opponents as Karma Bribing and Gambling with God, is more in-demand than ever.
Let's look at what the brochure says:
"Back by incredible demand, our empathetic and compassionate customers want to live lives that respect and protect our environment and its many beautiful ecosystems. Today, there is simply no way for a caring, conscientious citizen to be certain of the consequences of their actions.
Our customers care. They want the reassurance that their lifestyles do not harm the environment, exacerbate climate change and or threaten biodiversity. But no individual can be expected to research the consequences of each and every daily decision
We do this research for you.
Through a simple interview, we evaluate your lifestyle and take effective steps to balance any potential harm you may inadvertently do through purchases and habits so that you can sleep soundly in the knowledge that you are not damaging our beloved Gaia.
Pay it Forward."
The genesis of the product was an unexpected one, spurred on by the dramatic drop in the birth-rate of Germany's most affluent areas. Popular opinion was that rich GenZ weren't having children because they don't want to spend their time and money on anyone other than themselves. They were the selfish generation; spoiled. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Consumer research conducted by Massenpuls on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Future Generations (BMZG) showed that over 70% of GenZ were not starting families for fear of the impact that those children would have on the planet. The consensus amongst wealthy Germans in their 30s was that any new person would be a net-negative on the world and they would not subject their children to that knowledge.
Neue Erbsünde (direct translation, new original sin), that viral trend from the mid-2020s, was deep-seated. Commentators and demographers had assumed that this was nothing more than a brief fad. A childish ideology created by the hysteria of collapsed ecosystems and weather pattern change. Meme's and movements can override the natural drive to procreate.
But meme's can be defeated.
Tellingly, 97% of GenZ surveyed said that if they could guarantee that their children would have a neutral or positive impact on climate and biodiversity, they would consider starting a family. This has been a resounding truth. Pay It Forward has been bought over 260,000 times in the past five years. German wealthy neighbourhoods have witnessed a population increase of almost exactly that.
In other words, every baby born into a middle-income or above German post-code has been subscribed to Pay It Forward.
It has been so successful that the German federal government has begun to subsidise it in a bid to boost births further.
And that is where the trouble really started. The environmental anarchist collective Naturkrieg have branded the insurance firm Eco-Nazis and buyers of the product collaborators. In late March, Naturkrief staged a series of protests in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. They also claimed a series of partially successful DDoS attacks on major federal government websites. More successfully, they launched a massive (now-viral) campaign highlighting some abhorrent behaviour by recipients of Pay it Forward. These videos show boho Germans jet-setting, burning wood stoves, clearing forested land while laughing. The videos, interspersed with horrific montages of climate damage and animal death in less well-off areas of the globe, left a deep impression on popular opinion.
The message was picked up by Opposition Christian Green Party which has made noises that not only would they ban the product, but they would severely prosecute individuals who used the product and subsequently engaged in environment-damaging actions.
Clearly, this cohort of abusers is a minority. And the discourse is further muddied by the fact that at least some of these videos are proven deepfakes. Despite this, Pay it Forward was paused on July 15th, citing an 'adverse and charged public discourse'.
Public opinion seems to have shifted dramatically in the past 6 months, following the murder of 18 young parents and 24 children in an attack on a pre-school in Prenzlauerberg, Berlin. The terrorist attack claimed by Black Summer was the latest and most bloody of a series of attacks on parents and children. The Deutsche Insurance website has a main banner stating "We stand in solidarity with parents who want to bring children into this world so they might do good. We cannot allow child-killers to dictate our shared future."
Interspersed with issues as contentious as the environment and biodiversity, inequality of those who can afford to off-set their lifestyle and the very contemporary resurgence in morality and religious, the focus on original sin and by extension its twin, eternal damnation, is it really a wonder that Pay It Forward has proven such an issue of Life and Death?
This is the first of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.
Favourite Problems
In 907 there was so much information in the world that you could never hope to imbibe it all. It was too much. Simply undigestible.
Thankfully, all that information was not available to eat. It resided in other people's minds. Minds who were mostly far away. It resided in books. Books which were rare and far away. An information glutton did not risk reading themselves into the oblivion of the shallows.
A short 600 years later, the info-glutton could move to a city, or chance upon a now slightly less rare book and gorge to their hearts content. Still too much to eat in the world, but still mostly manageable for what's close at hand.
Cue the 19th century and you're fucked. Cheap books and many minds and you surrounded by information. Information tempting you to scatter your mental faculties across too many mental hooks.
Cue the 20th century, and you're fully fucked. Cheap books out the wazoo. Radio, television and masses of minds moving the mills of industrial science. Enter Feynman, and his method to restrict his diet to only those questions he deemed his 'favourite problems'. Open-ended curiosities that he found himself returning to again and again. A beautiful lens through which to view the world of information; one which focuses it elegantly on the questions most important and intriguing to you. One which right-sizes the info-glutton’s mouth to their belly.
