The Future of Offices

I just came to think about how offices will look in the future; if there will be such things as offices. On my way home, I had this idea if I would start a small company, to redecorate my apartment just as an office, with a hidden bed. In bigger cities, where central housing is relatively expensive, I guess it could be an idea, if still a bit radical. It also had me think about one of my childhood apartments, where my room was a separated room from the other parts of the apartment, originally built for servants. These architectures are kind of a funny, obsolete thing, but in the future, I guess the same apartments could be used for one living and one business area. Maybe this doesn’t seem to be anything to pay the least attention to, but I still think it’s cool to see how changes in our society and our behavior have visual, concrete manifestations.


This is kind of what I had in mind, if I would redecorate my apartment to look like an office ;)

Lecture by Professor Ronald Jones

Tonight’s lecture was held by a really cool looking professor named Ronald Jones. He talked about micro trends in education and design, and the results of mono-, multi, inter- and trans disciplinary work. It seems a bit unnecessary to repeat everything he said, but if I would emphasize just one thing, it was some things he said about creativity and the birth of ideas. I’ve always wondered how you can explain the process of how you come up with ideas. To me, it seems that it is something that just appears out of nothing. In a second, you just have a business idea or such and can’t explain why. It is almost something like god given.

Professor Jones told us about how the left and right brain halves function. There seems to be a change of strategy in the brain, when one unconsciously is about to give up, to broaden the search, and when this happen, you come up with the idea that actually works. If it’s true, it says something about how brilliant the human body and mind is. To brilliant to fully grasp, even.

The Future Medicine Gadgets

I just found this kind of cool blog/website on futuristic medicine gadgets.

http://medgadget.com

Take a look! It may be something for all the medstudents in this class.

Ideal Beauties of the Future

Today, our project group briefly – and kind of off topic – discussed what kind of ideal beauty we will have in the future. As all of us know, every different age has its own ideal beauty. Thick, thin, tall, short, pale, dark. Here are some pictures I found on Google to remind you all. As always when talking about ideal beauties, women are always in focus.


I wouldn’t say it’s fully accurate to say that the zeitgeist today is to find a sun bleached, thin blonde with silicone D-cups, tripping along the beach of Los Angeles in some skimpy, red baywatcher’s swimsuit. But I wouldn’t say it’s fully inaccurate either. To me, I think this stereotype woman looks synthetically. A long time ago, I heard of a theory that says ideal beauties have features that indicates that they don’t have any major disease. No abnormalities are common for ideal beauties. If you’d morph thousands of ordinary people’s pictures together, it would make a pretty attractive person.



Another anecdote I came to think about, when thinking about the busty, thin sunbleached blonde, is the story of Charles Darwin and the peacocks. Darwin was said to be puzzled by these birds and their long beautiful tails. At first, he couldn’t see how they fitted into his evolutionary theory. He then talked about sexual selection and that the long tail offered an advantage in the mating game.

I really don’t know how to think of that blonde girl. I’d say that her disproportional body doesn’t look too healthy, and therefore shouldn’t be attractive. In the future, I think the borders between health care and beauty industry will fade, and that we will do things to ourselves that make us healthy and therefore more sexually attractive. Today, the beauty industry with implants and such, imply medical risks, while in the future, such bodily modifications should start with improving the health and in that process, making you an ideal beauty. A natural beauty will be the ideal beauty of the future. I just suspect we must put a lot of effort in making ourselves look like that natural beauty though.

Finally, a tribute to my all time favourite model and actress, Marilyn Monroe. As you can see, she was not only drop dead gorgeous, she was also weight lifting from time to time and looking pretty healthy. She was actually said to be a borderline case – that is – severely mentally challenged. That's true, looks aren't everything. I’d put up with lots of crazy shit for that girl though =)

2001: A Space Odyssey

Today, I and my friend Philip, who you may know about now, watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, by the famous Stanley Kubrick. It was great, as always. I've seen it many times before. If you want to know what the film is about, please visit Philips blog Anacott. He wrote this very long post about it, so I will not. Blogging is all shortcuts ;)

Full information

Since my blog post yesterday was rather brief, I felt I ought to provide links with more information on what happened in Kauhajoki, Finland. Most of the articles provide the same information and new reporting are being done constantly.

