Panorama - The exhibition newspaper

PANORAMATHE EXHIBITION NEWSPAPER

“ The future is already here – it‘s just not evenly distributed.” – William Gibson, 1999

English Edition Konstantin Grcic – Panorama 22.03. – 14.09.2014

LIFE SPACE How will we live, and with whom ? / Cell or world-bubble ? / A house printed in 3D / The immesurable need for non-communication / How small is too small ? 2

WORK SPACE The revolution of industrial design / Where did my office go ? / Will robots take our jobs ? / The internet as collective memory / Is creativity the new capital ? 4

PUBLIC SPACE The Open City / Smart city or smart citizens ? / From digital cloud to physical nation / Migrant cosmopolitans / Who owns the city ? / Shrinking cities / The megalopolis society 6

Konstantin Grcic is one of the most influential designers of our time. With “Konstantin Grcic – Panorama”, the Vitra Design Museum is now presenting the largest solo exhibition on Grcic and his work to date. Specifically for this exhibition, Grcic has developed several large-scale installations rendering his personal visions for life in the future: a home interior, a design studio and an urban environment. This newspaper contains specimen of research and background information, gathered during the three-year conception process of this exhibition.

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama 22.03. – 14.09.20142 LIFE SPACE

BUILDING TOWARD THE HOME OF TOMORROWJenna Wortham, “Building toward the home of tomorrow”, The New York Times, 19 January 2014 • http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/technology/building-toward-the-home-of-tomorrow.html

The concept of outfitting everyday objects with sensors and connecting them to the web, often called the “Internet of Things”, has been brewing for several years. But the announcement that Google was paying 3 billion U.S. dollars to acquire Nest, a maker of internet-connected home products, put a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval on this nascent market. […] Venture capitalists are also catching the wave, pushing close to 500 million U.S. dollars into smart-connected products and companies since the beginning of 2012. […] “the global market for connected home products could be as large as 40 billion U.S. dollars in the next five to seven years,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray. […] “This is the tipping point year,” said Alex Hawkinson, the founder and chief executive of SmartThings. “A giant statement like that from one of the top technology companies causes everyone to start thinking about the space. The big guys are waking up to the opportunity and it’s likely to accelerate.”

SOON, THE VISION GOES, EVERYTHING FROM GARDEN PRODUCTS TO BATHROOM APPLIANCES WILL BE CONTROLLED BY THE TOUCH OF A SMARTPHONE.

Jenna Wortham, “Building toward the home of tomorrow”, The New York Times, 19 January 2014 • http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/technology/building-toward-the-home-of-tomorrow.html

WHEN SMART HOMES GET HACKED…Kashmir Hill, “When ‚smart homes‘ get hacked: I haunted a complete stranger’s house via the internet”, Forbes, 26 July 2013 • http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/26/smart-homes-hack/

I haunted a complete stranger’s house via the internet. “I can see all of the devices in your home and I think I can control them,” I said to Thomas Hatley, a complete stranger in Oregon who I had rudely awoken with an early phone call on a Thursday morning. He and his wife were still in bed. Expressing surprise, he asked me to try to turn the master bedroom lights on and off. Sitting in my living room in San Francisco, I flipped the light switch with a click, and resisted the Poltergeist-like temptation to turn the television on as well. […] Thomas Hatley’s home was one of eight that I was able to access. Sensitive information was revealed, […] there was enough information to link the homes on the internet to their locations in the real world. The names for most of the systems were generic, but in one of those cases, it included a street address that I was able to track down to a house in Connecticut.

The automated home of tomorrow: How vulnerable is it to cybercrime?© Trend Micro

IS MY TOASTER SMARTER THAN ME?

Bill Wasik, “Welcome to the programmable world”, Wired, 14 May 2013 • http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/internet-of-things/

In our houses, cars, and factories, we’re surrounded by tiny, intelligent devices that capture data about how we live and what we do. Now they are beginning to talk to one another. Soon we’ll be able to choreograph them to respond to our needs, solve our problems, even save our lives. […] The idea of animating the inanimate, of compelling the physical world to do our bidding, has been a staple of science fiction for half a century or more. Often we’ve imagined the resulting objects to be perverse in their lack of intelligence, like those remorselessly multiplying brooms conjured up by Mickey Mouse in Fantasia. At other times we’ve feared the perversity that results when our things get too smart, like HAL refusing to open those damn pod-bay doors. In reality, though, just as in our programmable computers, the “intelligence” in our programmable world will never be more or less than the intelligence we can install into its far-flung moving parts.

3D-PRINTED HOUSES: FUN FOR ARCHITECTS, IRRELEVANT FOR THE REST OF US?

Ian Steadman, “3D-printed houses: fun for architects, irrelevant for the rest of us”, New Statesman, 17 January 2014 • http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2014/01/3d-printed-houses-fun-architects-irrelevant-rest-us

It’s a neat idea, sure, but don’t expect 3D printers to replace builders, bricks and mortar any time soon. Pictures of 3D-printed houses keep popping up in the news. […] The problems that researchers are having with scaling 3D printing up to the scale of houses should be pretty obvious – concrete isn’t very strong on its own. A house that’s 3D-printed might stay up […] but they’re nothing on concrete houses built with such boring, traditional things like reinforcing rebar. […] If 3D printers have a home in architecture, it will be as a tool of self-builders. Just as 3D printing is potentially great for democratising product design, it’s something that – combined with open-source architectural blueprint sites like WikiHouse – would suit the architecturally ambitious just great.

OUR CHALLENGE IN THE COMING CENTURY WILL BE TO RESIST HIDING IN THE COMFORT OF THESE SELF-MADE BUBBLES, TO REMEMBER THAT THERE WILL ALSO BE A GROWING NUMBER OF OTHER BUBBLES, LARGE AND SMALL, AND EACH ONE WILL CONTAIN PEOPLE WHO FEEL JUST AS STRONGLY AS WE DO ABOUT THEIR OWN INDIVIDUAL TRUTHS, PASSIONS, AND NEEDS.

Tad Williams, “The price of creating a connected future”, BBC Future, 27 September 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130927-challenges-of-a-connected-world

My own private mountain villa“Man ordered to remove fake mountain villa on top of Chinese tower”, Dezeen Magazine, 13 August 2013 • http://www.dezeen.com/2013/08/13/house-built-inside-a-fake-mountain-on-top-of-chinese-tower/

A Chinese businessman who built a house covered by an artificial mountain on top of a 26-storey apartment block in Peking has been told to remove it or face having it demolished. Local media sources including South China Morning Post have reported that the man spent six years creating the structure using fake rocks but real trees and grass.

THE VIEW FROM THE WINDOW…

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84. Books 1 and 2 (London, Vintage Digital, 2011), pp. 479–80

The scene outside the window suggested that the world had settled in a place somewhere midway between “being miserable” and “lacking in joy,” and consisted of an infinite agglomeration of variously shaped microcosms. On the other hand, there also existed in the world such unexceptionably beautiful views […]. In which should he place the greater faith? It was not easy for him to decide. [He …] closed the curtains, and returned to his own little world.

ONE WOULD NEED TO WRITE A HYMN TO ISOLATION. THIS WOULD EXPLORE A DIMENSION OF SOCIAL CO-EXISTENCE THAT RECOGNISES THAT PEOPLE ALSO HAVE AN IMMEASURABLE NEED FOR NON-COMMUNICATION.

Peter Sloterdijk, “Architekturen des Schaums”, Arch+, Nr. 169/170, May 2004, p. 22

Trend factor: THE NARCISSISTIC SOCIETY

W.I.R.E. Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise, Mind The Future (Zurich, NZZ Libro, 2012)

The individual is the undisputed focus of affluent societies. Although the growth of mass markets and the global standardisation of fashions underline people’s continued fundamental need to be a member of a group, we also celebrate our individuality in the desire for self-fulfilment. While in less liberal nations the strengthening of the individual is gaining importance as the basis for democracy, in the west hyper-individualisation is increasing the risk of a decline in social solidarity. The stabilisation of the notion of community will be the central challenge of the years to come.

TOKYO FLUX

Arch+ 183, Situativer Urbanismus, May 2007, p. 133

The most important thing for young Tokyoites is to live in the city. They rent a room, where they then live, or more accurately, spend the night, since the surrounding urban environment allows them to take care of the rest. In order to meet up with friends, the brasserie on the corner becomes the dining room; spaces where people meet up to have a drink, to dance or listen to music become the living room, and the gym serves as a bathroom.

Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in his Study, about 1475

© The National Gallery, London

DO YOU “LIKE” ME?

Tad Williams, “The price of creating a connected future”, BBC Future, 27 September 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130927-challenges-of-a-connected-world

Future generations will live in a world more connected in almost every way […]. Recent studies on group polarisation in cyberspace suggest […] that we become more extreme in like-minded groups, more contemptuous of differing viewpoints, than we are as individuals. Our challenge in the coming century will be to resist hiding in the comfort of these self-made bubbles, to remember that there will also be a growing number of other bubbles, large and small, and each one will contain people who feel just as strongly as we do about their own individual truths, passions, and needs. […] We will still need to think about others, and not just ourselves. In fact, as the old ways disappear, we humans will need to find entirely new ways to be neighbours.

CELL OR WORLD-BUBBLE?Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären. Plurale Sphärologie. Band III: Schäume (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004), pp. 568–69, 573

The modern apartment […] materializes the tendency towards the formation of cells, which one can identify as the architectural and topological analogue of the individualism of modern society. […] Just as the live cell in an organism embodies both the biological atom and the generative principle […], modern apartment construction brings out the habitat atom – the onespace apartment with the solitary inhabitant as the cellular core of a private world-bubble. […] Existence in a one-person apartment is nothing other than a single case of being-in-the-world, or the re-embedding, after its specific isolation, of the subject in its “lifeworld” at a spatio-temporally concrete address.

IS MICRO-LIVING HAPPY LIVING?

Jacoba Urist, “The health risks of small apartments”, The Atlantic, 19 December 2013 • http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/the-health-risks-of-small-apartments/282150/

Living in tiny spaces can cause psychological problems. […] But how small is too small? Should we allow couples to move into a space the size of a suburban closet? Can a parent and child share a place as big as a hotel room? […] Beyond the economic impact of smaller spaces, our homes also serve an important role in communicating our values and goals, or what scientists call “identity claims”. […] “When we think about micro-living, we have a tendency to focus on functional things, like is there enough room for the fridge,” explained University of Texas psychology professor Samuel Gosling, who studies the connection between people and their possessions. “But an apartment has to fill other psychological needs as well, such as self-expression and relaxation, that might not be as easily met in a highly cramped space.”

AND HOW DO YOU LIVE?Source: European Commission, Eurostat, July 2013 • http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Housing_statistics

In 2011, an 11.4 % share of the EU-28 population lived in households that spent 40 % or more of their equivalised disposable income on housing.

17.1 % of the EU-28 population lived in overcrowded dwellings.

Over seven out of every ten (70.8 %) persons in the EU-28 lived in owner-occupied dwellings, while 18.0 % were tenants with a market price rent, and 11.2 % tenants in reduced-rent or free accommodation.

40.9 % of the EU-28 population lived in flats, just over one third (34.7 %) in detached houses and 23.6 % in semi-detached houses.

Fake mountain villa on top of Chinese tower in Peking, 2013© Luo Xiaoguang/Keystone

THE EXHIBITION NEWSPAPER LIFE SPACE 3

The facade of Torre David in Caracas, 2012© Iwan Baan

THE VIRTUES OF SQUATTING

Owen Hatherley, “Communal living – forget stereotypes, it could solve the UK’s housing crisis”, Guardian, 30 October 2012 • http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/communal-living-answer-uk-housing-crisis

Collective housing is unlikely to endear itself to the government, but it’s time we look beyond our obsession with private space. Squats, long the major laboratory of experiments in group living, are being criminalised, not coincidentally at the time when they’re most needed. […] Squatting is usually – and especially now – a response to emergency, a matter of improvisation, taking somewhere dilapidated, removing the trees growing into the floorboards and getting electricity and drainage working. Like all experiments of this kind, squats can find themselves making a virtue of necessity. This wouldn’t be the case if collective housing was planned and designed.

LIVING IN A BOX?

“Life in 2050: How much space will you have to live in?”, BBC Future, 29 May 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130529-how-living-space-changes-by-2050

Already there are more than 3.5 billion people living in cities and by 2050 that figure is expected to rise to around 7.5 billion, putting new pressures on everything from transport and energy to food and infrastructure. It is also going to change your living space; specifically how much area you will have to live in.

City spaces. How the space you live in will change by 2050© 2013 BBC

Trend factor: THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS


The economic rise of India, China and Brazil is leading to the creation of a new global middle class, which will soon make up 19 % of the world’s population. 1.5 billion people will reach a level of income equivalent to the pro capita GDP of the USA in the 1950s. These new middle classes not only form the backbone of economic growth in the newly industrialised nations but also boost the global economy with their consumer behaviour. At the same time there are signs of a decline of the middle class in developed countries – with far-reaching consequences for the economy and society at large.

Torre DavidThomas Wagner, “Hausbesetzer in Venezuela: Sozialismus im Wolkenkratzer”, Spiegel Online, 31 May 2012 • http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/torre-de-david-in-caracas-chavez-leute-besetzen-hochhaus-a-834195.html

In many major cities, office blocks stand empty. In Caracas in 2007 former slum dwellers took over the vacant shell of an unfinished office tower that had remained unoccupied since the 1990s and converted it into private living space. The residents call the building Torre David (Tower of David). The tower is a vertical city in which over 2,500 people now live.

“Some neighbours say the Torre David is the highest squatted building in the world. Others see it as a slum growing upwards floor by floor. Josefina lives on the 22nd floor. She has two rooms and a kitchen for herself and her six year old son. [...] Like most of the squatters, Josefina erected a safety railing to avoid falling into the abyss.”

YOUR BET AGAINST THE SINGLE-FAMILY HOUSE?

Joel Kotkin, “Don’t bet against the (single-family) house”, Forbes, 28 February 2012 • http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2012/02/28/home-depot-lowes-lennarsingle-family-house/

Nothing more characterizes the current conventional wisdom than the demise of the single-family house. From pundits like Richard Florida to Wall Street investors, the thinking is that the future of America will be characterized increasingly by renters huddling together in small apartments, [… However in reality there is a] strong preference of the vast majority of Americans to live in detached houses rather than crowd into apartments. […] Homeownership and the single-family house […] rests on many fairly mundane things – desire for privacy, need to accommodate children and increasingly the needs of aging parents and underemployed adult children. Such considerations rarely enter the consciousness of urban planning professors […]. Just look at the numbers. Over the last decade – even as urban density has been embraced breathlessly by a largely uncritical media – close

to 80 % of all new households, according to the American Community Survey, chose to settle in single-family houses.

HOW WILL WE LIVE – AND WITH WHOM?

Source: Statistisches Bundesamt, Demografischer Wandel in Deutschland. Heft 1. Bevölkerungs- und Haushaltsentwicklung. Ausgabe 2011, Wiesbaden 2011; Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung (BiB): Pressemitteilung Nr. 9, 2013 • https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/Bevoelkerung/VorausberechnungBevoelkerung/evoelkerungsHaushaltsentwicklung5871101119004.pdf?__blob=publicationFile; http://www.bib-demografie.de/SharedDocs/Publikationen/DE/Download/Grafik_des_Monats/2013_07_pro_kopf_wohnflaeche.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=3

In 2009, the number of households in Germany amounted to 40.2 million. This was an increase of 14 % compared to 1991. The trend towards smaller households means, however, that the number of households is going in a different direction compared to the actual population. From 1991 to 2009 the number of households grew by a factor of almost six compared to the number of people living in these households. By 2030, the number of single-person households will rise by around 11 %; two-person households will increase even more, by 13 %. By contrast, as one would expect, the number of larger households will decline: three-person households and households with four or more persons will each decrease by 26 % compared to 2009. In 1998, each dweller had an average 39 m² of living space; by 2013, the amount of living space per capita had risen to 45 m². Since 1996, the number of families – defined in the micro-census as two-generation households in which parents (or a parent) live with children – with at least one child under the age of 18 fell by around 13 %. The number of married couples with children under the age of 18 declined by as much as 22 %, while the number of single parents increased. These trends will also continue in the future.

