human works design - building meaningful futures - Issue #21
Conscious leadership
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” - Rumi
While the world keeps spinning and our world leaders keep playing the ego game, the present and future to create fulfilling, playful and joyful lives lies within ourselves.
With technology and sciences we have the opportunity to solve humanity’s most challenging problems in less than 2 decades. Why is it that we have everything we need to create good lives for everyone, yet we don’t do it? This is arguably the single most important question we humans can ask ourselves at this juncture in time.
It’s wise to observe self and society; do we spend our lives collaborating, creating, cuddling, playing and making beauty, or do we spend it on conflict and competition? When you turn on the TV or go to the movies, how many stories will you see in which there is no conflict? Virtually none. Conflict and drama are what the average human mind gravitates toward — in our entertainment, in our social media, in our conversations, and in our routine mental behaviour. We’re ‘trapped’ in that narrative.
For example Steven Spielberg’s latest movie Ready Player One tries to picture a paradise for everyone in the virtual game; The Oasis. In Oasis you can be anyone you want and do anything you want (limited to your game credits). The movie is a lost opportunity in creating new narratives and instead a repetition of human addictions to suffering. First the only so called heaven is in the virtual world where in the real world, in the Stacks people living in mountains of metal trash, Pizza-delivering drones are buzzing through the foreground to deliver food to lonely people who ignore even their children’s needs to play the game. An enormous video billboard for a haptic suit blares in the background highlighting you need to compete and destroy others to survive in Oasis. And the artificial heaven Oasis is only a cliché replica of dopamine addictions; meeting with strangers for fast shallow interactions hiding who you really are, satisfying your needs of violence addiction in boxing matches, simulated war zones where you encounter with all kinds of beasts and porn addiction in champagne-room stripteases.
Is this really what we want?
And today, why don’t we collaborate to create goodness? More passionately and collectively?
Don’t we want to create the utopia because it’d be boring?
Are we too addicted to our as is ideas and negative emotions?
Don’t we have the courage even to believe such futures are possible?
And how comfortable are we amplifying as is problems using technology and inheriting a toxic culture and thus world to our children?
We know human civilisation needs to be re-structured in a manner that is aligned with the needs of humanity, earthlings and the planet. And for that we need role model conscious leaders to create new cultures combining tradition (of what’s good) with innovation (of what’s possible).
That’s why it’s important to transform ourselves as conscious leaders to create new futures, new cultures, and new models of humanity. To live fulfilling lives as noble and deserving humans.
Contact us for a talk or workshop to innovate your business model with consciousness, with new value propositions, innovation metrics and exponential partnerships based on the values that matters to you and your communities most.
In this weeks newsletter more about children first world design, healthy living, the future of learning, positive news, new visions for society, the future of work and some interesting reads on the social media delirium of the last few weeks.
With love and gratitude.
Have a joyful Sunday.
Canay and Rudy.
human works design activities
and& is a one of a kind summit & festival at the intersection of health, tech & creativity curated for the curious
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” alongside Maroš Šefčovič, Vice President of the European Commission. Rudy will be covering “The Age of Consciousness” the following day. On Friday, together, we’ll be running a Wapaland discovery workshop with children on the “Imagining a future city life” topic. 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
How babies learn – and why robots can’t compete
Roy Deb had discovered that human learning was communal and interactive. For a robot, the acquisition of language was abstract and formulaic. For us, it was embodied, emotive, subjective, quivering with life. The future of intelligence wouldn’t be found in our machines, but in the development of our own minds.
What If All I Want for My Kids Is An Ordinary Life?
Less striving, more silence. Less running, more reflection. Less stress, more gratitude for a spectacularly ordinary life.
It’s Time to Tell Your Kids It Doesn’t Matter Where They Go To College
Children are much more energised when they envision a future that is in line with their own values than when they dutifully do whatever they believe they have to do to live up to their parents’ or teachers’ or college admissions boards’ expectations. We don’t inspire our kids through fear. We inspire them by helping them to focus on getting better at something, rather than being the best, and by encouraging them to immerse themselves in something they love.
