Speculative Design & Futures https://xitter.cf/t.co/2fUvllNrtB + https://xitter.cf/t.co/kv4nuupaqB, Optimizing Happiness https://xitter.cf/t.co/fPiPgIl8nu
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We live in a time where the speed of change is profound, and accelerating. This creates "Possibility Dilation", where all possibilities could arrive sooner. #SpeculativeDesign becomes an essential for organizations to understand and prepare for all potentials. #design #nkd
A useful idea about the future should sound a little ridiculous the first time you say it. Anything that already sounds reasonable is usually just the present wearing a later date. The futures worth preparing for tend to arrive first as the ones everyone is quick to laugh off.
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
Surprised @TheLancet published such unscientific polemic. This on the heels of the new ER-100 results reminds me of when @NYT predicted powered flight could take a million yrs, just 69 days before the Wright brothers flew.
“Several renowned experts told me” is what people write when they lack evidence. Expect more articles from the establishment as we make progress. People often fear what they don’t understand.
ICYMI:
“There are two delusions driving the world of longevity: the first is that ageing in humans is as malleable, or plastic, as it is in roundworms, fruit flies, and mice. The human body, the product of millions of years of evolution, is not, as our tech overlords believe, a programmable dataset. Several renowned biogerontologists told me that a significant biotech mediated expansion of human lifespan is unlikely in the foreseeable future: the longevity industry is a goldrush without gold. The second delusion is that longevity is primarily a scientific, or medical, concern. It is not.” 🙈
"The longevity industry exists to exploit humanity, not to save it." - Seamus O'Mahony writes @TheLancet
Or, as he puts it, "the longevity industry is a goldrush without gold."
Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater!
Of course, the field is drowning in hype and commercial interests pushing unproven interventions. But that doesn't detract from the fact that slowing human aging - even if slightly - would have enormous health and medical benefits.
Manipulating human aging may prove harder than many in the field currently promise. But aging is no doubt malleable, so let's not lose sight of the field's long-term transformative potential.
The challenge is to tell hype from science, not to dismiss the science because of the hype.
A lot of what you call emotion is you reading your own body. The heart speeds up, the gut tightens, the breath goes shallow, and the brain writes a feeling to explain it. Part of why calming the body calms the mood is that you are editing the evidence the feeling is built from.
The hardest thing for an experienced person is to be a beginner again. Most of us stop learning the day we start getting paid to be the expert. The School of Critical Design is partly a room where senior people let themselves be novices again, at imagining the future.
The word sits just out of reach. You know that you know it, you can feel its shape and almost its first letter, and still it will not come. Somewhere the brain has confirmed the memory exists while refusing to hand it over, a filing system showing you the empty folder.
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
‘A blow for environmentalists’.
No, a blow for young people and anyone who wishes to see their children grow old.
@andyburnham @JohnHealey_MP
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
Your 'doom quote' for today:
"It’s extraordinary to realise that we are witnessing the great unravelling; the beginning of the end of things. I honestly never thought I’d live to see the start of what sometimes feels like the apocalypse."
climatecodered.org/2023/06/w…
You are not going to guess the one right future. What you can do is build an organization that several of them cannot blindside. Being hard to surprise ages better than being right, because the world keeps voting on your forecast long after you made it.
When someone else will cover the downside of your risk, the risk gets cheap to take. Shield a bank or a department from its own losses and it quietly starts reaching for more of them. The safety net and the recklessness are often the same design, seen from two ends. #nkd
Every strong vision of the future seems to breed its own resistance. Name where you are going clearly enough and you hand your opponents a target, and the louder the promise the sharper the backlash. Part of futures work is planning for the pushback your own clarity creates.
What you see can quietly overrule what you hear. Watch a mouth form one sound while a different sound plays, and your brain will often side with the eyes, so you literally hear the wrong thing. Perception is a negotiation, and vision tends to win the argument.
You can now put an earbud in and hear someone speaking another language rendered into yours, roughly, a second behind. Still clumsy, but improving fast. One of the oldest walls between people, the one the Babel story is about, is quietly starting to come down.
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
“techno-optimist” scientists [engaged in] less civic actions and protests, signed fewer petitions and engaged in less advocacy, also less likely to reduce the number of flights they took, cut car usage......."
You know who you are - and should be ashamed
theguardian.com/environment/…
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
I do fear that this may be @andyburnham’s undoing.
Not solely because he’s approved these fields but that he does not understand the scale of the climate crisis and refuses to educate himself or inform the public - and this year the shit is going to hit the fan.
When lots of people die from an extreme flood or heatwave he and all politicians wont be able to say they didn’t know it was coming.
When bodies are floating down British streets climate change will suddenly become the number one issue in the country and politicians have refused to attend briefings or warn the public let alone protect us.
@nebriefing now
@AngelaRayner @bphillipsonMP @YvetteCooperMP @edballs @ShabanaMahmood @JohnHealey_MP #jackdaw
J. Paul Neeley retweeted
Global warming is accelerating.
reuters.com/sustainability/c…
A group can end up doing what no single person in it wanted. Each one goes along, guessing the others are keen, nobody says the quiet doubt out loud, and the decision builds itself out of everyone's politeness. What looks like consensus is sometimes just shared silence. #nkd
Everyone asks what will change. The more useful question is often what will still be true in ten years, because that is what you can actually build on. Trends are exciting and mostly temporary. The constants are boring and quietly decide which strategies survive the decade.
Close your eyes and touch your nose. The sense that lets you do that has no name most people know, and it runs constantly under everything, telling you where your body is without looking. You mostly notice it the moment it fails, which is the quiet work the hidden senses do.