[Dialogue] Imagining the Future

[Wayne Nelson]

We saw it at the Art Gallery of Ontario a while ago.

Thanks for all your work with the ICA board. We know it is profoundly
difficult to do what you're doing.

Wayne


"Norm and Judy Lindblad"  wrote:

> Thank you Wayne for sharing Bruce Mau's perspectives.  We had the good
> fortune of seeing the Massive Change exhibit at the Chicago
> Contemporary Arts Museum several times this summer.  It is well worth
> a special trip...Imaginal Education and much, much more.  It closes
> Dec. 31.  Even viewing the images on the website
> www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/ will give a little taste of the way
> Mau and his collaborators walk their talk, as they pose the question,
> "Now that we can do anything, what will we do?
> Great exhibit, great question!
> Seasons greetings, Norm and Judy LIndblad
> 
> 
> On 12/13/06, Wayne Nelson <wnelson at ica-associates.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> While I was at my brother's place recently, I had a free evening. Fishing
>> through the channels on his TV, I fount the "Gospel of John." The one we
>> watched in the early - mid 70's with Jesus tossing lines over his shoulder.
>> The line that caught me this time was, "I come not to judge the world, but
>> to save it." It reminded me that the focus on what's wrong is not the place
>> I really want to be looking.
>> 
>> This article appeared in the most recent copy of "The Walrus", Canada's
>> version of Harpers or Atlantic Monthly - more or less. It's an interesting
>> twist on things that you may enjoy.
>> 
>> 
>> Imagining the Future - Why the cynics are wrong
>> by Bruce Mau
>> 
>> Let me begin with an admission. I am a designer, which means I cannot afford
>> the luxury of cynicism. Designers are called upon to come up with solutions
>> to problems of every imaginable description, from designing a machine to
>> provide kidney dialysis at home to creating an interface for complex
>> critical systems like air-traffic control. No matter what the specific
>> nature of a project ‹ whether it¹s a park or a product, a book or a business
>> ‹ optimism is always central to my work. It¹s as important to what I do as
>> research tools, computer systems, or a sense of colour.
>> 
>> Three years ago, the Vancouver Art Gallery invited me to produce a major
>> exhibition on the future of design. They had no fixed ideas as to what that
>> might mean, except for the scale; they wanted something that would mark a
>> significant commitment by their museum to the design field.
>> 
>> My first impulse was to say no. To discover what is happening in design
>> around the world and to explore its potential across all the disciplines
>> seemed too daunting. Besides, I was happily working on a full slate of
>> projects that were already very demanding and personally rewarding.
>> 
>> But something was irritating me. There was something floating around in our
>> culture that I found deeply troubling. It got under my skin until it became
>> an itch I had to scratch. There seemed to be a growing split between reality
>> and mood, a conflict between what is actually happening in the world ‹ what
>> we are capable of, what we are committed to, what we are achieving ‹ and our
>> perception of how we¹re doing. The prevailing mood feels dark, negative,
>> harrowingly pessimistic, and tending to the cynical. Bizarrely, this kind of
>> negativity has become the vogue even in creative fields, which are
>> traditionally committed to vision, beauty, and pleasure, to notions of
>> utopia ‹ to possibility, in other words. This is especially true in design.
>> How, I wondered, had the virus of pessimism crept into the one area of art
>> that is charged with looking forward?
>> 
>> First and foremost, design is committed to a better, smarter future. It¹s
>> the art form pragmatically focused on finding solutions for how we live in
>> the world. But it seems we have mistakenly conflated the word ³critical²
>> with the word ³negative² and embraced a cynical perspective. Art speaks
>> mostly in dystopian terms, while business is charged with envisioning our
>> future. Today the talent to make beautiful paintings is a bus pass to the
>> suburbs of art discourse; cranky architects scowl from magazine covers and
>> moan, absurdly, about their powerlessness. Gloom and doom are everywhere.
>> 
>> These days, to express optimism in educated company suggests that you are
>> either willfully ignorant of the facts or simply a fool. To be serious, to
>> be critical, to have a voice, we have to be cynical. To strive for something
>> ‹ something better ‹ is a Pollyanna project for the naive.
>> 
>> In stark contrast to this prevailing wind of negativity, the experience of
>> the team that worked with me on Massive Change (as the Vancouver project
>> came to be called) was quite the opposite. In the face of global challenges
>> ‹ and there are many of unprecedented seriousness, from the AIDS disaster in
>> Africa to the environmental impact of our growing population ‹ we
>> nevertheless witnessed action coming to bear on almost every significant
>> problem. We saw new possibilities in collaboration and connectedness, which,
>> along with the Internet, would allow designers around the world to draw on
>> knowledge and expertise that had never before been accessible.
