How to re-spark your imagination (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy: 

You’re listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I can remember when I was a little kid hearing so much about the invention of the Segway scooter. There was all this talk about how the Segway was going to be the future of mobility and transportation would never be the same.

Cars were gonna become obsolete as we each zipped about in our own personal mobility device. We'd climb stairs without ever bending our knees, and city streets would be silent except for the sounds of laughter and friendly hellos. Well, I think it's fair to say that that has not panned out.

Transportation successfully held out against the revolutionary power of the Segway scooter, and whether it is flying cars or VR headsets or giant two-wheeled electric scooters, there's often a lot of talk about what the world is going to look like in the future. And the truth is that there are always multiple possibilities, right?

Which hypothetical future world is the one that we are going to end up living in? So many of our biggest decisions and our most important life choices are based on us trying to figure out the answers to those questions. Today's guest, Anab Jain spends her days trying to separate out signals from noise when it comes to predicting the future.

And on today's episode, she's gonna share her strategies and her philosophy about planning and predicting for the worlds that may be coming down the road. Here's a clip from her TED Talk. 

[00:01:23] Anab Jain: 

I visit the future for a living. Not just one future, but many possible futures bringing back evidences from those futures for you to experience today, like an archeologist of the future.

Over the years, my many journeys have brought back things like a new species of synthetically engineered bees, a book named Pet Says Protein, a machine that makes you rich by trading your genetic data, a lamp powered by sugar, a computer for growing food. Okay, so I don't actually travel to different futures yet, but my husband Jon, and I spend a lot of time thinking and creating visions of different futures in our studio.

We are constantly looking out for weak signals, those murmurs of future potential. Then we trace those threads of potential out into the future asking, “What might it feel like to live in this future? What might we see here and even breathe?” Then we run experiments, build prototypes, make objects, bringing aspects of these futures to life, making them concrete and tangible so you can really feel the impact of those future possibilities here and now.

But this work is not about predictions. It's about creating tools. Tools that can help connect our present and our future selves. So we become active participants in creating a future we want, a future that works for all.

[00:03:00] Chris Duffy: 

We're gonna talk about how to become active participants and how to build that hopeful future in just a moment. So don't go anywhere because we will be right back in the very, very, very near future.

Today we're talking about designing for the future, planning for hypotheticals, and being open to the unknown with Anab Jain. 

[00:03:26] Anab Jain: 

Hi, uh, so I'm Anab Jain. I am a designer, a speculative designer of sorts, and I'm also professor of a department called Design Investigations at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

And I am a co-founder of Superflux, uh, design future studio based in London. 

[00:03:47] Chris Duffy: 

How did this start? How did you get into this work in this field? 

[00:03:50] Anab Jain: 

So I studied filmmaking in India and I went to the RCA Royal College of Art in London to study interaction design. And that's where I met Jon Ardern and my partner, life partner.

And a few years, uh, later we started Superflux. After graduating from the Royal College, it was around 2008. There was the credit crisis. We were these wide-eyed, young, idealistic, uh, graduates, wanting to change the world and we could see the world collapsing before us. There were keys of people outside, but the banks here in London, we could see boxes of people, like people leaving with boxes of this stuff from Lehman Brothers.

It was like, you know what has just unfolded? And I think at that point, we started exploring the idea of a studio, wondering, “How can we as designers, artists, creative people, what contribution can we make with our skills to say that this doesn't have to be the way forward? This, we don't have to accept this as our reality.”

And so that's how our journey started. We were interested in exploring narratives that were outside of consensus reality as we know it. Over the years we've explored that, uh, trajectory through working with, uh, clients, businesses, governments, cultural institutions who are interested in imagining, uh, visions, uh, strategic or uh, simply inspiring.

[00:05:15] Chris Duffy: 

Why did you choose the name Superflux? 

[00:05:18] Anab Jain: 

I'm a big fan. We are big fans of architectural radical architecture studio in Italy called Superstudio. And of course, um, they are, uh, well known in the architecture and design worlds. These to create quite sort of radical, almost technologically utopian visions, I have to admit, of, uh, possible worlds.

And so I was very drawn to, to them at that point. And flux was the idea of change. So big change. So how can we sort of situate ourselves in the space where change is happening and it's constantly in flux? 

