Future Design Inquiries. July 2024

Hello from your friends at enso, a future design company.

For anyone new here, we’re sharing the things that make us think, bring us joy or shift our perspective. And we welcome your reactions, additions, and suggestions – reach out news@enso.co.

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What we’re reflecting on

These nuggets are curated by enso partners Hanna Siegel (HS) and Sebastian Buck (SB).

Relationships are the ultimate superpower

“We’ve been in an economy where knowledge was your power—your ability to put your hands on different information quickly and then synthesize it, or deliver it, was really your extra edge…and I think we’re moving from [the knowledge economy]...to the relationship economy.” That’s from LinkedIn’s Chief Economist Karin Kimbrough, speaking at Cannes Lions. But I respectfully disagree that relationships were ever a secondary asset. [Good] relationships have always been the backbone of any successful system, including an economy. A person might have all the knowledge, but if they use it or communicate it and no one cares or no one listens, its power is neutralized. For centuries, technological development has provided trade-offs for societies – usually with a net-positive outcome, often with a rocky start. But nothing – including AI – has yet changed the fact that good, meaningful relationships are necessary for progress, growth and overall wellbeing, individually and collectively. A society is, by definition, built on relationships. The ability to cultivate and maintain those is, and always has been, the ultimate superpower. (HS)

If you want to feel excited about the future

The answer is typically not, ‘check out The Economist this week’; in my house, it’s often kept face-down to avoid a surprise attack of despair. This cover story is an exception, as it outlines the economics of solar, and the mind-bending near-future reality of abundant, cheap energy. Solar generation capacity is already growing exponentially (doubling every ~3 years), and unlike other major energy transitions of the past (wood to coal, coal to oil), there’s no scarcity of the core fuel and the resources required are ‘hundreds to thousands’ of times less than what’s gone before, so the economics are likely to keep improving, almost indefinitely. Even fossil-funded politics trying to slow things down will be steamrolled by unarguable physics. “The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it … in its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination”. (SB)

What if AI helps us reconnect to each other?

Hear me out. There is a well-documented loneliness epidemic, with well-documented reasons for why it’s happening. And one of those reasons — the big one — is the hours and hours we spend in front of our screens. And a lot of that time is while we’re working by ourselves, not interacting with anyone. Writing emails, for example. Or coding, or solving IT issues, or working in a database or doing paperwork, or other administrative tasks…the list is endless. Pretty soon, these tasks aren’t going to get done by us sitting at a computer. The computer can just take care of it. Which sounds scary, and yes, it’s clear that jobs will change. But will they disappear? It seems unlikely, especially looking at these BLS charts from this excellent Andrew McAfee post, The Robots Won’t Cause Massive Unemployment This Time, Either.  Instead, they may leave us more time for the things that AI can’t do — those things that require humans collaborating with other humans. Maybe when I’m not dealing with paperwork, I’ll brainstorm with a coworker. Or talk to my husband. We’ve been so connected to our devices in part because we had to keep giving them instructions. Now, they can learn on their own. And maybe we can learn how to connect with one another as humans again. (HS)

Against optimization

Just as our world has started to experience a new era of constant rapid change, the idea of trying to optimize one’s life is at peak trendiness. Which is interesting because as Mandy Brown points out, successful optimization depends on conditions remaining static. And we don’t live in a society that enjoys that luxury. The breakthrough with AI isn’t that technology can help us be more efficient – technology has been doing that for centuries. It’s that it can adapt to changing conditions, questions and inputs. The same goes for us. Optimizing our lives is a silly goal because as soon as we do, the conditions will change. In today’s society, it is adaptability, and its cousin, resilience, that are the skills worth cultivating. (HS)

Shared fictions made us what we are, and will be

Graham Moore, best known for writing The Imitation Game, has a new book, The Wealth of Shadows. It’s a compelling tale (historical fiction, but hewing close to history) of the ingenuity that beat Hitler. We’ve heard a lot about the innovation, human bravery and sacrifice that required, but what paid for all that? John Maynard Keynes and a renegade group at the US Department of Treasury concocted billions of dollars from nothing more than a new story that we all chose to believe in. A big shared fiction became real weapons and millions of salaries. This is the same insight that Noah Yuval Harari champions: what really marks humans out is our ability to collaborate around stories: countries, companies and currencies are nothing more than stories, that if enough people believe in, become ‘real.’ So could we adjust today’s story to take care of climate change? Keynes dreamed of creating a global currency; perhaps this is how we should pay for the ~$3Trn per year required for the challenge of this generation. (SB)

The pursuit of happiness, now?

Eckhart Tolle tells us to live now. But while many of us aren’t as present as he’d suggest, our attention span is increasingly trained by social media to resemble that of a kitten, and our politics reduced to a form of pseudo-debate that’s ignorant of the past and unbothered by the infinite future. Around this time of year, Americans love to revere the founding fathers, but how many know of, or live by, the moral traditions they revered? Jeffrey Rosen’s new book, ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’ traces the founders’ quest for moral growth via classic books; for instance, both Franklin and Jefferson had similar lists of virtues for daily living, both inspired by Cicero’s ‘The Tusculan Disputations’. English writer Samuel Johnson is the source of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ language.  Of course, today we like to use the language but not the ideals. “The ancient wisdom fell out of fashion in the 1960s and in the “Me Decade” … when our understanding about the pursuit of happiness was transformed from being good to feeling good.”  In the sugar rush of all our now-ness, could we find time to make wisdom more accessible and delicious? (SB)

8 things that made us think, gasp, share and laugh:

• Short videos of conversations that never took place between people who never met. Like Will Smith & Chris Rock. Elon & Kanye. Genius. 
• This piece by Rory Sutherland, Is Everything BS? (Behavioral Science…and also Bullshit)
• Keith Houston’s website and book, Shady Characters, which charmingly chronicles the origins of things like punctuation marks and emojis. Interested in Roman history x grammar? Check out the story behind the ampersand. 
• Elephants have their own names.
• Jon Rafman’s Nine Eyes of Google Street View (h/t ensonian Maya Cohan)
• Live Near Friends, a real estate site dedicated to helping you and your friends find places to live near each other. 
• This piece on small but impactful innovations to help with extreme heat – and the people who built them. Read about an app to help people find relief from heat, an insurance program that pays working women when it’s too hot to work and local laws protecting outdoor workers on unbearably hot days
• Will Paris escape the Olympic curse? Its innovative Olympic Village might mean that not only does the Olympics not hurt the city, but it could actually help it (unheard of…) for years to come. 

What we’re working on

enso is a small, senior team so that we can work on just a few initiatives at a time. This allows us to go deep on some of the biggest challenges/ opportunities. Recently, we’ve been working on a few main missions with our partners:

1. The business case for work wellbeing: Showing how companies that prioritize employee wellbeing outperform the market – and spreading the word. 
2. Design The Future book: Distilling wisdom from those actively designing and creating the future, from a wide variety of fields. We hope to complete this in 2024.
3. A brand to radiate optimism: We think restoring optimism in the world is essential. We're exploring building a product, content and community brand around this idea.
4. Radical leap stories in Africa: Uncovering the stories of Kenyans creating and solving with technology.
5. Reforming the world of work: Bringing the world’s talent leaders together to build a better world of work.
6. Helping anyone build their future: How can we enable any entrepreneur to build their future through a business that can reach the world? 

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All photos by Sebastian Buck.

See you next time.

enso • 115 W California Blvd #9101 Pasadena, CA 91105