Why dance class is just as important as math class
Dance – and physical activity – should have the same status in schools as math, science and language, says Sir Ken Robinson.
Positive news
What went right?
Tired of all the fake and negative news these days? Read 20 positive stories that happened from January till March this year, complied by Lucy Purdy.
Future of learning
6 Tips on the Future of Learning from Actual Teenage Exponential Thinkers
What happens when you gather 14 of the world’s brightest teenagers at Singularity University and ask them to design the future of education? Here are the teens’ six tips for entrepreneurs and educators building future of education.
Assassin's Creed's new life as a virtual museum
What happens when you remove the fighting from a video game and turn it into an ancient world to explore? The creators of Assassin’s Creed Origins found out.
The Third Education Revolution
Schools are moving toward a model of continuous, lifelong learning in order to meet the needs of today’s economy.
Healthy living
The Disease of Being Busy
I want my kids to be dirty, messy, even bored — learning to become human. I want us to have a kind of existence where we can pause, look each other in the eye, touch one another, and inquire together: Here is how my heart is doing? I am taking the time to reflect on my own existence; I am in touch enough with my own heart and soul to know how I fare, and I know how to express the state of my heart.
How to Be Happy Every Day (TED video)
The World Happiness Report states “Over 1 billion adults suffer from anxiety and depression.” How do we get to happy? Jacqueline Way shares a secret to happiness so simple a 3 – year old can do it.
'Happiest man in the world’ says veganism is the key to happiness
Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says that adopting a plant-based diet is the key to long-lasting wellbeing. Read the GQ interview and learn how we all might make our lives a bit happier.
The unstoppable rise of veganism: how a fringe movement went mainstream
Health, climate change, animal welfare… what’s driving more people and brands to embrace a plant-based lifestyle? The Guardian investigates interviews four vegans about their choice.
Mozilla's Internet Health Report 2018
The Internet Health Report is about the human experience of the Internet. It is an independent, open source compilation of data, research and stories that show how the Internet is evolving. The 2018 compilation of research explains what’s helping and what’s hurting the Internet across five issues, from personal experience to global concerns.
Why You Should Surround Yourself With More Books Than You'll Ever Have Time to Read
Lifelong learning will help you be happier, earn more, and even stay healthier, experts say. Plus, plenty of the smartest names in business, from Bill Gates to Elon Musk, insist that the best way to get smarter is to read. So what do you do? You go out and buy books, lots of them.
New visions for society
The Relationship Between Money and Happiness
Can money buy happiness? It can up until a certain point, but as this giant chart shows, money and happiness are not always as aligned as one might guess.
The ecological singularity
There will be a latency period during which the singularity gradually imposes its constraints. Not everyone will be concerned at first. Then, there will be global acceptance that things will get worse and that there is no turning back. Those who have an influential position regarding our destiny as humans will need to change their way of seeing the world.
The Paradox of Universal Basic Income by Joi Ito
WIRED columnist Joi Ito on the polarizing, poorly understand concept of universal basic income—and why its moment may have finally arrived.
Universal Basic Services (report)
The Institute for Global Prosperity has put forward the set of ideas, which it calls ‘universal basic services”, as a more achievable and more desirable alternative to universal basic income (UBI) in the UK.
The Truth Machine - In Blockchain We Trust
Freely accessible open-source code is the foundation upon which the decentralised economy of the future will be built.
The wrong assumptions of blockchain
As a society, and as technologists and entrepreneurs in particular, we’re going to have to get good at cooperating — at building trust, and, at being trustworthy. Instead of directing resources to the elimination of trust, we should direct our resources to the creation of trust—whether we use a long series of sequentially hashed files as our storage medium or not.