[00:05:53] Chris Duffy: 

Your work it, it combines art, technology, and data. Just to start us off to people who, who aren't already familiar with your work, can you explain Superflux and the speculative designs that you create?

[00:06:05] Anab Jain: 

I suppose the easiest way to help people understand what we do is through examples. So imagine you are in a room with ministers and you are trying to get them to invest a significant amount of money in renewable energy to reduce pollution in the, in our cities. Quite often when senior leaders see data about the future, they don't necessarily leap to a decision around investment.

It's very difficult for them to see how that data could lead to direct action, and that's where we come in. We took these ministers in the government of UAE through a scenario where they were invited to breathe polluted air from the future. Just one with, of the noxious polluted air brought home the point that no amount of data can, that this is the reality your children and grandchildren could inherit, and that's the work we do. 

We bring the future to life through embodied experiences because we know that it is only when we really touch, sense, hear, feel and smell something different. We truly understand its value and impact today. 

[00:07:25] Chris Duffy: 

I love that example because I think it shows why it's so different than other approaches because we, we all have heard so much data and so many reports about, uh, the dangers of climate change and of, of global warming. 

And yet I think for, even for the people who are the most, uh, compelled by that, it's very hard to viscerally understand what the experience of it would be. It's hard to feel like it's an emergency and, and what you've done by, by bringing it into our actual senses, by bringing it into our actual body, just by having the, the smell of what air smells like right now versus what it could smell like if we don't change things, it, it shifts it into a different register.

Why do you think that is? 

[00:08:04] Anab Jain: 

So there is a lot of research that shows that the way our cognitive wiring, the way our brains are wired, is we spend a significant percentage of our brains for reasoning. And that capacity for reasoning takes place through metaphors, stories, emotions, narratives, and that stuff really creates the circuitry in our brain to start to make connections and see possibilities. 

There is a well known linguist called Professor George Lakoff at the University of Berkeley, who has written significant amount on this topic. So that is one side. The other side is that we are biological beings. We, for thousands of years, we've met the world through stories.

That's how we meet the world. So knowing that we as human beings require different kinds of inputs in order to make decisions. We really feel that's something we should really sort of harness that power of storytelling, embodied experiences, visceral experiences to create visions of the future that can help us make more informed decisions today.

[00:09:24] Chris Duffy: 

It makes me wonder how you think about the line between fiction and nonfiction in your work. Because in many ways you are an author of short stories, an author of experiences, and they are of course, based on facts and data and possible futures, and yet they're also, fictional in the sense that they're hypothetical, they're not necessarily what has to happen.

[00:09:46] Anab Jain: 

I often wonder about what we consider nonfiction. Is it the stories we see in news? Is the way we, we are presented with news truly nonfiction or are there biases and is this one person's view or one certain journalist view of the world? Of course there are facts. I completely understand, but I'm, I'd like to lead into the ideas that Ursula Le Guin, a well known author has written about where she said, “Truth is a matter of imagination.”

I feel that very much in our lives and the way we've constructed some meta narratives about ideas of progress, about ideas of what is a developed country and what's a developing country. A lot of these that we tend to think of as nonfiction are actually fictional narratives that we – money. The idea of money, we've gone about believing that this is how it is, it doesn't ha have to be this way. 

So I think, I like to work in that space between what we consider nonfiction and what we consider fiction as the space of speculative realism where you are understanding that there are some hard facts. There are some real sort of ideas about data, uh, and even scientists would argue that anything that they're projecting into the future based on their data, historic data is actually fiction, but it is certainly credible. Now, that's where there's an opportunity to get into fiction. Like, “If this were to happen? What if? How might we live?”

And the fact of the matter is that the future beams no data back to us. So all we can do is work with it creatively with imagination. 

[00:11:28] Chris Duffy: 

Maybe it's just the most visceral experience I had of this was, uh, at the beginning of the Coronavirus Pandemic, where all of a sudden this big, scary global event, the kind of thing that seemed straight out of a movie or a fiction novel, was all of a sudden real, and of course, the rules of lockdown, being able to only stay inside of your home, being scared about not knowing how a disease was transmitted, all of that felt like possibilities that I hadn't thought were even within the realm of probable becoming very real. 

