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Here is a little text taken from the PowerPoint presentation
lecture.<br><br>
... The environment in which politics functions has not made adequate
progress over the past century. Culture developed from a world in
which kings ruled, landowners enslaved, and citizens elected.
Politics became a means for people to determine how they wanted to be
governed. But politics does not always work, and eventually
stagnated in the 20th Century. <br>
<br>
Politics is not futuristic enough. What is vastly needed is a strategic
crafting of politics that is inclusive of the best ideas we have, across
political boundaries, and sculpts these ideas into a plan of action that
actually deals head-on with issues. <br>
<br>
What I thought about when I once ran for office, and what I think about
today, is the development of a new political system that is non-partisan
and trans-political. By this I mean a transition stage in which we
cultivate better ways to assess how society views issues and how those
issues affects society. One big question is how to get everyone’s
opinion, not just those who vote and not just those who are
elected. Could it be accomplished through a blogocracy? <br>
<br>
A blogocracy would preview the blog’s reputation systems for recognizing
authenticity of people, bonding for people of the same social circles,
and of bridging people in different circles. The non-partisan blogocracy
would emerge as a trend of nomothetic and diplomacy-based referendums for
voting on issues through pervasive computing environments. This would
help enable instant feedback and communication between people in diverse
cultures going through diverse situations in their own personal
lives. The ubiquitous environment would produce rapid
multi-cultural communication networks with instantaneous discussions,
idea building and selection of choices on dealing with issues
(voting). This communications produces a broader understanding and
cooperation through online politics.<br>
<br>
Another idea concerns voting on issues rapidly by using molecular logic
gates which would be a level of molecular nanotechnology as a novel
format for computing power. The application would be rapid, it
would be efficient, and it would be time-conscious and independent from
bureaucratic waste.<br>
<br>
So this leaves the onus on the person, the individual to determine for
him or herself where taxes goto feed the children in Africa, toward
desalination of water, national security, or alternative energy, for
example. The point, which is so necessary for us to consider, is
whether critical thinking is a skill that people can practice in a
networked idea-exchange around the world. But if people don't have
the skill of critical thinking, it is not going to work. <br>
...<br><br>
What we can be sure of is that change will continue happening and we need
to design the means for breaking away from constraints and limitations
that keep us from realizing the fact that <i>we can design our future</i>
– barring an unforeseen catastrophe. What we need is an economic
strategy to distinguish plausible from implausible claims about
technologies such as molecular nanotechnology.<br>
<br>
In order to explain the role of the futurist as global designer,
Buckminster Fuller, the famed architect and futurist, and comes to
mind. He strove to see the big picturethe dynamics of the world
and growing population. He was a designer who believed that the
Earth's many problems could be solved by individual thinking and applied
effort. He called this effort the “comprehensive anticipatory design
science” which incorporates whole systems thinking in doing more with
less. Fuller’s whole systems thinking advocated using nature’s own
principles of design as a never-ending flow. This never-ending flow
reminds me of the futurists’ notion of the continuous cycle of
change.<br>
<br>
But design’s complex adaptive system is what I'm most interested in here
today. And I believe Walt brought that up by talking about systems
and complexity. Complexity and adaptive systems are happening
simultaneously and “it” [design’s complex adaptive system] is that moment
when the adaptation takes place and the variables suddenly form new
patterns. And those new patterns start forming balancing and
reinforcing loops that, in turn, form new patterns. This is
happening simultaneously as the world is becoming more prepared for the
full automation and the perpetual adaptation for the change of
nanotechnology. But I don't want to take this too far out of focus
on the adapting systems, its agents and the variables that are forming
themselves. I want to bring it back to what we can do with the
brainpower that we have here in discussing global design and our
future. <br>
<br>
In 1982, I met Bucky Fuller. He was holding a conference on the
World Game plan. Adjacent to the stage was a big map and people
would come up from the audience and start moving symbolic shapes
representing products and commerce in the different locations around the
planet. Each one had a formula of how they had to make the world
work together and they bargained, they bartered, they traded, they
negotiated. <br>
<br>
And they came up with ways that each location could produce something
that would benefit the other area, knowing full well that a lot of the
problem in the world is getting the resources to the people in
need. What they did was to form linkslike bridgeswhere they
recognized a problem and use the symbolic shapes representing different
products, whether it was agriculture or technology or education, to
remedy the problem. It made a beautiful design. It was then
that I made up my mind that design is not just essential to the futureit
is our future. <br>
<br>
Another creative thinker, Bruce Mao, produced a project called Massive
Change. What Bruce is doing in Canada is figuring out ways to
explain, through the art world’s museums, how change happens on many
different fronts. But he's not looking at it as a transhumanist or
a futurist with the perspective that <i>proaction</i> is what needs to
take place <i>now</i> in determining not just the ethics (and not just
the philosophy - and not just the physical protocol of it), but what we
can do in a “game plan.” <br>
<br>
Today there is a software program where people come together (and they
pay a good amount of money for it) and work on games that are based on
Fuller's world game plan. It's all animated, it's electronic and
you can be in person, or through the net, and take on different
roles. So you are given a card and you join the team. You
don't know what your role is going to be but you have the card and you
find out that you have to trade something, maybe something that you don't
believe in. Or you have to solve a problem, maybe one that you've
already solved or one that you would never want to solve. <br>
<br>
The point here is that it's teaching people different skills and
developing communications. The reason I think this is important for
global design is that we know we have the talent, we know we have the
skills, we know we have the opportunity. What we don't know is
whether or not we can work together because of a lot of the biases. I
think that Wrye [Sententia] was mentioning that in regard to sentence
structures and how even in one sentence we might not grasp the same
meaning. It’s how we phrase words and how we build design that will
make a difference in how we communicate together.<br>
<br>
A shape can take many different forms. It can be angular, move
around, gyrate one way or another, become a spiral, move up and down and
around, and form many vortexes and apexes from which to create new
designs, new complex adaptive systems and new ways of dealing and
thinking about things. But if we look at the world as a design as I
think Bucky Fuller did, with varied backgrounds and expertise needed to
develop a design for the future, I think that we can work towards that
end. <br>
<br>
And I think maybe one of the best ways is through storytelling. But
it's not like we have to tell the story to someone else or we have to sit
and listen to the story being told to us. Perhaps we take on the
roles. Role-playing is an excellent way, like systems thinking, to
teach each other how to deal with change and play (participate) on the
other side (opposing side). <br><br>
...<br><br>
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