Future Fun—Playing the Technology Innovation Game
Getting in touch with the innovator within
I love this workshop. But before I tell you about it, I am going to wax philosophic for a few paragraphs about why it’s so important. So, if you want to get right to the workshop, skip ahead.
If you want to see an example of how the medium becomes the message, consider this:
One of the most important variables in the Google search equation is the frequency with which web page information changes. We now create web content with that in mind, knowing that the rate at which we change our information is more important than the actual content we convey.
So much for the value of the classics. But if you’re not searchable then you’re nobody.
Google led our obsession with the present, and has managed to inspire everyone else to follow its lead. The result is that the digital age has lost its sense of history. There is only now, as RSS feeds and Tweet frenzies pump all of us so full of breaking news that we barely have the energy to remember yesterday’s bullet points, let alone how they connect to today.
Stuck in the present
As a result, not only do our connections with the past atrophy, but so do our abilities to see our future:
When we remove ourselves from the historical continuum we become stuck in the present. If you are Buddhist, this might sound great. But our approach to “being here now” has very different consequences than any Zen Master ever intended.
Rather than detach ourselves from the material world, we become enmeshed in its outermost layer, the infosphere. It becomes the portal through which we get to our things.
Think of the infosphere as the ever-roiling cloud that follows us everywhere; that is continually updated and punctuated by blinking ads that are tailored to the story we tell about ourselves; by the bits of information we leave behind as we traverse the Internet. We don’t dare step out of the cloud, lest we miss something important the very moment it happens. So, we see right in front of us, playing out our story one click at a time. If we are smart, we drive into the future while looking into the rearview mirror, as McLuhan suggested, to understand where we have just been.
The irony about being stuck in a present that is obsessed with the future is this: there is no better way to understand the future than by understanding our past. It is how we see those aspects of human nature that don’t change, and that comprise what Michael Dertouzos, former head of the MIT Computer Science Dept., called “the ancient human” within each of us. The basic model of human being has not changed, according to Dertouzos. But the props in our stories are changing faster than we can rewrite the script. The result is that innovation is at least somewhat predictable.
The Technology Innovation Game Workshop
How do we reinvolve people in the historical continuum? One way is through the technology innovation game. It has become one of my favorite workshops to conduct. In it I show participants various ways to understand how innovation happens by looking at how “the things” in our lives – the props in our stories - evolve. Whether we consider coffee cups, computers, or Singularity, everything sits on a timeline, borrows from the innovation of others, and moves in the direction of human fulfillment. In the workshop, we look at the history of some of our more enduring things and how they satisfy the needs of the ancient human. Then we add modern materials and tools into the mix. Then we project today into tomorrow.
This is all conceptual, of course. We don’t actually get to build anything. But the ideas participants come up with are mind-boggling. I have done this with many age groups, from middle schoolers to rapidly-aging digital immigrants. It doesn’t matter. Creativity, history, and fun merge. And everyone gets in touch with the innovator within.