human works design - building meaningful futures - Issue #19
The Age of Consciousness
At human works design we like to dream, to design dreams and turn them into reality. Our dream is to create happiness and joy for ourselves and around us with people who love, create, explore and make life worthwhile living.
A world free of addiction, pollution and systemic technological entanglement. We are living and working to make this happen every day. The task looks difficult when you look at the world today around us but we believe change starts from within oneself, with small actions in your own life, making more conscious decisions every day.
That’s why we both became vegan last summer as we did not want to support the killing of animals and the industrial food production any longer - one of the most polluting in the world. Since then our whole being became purer - as we don’t put any junk or unhealthy food any longer in our bodies. It’s amazing what simple changes can bring to your life! People think you loose energy becoming vegan but that is not true, it’s the opposite! Our energy levels are a lot higher and more balanced now.
Many athletes switch to a whole-food plant-based diet with better results. Watch James Cameron’s documentary ‘Game Changers’ showing the masculinity in vegan athletes portraying a new Era of Veganism, replacing corrupt authority with the truth.
The reality we live in needs a lot of conscious change and we are determined to make that change happen.
Huge corporations keep selling junk and sugary foods to our population in an addictive mindset, smartly stimulated by the industry who controls the advertising and the industrial food chain. We have created the perfect system to create, distribute and deliver all this with a click or a “Go” voice-command on a device to be delivered within minutes at our doorstep.
Today, more than one in two adults and nearly one in six children are overweight or obese in the OECD area. Half of all the food bought by families in the UK is now “ultra-processed”, made in a factory with industrial ingredients and additives invented by food technologists and bearing little resemblance to the fruit, vegetables, meat or fish used to cook a fresh meal at home.
Worse, we are advertising the same bad habits and products to our children. On average children view over 40,000 commercials a year, most of which are for candies, cereals, toys, and fast food restaurants (stats from 2004 btw!). Everybody with a bit of common sense knows it’s not the right way to continue. As all statistics globally are showing, these addictions will continue to rise. In the end, it’s a huge cost for all of us if our society is or stays unhealthy.
All these addictions, from fast food to app consumption create dopamine in our brains, the chemical part that is looking for fast and short-term rewards constantly. We need to move from an ‘instant gratification’ dopamine addictive society towards a more serotonin-driven society, our chemical reward towards lifelong-learning processes and happiness. In other words, the human potential at its highest level.
We will need to move out of the centuries old ego-driven, controlling and addictive behaviour, based on wrong assumptions and greed, towards a more complete and more humanistic one. We need to move towards a world of co-creation and collaboration instead of more competition, towards a decentralised, more feminine future.
Ask yourself which society do you want to live in or help to create? Which society do you want yourself and your children to live in? What kind of values are we inheriting? How can we contribute to bring positive change?
The future of our societies lies in the will for the people to continuously learn in a world where everything is in constant change.
“Progress of human civilisation in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top down. No king, no parliament, no government ever extended to the people more rights than the people insisted upon.” - Terence McKenna
In this newsletter you can read about some of our current memes, including children first world design, the rise of the feminine energy era, personal transformation, future cities, platform capitalism, the unbearable lightness of artificial intelligence, the experience economy, sustainability, decentralisation, and last but not least, Albert Einstein on love.
With love and gratitude.
Canay and Rudy.
Enjoy the reading!
human works design services
Conscious Business Model Design and Innovation
human works design ideates, describes, evaluates and dialogues about new business models using the Conscious Business Model Canvas towards the purpose of the organisation based on the human values of leaders/employees/teams and wellbeing of our stakeholder ecosystems (employees, clients, business partners and communities) and planet, with new metrics and exponential partnership scenarios for 1-3 years. Hands-on understanding of ‘how-to user personas’ and scenarios to articulate the value offer’s key drivers. Contact us if you’re interested to book a workshop or a talk with us.
and& summit & festival 2018
human works design co-founders, Canay and Rudy will be talking at the and& summit & festival in Leuven, May 2-5. Canay will talk at the opening night about “Children First World Design”. Rudy will be covering “The Age of Consciousness” on the following opening day. We will as well organising a Wapaland workshop and let children design the dream city of their future, After all, they are the future in a couple of years time. We are really looking forward to this well-selected worldwide collage of +100 thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs & artists of all backgrounds to explore the impact of health, tech & creativity on future city life including 4 days & nights of inspiring talks, avant-garde music acts, a start-up & scale-up forum, a tech expedition & art interventions in public space. We hope to see you there!
Children first
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams: If We Don’t Let Kids Smoke Cigarettes, Why Are We Feeding Them Processed Meat?
