A Macrohistorical View Of Better Futures
This podcast recorded last year explores the concept of futures from a macrohistorical perspective. It draws our attention to the ways in which old, centralised, mechanistic and individualistic 20th Century systems have passed their use by dates, resulting in a multitude of existential challenges. The task is to understand our past and current habits and patterns of understanding and to …
A Different Kind of Sense Making in Times of Chaos and Fake News
A plague on both your houses! I am sped. Is he gone and hath nothing? (Mercutio to Romeo in Romeo and Juliet Act 3. Sc. 1) Mercutio’s curse of frustration and anguish, as he confronts his imminent death, is in some senses echoed by many across the globe as they confront seemingly unpalatable and opposing choices. Does one, on the …
The Decentralisation Revolution: Now no-one and everyone can own networking power
Perhaps the line of logic here is a bit complicated but in my view the line of logic will be repeated again and again in the next few years. It goes as follows: When the internet was first developed two important principles were central to its design. The first was that the internet as conceived by Robert E Kahn and …
Probing Ephemeral Futures: Scenarios as Fashion Design
I was involved in producing the following article after attending the Oxford Forum for the Future 2014 on the intersection of scenarios and design. For those of you of more academic mind – enjoy. For those of you who are not so inclined, basically it suggests that if all that matters is the 24 hour news cycle we must as …
The big silence
About the time of this last post I decided to do a PhD that critiques the work of Jeremy Rifkin and in particular his work on the Third Industrial Revolution. I chose to do it under the supervision of Sohail Inayatullah a globally renowned futures thinker, philosopher and more recently UNESCO Chair of Future Studies, using macro history as a …
The future of food
Until now most conversations about the future of food focus almost exclusively on the issues of production. In this short video, based on a keynote given to an Australian Regional Agribusiness Forum I argue that a more nuanced debate is required; one that looks at the dynamics and required shifts of at least five different ways that value flows from …
The transformation challenge for the Property Sector: Rethinking form and space in the 21st Century.
The form and space of our cities reflects what we have valued and what we value. The banks with their Roman or Greek columns, churches with spires and formal botanic gardens say much about what our 19th century forebears valued and aspired to. So too, the Mechanic’s Institutes, the surprisingly enduring 50’s state house and the large cloned shopping mall …
Re-imagining Christchurch as a 21st century CBD
In November, the Chinese held their 18th National Party Congress. As the debate focused on a new era of leadership, one of the key influences was Jeremy Rifkin’s bestseller the 3rd Industrial Revolution. Perhaps its lessons already in currency in Europe, might well apply to the reframing and rebuilding of Christchurch’s new CBD as well? Lets consider: Getting …
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