Real-life avatar“Real-life avatar”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. White noise. Why a data-driven society needs more common sense, vol. 12, 2013, p. 153; see www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22125682

After eight-year old Grady Hofmann needed a bone marrow transplant, he was confined to an isolation room for two months. A situation that his mother did not want to put him through, so she approached Anybots and asked them to lend her one of their telepresence robots. This way he came to have his own robotic proxy that went to school for him, hung around the school playground with his pals and watched TV in the evening with his brothers. The (admittedly rather abstract) humanoid robot used its inbuilt camera for eyes and a microphone for ears, and transmitted what was going on to Grady in real time. The boy’s reactions could be seen on the monitor attached to the face of the robot. From his hospital bed Grady was able to manoeuvre the robot via the keyboard of his computer. And this was apparently so realistic that when they sat down together for their evening meal – Grady in the hospital, the Gradybot at home at the family dinner table – his brothers occasionally gave the device an affectionate dig in the robotic ribs.

Trend factor: THE RISE OF EMOTIONAL MACHINES


Robots are among humanity’s oldest visions. Industry and engineering have been making use of them for many years. Artificial intelligence and sensory technology allow robotics to be used in an increasing number of fields, ranging from medicine through housework to the public sector. In South Korea robots perform duties in almost every household. The next stage of development will add empathy to intelligence: machines will become likable. And if the performance of computer brains continues its rapid growth, “human rights” for robots may one day be introduced.

A river in my living room!Victoria Woollaston, “The ‚living fridge‘ that recreates a river in your front room to give you fresh fish and vegetables to eat (but no chips, sadly)”, Mail Online, 28 May 2013 • http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2332090/The-DIY-ecosystem-lets-grow-fresh-fish-living-room-eat-dinner-perfect-lazy-aquarium-owners.html

Designers in Paris have developed a do-it-yourself ecosystem that lets owners grow fish and plants inside tanks in their living room. Known as “Local River”, the plants within the tank feed off the waste produced by the fish and the fish can then survive in the filtered water with little interference or cleaning from the owner. The system has also been dubbed “fridge-aquarium” because owners can use the fish as food – growing and breeding the fish within the “Local River” before killing and eating it. […] Using the principle of aquaponics, the fish and the plants in the “Local River” can sustain a balanced environment with little interference from owners.

BIOGRAPHY BY NUMBERS“Biography by numbers”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. The allure of the new. On the myth of innovation, vol. 11, 2013, pp. 118–19; see fumaga.com/7835 •Sources: Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.S., U.S. Census Bureau, UK National Statistics, U.S. Energy Information Administration, ABC, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and others

We drift through life as through a fog, without ever seeing the big picture: a bite to eat here, a wink of sleep there, and maybe a brief phone call in between. When you add up all the things we do or consume during our lives, we arrive at some impressive figures.

HOW WE GET AROUND:• We walk 56,000 kilometres(That’s twice the

distance from Paris to Shanghai and back)• We sit for 1.3 million kilometres at the wheel*

(That’s 3.5 times the distance to the moon)• We spend 37,047 hours in the car*• We commute 9,100 hours to work*• We spend 4,050 hours in traffic jams*, enough

for 8 hours’ sleep per night for 506 nights• We wait for 4,320 hours at traffic lights*• We move house 11.7 times• How we spend our time:• We spend 18,140 hours in conversation*• For 5,365 hours of that we are on the phone*• We use 73 million words*• We spend 20,748 hours reading* (That’s enough

to read Moby Dick 1,346 times) • We watch TV for 9 years, consuming 2 million

advertisements in the process

HOW WE WORK AND WHAT FOR:• We change jobs 12 times*• We are off sick for 420 days*• We earn 2.3 million U.S. dollars (USA), 8,000

U.S. dollars (Uganda)

HOW LONG WE SLEEP:• 217,175 hours (That would be enough time to

watch every film ever launched nation-wide in U.S. cinemas)

* Applies to the average American

Trend factor: HEALTH AS A STATUS SYMBOL


Health is being redefined. Whether people are healthy or sick now depends not only on their physical but also on their mental wellbeing. This makes the individual lifestyles people lead – from their diet to their leisure activities – into a decision for or against being healthy. Medicine no longer only treats the sick but also healthy people. Patients are becoming consumers. Yet this obsession with health also places more pressure on people to meet the growing requirements of our achievement-oriented society. To compensate for human imperfections a new market for health, performance and beauty is growing. Six Viagra pills are swallowed every second, and the wellness industry and organic produce are experiencing disproportionate growth rates – even though there is often no evidence of any actual health benefits.

City spaces. How the space you live in will change by 2050© 2013 BBC

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama 22.03. – 14.09.20144 WORK SPACE

Trend factor: THE REVOLUTION OF INDUSTRIAL DESIGN


The shift in the focus of research from the micro- to the nano-level opens up new perspectives for the development of materials. Nanotechnology allows scientists to create anti-bacterial surfaces for medicine, self-cleaning materials or packaging that measures the freshness of food. Futurologists even foresee an age of “total design”: machines and robots a billionth of a metre in size will be made from individual atoms. Yet many of today’s nanotechnology visions are still pure science fiction. Instead 3D printers already offer an era of product design in which objects ranging from clothes to furniture can be manufactured and reproduced many times over at home.

THE DIGITAL WORLD OF BIG DATA

“The digital world of big data”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. The allure of the new. On the myth of innovation, vol. 11, 2013, p. 136; W.I.R.E. Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise, Mind The Future (Zurich, NZZ Libro, 2012); see www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/bigdata, US Census Bureau, 2011; United Nations, 2004, Berkley Education, 2003, CERN, Google, Facebook, Nasdaq, National Climate Data Center, et al.

Twenty years ago the first electronic databases were created, digital music was still pure fantasy to many people and google co-founder Sergey Brin was an intern in a software company. The past two decades, in contrast, have seen an explosive increase in digital information. According to the international Data corporation, 2.8 zettabytes of data were generated in the year 2012 alone – a zettabyte is a sextillion bytes, and corresponds to 24 quintillion tweets. Global knowledge doubles every five years. One edition of The New York Times contains more information than that available to an average seventeenth century European throughout their entire life. 1,110 terabytes of data are generated every second. As a comparison, one terabyte is equivalent to 250 million typewritten pages or a pile of 25 km high. As the amount of data is growing faster than available storage capacity, currently around half of all newly produced information cannot be archived.

Digital databases compared© W.I.R.E. Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise

IS THE CLOUD POLLUTING THE AIR?

James Glanz, “The cloud factories. Power, pollution and the internet”, The New York Times, 22 September 2012 • http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html

Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s web site, send Yahoo email with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online. A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness. Most data centres, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centres can waste 90 % or more of the electricity they pull off the grid.

Aerial photo of giant Google-funded solar farm, #8796, 27 October 2012 © 2012 Jamey Stillings, jameystillingsprojects.com

WILL 3D PRINTING REPLACE MASS MANUFACTURING?

Carl Bass, “An insider’s view of the myths and truths of the 3D printing ‘phenomenon’”, Wired, 28 May 2013 • http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/05/an-insiders-view-of-the-hype-and-realities-of-3-d-printing/

Most 3D printing will be personal and custom, similar to the way we use our inkjet printers today. […] It will enable domestic manufacturing, but not the same kind, and it probably will not bring back the jobs that have been lost. The product companies of the future will have design, engineering, and manufacturing more tightly integrated together – rapid prototyping and the ability to manufacture small runs will be crucial to their success. This means the jobs of the future will continue to be higher skilled, and that the skills of future craftspeople will be as much digital as they are analogue.

IN A DIGITAL PRODUCTION PROCESS, STANDARDIZATION IS NO LONGER A MONEY-SAVER. LIKEWISE, CUSTOMIZATION IS NO LONGER A MONEY-WASTER.

Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2011), p. 41

From the media democracy to the democracy of manufacturingThomas Escher, “3D-Drucker: Revolution aus der Düse“, Spiegel Online, 21 January 2013 • http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/gadgets/replicator-2-makerbot-eroeffnet-ersten-laden-fuer-3-d-drucker-a-878116.html

A small shop in Manhattan is set to become the epicenter of the next industrial revolution. The company MakerBot sells 3D printers, with which every private individual can produce cups, lamps and all sorts of other objects. [...] The Replicator 2 is a desktop printer with a relatively low starting price of roughly 1,650 euros [...] around the world, ambitious hobby engineers are creating computer-generated 3D models and sharing them on online sharing services like MakerBot’s own platform, Thingiverse. Free 3D software such as Google’s SketchUp brings the digital workbench directly into the living room. [...] For those who want to save on hardware, there are businesses like Shapeways, who will produce your work of art for you. [Bre Pettis, head of MakerBot] believes that “the ultra-rapid development of desktop manufacturing is for the manufacturing industry what the invention of desktop publishing was for the media industry”.

