Peter spoke at the Entertainment Gathering (EG) Conference which is host to the community of the leading innovators of the worlds most creative industries. Peter spoke on the rebuilding of "Tomorrow" as a brand.
Rebooting tomorrow is such an exciting idea, I think tomorrow is one hell of a brand and personally its one I grew up with. Since inevitably tomorrow is in so many of our futures, I’d like to pose the question; just who is the brand steward of tomorrow anyway? I ask this question because its important we find out how the shots are being called and where we fit in. I’d like to start by going back to where tomorrow was young; nobody sold tomorrow like they did in 1939.
The 1939 World's Fair was branded as the world of tomorrow, and was one of the great acts of packaging. It was the birth of modern design, of consumer culture, the source of the visions of new technologies and the cities we live in today. Like everything else in the industrial era our role in tomorrow was that of consumer. Newspapers had their readers, NBC its viewers. GM’s Futurama was a lovely future with no traffic, plenty of automobiles and lots of order. Cities were supposed to be top-down, planned, radiant; none of that messy organic or emergent stuff. We know how that story turned out. Folks drove to the suburbs, urban renewal didn’t yet exist and we started to run out of gas. There as an economical crisis the government was poor, people got cranky about the government and we all ended up here talking about rebooting tomorrow.
“In the middle of all that, there was a growing sense that perhaps the future was more being done to us than being done by us.”
The great urbanist Jan Jacobs really foresaw this when she wrote in 1961; “cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when they’re created by everyone.” How do you handle something as complex as a city and assign it to everybody? That would seem like a completely fantastic question unless you happened to live through the last decade. Since the dawn of social media we’ve created more participatory technology than ever in history. We learned how to crowd source, co-create, collaborate, and write encyclopedia’s bottom-up. As the internet spills out into our streets, as sensors and data become pervasive, as we move into the era of smart cities. The essential question becomes can we architect a future where all of those social media and participatory effects follow us in the physical world and give us a new roll in our cities and in government? Put differently its up to us whether the future will look like Robert Moses with LED’s and sensors or more of what Jan Jacobs had in mind.
Like so many things this movement had its start in the Bay Area. Oakland was the first of many cities to start sharing its municipal data. It was citizens in Oakland analyzing this visual data that noticed the prostitution arrests seem to happen once a month from north to south on San Pablo Ave. Citizens brought it to the attention of the police that crimes couldn’t possibly happen like this, but this is what lazy police word does and the police changed their ways. When Japan was faced with a nuclear meltdown caused by the recent earthquake the government couldn’t or wouldn’t tell the public where the radiation was. Top-down intransigents was topple by data; crowd source, citizen created data. Who would’ve thought that something like data would be such an instigator?
 | (Cont. in Rebooting Tomorrow Pt. 2) |
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