Article by CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/09/23/finland.school.shooting/index.html?eref=edition

Articles by Dagens Nyheter (Swedish):
(1) http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=148&a=831903
(2) http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=148&a=831835
(3) http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=148&a=831889
(4) http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=148&a=831863
(5) http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=148&a=831750

Article by Al Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2008/09/2008923141243515946.html

Article by BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7630969.stm

Article by New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/world/europe/24finland.html?ref=europe

Article by Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b43bac9a-8951-11dd-8371-0000779fd18c.html

I will now leave this subject and the two young Finnish gun men. Needless to say, our deepest sympathies are with the familys of those who lost their life to this tragedy.

A New School Shooting in Finland

I was chocked when I saw the today’s headlines. Just thirteen days ago, I mentioned the tragic school shooting in Jokela, Finland. Today, yet another school shooting occurred in the same country. It seems obvious that the 22-year old culprit was heavily influenced by the last school shooting. He killed 10 people and then commited suicide. This picture was published on the website of Aftonbladet. This culprit also posted videos on YouTube prior to the shootings. Just compare it to the picture on Pekka-Eric Auvinen and you’ll see what I mean. The shooting today is awful, tragic and says something important about our contemporary world. It further suggests that it is just a matter of time until something similar will happen in Sweden.



I don’t think it’s morally uncomplicated to publish this picture. Media in general and the internet in particular, plays an important role in these dramas. I think it’s inevitable today that these pictures are being published. Our norms of these things have changed. Yet, in a way I think this can trigger other violently depressed people. I don’t have a solution on how to prevent these tragic acts of terror. I just hope this won't be a driving force for new school shootings. Tragically, I think it will.

Life's Getting Better

Yesterday the poet Bruno K. Öijer released Svart som silver (Black as Silver). It is the first book in seven years. In many bookstores, it was sold out just hours after the release. I happen to buy a copy yesterday. I just read it. I am delighted and quite surprised on how bright and cheerful this collection of poems is. What caught my attention the most in the underlying theme is the agony from the loss of a beloved woman. She’s the shadow and the light of the collection itself. These poems are poetry as it’s best – painful, passionate and yet so utterly, utterly beautiful. I usually don’t use this kind of adjectives to describe something I appreciate, but this time I can’t stress it enough. The artist seems to have come to a closure – with lost love, with all meaningless people, with all evil and, in the very last pages, even with him and how he is portrayed.

In the future, this man will be cherished as one of Sweden’s best poets of all times – på den vänstra handens fingrar.



I was in such a good mood yesterday I also bought some dope ass wine. Saturday night I plan to intoxicate my fellow trendspotter and good friend Philip. He’s a non-drinker, usually, so I am not sure if I’ll succeed. Only time will tell. ;-)

Outcasts and Future Housing

This morning I watched a debate on SVT. The moderator was Pär Westerberg, former leader of Folkpartiet Liberalerna, now working for the Red Cross. The topic was housing for the homeless and it touched upon the complexity of the problem. Should one for instance plan for extremely plain apartments so that the people outside the common society (drug addicts, the mentally troubled, the very sick and the poor) can afford them? On the one hand, it’s naïve to think these people can do well on the unregulated market, where these people have totally other preconditions than the vast majority of people. On the other hand, such apartments would certainly be new-built ghettos. I’m not fully sure which way to go. I guess it’s a choice between making a point and making a difference. If I had to chose, I’d built the ghettos. I’m very pragmatic in that sense. I try to picture myself homeless and needing a fix just to feel alive. I’d think it would be perfectly fine with living in a ghetto at that point. Baby steps are better than no steps at all.



In order to move on, you must have a starting point somewhere. Whole societies similar to Christiana in Copenhagen might be useful and more common in the future. A ghetto is defined as: "portion of a city in which members of a minority group live especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure”. Christiana ought to be regarded as mainly a result of social pressure. Economic pressure could make rise to other types of ghettos, new-built ones. Such could reduce the threshold of getting back to a meaningful life, I think, even if we'd hope for an even better solution. At least, thinking differently is a first step of thinking better.

I, Robot and the year of 2035

Normally being quite picky with which films I rent, yesterday evening was kind of liberating. I and Philip (friend, class-mate and source of Anacott) rented I, Robot – The Will Smith version. I’ve never read Isaac Asimov’s collection of short stories with the same title, but I assume that it is something else than this blockbuster junk. It was a good evening though, and – as planned – we had some ideas about the future.