We’re printing a house on the moon!See ESA, “Building a lunar base with 3D printing”, 31 January 2013 • http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Technology/Building_a_lunar_base_with_3D_printing

Working with the European Space Agency, the architect Norman Foster has developed a proposal for creating buildings on the moon. For the construction work, the lunar soil known as regolith is to be used as a base for cement. The plan is to use robots with an integrated D-Shape printer – to date, the world’s largest 3D printer – to build a structure on the moon using as much local material as possible.

European Space Agency /Norman Foster, lunar base, 2013© ESA/Foster + Partners

Would you download a car?James Vincent, “Would you download a car? Man 3D prints life-size Aston Martin DB4”, The Independent, 2 August 2013 • http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/would-you-download-a-car-man-3d-prints-lifesize-aston-martin-db4-8744159.html

Man 3D prints life-size Aston Martin DB4. The bodywork is being 3D printed in 4-inch squared segments before it’ll be fitted over the innards of a Nissan. Using just a 500 U.S. dollars 3D printer and a free wire-frame model downloaded from the internet, Ivan Sentch is printing out his own car. It’s a response years in the making to the notorious anti-piracy advert that shouted at would-be pirates that they “wouldn’t steal a car”. The standard response – “well I would if I could download it” – is now a step closer to reality.

CAN YOU IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT SHOPS OR FACTORIES?

Peter Day, “Imagine a world without shops or factories”, BBC News, 11 October 2013 • http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23990211

“The twentieth century was about dozens of markets of millions of consumers. The twenty-first century is about millions of markets of dozens of consumers.” [Joe Kraus, dotcom pioneer] And that single phrase […] really does turn the conventional, mass production, twentieth century business world, upside down. The really revolutionary thing is what is happening to the notion of the “consumer”, a term which seems first to have appeared in print in the Sears Roebuck catalogue at the very end of the 1800s, but which rose to prominence in the second half of our twentieth century. In many societies, consumers are now beginning to challenge their passive role as users of stuff provided by others. They are becoming much more like creators than they have ever been allowed to before.

IS IT THE END OF INVENTORY ALTOGETHER?

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York, Hyperion, 2006), pp. 96–97

The overwhelming trend of our age is to take products that were once delivered as physical goods, find ways to turn them into data, and stream them into your home. […] The ultimate cost reduction is eliminating atoms entirely and dealing only in bits. Pure digital aggregators store their inventory on hard drives and deliver it via broadband pipes. The marginal cost of manufacturing, shelving, and distribution is close to zero, and royalties are paid only when the goods are sold. It’s the ultimate on-demand market: Because the goods are digital, they can be cloned and delivered as many times as needed, from zero to billions. A best-seller and a never seller are just two entries in a database; equal in the eyes of technology and the economics of storage.

THE NEW STATUS OF THE OBJECT NO LONGER REFERS ITS CONDITION TO A SPATIAL MOLD – IN OTHER WORDS, TO A RELATION OF FORM-MATTER – BUT TO A TEMPORARY MODULATION THAT IMPLIES AS MUCH THE BEGINNINGS OF A CONTINUOUS VARIATION OF MATTER AS A CONTINUOUS DEVELOPMENT OF FORM.

Gilles Deleuze, The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 19

IS CREATIVITY THE NEW CAPITAL?

Bastian Lange, “Wachstumsmotor Kreative – Eine Kritik an Richard Florida”, Schrumpfende Städte. Band 2: Handlungskonzepte, ed. Philipp Oswalt (Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2005), pp. 401–3

In West European societies, the retreat of the welfare state leads to the development of a new form of individual entrepreneurship. […] The attempt to capitalize creative labour and its direct control, both of which are summed up under the headings of “creative class” and “creative industries”, may have lost its high-profile impact given the flops seen in the New Economy and in the start-up generation. But it has not halted restructuring in favour of a society of creative entrepreneurs, who pursue their passion and talent and likewise market this successfully.

THE END OF THE CREATIVE CLASS?

Tom Campbell, “The end of the creative classes in sight”, Guardian, 4 March 2013 • http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/mar/04/technology-end-of-creative-classes

As politicians applaud “creativity” and economists try to measure it, computer scientists are getting on and replicating it – but will this industry go the way of others? […] In recent decades, we have become accustomed to the notion that manual labour in the UK has been rendered obsolete, uncompetitive or poorly paid. But are we now prepared for the same thing to happen to skilled labour, to white-collar workers, to the creative classes? […] Is there intrinsically anything of a higher quality about the work of a UK designer or film editor that cannot be done faster and cheaper elsewhere? Much is made of the “creative process” – but it is just that, a process, and as such it can also be an algorithm.

Trend factor: THE INDUSTRIAL SECTOR REDISCOVERED


In the developed world today over two thirds of value creation is gained from the tertiary sector, while in large cities the figure is often over 90 %. As a result of increasing life expectancy and the economic rise of the newly industrialised countries, the global market potential of the service sector will continue to grow. Yet the pressure on profit margins may lead to an automatisation of services. Furthermore, as independence from the service sector increases, there are growing calls in many places for reindustrialisation to increase economic stability.

THE DESIGNER OF THE FUTURE HAS TO BECOME A DATABASE DESIGNER, A META-DESIGNER, NOT DESIGNING OBJECTS, BUT SHAPING A DESIGN SPACE IN WHICH UNSKILLED USERS CAN ACCESS USER-FRIENDLY ENVIRONMENTS IN WHICH THEY CAN DESIGN THEIR OWN OBJECTS. […] THE TASK OF THE META-DESIGNER IS TO CREATE A PATHWAY THROUGH DESIGN SPACE, TO COMBINE THE BUILDING BLOCKS INTO A MEANINGFUL DESIGN.

Jos de Mul, “Redesigning Design”, in B. van Abel, L. Evers, R. Klaassen, P. Troxler, Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive (Amsterdam, BIS Publishers/Premsela, 2011)

THE EXHIBITION NEWSPAPER WORK SPACE 5

genetically engineered crops and livestock 4. Old age wellness manager/consultant 5. Memory augmentation surgeon 6. “New science” ethicist 7. Space pilots, tour guides and architects 8. Vertical farmers 9. Climate change reversal specialist 10. Quarantine enforcer 11. Weather modification police 12. Virtual lawyer 13. Avatar manager / virtual teachers 14. Alternative vehicle developers 15. Narrowcasters 16. Waste data handler 17. Virtual clutter organiser 18. Time broker / Time bank trader 19. Social “networking” worker 20. Personal branders

Trend factor: THE METAVERSE


The next generation of the internet will change not only the manner in which we search for information online but also the way we deal with the real world. Digital maps and augmented reality applications open up new opportunities for navigation and act as a browser of the world: geographical information is linked to restaurant recommendations, data on free parking spaces or personal holiday experiences. Yet since the individual information systems are rarely interlinked and the data is sorted according to different relevance criteria, they often create more confusion than simplification. As a result, the next stage will be a semantic web that can understand content and adapt to the needs of the user. The next-generation internet will provide a smaller, pre-selected amount of higher-quality data, thus also opening up a new source of income.

production leads to cost savings, and cooperation with creative partners to more innovation. As the complexity of the resulting networks is often difficult to control and the organisations involved are often overwhelmed, the importance of open, autonomous collaboration models is growing. The software market has already been revolutionised by so-called open-source models: independent experts work together on a freely available program and constantly improve it through free licences. The challenge now lies in transposing this way of working from the internet sector to the real economy and in determining both the opportunities and limitations of the commercial use of open collaboration models.

WHY ROBOTS WILL – AND MUST – TAKE OUR JOBS

Kevin Kelly, “Better than human: why robots will – and must – take our jobs”, Wired, 24 December 2012 • http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/

It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 % of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. […] even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time. This upheaval is being led by a second wave of automation, one that is centred on artificial cognition, cheap sensors, machine learning, and distributed smarts. This deep automation will touch all jobs, from manual labour to knowledge work. […] Imagine that 7 out of 10 working Americans got fired tomorrow. What would they all do?

