April 11, 2007
Critical Life Path
Media A (via via Visual Complexity) has a fascinating diagram of events in the life of a fictional designer living from 1990-2090. It mixes personal development ("Learn early networking skills at kindergarten", "Go back to school and study nanotechnology") and trends ("Child plays with HAM II: mother-in-law objects", "24-hour business and recreation hubs", "Prada fashion and Monsanto agribusiness join forces for hostile takeover of big corporation"), showing how they affect each other.
It is a mixture between plausible possibilities and bisarre wildcards, which makes it ring very true. Airport hub universities and pausing groups sounds like good ideas already. Memory telescopes, Greenpeace reincorporating as Greenpeace Innovation Design Ltd, business models for design in multiple universes, why not? Weirder things have happened. Most future speculation tries to be grounded in known facts and trends, which makes it miss the totally new trends. This design-biased play seems to come up with several good ideas.
Maybe this kind of inventive life map is something we all ought to do? Based on what we think is likely or possible, we should draw possible future lives. Maybe What If could be another inspiration. Another interesting approach is Dandelife, where people can enter their life stories. That is intended for Web 2.0 autobiography, but it could easily be extended for making potential or proactive autobiographies.
As for myself, I have known since I was about 5 that I'm going to end up as a planetary information network.
Posted by Anders3 at April 11, 2007 12:41 PM