human works design - building meaningful futures - Issue #22
Surrendering to Our Greatness
Convenience is the new definition of happiness (!) these days. From getting easily brewed coffee anywhere, ordering a meal or product with the click of a thumb, to binge-watch a new series on Netflix or keep on scrolling down to find your dream vacation destination. What we don’t realise often is that such conveniences can easily turn into addictions.
Without a deep understanding of our beliefs and dreams, technology companies are focusing on creating more convenience all around us and amplifying such addictions exponentially as well. We are totally unprepared to use these services and products for our benefit without getting addicted to them, and even worse we don’t know how to guide our children either.
As stated in the essay ‘How to Organize Learning?’ by Humberto Schwab, “How can we prepare our kids for the future when we have no clue what the future will bring us. Experts think that the digital natives, the youngsters of today, have a better view into the future than we do, we are the “digital immigrants.” However, this appears to be a fallacy, which identifies technique with culture. After all, knowing how to operate an iPad or how to build an app does not imply wisdom. An “Ipad school” is as stupid as a pencil school.”
In a quite amazing demo at Google I/0, Google’s Assistant (Google Duplex) can actually ring up a salon or a restaurant to make an appointment for you sounding like a real human-maybe a bit too human. We say hurraaayy, let’s outsource all the boring things to machines! But this may not be exciting news to celebrate for a personal assistant or a call centre agency. Besides normal assistant work, the $200 billion call centre industry can expect a shake-up over the coming years. In the US alone this market provides work for 3.4 million people.
A problem here is not just about the job-loss for these people but who is going to teach or learn these people to prepare for another job in the future? It used to be that we could count on social institutions but not anymore. We now have more watchdogs than institutions. From health to education systems the whole scene is dehumanised. We are looking for experts to get answers, following big platform’s announcements about the next big AI products and services but businesses are too busy monetising our addictive pleasures.
Aren’t we all tired of repeating, reading and circulating the same concerns about how people will be out of job and why nobody is doing anything about it?
The problem is we don’t understand the problem; that’s why we can’t find the answer. And we are trying to find solutions for existing problems without looking at the systemic root of the problem.
It is obvious that convenience of technology should come with consciousness on a systemic level. And as all the great masters point us within, consciousness starts with being aware of one’s self.
As stated by Dr David Hawkins in his book ‘Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender’: “If we take a close look at human life, we see that it is essentially one long elaborate struggle to escape our inner fears and expectations that have been projected upon the world. Interspersed are period of celebration when we have momentarily escaped inner fears, but the fears are still there waiting for us. We have become afraid of our inner feelings because we have no conscious mechanism by which to handle the feelings if we let them come up within ourselves.”
When we can surrender to be free of negative feelings in a given area so that creativity and spontaneity can manifest without opposition or the interference of inner conflicts. To be free of inner conflict and expectations is to give others in our life the greatest freedom. It allows us to experience the basic nature of the universe, which, it will be discovered, is to manifest the greatest good possible in a situation.
Our stress and fear about change, competition and survival need to be surrendered. It is no longer about humans vs machines, we need to focus on new ecological systems where we can co-exist with fellow humans, earthlings and use the opportunities of technology towards such systems. At human works design, we start by designing conscious business models and new learning systems.
We can dream lives and live dreams where we don’t need to work to make money but to work to grow and enjoy ourselves and serve others. We can heal centuries old humanity wounds and self-torture by looking at the mirror, taking care of others and ourselves. Let’s replace suffering with love and joy. Let’s surrender to our greatness and fulfil our human potential.
Don’t wait to take action! We invite all leaders to join our ‘Conscious Leadership’ and ‘Conscious Business Model Design and Innovation’ workshops to start their transformation from within and beam their light upon all stakeholders.
Happy Mother’s Day.
With love and joy,
Canay & Rudy
human works design activities
Announcement: We are excited and eager to share more, learn and grow together. That’s why we decided to start ‘conscious leadership webinars’ where we’ll be sharing inspirational content that matters, humanist future trends, new methodologies and experts, case studies, and actionable insights designed to improve your business and personal lives. We appreciate your feedback, please share your insights with us on this short survey and receive your invitation to our first webinar.
Join us at one of our upcoming talks and presentations.
Canay will chair a Socratic Dialogue session in Soho House Istanbul on May 22nd. She will keynote on June 14 in Kiel, Germany on our Conscious Business Model Design and Innovation model and Children First World Design at the Waterkant Festival.
Rudy will keynote at Mind The Future on May 16 in Monterrey, Mexico and at the Data Centers and Cloud Infrastructure Congress on May 23 in Madrid. He will join Adobe Visual Trends activities at OFFF 2018 in Barcelona on May 23-25 and on June 14 he will do a keynote at FER in Geneva.
More events will be announced soon on our updated website. Meanwhile, you can contact us if you wish to book us for a talk or a workshop.
The Business of Happiness by Canay Atalay
The 2nd article by Canay Atalay in her Happy Innovation Series.