DOES THE FUTURE LIE IN ROBOTICS?

Eric T. Hansen, “Kolumne Wir Amis: Das nächste große Ding”, Zeit Online, 31 December 2013 • http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2013-12/roboter-boom-usa

In the past year or so, Google has bought several companies that produce robots, such as the Japanese firm Schaft, which won the Darpa Robotics Challenge. The company develops humanoid robots and was not founded by the military, but instead began as a start-up, similar to Microsoft or Apple. [...] Thanks to Robo-Stox, the first stock market index exclusively devoted to robotics, now anyone can invest in the Robo start-ups. Suddenly the future is plainly recognisable: the robot stands today where the computer was in the early 1970s. Anyone who wants to be rich tomorrow should invest in robotics today.

THERE WILL PROBABLY BE ROBOTS FOR THAT TOO…

Steven Poole, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson – review”, Guardian, 7 December 2012 • http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/07/makers-chris-anderson-review

Few techno-utopias are as confusing as this one. In Anderson’s brave new world, everyone is a creative-geek tinkerer but no one does the boring stuff. There will be lots more jobs created in manufacturing – even though the entrepreneurs are persuading people to work for free and also employing as many robots as possible. (I for one welcome our new robot underlords, as long as they don’t come to resentful consciousness of their slave-state and overthrow us, as they do in Karel Capek’s R.U.R. and most dystopian robot fiction since.) And at the end of a long day’s making of exclusive knick-knacks for the anomic plutocracy, where will these hero-entrepreneurs go to scarf a pepperoni slice or get their custom-printed shirts laundered? Who cares, right? There will probably be robots for that too before long.

ARE WE ALLOWED TO HATE SILICON VALLEY?

Evgeny Morozov, “The internet ideology. Why we are allowed to hate silicon valley”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 11 November 2013 • http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/the-internet-ideology-why-we-are-allowed-to-hate-silicon-valley-12658406.html

Silicon Valley firms are building what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our lives. We are promised more freedom, more openness, more mobility […]. But the kind of emancipation

D2C GENERATION

Jonathan Olivares, “D2C Generation”, Domus 964, December 2012 • https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2012/12/17/d2c-generation.html

Helped by the internet, the designer-to-consumer model (D2C) avoids traditional distribution costs, allowing the designer to sell fewer items at a higher margin than traditional manufacturers. […] While the D2C model is new, and it demands a new set of skills from the designer, the products emerging from it remain somewhat conservative. Though some D2Cers have found inventive ways around constrained development budgets, the D2C products launched thus far assume many typological norms established by existing design brands. We have yet to see if the D2C model will venture into products that are as novel as the distribution model itself.

Crowdfunding via KickstarterCharlotte Gerling, “Crowdfunding via Kickstarter. Eine-Milliarde-Dollar-Marke geknackt”, Taz. Die Tagezeitung, 5 March 2014 • http://www.taz.de/Crowdfunding-via-Kickstarter/!134253/

A reason to celebrate for the New York-based company Kickstarter: since the platform was founded almost five years ago, supporters have pledged a total of just over one billion U.S. dollars. [...] Kickstarter has already helped many a high-flying project to get off the ground. This is made possible by 5.7 million users, who use the portal to donate money to projects they’d like to see brought to fruition. [...] Kickstarter is the world’s best-known crowdfunding platform. According to the company, users donated an average of $913 per minute in 2013. [...] For every successfully implemented project, Kickstarter receives 5 % of the proceeds as a commission. [...] For projects where the pledged donations at the cutoff date are insufficient, the entire financing falls through. Kickstarter reports that its current success rate is 43.55 %.

Trend factor: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY REDEFINE


While land and gold were once the key to prosperity, today it is ideas that lead to wealth. In the developed world innovation generates around half of economic growth, and knowledge is seen as the most precious raw material of the twenty-first century. Yet at the same time product piracy and the violation of intellectual property rights are booming. The growth of file-sharing networks in the internet now also allows individuals to commit breaches of copyright on a grand scale. Industry is calling for better protection of intellectual property and is implementing drastic measures. Yet in a world where anything can be copied, these measures will be ineffective in the long term. What is needed are new types of licence that allow people to exchange knowledge while at the same time protecting copyright.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS ABOUT DOZENS OF MARKETS OF MILLIONS OF CONSUMERS. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY IS ABOUT MILLIONS OF MARKETS OF DOZENS OF CONSUMERS.

Joe Kraus, dotcom pioneer

Trend factor: THE TRIUMPH OF OPEN NETWORKS


In the global economy and in research, cooperation and partnerships have taken on an increasingly important role in the strategies of companies or universities. The outsourcing of

that we actually get is fake emancipation; it’s the emancipation of a just-released criminal wearing an ankle bracelet. […] Silicon Valley has destroyed our ability to imagine other models for running and organizing our communication infrastructure. […] We are asked to accept that Gmail is the best and only possible way to do email, and that Facebook is the best and only possible way to do social networking. […] Inspired by Silicon Valley, policy-makers are beginning to redefine problems as essentially stemming from incomplete information while envisioning solutions that only do one thing: deliver more information through apps. […] We are building apps to fix the problems that our apps can fix – instead of tackling problems that actually need fixing.

THE WORKPLACE: BIOSPHERE OR SCHOOL CAMPUS?

Victoria Woollaston, Mark Prigg, “Facebook’s ‚hacker campus‘ to take on Apple’s spaceship, Google’s new Googleplex and Amazon’s Biosphere in battle of the hi-tech offices”, MailOnline, 27 May 2013 • http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2331658/Facebooks-hacker-campus-Applesspaceship-Googles-new-Googleplex-Amazons-Biosphere-battle-hi-tech-offices.html

• Facebook’s “hacker campus” to take on Apple’s spaceship, Google’s new Googleplex and Amazon’s Biosphere in battle of the hi-tech offices. […]

• Amazon’s biosphere will be full of plants that have been specifically designed to survive in the microclimate while still being comfortable for Amazon’s employees.

• Facebook’s new office, designed by Frank Gehry, is designed to replicate a college campus and will feature the largest open floor plan in the world for 3,400 engineers.

• Apple’s “spaceship” campus in Cupertino has a unique circular design masterminded by British architect Norman Foster.

• Google’s Bay View “village” will cover 1.1 million square feet and will have nine rectangular buildings connected by bridges.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK

Source: Statistisches Bundesamt: Volkswirtschaftliche Gesamtrechnungen, Fachserie 18, Reihe 1.4, Wiesbaden 2013 • https://www.destatis.de/DE/Publikationen/Thematisch/VolkswirtschaftlicheGesamtrechnungen/Inlandsprodukt/Inlandsproduktsberechnung-VorlaeufigPDF_2180140.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

In 1995, 42.5 % of the entire workforce in Germany was employed in knowledge-based sectors of the economy; in 2012, it was already 50.8 %. During the same period, the proportion of the workforce employed in non-knowledge-based sectors declined from 55.8 % to 43.8 %.

WHERE DID MY OFFICE GO?Myriam Robin, “Decentralised, diverse and flexible: Why Deloitte thinks offices in 2030 will look radically different”, Smart Company, 26 July 2013 • http://www.smartcompany.com.au/leadership/management/32863-decentralised--diverse-andflexible-why-deloitte-thinks-offices-in-2030-will-look-radically-different.html#

Office workers will be older, more ethnically diverse, more likely to be female, and in all likelihood, fatter. […] Workplaces will be more flexible, and include a variety of spaces for different workers to use. […] As people are judged on the insights they bring, they will seek out community and conversation with their coworkers to help spark these new ideas. This means workplaces will be more casual, and offer more spaces for collaboration. Workplaces will be smaller and more numerous. As workers become more able to do things at home, they will increasingly do so if their office is far away or difficult to access. This means large corporations will have to offer more offices and those offices will be smaller and more decentralised. Hubs and coworking spaces, currently used predominantly by start-ups, will grow in importance, and become used by larger, more established companies.

WHAT JOBS WILL WE DO?

