I have a vision for a future where we’ve reached a perfect harmony with nature.
The creative pursuits of technology have merged with the undeniable “intelligence” of nature. Where the toil of our daily lives balances our own interests with the interests of creating a better world for all humans. Not just those of your own social class, proximity, colour, language, or ethnicity. Where the measure of success is not put on profits above all else, but on good to humanity, on happiness.
For years we’ve turned our backs on nature. We’ve seen ourselves as better than, as above the “filth”, the apparent disorder, the unintelligent chaos of the natural world. This arrogance has been humanity’s greatest downfall.
As humans, we’re suffering. The privileged are suffering from their own greed and gluttony with man made afflictions like diabetes and obesity. The poor are suffering as a result of the capitalistic greed of the privileged, forced to deal with air pollution, rising sea levels, polluted drinking water and increasingly inhospitable weather events.
But it doesn’t need to be this way.
I see a future where technology and nature work together.
They work together to create objects of modern comfort and luxury in a way that doesn’t hurt the environment, or us. Products and services that don’t steal from the future to gratify the present, but actively help the future for humankind and the earth.
A future where products and services learn from the embodied intelligence of millions of years of evolution of flora and fauna, taking not just inspiration not just in form like we’ve done with velcro, turbulence reduction on wind-turbines, and the design of bullet trains, but from the very cells and structures, the materials which create that form and it’s amazing properties.
Material science of the last few centuries has taken us a long way from nature, however without this journey we wouldn’t be where we are today.
You wouldn’t be reading this on a device which, only a couple of generations ago, was beyond our wildest imaginations if it weren’t for the material science and technology pursued over the last couple of hundred years.
But technology has reached a tipping point.
We’ve collected all the tools and resources humanity needs and we’ve got enough stuff for our journey into the future. Instead of being focused on collecting more and more, it’s now safe for us to focus on better.
Better efficiency, better ethics, better for the environment. We need to get smarter with our products and services. We need to be more critical of our own actions, more contemplative over the effects to others, and more focused than ever on reversing the damage we’ve done to ourselves and to the earth in the relentless pursuit to get us to the now.