human works design - building meaningful futures - Issue #18
From protesting to proposal and action.
Since the beginning of 2018, we have been witnessing growing protests of concerned communities on topics like violence against children, sexism against women, speciesism and environmental damage.
Collective consciousness is rising and social movements are happening all around the world, thanks to courageous role models and social media. However many social movements find that it is easier and in many cases more popular to articulate what they are opposed rather than what they wish to build. Awareness of information and willingness to act are indeed important part of the social change but they are only a part of it. The challenge is how societies as a whole change and move toward new way of relating and organising lives together for better futures. It is never about us versus them. We need to think of change as in a web form instead of a linear one, how multiple sets of interdependent processes will link people to move the whole system toward those changes that inspire rather than focusing only on -thus spreading more- fear, guilt, division and anger. It is time to dare to dream a better vision and make proposals towards that vision. This requires awareness, action and broad processes of change, which starts always with the change in the thought systems of individuals, empowering good role models and manifesting sustainable, inclusive and positive actions.
#Childrenfirst. 17 people, mainly young students, were killed by a gunman last Wednesday in a High School in Florida. The shooting was the 18th in a U.S. school this year, according to gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety. As one of the survivors shook us with his statement after the massacre, children are way better demanding action from adults to play their part more responsibly for children. Wired’s ‘Courageous Grieving and The Tragedy in Parkland’ article mentions; “These children are making their incontrovertible record, distributing it in social media, giving interviews, publishing editorials and saturating the airwaves with the truth.” We are long overdue for giving children a voice in the decision making rooms for their own future. Can we as adults, especially as business leaders and regulators, dare to dream of a world where children come first, our businesses and politics designed for and with children? If it is not us, the ones who can and will are growing and I am looking forward to that!
#MeToo. Natalie Portman made a speech at the Women’s March 2018 last month. In her talk, she did not focus on how corrupt show business is, but how deeply rooted the desperation is for very young, female bodies in every level of society and how her industry feeds that sickness. What impressed me most is that she moved beyond just protesting but came up with a vision; “A world in which I could wear whatever I want, say whatever I want and express my desire however I want without fear of my safety or reputation. That would be the world in which female desire could have its greatest fulfilment.” Can we, especially as women, dream of such a world? Let’s first deal with the sexist voice in almost all of our heads telling us to behave, keep quite and settle with less than who we really are. That’s the ultimate freedom.
#Veganism. Scientists just learned that at least 150,000 Bornean orangutans have disappeared over the past 16 years, mainly due to deforestation or transformed for industrial agriculture (often palm oil plantation which is the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet, and it is in about half of all packaged products sold in the supermarket.), people killing them and trading their babies as pets. Can we as humans, dare to dream of a world where we don’t see animals, plants as resources/ commodities but as fellow Earthlings? Killing orangutans to take their babies might be sickening to you as it should, but can we take responsibility with what we consume everyday on our plates, which might create an equal harm? As Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer nicely puts it; “Animal Liberation is Human Liberation too.”
We cannot leave ourselves at the mercy of all regulators, all men and all industry leaders to change first to have better lives for ourselves and others. It is too late and too costly to wait until good actions become mainstream. Change starts always with you and within, it happens when you make peace with yourself, show compassion to others and take full responsibility of the impact you make. Encouraging, inspiring and role modelling towards this vision is what we can all embrace today.
As human works design, we are on a mission for a world where children understand the value of who they are and design the futures they deserve, so they never feel like taking guns and killing each other or perceive a certain sex, gender, nation or species inferior or enemy, but all of us as one. We also work with game changer leaders to design and innovate conscious business models and transform the culture of their organisations free from the burden of destructive thoughts and procedures.
Let us know if you want to learn more how to become a conscious business or exchange best cases, methodologies from your experience to make the switch from protesting to proposal and action.
With love and gratitude.
Canay Atalay
Children first
We are born creative geniuses and the education system dumbs us down, according to NASA scientists
A test, developed for NASA, for 4-5 year old children looked at the ability to come up with new, different and innovative ideas to problems. What percentage of those children do you think fell in the genius category of imagination? A full 98 percent! What about us adults? How many of us are still in contact with our creative genius after years of schooling? Sadly, only 2 percent. We need to find that five-year old again. That capability that we as a five-year-old possessed, never goes away. That’s one of the reason’s at human works design, we believe in Children’s First World Design approach.
Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built
A group of Silicon Valley technologists plans to call attention to the dangers of tech, including working on an ad campaign aimed at 55,000 public schools.
UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World
BOOK RECOMMENDATION - UnSelfie by Dr. Michele Borba explains what parents and educators MUST do to combat the growing empathy crisis among children today—including a 9-step empathy-building program with tips to guide kids from birth through college, and beyond.
Conscious business
2018 Edelman TRUST BAROMETER (report)
The 2018 Edelman TRUST BAROMETER reveals a world of seemingly stagnant distrust. People’s trust in business, government, NGOs and media remained largely unchanged from 2017 — 20 of 28 markets surveyed now lie in distruster territory, up one from last year. Yet dramatic shifts are taking place at the market level and within the institution of media.
The tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory
If tech companies are serious about building a better society, and aren’t just paying lip service to justice for their own gain, they must attend more closely to social theory. If social insights were easy, and if practice followed readily from understanding, then racism, poverty and other debilitating systems of power and inequality would be a thing of the past. New insights about society are as challenging to produce as the most rarified scientific theorems – and addressing pressing contemporary problems requires as many kinds of knowers and ways of knowing as possible.
How to be a leader in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
“We need leaders who are emotionally intelligent, and able to model and champion co-operative working. They’ll coach, rather than command; they’ll be driven by empathy, not ego. The digital revolution needs a different, more human kind of leadership”. - Professor Klaus Schwab.
Jaron Lanier interview: on VR and consciousness
Jaron Lanier is a VR pioneer and a digital philosopher. He coined the term “virtual reality,” founded one of the first companies in the space, and has been involved in both the practice and theory of creating and living in virtual worlds for decades now. He’s one of the most trenchant critics of Silicon Valley’s business model and the way it’s screwed up both the internet and the world. And somehow, all this has made him a much more humanistic, insightful analyst of what it’s like to live in the real world, too.
Listen to this podcast interview with Jaron where he talks about VR and consciousness, amongst many other topics, including the influence of technology on our humanity.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION - If you haven’t read ’Who Owns the Future?“ or ”You Are Not a Gadget“, catch up as his new book is out now ”Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality“.
Business is having a 'morality moment'. It could become a movement
CEOs must understand that morality should be measured not just from statements and commitments, but from evidence that a company is addressing human rights and environmental and governance challenges in its own operations.
Stop Saying 'Smart Cities'
There Is No Such Thing as a Smart City by Bruce Sterling
MUST READ - “Smart cities” drift away from open public websites and popular comments. Instead, they’re adopting that new surveillance-marketing paradigm of “data extractivity.” Why trouble to ask the “citizens” what they want from urban life, when you can accurately surveil the real actions of city’s “users” and decode what they’re actually doing, as opposed to what they vaguely claim they might want to do?
Design thinking
Welcome to the Post-Text Future
The internet was born in text. Now, video and audio are ascendant, writing is being left behind, and everything will be different.
Personal growth
Too often we hear that companies or ‘others’ are responsible for the society and work environments created. However, we always are the first to decide what we want in our lives. We believe there is no better way to bring change than to transform yourself first. In this section, tips and reading about how to transform yourself from within.
4 Things We Think We Need Today that Won’t Matter at All in the Long Run
Sometimes it gets so busy and difficult that we forget how important it is to actually listen to ourselves. We fill our calendars, our social media feeds, and our days with various forms of distraction, just to avoid doing the little uncomfortable things required to get us from where we are to where we hope to be. The instant we feel a bit of discomfort, we run off in the direction of the nearest shiny object that catches our attention. And this habit gradually dismantles our best intentions and our true potential. Our dreams and priorities go by the wayside, and we’re left regretting another wasted year.
Unconventional Inspiration: The Best of Terence McKenna
For those of you who aren’t familiar with him already, Terence McKenna was a man who wore many hats. While he is most well known for being one of the pioneers of the psychedelic movement during the early 80s, Terence also dipped his toe in a plethora of other topics — things like philosophy, culture, science, VR and AI, the nature of time, evolution… and much more. Even if you disagree with his unorthodox practices, much of what he discusses is still incredibly thought-provoking and fun to ponder.
The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron:
BOOK RECOMMENDATION - “The Artist’s Way,” is a book that can be classified as self-help but is more like common sense. The book is a program designed to help readers reject the devils of self-doubt on their shoulders and pursue creative activity not as a profession but as a form of therapy. At the core of the process is a ritual called “morning pages,” based on the belief that writing out three pages of free-form writing, in longhand, each morning, will unclog one’s mental and emotional channels of all the muck that gets in the way of being happy, productive, and creative. It really works, try it!