Source: “Shape of jobs to come”, Fast Future Research, 2010 • http://fastfuture.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/future_jobs_sheet.pdf

Possible New Careers Emerging from Advances in Science and Technology (2010–2030) 1. Body part maker 2. Nano-medic 3. Pharmer of

Albert France-Lanord Architects, Pionen White Mountain, server room in Stockholm, 2008 © Åke E:son Lindman

OUR EXTERNAL MEMORYBetsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, Daniel M. Wegner, “Google effects on memory: cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips”, Science, 14 July 2011 • http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/pdfs/science.1207745.full.pdf

The advent of the internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

IS WIKIPEDIA AUTHORITATIVE?

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York, Hyperion, 2006), p. 69

The advantage of probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the micro scale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. Wikipedia should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts. The same is true for blogs, no single one of which is authoritative. Blogs are a Long Tail, and it is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail – it is, by definition, variable and diverse. But collectively blogs are proving more than an equal to mainstream media. You just need to read more than one of them before making up your own mind.

»Konstantin Grcic - Panorama« 22.03. – 14.09.20146 PUBLIC SPACE

THE OPEN CITY

Richard Sennett, “The Open City”, lecture at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, UK, 19 March 2013 • http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/24635

The boundary is an edge where things end; the border is an edge where different groups interact. […] The cell wall retains as much as possible internally; it is analogous to a boundary. The cell membrane is more open, more like a border – but membranes reveal something important about what “open” means. The membrane does not function like an open door; a cell membrane is both porous and resistant at the same time. […] Openness is not an absence of form. It is a particular kind of structure which allows contrary conditions to occur at the same time. […] The closed city is full of boundaries and walls, the open city possesses more borders and membranes. The closed city can be designed and operated top-down; it is a city that belongs to the masters. The open city is a bottom-up place; it belongs to the people. These contrasts of course are not absolutes of black-and-white; real life is painted in greys. Yet to design the modern city well, I believe we have to challenge unthinking assumptions now made about urban life, assumptions which favour closure. I believe we have to embrace less reassuring, more febrile ideas of living together, those stimulations of differences, both visual and social, which produce openness.

The boundary wall of the Paraisópolis favela in São Paulo© Tuca Vieira

WHY ENCLAVE?

Keller Easterling, “Zone: the spatial softwares of Extrastatecraft”, Design Observer, 6 November 2012 • http://places.designobserver.com/feature/zone-the-spatial-softwares-of-extrastatecraft/34528/

In the past generation, the [economic free] zone has become a kind of petri dish for the cultivation of a host of spatial products – e.g., calling centres, software production facilities, factory compounds, office parks – that easily migrate around the world and that thrive in legal lacunae and political quarantine, enjoying the insulation and lubrication of zone exemptions. Indeed, the zone as corporate enclave is a primary aggregate unit of the contemporary global city, offering a “clean slate,” a “one-stop” entry into the economy of a foreign country. […] Paradoxically, the zone is at once the mascot and contradiction of the basic tenets of “free market” liberalism. […] In a sense the free zone is itself a form of big government par excellence, constituting a significant effort to thread together existing networks of global contractual relations in the absence of any robust international law. […] The proliferation of the zone as a worldwide urban-infrastructural format is deriving less from any financial return or economic wisdom than from the very fact of its self-perpetuating proliferation.

FROM DIGITAL CLOUD TO PHYSICAL NATION

Balaji Srinivasan, “Software is reorganizing the world”, Wired, 22 November 2013 • http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/

From Occupy Wall Street and YCombinator to co-living in San Francisco and co-housing in the UK, something important is happening. People are meeting like minds in the cloud and travelling to meet each other offline, in the process building community – and tools for community – where none existed before. Those cloud networks where people poke each other, share photos, and find their missing communities are beginning to catalyze waves of physical migration, beginning to reorganize the world. Will this ultimately end in a cloud country of our own, as Page, Thiel, and Musk propose in different ways? We can set this as a long-term goal, like the kind of dream that propelled so many millions to exit and come to America in the first place, but it’s unclear what the future holds. We do know this, however: as cloud formations take physical shape at steadily

greater scales and durations, it shall become ever more feasible to create a new nation of emigrants.

THE PUBLIC SQUARE: A FREE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC?

Mohamed Elshahed, “Tahrir Square: social media, public space”, Design Observer, 27 February 2011 • http://places.designobserver.com/feature/tahrir-square-social-media-public-space/25108/

Tahrir Square: social media, public space. […] During these days Tahrir became a hub for social activity and artistic creativity. People sold food and drinks, set up recycling bins and portable toilets, organized the logistics of daily life. Protest signs were humorous and creative. […] Throughout the square bloggers were streaming comments and images onto the internet. Doctors and nurses were providing free healthcare in impromptu clinics. Filmmakers were interviewing protesters and creating an instant archive, a visual and oral record of history as it was unfolding. Musicians, professional and amateur, wrote songs and tested them on eager audiences. There were poets, puppeteers and comedians. Art teachers provided supplies and then displayed the artworks that resulted on a public wall. There was even an artist who painted a large canvas that invited protestors to participate in its making. Tahrir Square had been transformed not only into a social and public space but also into the biggest spontaneous event of community-organizing and nationbuilding the country had ever seen.

HAVE WE TALKED TO MITSUBISHI, WHO OWN PATERNOSTER SQUARE?

Jeevan Vasagar, “Public spaces in Britain’s cities fall into private hands”, Guardian, 11 June 2012 • http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/11/granary-square-privately-owned-public-space

Public spaces in Britain’s cities fall into private hands. […] You probably remember the way Occupy London started, [people] started a Facebook page, saying: “let’s occupy the London Stock Exchange”. I’m not sure the people who started up that Facebook page understood that Paternoster Square was private land until we started getting the first press reports on it saying: “have we talked to Mitsubishi, who own Paternoster Square?” The Paternoster Square management’s application for an injunction noted: “The protest is inspired by the ‘Arab Spring’ movement.” But London’s protesters had to find their Tahrir Square elsewhere.

IS THE FUTURE CITY ALREADY HERE?

Bruce Sterling, “Bruce’s Sterling’s vision of the future city”, BBC Future, 8 May 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130507-bruce-sterling-2050-city-vision

People can flee with relative ease, but cities are tender and sessile beings. When the survivors return to their beloved rubble, they find themselves forced to create another city – one that makes genuine technical sense under their circumstances. Only engineers and architects will ever rub their hand at this dreadful prospect. These modernists are in secret collusion with the feral urban crows and hungry pigeons picking over the blast zone. For years, while a sentimental mankind clung to a museum economy, they have rehearsed another city, some angular, rational monster with an urban fabric that’s a whole lot more nano-, robo-, and geno; buildings they can shape, and that will henceforth shape the rest of us. To tell the truth, we never liked that city. But it just keeps happening.

Trend factor: THE MEGALOPOLIS SOCIETY


The modern metropolis – the hub of economic, social and cultural life – is overtaking rural areas as the preferred place to live. Today more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, which cover around 2 % of the earth’s surface. According to UN estimates, the urban population grows by 1.6 million people every ten days. The new megalopolises will dominate the economic and cultural landscape of the twenty-first century. Yet the interaction between cities and rural areas will be a key challenge for the sustainable development of society.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS A CENTURY OF EMPIRES, THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS A CENTURY OF NATION STATES. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WILL BE A CENTURY OF CITIES.

Wellington E. Webb, Former Mayor of Denver Source: IBM report, “A vision of smarter cities”, 2009 • http://public.dhe.ibm.com/common/ssi/ecm/en/gbe03227usen/GBE03227USEN.PDF

Trend factor: RUNNING OUT OF SPACE


In 1950 there were 5,600 m2 of arable land per person, yet by 2050 there will only be 1,500 m2. This development is due to the growth in the world’s population, the global trend towards urbanisation and agricultural methods that deplete the soil until it becomes infertile. Additionally, global warming is leading to the formation of new deserts, which also reduce the amount of farming land available. The property prices for both agricultural and attractive residential land are exploding. At the same time the phenomenon of “land grabbing” is growing: industrial states are obtaining fertile land in developing countries to produce for their own needs.