But then where we are now, at least in the US and I think in many other places, there were such huge and rapid gifts in programs, in government programs. All of a sudden there was money to make sure that people who were unemployed didn't suffer.

All of a sudden there was, uh, huge assistance in food. There was a huge effort to, to change child poverty and these things were not just like ambitious dreams. They happened and then they were temporary, and now many of them have lapsed and now have not been continued. So to me, I, I still haven't been able to wrap my mind around the fact that in the country where I live, we solved some problems and it was possible.

And then we decided it's not. Having that experience of big, dramatic changes are practically implementable and it's a choice rather than, it's a question of, you know, capacity, that feels very real to me in a way that it hasn't before. And I know that's a lot of what you're trying to get people to understand if I understand your work correctly.

[00:13:00] Anab Jain: 

Yeah. I could also give you an example of around the same time as the pandemic was happening, we also had a lot of wildfires in Australia. It was a really horrific time and very tragic. Now, we have created a piece of work, which is an installation where people are invited to visit an apartment in the future.

It is a climate altered future where there is broken supply chains and economic uncertainties and really extreme weather events that prevent people from getting food or access to food and often can't grow food outside. So we've, as our piece of fiction, our embodied storytelling was creating an installation, a future home where members of the home were creating ingenious ways of growing food, indoor using fog, bon eggs, all sorts of interesting. 

And they, so we built all this, we really built all these food computers and they were growing food fully throughout the exhibition. There was fog everywhere. It was really very visceral. 

[00:13:58] Chris Duffy: 

Mm. 

[00:13:58] Anab Jain: 

In which world imagine people would still have homes like this and live in this way and be able to grow your, grow the food?

Really, that's exactly what our work is doing. Inviting people to step into a future they have not yet imagined. That future, that experience then becomes an episodic memory that is situated in people's minds. So next time they have to imagine a future or home in the context of climate change, that apartment will become part of their memory landscape, so to speak, and they'll be able to lead on it and say, “Okay, actually this could happen. I might have to grow food. I might have to try this thing.” 

So in a way, we are expanding and catalyzing people's imagination to start having more alternate narratives about the future in their memoryscape.

[00:14:49] Chris Duffy: 

That, that question of, uh, utopian versus dystopian of, of positive versus negative imagination, it seems like a few years ago in the popular imagination, technology was going to solve all our problems, and I think there has now been a real shift in the way that people view technology, view large technological innovations, view the companies that control them in that for example, drones, the idea that like, “Drones are gonna deliver our packages and it's gonna be so easy to get pizza.” 

That's not the way that people talk about drones anymore. What's the balance that we should be striking between positive and negative between utopian and dystopian? 

[00:15:27] Anab Jain: 

In all honesty, I'm not a fan of dystopias or utopias because they also come with associations of either apocalyptic science fiction, or actually when it comes to utopia, it gets even harder to imagine a true utopia. 

You know, I don't think it can really exist. Uh, so we in our studio, Jon, I and our team, we are really interested in that space between utopia and dystopia, because any future would be as messy and complicated as today. It's more about creating or exploring guiding visions that can help us navigate this complexity, this turbulence, this messiness. 

And where do we end up? How do we reduce the losers of the world? Right now it's really, we are living in a highly unequal world. One big problem is that, is the equity of, we don't even have equity in imagination, uh, in the voices of imagination, so to speak.

So I really wanna sort of say that the, the future will build on our histories, on our on, on the actions and the bones of the actions we're taking today, so to speak. So essentially our exercise in imagining a different feature is to be able to bring back learnings from it to make better decisions today.

[00:16:54] Chris Duffy: 

We are gonna take a short break right now, but we will be right back if you can imagine that.

And we are back. You have a unique ability and imagination and creativity. Certainly it feels like there is a creative framework, a way of approaching reality that you use that other people could experiment with. Is there any way that you can kind of articulate for those people listening, how do you approach one of these problems that you're trying to imagine a speculative future for?

[00:17:32] Anab Jain: 

So, you know, how do we put these ideas out in the world? How do we create the cultural, spiritual, emotional infrastructure for people to be able to engage with these ideas and start to see these possibilities? For several organizations, we've created bespoke world building frameworks inspired by fiction writers, but really understanding that organizations kind of, uh, line of travel and understanding what is their vision? Where do they want be in whatever, 10 years time? We are able to create a, a framework that became like a toolkit.

