Noise Between Stations

Tangible Futures

  • Principles for tangible futures

    •

    1 min read

    Tangible Futures, Part 3: Principles These are principles I’m using to develop tangible futures now… Tangible Futures are Inspirational, touching us both intellectually and emotionally. Pragmatic, optimistic in a realistic way. Innovative, they are a vision of something that is a mystery now because, by definition, we haven’t invented it yet. Strategic, describing something happening…

  • Futures studies and the importance of ‘images’

    •

    1 min read

    Tangible Futures, Part 2: The historical context The Wilson Quarterly’s Winter 2006 issue focuses on future studies and includes this historical review, Has Futurism Failed? In it the authors cite several practitioners hailing the importance of our images of the future. To me this could include our science fiction, our movies, and our political rhetoric,…

  • Tangible Futures example: Futurama

    •

    1 min read

    Sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. The social and political upheaval of the 1960’s and 1970’s may have squelched the raw optimism of previous decades, but this only made the need for inspiring visions even more important in the face of new, complex business environments. In…

  • Tangible Futures example: Earth from space

    •

    1 min read

    Stewart Brand knew the power of this photograph before it was publicly released. In 1966, “…he sold buttons which read, ‘Why Haven’t We Seen A Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?’ Legend has it that this accelerated NASA’s making good color photos of Earth from distant space during the Apollo program and that the ecology…

  • Tangible Futures example: Da Vinci’s flying machine

    •

    1 min read

    Leonardo Da Vinci possessed one of the greatest abilities to imagine the future potential for humans and work out these ideas as an engineer or designer would. It’s telling that we remember his drawings more readily than his words. Here is his pen and ink drawing of A Flying Machine from 1490…

  • Tangible Futures example: Hugh Ferriss’s delineations

    •

    1 min read

    Imagine it is the year 1900 and you own a large corporation needing offices in a major city. You want to construct a building that makes a grand statement of your financial strength and contributes to the civic infrastructure. Currently the highest buildings are about 20 stories, but you are told new construction techniques are…

  • Understanding the future in a tangible way

    •

    3 min read

    Tangible Futures, Part 1: Background I’m starting a series of posts to talk about something we’re calling Tangible Futures, which are tangible expressions of visions for the future. That might sound quite ordinary or quite esoteric depending on your point of view, but having worked on it for several months I’m finding it to be…