Platform capitalism
Workers are the Heart of the Algorithm
“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the platforms are fragmenting and rendering invisible the labour that is necessary to make the algorithms work.” - Antonio Casilli.
Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disrupted by Scott Galloway
Four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history. The only logical conclusion? We must bust up big tech.
Sustainability
Coca-Cola And Nestlé To Privatize The Largest Reserve Of Water In South America
Private companies such as Coca-Cola and Nestlé are allegedly in the process of privatising the largest reserve of water, known as the Guarani Aquifer, in South America. The aquifer is located beneath the surface of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay and is the second largest-known aquifer system in the world.
The shopping centre dedicated to repaired and recycled goods
Residents of the small Swedish town of Eskilstuna don’t have to go far to get their shopping fix – or to help save the planet. Whether they’re looking for a TV, furniture, fashion, sports equipment or houseplants, they will find them all at ReTuna, Sweden’s – and probably the world’s – first shopping centre dedicated to refurbished and recycled goods. Everything sold has either been recycled or reused, or organically or sustainably produced.
Future of work
Towards a Re-skilling Revolution (report)
As the types of skills needed in the labour market change rapidly, individual workers will have to engage in life-long learning if they are to achieve fulfilling and rewarding careers. For companies, re-skilling and up-skilling strategies will be critical if they are to find the talent they need and to contribute to socially responsible approaches to the future of work. For policy-makers, re-skilling and retraining the existing workforce are essential levers to fuel future economic growth, enhance societal resilience in the face of technological change and pave the way for future-ready education systems for the next generation of workers.
Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results
As Astro Teller, CEO of X, the ‘moonshoot factory’ at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has said: ‘Having people who have different mental perspectives is what’s important. If you want to explore things you haven’t explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.’ We must see the forest.
Labour 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality (report)
Demographics, automation and inequality have the potential to dramatically reshape our world in the 2020s and beyond. Analysis by Bain’s Macro Trends Group shows that the collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than we have experienced over the past 60 years.
Artificial Intelligence
Where Did All the Advertising Jobs Go?
For the first time on record, the number of people working in the industry is declining during an economic expansion. The future of the advertising business is being moved to technology companies managing ad networks and media companies making branded content—that is, away from the ad agencies.
“We’re in a diversity crisis”: cofounder of Black in AI on what’s poisoning algorithms in our lives
Timnit Gebru looks around the AI world and sees almost no one who looks like her. That’s a problem for all of us.
Health
Gabor Mate on How Materialistic Society Creates a Toxic Culture (video)
In this strongly recommended video, Gabor Mate talks about how we are bio-physical-social beings and how relationships directly affect health.
Blockchain
Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO
A document submitted to the SEC earlier this week states that the money was raised “for the development of the TON Blockchain, the development and maintenance of Telegram Messenger and the other purposes.” The security is described as “purchase agreements for cryptocurrency” and the filing is signed by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.
The Big ICO Swindle by Joi Ito
MUST READ - Many cryptocurrency speculators are banking on the theory that someone dumber than them will buy their tokens for more than they paid. That’s a pretty good bet … until it isn’t. WIRED’s new columnist Joi Ito on the many things that could go wrong with cryptocurrencies.
Why the Web 3.0 Matters and you should know about it
There’s plenty of buzz around the web 3.0 and the sweeping changes it will bring to the industry, but few people actually know why it spawned and what it will bring.
Mobile Sunday and IoT Stars at MWC18
Mobile Sunday Barcelona 2018
Free beer, street food trucks, a couple of excellent talks, refreshing tunes from our house DJ Oisin Lunny and top-notch networking with mobile industry pioneers and European technology insiders: if you’ve been to Mobile Sunday in Barcelona before, you know to expect this and more. This year in partnership with Atomico, with talks from MessageBird and Teralytics, among other interesting speakers on Sunday, 25 February at 6pm at the amazing Antigua Fábrica Estrella Damm. Get your tickets now before they sell out!
We have 10 FREE tickets (use code HWD_MobileSunday_FREE) for our readers and a 50% discount (use code HWD_MobileSunday_50) in case you cannot grab one of the free tickets.
IoT Stars MWC 2018
Join the 4th IoT Stars MWC 2018, the most famous pitching and networking event for Internet of Things startups and companies during the first night of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. We have 10 FREE tickets (use code VIP_HWD) for our readers and a 50% discount (use code HWD_IOT50) in case you cannot grab one of the free tickets.