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams believes that change in our food system will happen on a grassroots level and grow from there. Hopefully, thanks to the foundation he is laying in Brooklyn, paired with a growing global awareness, the days where kids are fed unhealthy junk in school will end and community-based agriculture and knowledge about the power of a plant-based diet will thrive.
This School Focuses On Teaching Students Happiness, Not Math
A modern new school in rural India turns the traditional education model on its head–focusing instead on cultivating happy students and compassionate people.
Stuck in the past: the UK needs to produce creative thinkers not exam-passing machines
The world is changing fast and education is not equipping children with the kind of minds they are going to need. To navigate and thrive in this new world, we need the new da Vinci’s and Michelangelo’s. We need individuals who are both scientist and artist: the creative visionaries. Instead, we are producing the very opposite.
Social media firms failing to protect young people, survey finds
Social media companies such as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter have been accused of failing to protect young people from harassment after a cyberbullying inquiry found that online abuse severely affects their mental health. Almost half of young people have experienced threatening, intimidating or abusive messages on social media, pushing some to the verge of suicide in the most extreme cases, according to a survey commissioned by the Children’s Society and YoungMinds.
Personal transformation
How to Thrive When the World’s Falling Apart
The world is changing dramatically, isn’t? Why aren’t you? Your real challenge now is change, too — but in the opposite way. To step forward while the world is going backwards. By Umair Haque.
The rise of the feminine energy era
Our future is networked and feminine
In our institutions and our markets, women are often a minority in the hierarchies, but in a T+I+M+N world (Tribes + Institutions + Markets + Network), women are over 50% and there is little hierarchy. Our future is likely to be networked and feminine.
“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.
Brotopia: Emily Chang on Understanding Gender Inequality in Silicon Valley -- and How to Solve It
I wrote ‘Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley’ to show how and why women have been left out of the greatest wealth creation in history and offer some solutions. We can’t solve Silicon Valley’s gender inequity if we don’t understand it.
Can a new crop of female and minority founded venture funds rescue us from the “hoodie kings”?
“Some $84 billion was invested in startups in 2017. And women-led startups got less than 3% of the money. Startups led by women of colour got some. 2%. It isn’t a surprise that the ratio of female to male investing partners is 1 to 14. Firms with a single female investing partner are twice as likely to fund other women.” Caterina Fake and Jyri Engeström want to do something about this inequality in the funding startup world.
FutureFunded
Cecilia Tham and partners created this fund to support and build the new generation of women in tech, revolutionising the process of acquiring future skills and job opportunities.
iFundWomen Crowdfunding Platform For Women Entrepreneurs
A crowdfunding platform for women-led businesses with a simple mission: to close the extreme funding and confidence gap that exists today for female entrepreneurs.. The platform offers free crowdfunding coaching, video production and a pay it forward model.
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.
Women in Cryptocurrencies Push Back Against ‘Blockchain Bros’
Virtual currencies and blockchain, the digital ledger that forms the basis of the cryptocurrencies, were intended to be democratising and equalising forces, buoyed by a utopian exuberance. But women who have been trying to participate in the gold rush are finding a lopsided gender divide. And some say the culture is getting worse, with the male-dominated culture buoyed by a new fleet of wealthy crypto speculators known as “blockchain bros.”
Future cities
Automated Vehicles Can’t Save Cities
They could actually make cities much worse. This New York Times animated opinion tells you why.
MIT Just Created Living Plants That Glow Like A Lamp, And Could Grow Glowing Trees To Replace Streetlights
Roads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts injected specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, which caused it to give off a dim light for nearly four hours. This could solve lots of problems.
Platform capitalism
Tristan Harris on how technology is designed to bring out the worst in us
When you open up the blue Facebook icon, you’re activating the AI, which tries to figure out the perfect thing it can show you that’ll engage you. It doesn’t have any intelligence, except figuring out what gets the most clicks. The outrage stuff gets the most clicks, so it puts that at the top.
The Tyranny of Convenience
All the personal tasks in our lives are being made easier. But at what cost? Let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity.
China's Dystopian Tech Could Be Contagious
The People’s Republic of China’s “social credit” scheme might have consequences for life in cities everywhere. It would be remarkably easy to achieve. It’s just a matter of making explicit the determinations that already go into credit scores—of binding together the data brokerages that even now siphon up public records, social-media profiles, web searches, and similar digital traces of life here in the West, and making our rights and privileges as city dwellers and citizens contingent on what they infer from our behaviour. Unless this tendency is contested and defeated now, what has unfolded in China since 2014 might become an early preview of the way order is achieved and maintained in the cities of the 21st century.