>> 
>> My experience with this project has been delightful, with one startling
>> exception: I discovered how controversial optimism can be.
>> 
>> THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM
>> 
>> Despite our collective despondency, we live in a time when more people are
>> richer, healthier, better educated, more literate, and more productive. We
>> live longer, travel more, and enjoy greater access to knowledge and freedom
>> than at any other time in human history. Worldwide, we now number more than
>> six billion people ‹ partly because we are able, with varying degrees of
>> success, to sustain that number. We have beaten back the Malthusians.
>> 
>> And there are other victories worth noting:
>> 
>> WE HAVE BEATEN BACK HUNGER
>> 
>> Through ongoing innovations in agriculture and the development of crops that
>> produce a higher yield ‹ India has become a net exporter of rice, for
>> instance ‹ we are feeding more people. Not the whole world, it must be said,
>> but we have come a long way. According to a 2004 report from the United
>> Nations, more than thirty countries reduced the number of hungry people by
>> at least 25 percent during the 1990s.
>> 
>> WE HAVE BEATEN BACK DISEASE
>> 
>> I don¹t want to sound overly optimistic here. AIDS continues to ravage
>> Africa, and until we find ways to deal with that tragedy, a deep shadow will
>> haunt our future. However, there is a genuine commitment to finding a cure
>> for big killers like malaria and dysentery. In the past, a disease like SARS
>> in China, Hong Kong, and Toronto would have wiped out tens or even hundreds
>> of thousands of people. It didn¹t. Because we collaborated globally to fight
>> SARS, we lost only hundreds.
>> 
>> WE HAVE BEATEN BACK CHILD MORTALITY
>> 
>> Since the sixties, we have halved the rates of child mortality for most of
>> the developing world, including China, India, and Brazil, and at the same
>> time we have increased global life expectancy by seventeen years. The
>> average number of children per woman in most of the developing world has
>> gone from more than five to fewer than four, while child mortality in some
>> countries has gone from between 10 and 40 percent of the population under
>> five to less than 10 percent. According to Gapminder.org, ³Today most
>> countries in Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world have small families and
>> infant mortality is low. We now have a completely different world!²
>> 
>> Related to this shift is the changing role of women. In a conversation I had
>> with E.O. Wilson, the author of The Future of Life, he said, ³If you want to
>> do something for the environment, educate and liberate women,² because ³when
>> women are educated and liberated, the birth rate declines.² The statistics
>> suggest that this is exactly what is happening.
>> 
>> WE HAVE BEATEN BACK DEATH
>> 
>> Not literally, of course. I am not that optimistic! But for most of recorded
>> history, life expectancy hovered around thirty years. Many died in infancy.
>> If we survived, we married young, and died young. Even by the end of the
>> nineteenth century, life expectancy was just over thirty-two years. Today,
>> average life expectancy worldwide is now sixty-five years.
>> 
>> ‹-
>> 
>> One way to measure global progress is through the United Nations Human
>> Development Index. The HDI measures a basket of factors including life
>> expectancy, school enrolment, adult literacy, and gross domestic product per
>> capita. Taken together, these offer a useful portrait of the development of
>> a society and its ability to meet the needs of its citizens.
>> 
>> Looking at human development around the world since 1975, it is striking to
>> see that with few exceptions the trends are all positive. Not only do the
>> United States, Canada, and other Western nations show steady improvement,
>> but more recently countries like India, China, and Brazil are moving in the
>> same direction. With the glaring exception of Africa, we are moving to a
>> more developed world. Of the thirtytwo countries still classified as low
>> development, with an hdi of less than 0.5, thirty are in Africa. But public
>> awareness of Africa¹s situation is at least on an upward swing, a dramatic
>> change in its long and tortured history with the West.
>> 
>> Another way to consider progress is to look at our commitment to reach
>> certain objectives. At the Millennium Summit in September 2000, 189
>> countries adopted a global to-do list. The eight goals are to eradicate
>> extreme poverty and hunger; achieve universal primary education; promote
>> gender equality and the empowerment of women; reduce child mortality by
>> two-thirds; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other
>> diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and cultivate a global
>> partnership for development. The fact that we have come together to
>> articulate these goals, and committed ourselves to meeting them, gives a
>> sense of the true nature of our human project.
>> 
>> Are we on target to get through the list by the deadline of 2015? No. Are
>> some places getting worse, not better? Certainly, but very few. Are some
>> developed countries negligent in meeting their obligations? Yes. But are we
>> making progress? Absolutely. We may be behind schedule but we are mostly