Future of work
The Workplace of the Future
The march of AI into the workplace calls for trade-offs between privacy and performance. A fairer, more productive workforce is a prize worth having, but not if it shackles and dehumanises employees. Striking a balance will require thought, a willingness for both employers and employees to adapt, and a strong dose of humanity.
To Take Charge of Your Career, Start by Building Your Tribe
Perhaps the contemporary workplace, with its celebration of independence, might be stoking the tribalism that makes it inefficient. Our loose attachments to institutions make it more necessary to find our tribe. Leaders who lack a tribe might find it hard to lead, and those whose organisations have too many tribes might have trouble too. And yet we need those open communities, those peculiar tribes. Without them, it would be impossible to remember who we are and to imagine who we might become.
Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don't Get a Job (video)
Brian Eno thinks differently. “I often get asked to come and talk at art schools,” he says in the clip above, “and I rarely get asked back, because the first thing I always say is, ‘I’m here to persuade you not to have a job.’” That doesn’t mean, he emphasises, that you should “try not to do anything. It means try to leave yourself in a position that you do the things you want to do with your time, and where you take maximum advantage of whatever your possibilities are.”
The Rise Of The Social Enterprise: A New Paradigm For Business
The Rise of the Social Enterprise: How can businesses be responsible, caring, and responsive to society and their customers at the same time? What is the new business paradigm?
Why Slowing Down Can Actually Help Us Achieve More
Leah Weiss believes that when we pay attention to how we do our work—our thoughts and feelings about what we do and why we do it—we can tap into a much deeper reservoir of courage, creativity, meaning, and resilience. In an interview, Weiss talks about how mindfulness can deepen our purpose and passion.
Social media delirium
The Last Days of Reality
MUST READ - Written in the summer of 2017, Marc Pesce explores in this awesome essay the real power of Facebook using profiling, artificial intelligence and augmented reality.
The new surveillance capitalism
Corporate giants have created an entirely new surveillance capitalism. And we’re too hooked to care. Paradoxically, it is the ordinary users—all those addicts of whom I write—who hold the key to a better future. For the one thing which truly terrifies Google and Facebook is that people might stop using their services. If one million people decided to take a break from Facebook for a month, say, then that alone would have a dramatic impact on the company, undermining its narrative of continual expansion and growth. More importantly, a million people would suddenly find that it’s possible to kick the social media habit. And they’d have an extra hour in their day to do something really interesting.
The Era of Fake Video Begins
The digital manipulation of video may make the current era of “fake news” seem quaint. Few individuals will have the time or perhaps the capacity to sort elaborate fabulation from truth. Our best hope may be outsourcing the problem, restoring cultural authority to trusted validators with training and knowledge: newspapers, universities. Perhaps big technology companies will understand this crisis and assume this role, too. Since they control the most-important access points to news and information, they could most easily squash manipulated videos, for instance. But to play this role, they would have to accept certain responsibilities that they have so far largely resisted.
TED 2018 Is All About Facebook—and Not in a Good Way
The official theme of this year’s TED conference is “The Age of Amazement.” But the unofficial theme may well be “Ugh, Facebook.” The first two days of TED’s polished, elite gathering of techno-futurists overlapped with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s painful-to-watch congressional hearing. That awkward timing only added fuel to the general air of anti-Facebook sentiment that’s been bubbling up in power corridors of Silicon Valley for the past year..
This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you
And if you haven’t made up your mind yet wether to stay or leave Facebook, have a look how Facebook and Google are harvesting our personal details, far beyond what many of us could imagine.
Closing quote
Charlie Chaplin : The Final Speech from The Great Dictator
“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.” – Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940).
Watch or read the full transcript of the The Final Speech from The Great Dictator. Chaplin spent many months drafting and re-writing the speech for the end of the film, a call for peace from the barber who has been mistaken for Hynkel. Many people criticised the speech, and thought it was superfluous to the film. Others found it up-lifting.
Regrettably Chaplin’s words are as relevant today as they were in 1940.