I had the pleasure of giving a talk at LIFT 13 in Geneva on the topic of networks, foresight and strategic surprise. It was an extraordinary event, one of the best I’ve been to in years. I highly recommend going if you haven’t already. Summary of my talk In the talk I went over two different approaches to dealing with change, being agile versus being anticipatory, and showed how we often get blinded to change around us. Then I showed how the creative use of strategic foresight, particularly role playing and simulation games and experiential scenario planning, can help us overcome some of the psychological and social limitations limitations which blind us. I ended with a call for more creative use of “design foresight”, i.e., design fictions, rapid prototyping, artefacts from the future, and an exploration of networked foresight approaches (including my own Futurescaper platform and a recent project on Post-Car(d) Urbanism I’m doing with colleagues in Stockholm). You can read a great live write-up of my talk here by Stephanie Booth, who has several summaries of other talks on her blog. Reflections It was an amazing event and all the LIFT 13 speakers and crew were truly inspiring. I spoke in a session on “Resilience and Resistance” with Venkatesh Rao (whom I’ve been a fan of for a while) and Konstantina Zoehrer, queen of the Greek start-up scene. It was also the first time I tried out my “all video slides” method of presentation, so let me know what you think. More on that later. Some of my other favourite talks included:
- Mark Sorrell’s very funny talk on game interfaces
- Enthomusicologist Christopher Kirkeley’s amazing talk on African sneakernets and shareable music culture
- Micah Daegle’s talk on new metaphors for digital governance
- Max Stern’s interesting take on participatory politics in the digital age
- Caroline Drucker’s talk on the economics and community dynamics of Etsy was fascinating
- Who could forget Justin Pickard’s awesome exploration of craft, labour and 3D printing?
- Bruce Sterling’s closing call to create design fiction theme parks was typically weird and wonderful.