Uncomfortable Talk: Digital Disruption

We‘ve recently been invited to Vienna by our friends at LHBS to give a talk for the Uncomfortable Talks series. We called it ‘Digital Disruption – How technology is changing our cities, our work and our media’. The video is now available. Have a look. Read more about it here and here. 

What Does Technology Want?

Steven B. Johnson (with Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (with What Technology Wants) have both released new books that I desperately want to read. Both joined Robert Krulwich (from my favorite podcast/radioshow Radiolab) on stage recentely for an interview about some of the greater questions:

In a world of rapidly accelerating change, from iPads to eBooks to genetic mapping to MagLev trains, we can’t help but wonder if technology is our servant or our master, and whether it is taking us in a healthy direction as a society.

• What forces drive the steady march of innovation?
• How can we build environments in our schools, our businesses, and in our private lives that encourage the creation of new ideas—ideas that build on the new technology platforms in socially responsible ways?

There’s an edited audio version available from Radiolab, too. 

The Future of Money and Collaborative Consumption

With the financial crisis and stuff, there has been some great thinking about where our whole money system is heading. 

Venessa Miemis and Gabriel Shalom (of KS12-fame) got together to produce a video about the future of money for a keynote presentation at the SIBOS Conference in Amsterdam. They basically interviewed a lot of interesting people and edited a great selection of quotes from them. A great conversation starter although it seemed to fall pretty flat with the banker crowd at SIBOS, unsurprisingly. 

There is a class of young, intelligent, creative people who are disillusioned with the debt-based monetary system, and are busy building the infrastructures for a commons-based economy, which is emerging, right now, in parallel to what currently exists. The foundation of this economy is built on trust… and transparency…. and the ability of distributed networks to self organize. And using the Web as a grounds for experimentation, we’re learning more effective ways to link unmet needs with unused resources, innovate, generate wealth, and build resilient communities.

This is the prototype of the future. This is where the opportunities are.

Venessa Miemis

Rachel Botsmann has researched and written a great book called ‘What’s mine is yours – The Rise of Collaborative Consumption’. She took an in-depth look at how technology is enabling alternatives to the basic goods/services-for-money model. 

Pressing environmental concerns and the global financial crisis has led to a questioning of the health (in all dimensions of the word) of consumerism on a scale we have never seen before. We are feeling a sense of emptiness, a distrust with ‘big’, and turning once again to each other. The phenomenal growth of Facebook and farmers markets may not seem connected but they are. We are seeking to be a part of a community of people with a shared interest (both in the physical and virtual worlds); to feed the part of us that seeks connection and belonging. It’s a perfect storm of drivers fusing together to create “The Big Shift”; away from the 20th Century defined by hyper-consumption, towards the 21st century, the age of Collaborative Consumption. It’s a new era marked by trust between strangers, access over ownership and the primacy of experience over “more stuff.

Rachel Botsmann

With the trust in our financial systems at an all-time low, these two videos can help us start thinking about future alternative that are already emerging. 

The Story of Eames Furniture

Marilyn Neuhart is the author of The Story of Eames Furniture. This beautiful video has her talking about all kinds of details from working with and researching on Charles and Ray Eames. 

In this video, I stumble about the same aspect that already got me thinking at the Dieter-Rams-exhibition ‘Less and More’: We marvel at these geniuses but tend to overlook the incredible community of people they surrounded themselves with. 

You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

Jim Rohn

Michael Karnjanaprakorn mentioned this quote in a recent interview and it got me thinking ever since. This idea that we need a good and strong community to excel in our work is what got me to Berlin. 

The collected jeffstaple insights

Here are a couple of video interviews with jeffstaple that I collected over the years.

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