Cue the 21st century and you're so fucked it isn't worth dwelling upon. Feynman's method is a sinking life-raft; but it is a life-raft and you're in no position to discard flotsam on this freezing Atlantic evening.
I've practice this method in fits and starts since 2020. Here's a look at my own 12 favourite problems, as of June 2022. This is mostly the residue of problems I was most intrigued with in 2020 and 2021 and the years leading up to Coivd.
When I joined TikTok it took an offshoot in other short-term directions.
They've evolved somewhat since I left TikTok. I'll update that shortly, unpick it a little, and try to understand what the evolution has been. And what caused that evolution. And perhaps chance a guess at where it might be leading.
Feathermap
Feathermap is a tiny experiment in how I might use visual design to make idea exploration more enticing.
I want to explore whether there is a site structure that would better fold into my own thinking, research and curiosity-seeking.
Is there a format of this website that would encourage flow for me and be more curiosity-generating to readers?
In Feathermap, I use an SVG exported from Figma as an interactive map as inspired by Tom Critchlow.
Material Ecology
Design in the 2020s is modular and static. It is not bad. Neither does it mimic the best features of Nature's invention.
In physical design and architecture form matters most. The material from which form flows is less important, less noteworthy, less remarkable. So too with the environment from which the design emerges and into which it is placed.
Much of this is engrained and invisible to how designers design and how users perceive those designs.
This state of affairs has been building since the Renaissance; modernism and mass production made it more so. Summarised:
The form of an object is the first thing we perceive. It is how we characterise things.
Objects are independent of their environment. They don't react to it, they don't change.
Objects are made from parts that are fixed in advance. There is no interplay between the systems level and the material level. Concrete is concrete no matter the temperature. Cotton, once woven, is cotton - whether you sweat into it, or use it as a warm blanket.
Material ecology is a movement that upends these principles. It directly subverts these 'givens'.
Materials as a fundamental aspect of design.
Materials that are not static but interact with their environments.
Materials that can organise themselves. Materials that are different under different conditions.
In other words, if a material can move, shift and change, the form is less important. As the form is not fixed. Designs move, shift and evolve based upon what's going on around it. Material doesn't have an upfront schema. Instead it processes itself into a form based on the events and conditions it finds itself in.
The best designs exist in nature. In this ancient canvas of living epoch-old experiments, we have much to learn and much to adapt.
And plenty to borrow and build upon.
— — —
Sources & Inspiration
Material Ecology, Neri Oxman.
Age of Augmented Invention
I expect we’ll shortly see the emergence of Quantitative Discovery studies.
The Philosopher’s Stone of the inventive world is a machine that can independently invent useful technologies for us.
I suspect that we are still quite a ways from this, despite the early promise of GPT-X, AlphaFold and friends. A credible concrete step towards this philosopher’s stone would to begin not with new inventions from AI, but rather with attempts to nudge AIs into independently re-discovering existing knowledge.
This would catapult us toward new, exceedingly actionable knowledge on how invention and innovation really happens. And how we may best approach it.
The parallel here is how simulation has helped us to better understand animal behaviour, disease, and the brain.
I expect it is still too early for humans to take the backseat to inventive AIs.
Instead, we are entering an Age of Augmented Invention.
Freeman Dyson on AGI
I do not believe that machines that think exist, or that they are likely to exist in the foreseeable future.
If I am wrong, as I often am, any thoughts I might have about the question are irrelevant.
If I am right, then the whole question is irrelevant.
Beautifully said. In hindsight, my thoughts exactly.
— — —
Sources
David Deutsch On Discovery
“Discovering chemistry, like discovering anything, would then depend on whether your problems led you there.”
Problem selection is not only important for its expected outcomes; but for the serendipity that hides behind it.
Behind some problems lie great discoveries.
Discoveries that will go unnoticed until those problems are themselves sufficiently explored.
In Praise of Futurism
The best way to predict the future is to build it.
But which future to build?
With manifold futures we have manifold options. Many of these lead down dark paths which are harmful to the Biosphere. Many unintentionally harmful; dark paths are rarely signposted.
Biosphere-affirming technology is possible but not inevitable.
By imagining 'what could be' the best possible futures, makes those futures much more likely to be made real.
If only because we may try.
Decarbonisation in one Number
We must end our dependence on carbon by 2050. This, to limit global warming to 1.5C above pre-Industrial levels.
In 2020 fossil fuels supplied 83% of the world's primary energy.
To get to zero from 83% in thirty years requires cutting 2.75% of global fossil carbon a year, every year.
We've not done that in a single year, let alone cumulatively. Since 2000, we've had an annual reduction of 0.2% from 87% fossil fuel contribution.
This means transitioning to Green sources at 14X faster than we managed in the past 20 years.