So, It takes people from across, uh, temporal scales or physical scales into the future to start to see mapping trends and weak signals to start to understand 10 years from the future if these things were to happen, what would a person living in this part of the world experience? And then we put it out as a toolkit to 150,000 employees of the organization actually, and they were all able to start creating stories. That really gave us hope that we can kind of scale this in different ways and create a framework which enables people to situate themselves in a world that that feels aspirational, transformative, and somewhere they can start to see how their actions could have effect.

That's the other thing that very often people feel, “What can I do? Whatever I do, that's not gonna make any difference.” But just to be able to have that seed of possibility inside of you is already action, then you feel you have your own agency to try and do something about it. So I think, yeah, some connections there.

[00:19:19] Chris Duffy: 

Definitely it, the idea of what can I really do about this issue? Whatever the issue is, you know, whether it's war or climate change or injustice or legal issues, like I, I find it extremely easy to imagine how I could, uh, make things worse. But it's harder to imagine the, the equal but opposite positive one of, I'm gonna fix everything. That requires a more active imagination.

[00:19:41] Anab Jain: 

So I think there are two points to that. One is I do wanna absolutely say that it is not individual people's responsibility to affect change at scale, and I don't think people should hold them so strongly to account and feel really bad about it, which I know is happening, especially with younger people, but it feels so helpless and paralyzed.

But I do want to emphasize that the biggest responsibility rests with the biggest emitters and governments and businesses who have the power and the influence to affect change. Having said that, I know as individuals, everyone feels responsible and so I would say that doing what you can, uh, in whatever way you can, whether you wanna be vegan or whether you wanna travel fly less, or whether you're doing some local gardening or the community is, these are all good things.

It's that ability to be able to keep that duality in view that I can do what I can and I will, whilst engaging with the bigger sort of, uh, systemic trap that we are part of. Like to be able to see that, that we are trapped in a system that we ha we can poke holes in whilst holding daily what we can do well and contributing.

[00:20:56] Chris Duffy: 

You said that we lack equity in imagination. I'm curious to think more about how we can go about changing that? How do we create equity and imagination? 

[00:21:05] Anab Jain: 

It is that even though as humans, we all probably have boundless imagination, there is inequity in whose imagination becomes part of the grand narrative and whose imaginations are not included in those narratives.

So I think that is inequity in the manifestation of imagination. However, people are led to believe that they don't have imagination and there's a failure of imagination, and I very much don't think that's the case. If you were to look at the world in the way that James C. Scott has written about seeing like a state, you would say, you would argue that imagination is actually dangerous.

Because the way we've created our education systems of the 20th century, we are training people for the workforce. We have trained people to be very good at answering questions, very bad at asking questions, and asking questions has always been reprimanded. “Don't ask too much. Stop asking why? Why are you raising your hand and asking questions? You need to just get on with the answer. What's the answer? You got the answer wrong. Why did you get the answer wrong?” 

So on and so forth. So I think. From the time the child goes to school over the years that faculty of imagination gets suppressed and then you stop questioning and you get on with it. If everybody was highly imaginative, they would be questioning everything we do.

They'd be questioning our unauthentic ideas of progress. And where would that leave us? 

[00:22:40] Chris Duffy: 

I know you, you as a professor, work with young people and you talked about how Superflux kind of came out of this moment where you graduated and the world was not exactly what you thought it would be. I graduated in 2009 and I wanted to be a journalist, I thought. 

That was a year where many newspapers closed, and so I had this kind of discombobulating experience of, I would send out my clips and my resume and a cover letter, and instead of even a rejection, I several times got a letter back that said, “This newspaper no longer exists. Like it has been shut down in the time between when you applied and getting this letter.”

I talked to someone who was a, a very distinguished journalist, who had a really successful career, and the advice he gave me was, he was like, “I honestly think you should do something else that you should write on the side, but this is not, I wouldn't encourage you to go into this career, especially right now.”

I think also young people who are graduating high school and college right now are similarly, they're at this moment that we're kind of told is supposed to be this hopeful, the start of the wonderful rest of your life. And yet the world, the broader world, does not feel like the hopeful start of the wonderful rest of your life.

It feels very dark and ominous and scary in so many ways. So what would you say to young people right now who are just starting their personal and professional adult lives? 