The movie itself is basically about robot development going out of hands. The first law of the robots is to never hurt a human being. But as the robots develop their thinking, they realize that some people must be eliminated in order to maximize the safety of people. The robots go for revolution. “You are so like children – you need to be protected from yourselves”, one robot states. And then there is a very special robot, named Sonny, who has developed feelings, hopes and emotions. He has an odd, kind of cute personality. He goes to sleep and says that he had even had dreams. He resists the harsh, cold hearted rationality of the robots and becomes something like a hero.

The thing I remember the most about I, Robot is the heavy product placement for Converse, Audi, FedEx and JVC. It is so apparent, it becomes comical. At the same time, I think this kind of embedded advertising will become more common in the future. As we are flooded with advertising, we learn to neglect most of it. And therefore, public relations, corporate social responsibility and masked marketing will replace traditional marketing in the future.

What also struck me with I, Robot, is the nostalgic tone that seems normative for work in the genre. Will Smith’s character wears 2004 vintage Converse shoes, uses an old JVC system and rides a gas driven motorcycle.

If we see I, Robot as a prediction of the year 2035, we can instantly notice that it is most occupied with thinking of gadgets and yes, robots, instead of behavioral changes and other invisible trends. In the movie, almost everyone is a stereotype from today. The black old woman is the stereotype of the black old woman of today. The alpha male stereotype, the business man stereotype, the researcher stereotype – all is represented with no adjustments from how it is today. That’s why the film isn’t interesting.

And besides, in 2035 I think that Converse, JVC, FedEx and Audi are lucky if they still exist. And Hollywood blockbusters won’t probably exist either, as today. I’d love to see what I’ll be like.

9/11

Seven years ago terrorists crashed planes into World Trade Center in New York. Five years ago the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh died from the stabbing the day before. Twenty-five years ago Salvador Allende was thrown over by Augusto Pinochet.

This date is a disgrace to mankind.

Fear and Terror

My poll on which work that told us the most about the future will expire in just hours. My candidates were: Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell [1948], 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick [1968], Brave New World, Aldous Huxley [1932], Blade Runner, Ridley Scott [1982] and Back to the Future, Steven Spielberg [1985]. At the moment, Back to the Future is in the lead. It has two votes or 40 percent of all the votes. But it ain’t over yet.

Literature has always been my passion. I have not read that many sci-fi novels though. In yesterday’s lecture, Nicklas Bergman briefly talked about Theodore Kaczynski also known as the Unabomber (University- and airline bomber). As you may or may not know, Kaczynski was a madman and also a social critic. He went to Harvard and other universities and was a quite clever mathematician. In his manifesto Industrial Society and its Future he is very concerned that the technology of the future will erode all human freedom.


This got me thinking of the tragic high school massacre in Jokela, Finland less than a year ago. An 18-year old, confused man named Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed 8 people in November 7, 2007. He then also shot himself. The day before the occurrence, he posted a sort of “press kit” on the Internet, including this picture of him, a YouTube-clip and a manifesto on natural selection. Luckily, Sweden has yet been spared from a tragedy of this type. Unfortunately, it think it’s somewhat a question of time, until something similar will happen here. I think it’s sad that the Internet can be used by anyone to presumably get immense attention when executing these extreme terrorist acts. I really don’t want to speculate in it, but I can’t help of thinking if this young man still would shoot these people if he knew he wouldn’t get the attention he had afterwards on the Internet.

Fear of technology and progress is perhaps the most common theme in sci-fi literature and movies. I am glad that people write books and direct films instead of blowing other people in the air, to get their points across. There is something about those books that can fascinate you. Perhaps it satisfies the same psychological need that make people go rent horror movies. Perhaps it is just that simple.

I think it's time to start dreaming about a future brighter than that.



For a couple of years, I thought Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the best books I’ve read. Today, I’d read it more as a depiction of its times and the thoughts and fears in 1948, than a prediction of our future. We always seem to be scared of the technology in the future. I think a very legitimate question is to get back and ask oneself if we can think of technologies in the past that makes us worried, and that we want to have undone. Except for the atom bomb, I can’t think of many, at least not on the whole. Even if the future can’t be predicted from the past, I think this way of thinking indicates that our fears are most often over-exaggerated.