Not an optimistic outlook. Not without gargantuan global cooperation unseen in our 6,000 years of civilisation.
But if it's to be done - and surely it must - there lies untold opportunities here for invention, innovation and deployment.
Where do we put the camera in the Permaweird?
Narrative demands a point-of-view.
What's so disorienting in this Permaweird is not simply the lack of coherent narrative. But the abundance of viewpoints.
No narrative can accommodate all points-of-view.
No regression can fit all data points.
No camera can be everywhere at once.
— — —
We try to drink the ocean and become sea-sick.
Van Gogh On Fear in Art
Vincent van Gogh, writing about the painter’s fear of the blank canvas.
The canvas is far more afraid of the painter.
The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.
Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares – and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t’.
Sources & Inspiration
Piraha Spirit Story
A story from the Piraha people of the Amazon, an excerpt from Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes.
A mythlike account of an encounter with a jaguar.
Mostly understood as an encounter with a spirit jaguar.
Xipoógi heard a brother call.
He spoke, Xitahá’s parent. What did the parent yell?
Xipoógi spoke. Go see
He spoke, Xipoógi. It is a jaguar.
He spoke, Xipoógi. Throw your bow.
The jaguar already grabbed Xitihoixoí.
She spoke. Boai, you go too.
You go see.
The jaguar roared.
She spoke. the jaguar went far.
It has already grabbed him.
Perhaps it ate the partner dog. He took the dog with him.
The woman spoke. Let’s go; the jaguar may get away.
He may have seen the dog partner. The dog partner left. The dog went into the jungle.
He spoke. Bring your machete. Sharpen the arrows.
The woman was afraid.
He had become tired.
It hit him in the face then.
It bit him.
It scratched his arm.
It scratched his shoulder.
He said, the arrows are all gone.
Socrates’ Daemon
Socrates heard voices. And listened to them.
At his trial Socrates spoke about this internal spirit, his daemon. This voice spoke to him at important junctures. Telling him what to avoid.
"a voice of God is made manifest to me indicating my duty"
Socrates' daemon warned against fleeing or fighting his accusers. That this trial had purpose. His fate was to marry the Truth until death indeed did them part.
"I shall prefer death to begging meanly for longer life and thus gaining a life far less worthy in exchange for death."
And Socrates believed we each have a daemon and should recognise them.
"I assert, that all men use, and this is their belief.
The only difference between them and me is that whereas they call the sources of their forewarning ... 'chance meetings', 'prophets,’ I call mine a ‘divine’ thing;1 and I think that in using such a term I am speaking with more truth and deeper religious feeling".
Lullabies and Content Recommendation
I don’t lose sleep over content recommendation.
But somebody should.
We’re a solid 20 years into content recommendation going mainstream in digital products. Yet despite better under-the-hood performance, how we interact with recommendations is stuck.
If you ask a random person on the street what are the implications of liking a post on Tik Tok, or repeatedly listening to a song on Spotify they probably don’t get that it impacts what content they will see in future.
Younger users get it; tech savvy users get it. But the average global citizen doesn’t yet. Users certainly don’t understand the dimensions along which those content recommendations work.
And yet, interview users and most of them would like more control over their recommendations.
Tech savvy users have workarounds. They also have hesitations.
They have algorithm hesitancy - a reluctance to interact with digital products because the don’t want to mess with how algorithm curates for them.
So we have couples who won’t share Netlix profiles, or users who are effectively punished for using their accounts in non-typical ways.
A good example is Spotify Discover weekly. Here’s a company that shot to popularity on the back of really great music recommendations.
And yet, I had to abandon my Discover Weekly in 2020 when my son was born and it became dominated by white noise and baby lullabies.
My PhD problem in 10 lines
Sometimes things go wrong with the brain. Sometimes large sections of the brain fire together. These are seizures: epilepsy in adults, neonatal seizures in newborns.
When the brain does unusual things, we want to know.
In the immediate term, this allows us to medicate to stop brain damage. In the longer term, this allows us to plan interventions and adapt care for the patient.
To know that seizures are happening, we can use EEG. This measures voltages on the scalp; the sum total of the electrical activity of the brain below each electrode is picked up.
EEG is imperfect and crude. Mostly, it only picks up big changes in brain behaviour; and these need to be trawled through by highly trained neurophysiologists.
Because they’re highly trained, they’re expensive. We usually can’t get neurophysiologist to monitor patients 24/7.
Instead we train computers to do their job.
This is machine learning. We feed the computer examples of seizures and non-seizures, and the computer learns the difference.
Then we run it on live brain signals. When it sees signals that look like seizures it alerts the nurses.
But computers get things wrong. Especially, they get things wrong when other signals interfere with brain signals. Every time a patient moves, blinks, or tenses their jaw the machine gets confused.
The focus of my PhD then was to figure out ways to detect and remove these interferences, so we can monitor seizures more accurately.