[00:23:57] Anab Jain: 

Yeah, that is hard, isn't it? We have to do what we have to do because every act matters. So around the world, people are in such difficult situations, and yet despite that in the middle of war right now as I'm saying this, and yet you see them cooking together, sharing recipes, talking about communities, talk – at the heart of all of this is the human spirit that is recognizing that actually there are ways forward, and that's spirit of sort of active hope. The spirit of recognizing that in each of us is the capacity to collectively affect change that they should hold onto.

And I think that faith, that understanding of self-agency, coupled with a sense of doubt and humility can really, hopefully give them, uh, the sort of, uh, emotional, uh, grounding needed to kind of get into a world that is gonna be very chaotic. 

[00:25:12] Chris Duffy: 

So, thinking about the future, one of the big shifts that I personally just totally, honestly do not know. I don't know if it is complete hype or if it is actually a radical shift, but there's so much talk right now about artificial intelligence and I, I'm curious more broadly thinking about the line between human and machine and the way that is being blurred in a way that it hasn't before.

What do you see in the future of creativity, in the future of human autonomy, in the future of the lines between what makes us unique and what makes a machine simply a tool or not a tool anymore? 

[00:25:53] Anab Jain: 

Yeah, and I think that's such an interesting question and very rarely asked because everyone gets caught up in the sort of disturbing vision technology and is gonna take our jobs, you know?

So I'm really glad that you're asking that question. I'm interested in that space. I'm interested in how might machinic intelligence extend my cognitive capacities for imagination? How might it sort of inspire me to think in ways I have not thought before, to create in ways I have not thought before, to question the world in ways I've not done before?

And that's the sort of machinic intelligence I'm interested in. I'm not interested so much in the machine intelligence that is going to do the chores for me that I already kind of do. I'm interested in that sort of machinic, artificial, synthetic ecological intelligence that will become my companion in a kind of a collaborative effort to explore new cognitive frontier, so to speak.

[00:26:58] Chris Duffy: 

Mm. You created a really beautiful piece about AI as as more poetic and and focused ecological flourishing and how art. 

[00:27:05] Anab Jain: 

Yeah. 

[00:27:05] Chris Duffy: 

Is gonna play into this future technological innovation and survival. 

[00:27:09] Anab Jain: 

Yeah. In that instance, we were really interested in asking, “What if air AI spoke for our rivers?” So we are casting doubt on the way we think about large language models and their sort of understanding of truth of the truth, so I'm interested in ecological intelligence because I genuinely believe that intelligence is also capricious. 

Nature is capricious, so is intelligence, ecological intelligence can share with us. And a wisdom of interconnectedness, of reciprocity, of, uh deep impact a small action by a little insect under a tree can have on the forest. 

And that was what we are trying to talk about with policy makers, that if they were going to make the decisions about policy around the future of a freshwater systems, what if we had an AI that spoke for a river and foregrounded the river's deep ecological interconnectedness with all the different species that it interacts with?

And just foregrounding that interconnectedness and intelligence could that enable the decision makers to consider the policies that not just foreground human communities, but the more the human communities as well. 

[00:28:25] Chris Duffy: 

What can we all do to be more active participants in what our future looks like? 

[00:28:30] Anab Jain: 

Question everything. I think be curious. Notice more, question everything. 

[00:28:36] Chris Duffy: 

Well, it was truly, Anab, such a pleasure talking to you and uh, I'm such a fan of your work and I really hope that people listening will go out and watch the movies and read the, the writing and also just witness and if you have the chance to in-person experience it, please don't miss that.

Superflux is doing incredible work and you are doing incredible work. It was such a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much for making the time. 

[00:28:56] Anab Jain: 

Thank you for having me. Thank you.

[00:29:01] Chris Duffy: 

That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest. Anab Jain. Her company is called Superflux. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you from the past to the future by a group from TED that includes Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Lanie Lott, Antonia Le and Joseph DeBrine. 

This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who forced me to smell a small sample of the air that is created by exaggerated details. On the PRX side, we've got a group of superstars who take my regular flux and they do their best to make it super, Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Maggie Gourville, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzales.

And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you are listening on Apple, one of the biggest ways you can help us get out to new listeners and spread the word about the show is by leaving us a five star rating and writing a review.

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