SHRINKING CITIESHans Schlappa, William J V Neill, Cities of Tomorrow – Action Today. URBACT II Capitalisation. From crisis to choice: re-imagining the future in shrinking cities (Saint-Denis, URBACT, 2013) • http://urbact.eu/fileadmin/general_library/19765_Urbact_WS1_SHRINKING_low_FINAL.pdf

Current estimates suggest that 40 % of all European cities with more than 200,000 inhabitants have lost significant parts of their population in recent years […]. Shrinking cities typically face declining revenues, rising unemployment, outward migration of economically active populations, surplus buildings and land together with a physical infrastructure which is oversized for the population it serves. These problems are compounded by current demographic trends. Although there are stark regional variations across Europe, and also big contrasts between rural and urban communities, the overall tendency is a shrinking population of working age and a growing population of 65 years and older. […] The proportion of retired people aged 65 and above in relation to people of working age is currently approaching 25 % and is expected to rise to 45 % in 2050. […] These

Issey Miyake, Age of the world, 2009Courtesy of Perimeter Art&Design © Photo Alexandre Balhaiche

trends have serious implications for all cities in terms of adapting buildings, transport, services and the physical environment. Moreover, the implications of demographic change are more pronounced for shrinking cities, which have very limited resources but large proportions of older people living in them.

Trend factor: PLANET OF THE NOMADS

W.I.R.E. Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise: Mind The Future, NZZ Libro, Zürich 2012

Around 192 million people in the world are migrants. In addition to economic and political refugees, more and more highly qualified workers are leaving their home country to take on managerial positions in research or the private sector at attractive locations. Although immigrants make an essential contribution to regional economic growth, in many developed countries there are growing fears of a flood of foreigners. Yet as a result of falling birth rates, there may soon be fierce international competition for foreign workers.

MIGRANT COSMOPOLITANS

Richard Sennett, “The public realm”, 2008 • http://www.richardsennett.com/site/SENN/Templates/General2.aspx?pageid=16

The ambiguities of cosmopolitanism have spoken most to me in understanding the public realm, practically as well as analytically. The projects which involved me in New York, London, Beirut, and Johannesburg all addressed migrants who could only survive by becoming skilled cosmopolitans. […] The public realm, in its impersonality and anonymity has offered to them a space of survival, whether they are undocumented or possessed papers. The spatial context which matters to them most is the crack, the “gap tooth” in the urban fabric where they can find a place to dwell. […] The migrant cosmopolitans who survive well have become, literally, skilled actors; they have learned the rituals of what Erving Goffmann calls “the presentation of self in everyday life” so that they can communicate with strangers. They are skilled at living in time, at home with change. In the developing world, they are the city’s future; perhaps these migrant cosmopolitans are also, in the developed world, a model for how to inhabit the city well.

OPENNESS IS NOT AN ABSENCE OF FORM. IT IS A PARTICULAR KIND OF STRUCTURE WHICH ALLOWS CONTRARY CONDITIONS TO OCCUR AT THE SAME TIME.

Richard Sennett, “The Open City”, lecture at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities (CRASSH), Cambridge, UK, 19 March 2013 • http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/24635

MAKING PUBLIC SPACE?Saskia Sassen, “Public interventions: the shifting meaning of the urban condition”, in Open! Art, Culture and the Public Domain. Key Texts 2004-2012, eds. Jorinde Seijdel, Liesbeth Melis (Rotterdam, NAI Publishers, 2012), pp. 67, 72

But let us not confuse public-access space with public space. The latter requires making – through the practices and the subjectivities of people. Through their practices, users of the space wind up making diverse kinds of publicness. […] In conclusion, both the work of making the public and making the political in urban space become critical at a time of growing velocities, the ascendance of process and flow over artefacts and permanence, massive structures that are not on a human scale, and branding as the basic mediation between individuals and markets. The work of design produces narratives that add to the value of existing contexts, and at its narrowest, to the utility logics of the economic corporate world. But there is also a kind of public-making work that can produce disruptive narratives, and make legible the local and the silenced.

Tahrir Square in Cairo during the Arab Spring, February 2011© Jonathan Rashad

THE EXHIBITION NEWSPAPER

Trend factor: THE INVISIBLE THREAT


In addition to the material mountains of waste, the invisible pollution of the environment is also increasing as a result of light, noise and electromagnetic pollution. The growing use of mobile phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and radio masts exposes people to increasing levels of electromagnetic radiation. Technological progress is proceeding at such a rate that research into the effects of the radiation fields that arise as a result is lagging far behind. It is virtually impossible to assess the long-term effects such as the impact on hormone levels, fertility or cancer risks. There is growing pressure to support research into the dangers and to implement the resulting measures to protect the population.

Windmills in the air“Windmills in the air”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. The power of making. The rise of the do-it-yourself culture, vol. 8, 2012, p. 126; see www.makanipower.com

Californian company Makani Power has put windmills up in the sky, where they produce 50 % more energy than on the ground. They circle like kites on a string at a height of 250 to 600 m, where the wind blows more strongly and more constantly than it does near the ground. That way, 90 % of the material used for conventional wind turbines and 50 % of the costs can be saved. The inventors provide reassurance: so as to prevent collisions, care is taken when determining the systems’ flying height to make it lower than that of aircraft, but higher than that of most birds.

PUBLIC SPACE 7

WHO IS AFRAID OF A THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION?

Jeremy Rifkin, The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 2, 37

Internet technology and renewable energies were about to merge to create a powerful new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that would change the world. […] The five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution are (1) shifting to renewable energy; (2) transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plants to collect renewable energies on-site; (3) deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies; (4) using internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy internet that acts just like the internet; and (5) transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell green electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

LIVING BUILDINGS AND METABOLIC CITIES?

Rachel Armstrong, “Living buildings for tomorrow’s cities”, BBC Future, 21 May 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130520-greening-the-cities-of-tomorrow

We have reached a point at the start of the twenty-first century where we do not have to copy nature but can directly design and engineer her processes with such precision – and on a range of scales – that we can think of them as a new kind of technology. Living technologies have unique properties that may enable us to imagine and realise our urban spaces in new ways, since they are adaptable, robust and have an incredible ability to transform one thing into another. […] In the near future, we will begin to tap into the technological potential of this “metabolic” diversity and strategically use it within the fabric of our cities. […] Perhaps the future of our urban environments will not be about designing buildings, as we know them, but in the production of synthetic ecosystems, which improve the quality of our lives.

SMART CITY OR SMART CITIZENS?

Jane Wakefield, “Tomorrow’s cities: do you want to live in a smart city?”, BBC News, 18 August 2013 • http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22538561

Tomorrow’s cities: Do you want to live in a smart city? […] In the future everything in a city, from the electricity grid, to the sewer pipes to roads, buildings and cars will be connected to the network. Buildings will turn off the lights for you, self-driving cars will find you that sought-after parking space, even the rubbish bins will be smart. But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city? And is it a future we even want? Technology firms such as IBM, Siemens, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco are busy selling their software to solve a range of city problems, from water leaks to air pollution to traffic congestion. […] There is another chapter in the smart city story – and this one is being written by citizens, who are using apps, DIY sensors, smart phones and the web to solve the city problems that matter to them. […] Whether such data is controlled by big business or citizens is not yet clear, but it is worth remembering what cities were originally designed for, says Dan Hill, chief executive of research firm Fabrica. […] “It is going to be smart citizens that make smart cities,” he said.

How to power the urban revolution?Gaia Vince, “Smart planet. How to power the urban revolution”, BBC Future, 18 April 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130418-how-to-power-the-urban-revolution

Most countries are looking to adopt smart grids in the coming years, partly because they are far more efficient and so use less energy, but also because they allow for renewable energy

integration – monitoring and sensing demand and supply in real-time and balancing loads accordingly – and for individual householders to feed their excess electricity back to the grid. […] Quick fixes, such as fitting low-energy lighting (20 % of a building’s energy is consumed through lighting), and improving insulation are likely to become mandatory through policy tweaks to building regulations and property sales and rental codes. These are small steps, but we may see the day when all new buildings must be self-sufficient energy generators, with scores of neighbourhood grids running cooperatively in a networked city grid.

Can deserts power the earth?Source: Desertec Foundation, The Desertec Concept • https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2639069/DESERTEC %20Concept.pdf

The systematic exploitation of deserts and arid regions as an energy source has not been adequately considered in national and international energy policies. The Desertec Foundation sees a huge opportunity here for gaining clean, affordable electricity for the safe supply of a growing world population and world economy. The consistent implementation of the Desertec Concept and, in the future, the substitution of fossil fuels with clean energy from desert and arid regions could reduce global CO2 emissions by 80 %.

