I first was introduced to Al Gore’s Six Drivers while working with him and a small group from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, hence it was a delight for me to see that he had developed these observations six years later into the book featured here.
Design is not a linear act. It is not relegated to mere widgets and websites, as important as they may be. Design has a larger context, scope, and scale in the 21st Century where most of our actions have systemic impact on the larger world. We are more connected now than ever before, and thus how we “mark out” (design) the world has large-scale ramifications. This global system of ours makes, or ought to make, designers of all of us, whether it’s a new business strategy, a new building project, or even sending a simple text. Everything speaks now to the larger world that we are creating and is being created around us. To bring intent to this process of designing our world is more critical now than ever.
We do not only design our world, our world designs us. Al Gore’s book “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change” is one among many important books that can provide a perspective on how the systemic emergence of our actions over the past century is having an impact on our own lives.
- Emergence of an interconnected global economy that increasingly operates as an integrated holistic entity
- Emergence of planet-wide electronic communications grid connecting the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and linking them to rapidly expanding volumes of data. This includes the emergence of AI and “thinking machines” the most powerful of which are already exceeding human capacity at a growing number of tasks
- Emergence of a completely new balance of political, economic, and military power in the world radically different from the ‘equilibrium’ of US global leadership at latter part of 20th C. We are living in a different world in which through technology power is shifting away from centralized governmental bodies to ‘smart mobs’ linked together through emerging social network technology.
- Emergence of rapid unsustainable growth: Population, cities, resource consumption, depletion of topsoil, freshwater supplies, pollution flows, and unsustainable economic output
- Emergence of revolutionary new set of powerful biological, biochemical, genetic, and materials science technologies that allow us to reconstitute biological ‘matter’, and alter the physical form, traits, characteristics, and properties of plants, animals, and people. Here we’re talking about the ways in which technology, e.g., will create conditions for humans to enhance their brains and bodies.
- Emergence of radically new relationship between aggregate power of human civilization and Earth’s ecological systems, and beginning of massive global transformation of energy, industrial, agricultural, and construction technologies. We have the technologies in place to solve the crises imposed by unsustainable sources of energy, but there is a long way to go before they become socially and politically ubiquitous.
I encourage you to read this book, whether you’re a business owner or executive or social entrepreneur. Use these points to create conversations with your colleagues to help you get a broader scope on your own work and plans for the future. Change is happening quickly. To be on the right side of it, you need to broaden your thinking and how you engage new ideas that may be radically different from your own. This is life in the Knowledge Economy. Al Gore’s book, and others I’ll be posting here, can practically help you.
If you are interested in how innovation, design, and group process can operate from a larger perspective to give you the advantages in your enterprise you’re looking for, then have a look at Kultur Design for more information.
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