I think that it is inevitable that we will be fully controlled and monitored in the future, resembling what is happening in Nineteen Eighty-Four. But I’m not sure this will be done in a mean spirited way as in the same book. Really. I’m not sure at all it will be something negative. I think it will reduce the incentives to commit crimes and make us all very safe. Perhaps your Big Brother can be your very best friend.

All We Need Is Love

I woke up to a television program on UR, SVT. I don’t know what the name of the program was, but it was quite interesting. The theme of the documentary seemed to be about language and the origin of man. There were some stuff about Lucy and the first humans. I think I now have come to a stage where I think of the future with a very selective perception. When I saw the program this morning I thought not of the monkey-people long time ago, but how their behavior can make us predict the very distant future.



Yesterday, when eating sushi to lunch with my group members, I once said that our morals and behavior change dramatically over time. Even short time. For you who know Swedish I’d like to quote Hjalmar Söderberg’s Doktor Glas:

”Moralen hör till husgerådet, inte till gudarna. Den skall begagnas; den skall inte härska. Och den skall begagnas med urskillning, ‘med ett litet saltkorn’. Det är klokt att ta seden dit man kommer; det är enfaldigt att göra det med övertygelse. Jag är en resande i världen; jag ser på människornas seder och tar upp vad jag har bruk för. Och moral kommer av ”mores”, seder; den vilar helt och hållet på seden, bruket; den har ingen annan grund.”

I will not try to translate this into English, since I couldn’t do it righteous. Even with the ongoing globalization, I think most people will have one native tongue; usually the language we first are accustomed to as newborns. To me, all languages have different tones. Translations never tell you everything. At its best, it tells you the same thing in a different way. If I’d try to say what the Swedish quote was about, in its essence, I would say that it learns us that morals do not reflect what is right and wrong, but what is said to be right and wrong.

To get back to the sushi lunch, I told my group mates that even our great grandfathers and great grandmothers would think we are all sluts, if they would see us all today, sometimes changing boy- and girlfriends as often as we buy new shoes. I have always been somewhat puzzled by how most Swedish people do not believe in God, but as the same time go to church to marry the man or woman they love; swearing to love this person in eternity in front of this God they don’t believe in. There is a very funny dialogue in the L'Étranger by Albert Camus. The protagonist’s girlfriend asks him if he loves her. “I don’t think so”. “Will you marry me?” she then asks. “Sure”. The really funny thing is, I don’t know who he most weird, him or us.

I’m not a religious man, but I have always loved the idea of monogamy. For some years, I have questioned this, thinking I have just been indoctrinated by some obsolete religious brain wash. That’s why I was so delighted this morning, when I heard about the homo erectus. They were the first human species that lived in pairs, long before religion.

“Man ska inte vara ensam. Man ska inte vara många. Man ska vara två”,

Hjalmar Söderberg once said.

I think about the monkey-people, living together two and two thousands of years ago. That’s why we’ll still live in pairs with the person we love, after all religion is gone. We don’t need it. All we need is love.

The Future of Drugs

Yesterday, I saw the movie Spun from 2002 directed by Jonas Åkerlund. It deals with a couple of methamphetamine junkies and includes some strong language, violence and pervasive drug content. I saw it with my brother who visited me for the weekend. Since he is a physician, I asked him what he thought about the future of medicine. He thought that we, in the future, will have individually composed medicines. It is a lot happening in the research of medicine every day. The specializations a doctor can choose from are presently based on organ specific topics. In the future these specializations will most likely be interconnected. In the near future, there will also probably be instruments regulating the dosage to be perfect within the body. In longer terms, one vision is that hospitals will be unnecessary, since medical care will shift to only preventive measures.



This morning, there was a documentary on SVT about people diagnosed with ADHD. Today, such people are treated with small doses of amphetamine. Even though the dose is about 1/50 what an amphetamine addict takes, the treatment is pretty controversial. Not only ADHD, but many other diagnoses, are treated with medicine, which are classified as narcotics if not prescribed by a doctor.

Why is it so that same chemical substances are considered to be either poison or medicine? Looking at the Swedish and English version of Wikipedia, I’ve found that the definition and classification of narcotic drugs differ between languages. What constitutes the belief that a substance is either something hurtful or something helpful? Is it the side effects, the social effects, or maybe only our current traditions? I would say that it is a difficult question with many legal, ethic and technological considerations to reflect upon. It will, more importantly, be a bigger topic in the future as our medical opportunities expand.



