Art that changes history

“The future is always first an idea”. This quote from Emilia Lahti has been our motto from the day we started on our mission to imagine a better future that works for all life. 

Every (r)Evolution starts with a story and they develop as those stories are believed by more and more people. 

Nature Magazine did a study and discovered that you only need 25% of a population to believe in something for that something to become mainstream. Decades of green activism and solutionism are finally coming out of the underground and joining the conversation. It’s the time to achieve critical mass. 

A primary goal at the Design Science Studio is to create art, stories, experiences, books, paintings, street art, podcasts, gatherings, crypto art, ads… anything that can carry a message! These messages become tools to propel transformation. 

There is no planet B, and we have a once-in-a-century opportunity to take everything we’ve learnt in the past hundred years and correct some of our mistakes. We still have an opportunity to re-align ourselves with nature and to design a world that accounts for all beings, where a sufficiency of resources exist for everyone. A world that is equitable and just, without colonization or racism, where all needs are served. A world that is in communion with nature, where we upcycle and recycle, where we grow in community and in harmony with our environment, where we create more human connections and work to live and not live to work. 

Too hippie? Well, the future is always first an idea. Our work is to dream. Our work is to imagine. Our work is to empower those who can draft and sketch the future we want to inhabit and to give them wings to share those visions with the world, because we only need to convince 1 in 4 people that it is possible. 

It’s time for Art that changes History.

Design Science Decade

This is the decisive decade for the future of our Spaceship Earth. What we do now will change the course of history forever. The difference between the best and worst case scenario has perhaps never been greater with climate collapse, income inequality, food insecurity, water shortages, systemic racism, indigenous genocides, and mass extinction all intertwining to create a Gordian knot. This complex knot leads us to pulling on one rope of a challenge and finding we are inadvertently making other challenges tighter and worse. In our best efforts to do good, we create harm in other systems and often at a higher order of magnitude. The trick to untying the knot is to look at the root causes and change the system, and follow Fuller’s axiom: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete”. 

The best case scenario from this decade sees humanity realizing it is far more capable than it knows,  to take care of itself and all life on Spaceship Earth. Fuller foresaw this transformational decade as the consequence of meeting a crossroads in the 1970’s where we finally had the technological ability to take care of all and could shift from scarcity to sufficiency. He said it would take about 50 years for all our institutions to catch up and shift from operating with a zero-sum game dynamic, in which one can only profit at the expense of another, to a win-for-all dynamic, in which all see benefit from others actions. Here we are 50 years later, watching our institutions crumble and be rebuilt upon this dynamic that could enable humanity to thrive indefinitely. 

The task of the decade is to apply all our human ingenuity, creativity, and tools to transform from an economy based on dominance, exploitation, competition, and control to a new world economy based on consent, regeneration, cooperation and reciprocity. 

And now as we emerge from the pandemic we find that people, communities, companies, and culture are ready for change. The clutch is in, will we shift up or down? We are in a critical moment, as Fuller says, it’s Utopia or Oblivion.  

This is the most concentrated transition moment humanity has yet to experience. In the course of ten years we will build a new economy that works for 100% of life. We envision the future of our society evolving through these five themes

RECONCILIATION & Commitment

Here we lay down the deep groundwork for the decade, remembering the living systems understanding of the world that many indigenous cultures have practiced for millennia. We start to address the root causes of our interconnected crises. We begin to uphold the oppressed people and recognize them as a resource for resilience. We make wild commitments, without knowing the path to get there.

RESTORATION & Capital-Transfer

We will do mass tree planting that is already being committed to in this first phase. We will use this planting to also detoxify the earth through myco- and bioremediation. We will ban pesticides, first on public lands and then phase in a ban on crops. At the same time as massive planting, massive amounts of money in family wealth will be passed to the next generation and these millennials will divest from exploitation and invest in regeneration. Billionaires are going out of style, they are giving away enough to stay a millionaire. 

RESILIENCE & Coming-together

As extreme weather and other shocks to the system continue, we will have the opportunity to upgrade our infrastructure. Our short-term reactions will build long-term resilience. Global temperatures won’t peak until 2053 at 1.526 degrees according to the latest Drawdown forecast and in the meantime we will have increasing fires, floods, storms and droughts that will require global cooperation for mitigation. This is not a time for selfishness, we will build a path to a more resilient world, through our emergency response. 

REGENERATION & Celebration

This is the anticipated phase when all our work will bear fruit in a wave of regenerative good news. We will see indications of life rebounding all around our living Spaceship Earth. The latency of our decades of regenerative actions will catch up in a wave of healing, cooling, and grounding. Life will re-emerge and we will dance!

RE-ENCHANTMENT & Circularity

This will be the point that marks the end of the era of exploitation --we will close all the loops. No more mining will be needed, all resources will be either recovered or regenerative. We will grow in a way that regenerates ecosystems and communities. We will mine the landfills and then close them down.