Concept by the Desertec Foundation for a global supply of renewable energy © Desertec

Electrified asphalt“Electrified asphalt”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. White noise. Why a data-driven society needs more common sense, vol. 12, 2013, p. 144; see news.volvogroup.com/2013/05/23/the-road-of-tomorrow-is-electric

One of the biggest disadvantages of electric vehicles is their need for heavy batteries, which, even when fully charged, only hold that charge for relatively short distances. Working with partners from industry and academic research, the Swedish vehicle manufacturer Volvo is now aiming to put electricity on the road – in the truest sense of the word. Two power lines built into the surface of the road provide electricity to a current collector located in the vehicles. To protect pedestrians and cyclists from the electric current on the road, the power lines are only live when the vehicle is moving at speeds of at least 60 km/h and when they also receive a specific signal from the current collector.

Highway to heaven“Highway to heaven”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. White noise. Why a data-driven society needs more common sense, vol. 12, 2013, p. 170; see www.terrafugia.com/tfx-vision

Thanks to its folding wings and propellers the vehicle prototype by Terrafugia can be converted into an aeroplane and vice versa in a matter of seconds. It can accelerate to speeds of up to 100 mph and reach an altitude of 800 metres. The producers believe that they will be able to develop a viable product within the next ten years – for the price of a high-end luxury car. The only catch is that the vehicle requires a runway as it can only take off after 30 metres and cannot simply land amid traffic on a motorway.

DO WE LIVE IN A DESIGN-BUBBLE?

John Thackara, In the bubble. Designing in a complex world (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2005), pp. 77–79

Best-selling author Richard Florida calls them “the creative class”. Management guru Peter Drucker dubbed them “knowledge workers”. British policymakers talk about the “cultural

industries”. Whatever the term for them, there’s a lot of them about – 30 % of the U.S. workforce, by Florida’s reckoning. A new survey of boom towns in North America attributes these cities’ success to the presence of the creative class – public relation specialists, communication analysts, advertising sales agents, and the like. […] But as with networks and infrastructure, so too with localities: Too much of our world is just too designed. We can learn a lot from the free-form approaches to urban design that flourished in situations when the state was collapsing.

DO YOU OWN A CAR?

Michel Taride, “Viewpoint: the future of mobility”, BBC News, 3 January 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/news/business-20671090

In London, 40 % of households do not own a car, according to a 2012 report by Transport for London. The decline in car ownership is particularly evident in the capital’s fall in multi-car households, which dropped from 21 % in 2001 to 17 % in 2007. Instead of the traditional focus on cars and driving, people are mixing and matching their transport choices – using what they need when they need it – and the radical advances in technology are making such “smart mobility” possible. Mobile apps can make travelling by different modes of transport seamless. It is now easy to combine air, rail and car travel in new ways to reach a destination.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF URBAN MOBILITY?

Dr Ryan Chin, “Solving transport headaches in the cities of 2050”, BBC Future, 18 June 2013 • http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130617-moving-around-in-the-megacity

By 2050 there could be 2.5 billion cars roaming the planet and most of them will be concentrated in cities, the OECD has reported. […] In 2012, the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at UC Berkeley reported an estimated 1.7 million car-sharing members existed in 27 countries. Car sharing has obvious benefits to the city. Zipcar estimates every shared vehicle replaces up to 20 private automobiles, thus reducing total vehicle miles and land devoted to parking. […] A-MoD systems builds upon research conducted by the City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab on the CityCar, a foldable, electric, and shareable two-passenger vehicles designed for on-demand use. […] We have to fundamentally re-think the urban structure of our cities, so that we don’t separate our living and working to the point that we need motorised transportation in the first place. It requires walkable, high-density, mixed-use neighbourhoods where the needs of every resident are met with less than a 20-minute walk.

A-social networks“A-social networks”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. The allure of the new. On the myth of innovation, vol. 11, 2013, p. 162; see avoidtheshoppingcrowds.com

Up to now, social networks have mainly enabled you to find out where all the cool, hip gang was hanging out so that you could join them. Now the Dutch company They has developed an app that allows the exact opposite: you can find out where the fewest people are, i.e. where you can get some peace and quiet. Based on data from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the software investigates in real time which department stores and shopping streets are overcrowded, and where you can stroll around at your leisure. The demand has already led to a follow-up app that analyses the density of people in trains.

THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY IS NOT REALLY LOCATION-BASED APPS; IT IS ABOUT MAKING LOCATION COMPLETELY UNIMPORTANT.

Balaji Srinivasan, “Software is reorganizing the world”, Wired, 22 November 2013 • http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/

Flying windmill developed by Makani Power© Makani Power, Inc

Artificial clouds“Artificial clouds combat warming”, W.I.R.E. Abstrakt. The big community. Thoughts on the solidarity of tomorrow, vol. 9, 2012, p. 136; see www.atmos.washington.edu/~robwood

The scientific community is so worried that it is adopting more and more unconventional means of curbing global warming. For example, physicist Rob Wood of the University of Washington aims to generate artificial clouds. They will reflect a lot of the sun’s rays and thus cool down the earth’s temperature. The principle is simple: boats would spray particles of sea-salt into the atmosphere to facilitate the formation of clouds. Because for humidity to condense, it needs condensation cores such as dust, soot or as in this case salt particles. Wood stresses that this is a quick-fix idea. The primary goal, he says, remains to dramatically reduce global carbon emissions.

Trend factor: THE BOOM IN CLEAN ENERGY


As a result of rising oil prices, the growing risks of climate change and the renewed awareness of the dangers of nuclear energy following the Fukushima catastrophe, the ecological awareness of society is growing and with it the importance of clean technologies. High-tech companies, the military and the science community together hope to sustainably increase the share of renewable energies by investing in solar energy, biofuels and tidal power stations. The medium-term aims are to allow private households and factories to have self-sufficient energy supplies and to ensure the total recycling of all waste products created in energy production.

Konstantin Grcic – Panorama 22.03. – 14.09.20148 CREDITS

EXHIBITION Directors Vitra Design Museum: Mateo Kries, Marc Zehntner

Exhibition concept: Konstantin Grcic, Mateo Kries

Curatorial team: Jan Boelen, Friederike Daumiller, Konstantin Grcic, Ils Huygens, Mateo Kries, Janna Lipsky

Exhibition design: Konstantin Grcic, Friederike Daumiller

Project management: Janna Lipsky

Assistant: Julia Selzer

Participating artists: Mia Grau, Neil Campbell Ross

Scientific consultant: W.I.R.E. Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise

Exhibition graphics: Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design, Thorsten Romanus

Translations: Barbara Hauß, Norma Keßler, Gregory Sims

Technical direction: Stefani Fricker

Installations: Michael Simolka, Anthony Bohmani, Marc Gehde, Martin Glockner, Patrick Maier, George Pruteanu, Manfred Utz

Media technology: Ina Klaeden

Conservation: Susanne Graner, Luise Lutz, Anita Fux, Grazyna Ubik

Registrar: Boguslaw Ubik-Perski

Communication & PR:Viviane Stappmanns, Denise Beil, Sabine Müller, Katharina Giese, Gianoli PR

Exhibition tour: Reiner Packeiser, Bettina Besler-Slawik

Supporting programme: Katrin Hager, Stefan Klein

Visitor services: Christina Scholten, Anna Deninotti, Annika Schlozer

NEWSPAPER Editing: Janna Lipsky, Friederike Daumiller, Ils Huygens, Viviane Stappmanns, W.I.R.E. Web for Interdisciplinary Research & Expertise

Art direction & design: Viviane Stappmanns, Takiri Nia

Printing: Freiburger Druck GmH & Co, KG

Typography: FB PANO, DTL Albertina, Franklin Gothic

We would like to thank all partners and sponsors, as well as the companies and galleries who supported the exhibition with loans and donations.

Vitra Design Museum Charles-Eames-Str. 2D-79576 Weil am RheinT +49.7621.702.3200www.design-museum.de © Vitra Design Museum, 2014

“I refuse to have any preconceived notions of functionality, any preconceived ideas of comfort and beauty. I want to understand how design is connected to life.”

– Konstantin Grcic, 2014

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