>> moving forward. For instance, based on current trends, child mortality rates
>> will be 15 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 1990. If the trend
>> continues, we won¹t meet the Millennium goal until 2045. Thirty years late ‹
>> but still a staggering human accomplishment, made possible by collective
>> global collaboration.
>> 
>> Another way of measuring progress is to look at not only what we have
>> defeated but what we have embraced. We have embraced wealth in all of its
>> dimensions. In fact, one accomplishment of Massive Change was to reconfigure
>> notions of wealth to include freedom, education, literacy, mobility, human
>> rights, health, sanitation, communication, collaboration, science,
>> technology, knowledge, and now, increasingly, sustainability.
>> 
>> To a large degree, the greatest challenge we face as a global culture ‹
>> sustainability ‹ is a consequence of our great success. We are six billion
>> people today, not because we have failed in designing solutions to the
>> problems we have faced, but because we have overcome many of the worst
>> problems afflicting people around the world.
>> 
>> CIRCLING THE WAGONS
>> 
>> In the course of our work on Massive Change, we met an extraordinary man
>> named Stewart Brand. An innovator and entrepreneur, he was the founder of
>> the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural landmark in the late sixties and
>> early seventies. He led a campaign to convince NASA to make a photograph of
>> the Earth from space, an image that has become a defining icon of our age.
>> 
>> Brand is also a founder of The Long Now Foundation, an effort to expand our
>> cultural time horizon from the next fiscal quarter to the long term. He
>> believes that when people think things are bad and getting worse, they do
>> the usual things people do to protect themselves: They circle their wagons,
>> hunker down, and close the border. They move to gated communities in their
>> cities and in their hearts. They take what they can get while they can still
>> get it.
>> 
>> However, if they come to understand that things are improving ‹ that we are
>> working together to make things better ‹ they will invest in their
>> communities and their businesses, in their children and their family, in
>> their culture and education. They will do so because once they discover that
>> things are actually getting better, enlightened self-interest will make them
>> want to be part of the improvement.
>> 
>> I think we have been missing something quite important in assessing where we
>> really stand, and this gap limits our forward momentum. We have been missing
>> it because the old politics of Left versus Right are no longer relevant or
>> helpful. A more collaborative approach is emerging. Rather than seeing
>> things in terms of Left or Right, this approach seeks indicators of social
>> and economic progress along a continuum running from retrograde to advanced.
>> 
>> To grasp the approach, think of an image whose pixels have been distributed
>> to a million citizens worldwide. It is an image of collaboration, shared
>> problem-solving, accessibility, and collective enterprise. It is a complex
>> and beautiful image, perhaps the most beautiful image of all time. In
>> contrast, our understanding of the world is driven by a media culture
>> obsessed with violence and conflict. The tenor is one of negativity and
>> crisis, which translates into pessimism and cynicism, and from there to
>> apathy and paralysis. This negative world view can erode human agency ‹ and
>> without that, we¹re basically sunk.
>> 
>> As a global culture we are beginning to outgrow polarized and binary
>> divisions but we still confuse the media with reality. If we were to publish
>> a newspaper called Reality, it would be a mile thick. The first quarter-inch
>> would arrive on your doorstep, scare the hell out of you, push the worst of
>> human possibility into your world, make you want to lock your doors, inhibit
>> your impulse toward community, and drive you to xenophobia, resentful and
>> fearful of all the violent others determined to ruin your life. The rest of
>> the mile of newspaper ‹ the reality of our world, the part that never gets
>> published ‹ would be Massive Change, the story of how millions of people
>> from every part of the world are working together to confront the dilemmas
>> we face as a global society.
>> 
>> The media is our siren and our lullaby. In a never ending cycle, it shakes
>> us up, alerts us to danger, then puts us back to sleep, reassured that
>> someone else is taking care of things.
>> 
>> But what we need to be reminded of is our own potential. We have the power
>> to make change on a global scale, to solve the problems we are facing today.
>> We have the means to make the things we love more intelligent and more
>> delightful. We have the imagination and the ability to invent new ways of
>> sustainable living in advanced, courageous, and open societies.
>> 
>> All we need is the optimism to realize it.
>> 
>> 
>> < >  < >  < >  < >  < >
>> Wayne Nelson - ICA Associates Inc
>> 416-691-2316 - http://ica-associates.ca
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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< >  < >  < >  < >  < >
Wayne Nelson - ICA Associates Inc
416-691-2316 - http://ica-associates.ca