Capitalism isn't an ideology -- it's an operating system (video)
Bhu Srinivasan researches the intersection of capitalism and technological progress. Instead of thinking about capitalism as a firm, unchanging ideology, he suggests that we should think of it as an operating system – one that needs upgrades to keep up with innovation, like the impending take-off of drone delivery services.
Why Facebook Is a Waste of Time—and Money—for Arts Nonprofits
The co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Artistic Activism explains why his company has officially cut ties with the social media behemoth.
Airbnb and the Unintended Consequences of Disruption
Airbnb was supposed to challenge hotels by letting tourists pay renters. But its platform is unwittingly producing a subsidy of tourists, paid for by nonparticipating urban dwellers, who bear the cost of higher rental prices. Like just about every story these days about revolutionary tech platforms, Airbnb is a story both of democratised access to commerce and the unintended consequences of those democratising efforts, even when they succeed on their own terms.
The unbearable lightness of artificial intelligence
Tech companies should stop pretending AI won’t destroy jobs
No matter what anyone tells you, we’re not ready for the massive societal upheavals on the way.
Technology isn’t just changing society — it’s changing what it means to be human
A conversation with historian of science Michael Bess. “Each of us needs to ask: what does it mean for a human being to flourish? These technologies are forcing us to be more deliberate about asking that question. We need to sit down with ourselves and say, “As I look at my daily life, as I look at the past year, as I look at the past five years, what are the aspects of my life that have been the most rewarding and enriching? When have I been happiest? What are the things that have made me flourish?” If we ask these questions in a thoughtful, explicit way, then we can say more definitely what these technologies are adding to the human experience and, more importantly, what they’re subtracting from the human experience.“
Why upgrading your brain could make you less human
As humans, we are not simply organic beings who deploy external material tools to meet our needs. Those tools and technologies become part of who we are, and so we need to be careful about what we use and how we use it. The blurring of person and product is already a widespread and, in some ways, unavoidable feature of society. But the advent of bio-enhancement takes the phenomenon to another level. If we are going to push back against it, we must start asking tough questions of ourselves today, and put into practice the sorts of choices and innovations that will keep us most vibrantly and creatively human. That might turn out to be where the real enhancement lies.
Malicious AI Report
Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are growing at an unprecedented rate. These technologies have many widely beneficial applications, ranging from machine translation to medical image analysis. Countless more such applications are being developed and can be expected over the long term. Less attention has historically been paid to the ways in which artificial intelligence can be used maliciously. This report surveys the landscape of potential security threats from malicious uses of artificial intelligence technologies, and proposes ways to better forecast, prevent, and mitigate these threats.
Experience economy
Just do it: the experience economy and how we turned our backs on ‘stuff’
New figures show we are continuing to spend less money on buying things, and more on doing things – and telling the world about it online afterwards, of course. From theatres to pubs to shops, businesses are scrambling to adapt to this shift.
Sustainability
Dutch Supermarket Introduces Plastic-Free Aisle
A supermarket in the Netherlands wants to make it easier on the planet and easier for its customers to avoid adding to the mountains of plastic waste generated every day. The initiative, part of a global push to fight waste, saw about 700 products packaged in compostable materials or in glass, metal or cardboard. “There is absolutely no logic in wrapping something as fleeting as food in something as indestructible as plastic.”
Nappies, takeaways and bubble wrap: could I remove plastic from my life?
It’s polluting our oceans and killing our wildlife, but how easy is it to get by without it? Four writers from The Guardian find out.
LEGO Will Start Selling Sustainable, Plant-Based Blocks This Year
LEGO has already managed to power 100% of its operations with renewable energy and it vows to reach zero waste in its production by 2030. It is essential that companies in each industry find ways to responsibly source their product materials and help ensure a future where people, nature, and the economy thrive
A Precautionary Tale: how one small town banned pesticides, preserved its food heritage, and inspired a movement
All communities need healthy soil, water, and air; wholesome food; and a sustainable inclusive economy. A Precautionary Tale provides a concrete example of how the holistic thinking and democratic power of the food movement could eliminate toxic chemicals from all agriculture.
Decentralisation
The Decentralised Internet Is Here, With Some Glitches
There’s massive distrust in centralised everything. We don’t trust the government, don’t go to church or synagogue, don’t trust banks, and now we no longer trust tech companies.
Why Decentralisation Matters
Today, unaccountable groups of employees at large platforms decide how information gets ranked and filtered, which users get promoted and which get banned, and other important governance decisions. In crypto networks, these decisions are made by the community, using open and transparent mechanisms. By Chris Dixon.
Einstein on LOVE
A letter from Albert Einstein to his daughter: about The Universal Force which is LOVE
There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.
This universal force is LOVE.
When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force.
Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it.
Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others.
Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals.
For love we live and die.
Love is God and God is Love.
This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.
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