Today, the use of another group of medicine, antidepressants, increases. It is not only used to treat major depressions but also anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, and chronic pain. What is legitimate to treat with medicine? Technology will certainly advance in the future. The question is, will our ethics also change?

Our Perception of the World

I started reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan today; The New York Times Bestseller dealing with everything we know about we don’t know. Taleb gives the impression of a talented and well-read author. A smart guy, basically. Reading just the first chapters gets you going. One basic point in Taleb’s reasoning is that anything can happen. History does not crawl, it makes jumps. The future cannot longer be predicted from past times experiences.

“I had been told in high school that the planets are in something called equilibrium, so we did not need to worry about the stars hitting us unexpectedly. To me, that eerily resembled the stories we were told about the “unique historical stability” of Lebanon. The very idea about assumed equilibrium bothered me. I looked at the constellation at the sky and did not know what to believe”. (Taleb, 2007).

It’s kind of a scary thought, indeed. If you really come to think about it, it seems more likely than ever that we’re all going to fall victim to some mass destruction weapon fired by some powerful lunatic in Extremistan. People have always had such dystopian fears, even in the most idyllic environments. And since we’re still all happy and alive, such fears and claims seem presently kind of stupid. I guess it will all be a big surprise for us when the bomb blows =)



Anyway, we talked, amongst other things, about visible and invisible trends on today’s lecture. It was said that invisible trends have greater impact than visible ones. When thinking about the future, people mainly think at gadgets and technology, rather than behavioral changes. Behavioral and taste-based changes seem harder to predict, but far more interesting, I think. If you look at paintings from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, you’ll notice that most of his ideas about the future concerns technology, movement and machines; instead of human beings. The futurists are already a bit old-fashioned in that sense, I guess.

Finally, I came to think about how our perception of the world changes quite literary. Have a look at a couple of these old world maps and see what I mean.

A Tribute to the Imagination of Man

I just got back from another course taught by the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, called Ideation. The courses seem, partially, connected. This was one of the pictures shown in the lecture, a one wheel motorcycle invented by a young fellow at MIT.



You’ll probably kill yourself if you try to ride one of those, but I like the picture as such. It challenges our way of thinking about what a motorcycle is. It’s very beautiful, in that sense.

Development requires dissidents.

That is always worth remembering. And I’ll come back to that later. Meanwhile, enjoy one of the best songs ever written as a tribute to the imagination of man.

Back to the Future

Today will be the beginning of this trend spotting and future thinking blog. You random reader, ending up here by chance or destined, should know I was put under the obligation to start this blog for a future thinking course taught at Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden. Nevertheless, it’ll be a fun opportunity to let loose of some of my crazy ideas about the future and let you all know about it.

At this point, all I really know about the future is that it is unpredictable. Still, I don’t thing blogging about it is contradictory. I think it is a perfectly logical and inevitable thing to do. Curiosity and imagination is what makes us different from the dead. Man is allegedly the only animal that thinks about the future. It is what makes us great.

Futurum exaktum is a verb tense in the Swedish language, expressing something completed in the future. “It will be like that in 2010”.



Since the future is so highly unpredictable, almost any statement about it should be bold and brave. Even the most well known and visionary predictions about our future tend to be partially comical over time. Just a few years after the real 1984, the Berliner Mauer fell, probably making the world more open that it had ever been. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner from 1982, people fly spaceships and make phone calls from phone booths. In all times, man thinks of himself as very visionary while in retrospect being kind of narrow-minded. Therefore, I think the most outrageous ideas about the future often can be the most reasonable.

Our way of thinking, our preferences and our minds are constantly changing. Horace Engdahl, the guy who announces who won the Nobel Prize in literature each year, claims in Meteorer (1999): “As Charles Rosen has stressed, there is no audience for past time’s popular music. Just the odd ones survive. We don’t listen to the charming Moscheles but Beethoven, who once was considered odd on the verge to inaccessible”. [My own crummy translation].

As I said, I think that the most outrageous ideas often are the most reasonable. Hence, I hope to be able to come up with some really crazy shit during the coming weeks. I promise to come back to you as soon as I can. Please come back! You’re utmost welcome! =)