“But are we happier? Historians seldom ask such questions. Neither business people. Economies depend on people purchasing and using things to feel happier for a temporary time so they would come back again, keep on sharing more data and exposed to more advertising. Do you think happy people with good social relationships and satisfactory personal lives would spend hours on social media scrolling, peeking into others’ lives and craving for more likes? Of course not. So it’s our job to think critically, ask questions and start with a basic one: what is happiness?”
Children First
Raising children in egalitarian communities: An inspiration
Certainly the way children are raised shapes their personalities. Aggregated, it results in the human relations and values of society. Communities provide conditions to raise emotionally healthy and cooperative individuals. Hopefully, they will inspire mainstream society to create conditions that resemble communal child care.
Why Children Make Great Role Models
Have you ever stopped to notice how much children know about life? As it turns out, it’s quite a lot. We think of adults as role models for children. Maybe we’ve got it all wrong.
Designing for children
The Designing for Children Guide was created by 70+ heroes – designers, psychologists, neuroscientists, health care specialists, educators, and children’s rights experts – during Talkoot, a 48-hour collaborative event in Helsinki 19-21.01.2018.
Number of children being homeschooled in UK rises by 41% over three years
The number of children being homeschooled has risen by more than 40 per cent in three years, figures show. Thousands more pupils are no longer being taught in classrooms across the UK – and avoiding school exclusions was one of the main reasons given by parents.
Living the good life
How to Lengthen Your Life
It is sensible enough to try to live longer lives. But we are working with a false notion of what long really means. We might live to be a thousand years old and still complain that it had all rushed by too fast. We should be aiming to lead lives that feel long because we have managed to imbue them with the right sort of open-hearted appreciation and unsnobbish receptivity, the kind that five-year-olds know naturally how to bring to bear. We need to pause and look at one another’s faces, study the evening sky, wonder at the eddies and colours of the river and dare to ask the kind of questions that open our souls. We don’t need to add years; we need to densify the time we have left by ensuring that every day is lived consciously – and we can do this via a manoeuvre as simple as it is momentous: by starting to notice all that we have as yet only seen.
The Biology of Love
Love actually does make us healthier, happier, and longer-living. It turns out molecular biology and love actually is a match made in heaven. Dr. Bruce Lipton challenges us to study and understand how to experience that heaven on earth continuously, with dancing proteins on our cells that swoon and sway with love.
Computer-generated mind games
As humanity keeps on struggling with discovering themselves and their own truth, more people find the escape to create perfect worlds with virtual characters and services.
Meet Fashion's First Computer-Generated Influencer
One of the world’s first Artificial Influencers is now a highly sought after marketing product – proving that despite being completely fake, the impact is real. She’s a 19-year-old fashion model and singer, with a Brazilian background. In a matter of two years, she’s gained over a million followers on Instagram as @lilmiquela, modelled the clothes of some of the highest fashion brands, and just raised $6 million to keep it up.
lifefaker
lifefaker is the world’s first online life-faking service, where users can sign up by purchasing packages that range from photos of perfect pets, holidays and meals, and post them as their own. the website offers thousands of ready-made photo packages to fake a perfect life on social media without the trouble of actually living it. While the project may have ‘black mirror’ written all over it, the real purpose of lifefaker is to remind users of the pressures of social media, highlighting that 62% of people feel inadequate when comparing their lives to those online. Part of a campaign by mental health startup sanctus, the site confronts unhealthy behaviours that can harm our mental health and explores ways we can change them.
Google Duplex: A.I. Assistant Calls Local Businesses To Make Appointments (video)
In a quite amazing demo at Google I/0, Google’s Assistant (Google Duplex) can actually ring up a salon or a restaurant to make an appointment for you in avery human way.
Future of work
How AI Will Reshape Companies, Industries and Nations
Kai-Fu Lee is the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, a Chinese technology venture investment firm. He was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2013. Before founding Sinovation Ventures, he was president of Google China and previously held executive positions at Microsoft, SGI, and Apple.
“Being liberated from routine tasks could be a wonderful thing for mankind. We need not only to change work at a technical level, but entirely reconceive the nature of work itself.”
When Robots Take Our Jobs, Platform Cooperatives Are a Solution
We are in a race that pits the explosion of artificial intelligence and automation against our ability to rapidly expand ownership of the engines that drive this technological revolution. Growing platform cooperatives from their nascent form today into a thriving new sector is a critical step toward a fair and vibrant economic future.
Is your work killing you?
In the United States, workers work among the longest, most extreme, and most irregular hours; have no guarantee to paid sick days, paid vacation, or paid family leave; and pay more for health insurance, yet are sicker and more stressed out than workers in other advanced economies. Health spending per capita in the U.S. increased nearly 29 fold in the past 40 years, outpacing the growth of the economy—and institute wellness programs like lunchtime yoga, meditation, anti-smoking, or obesity prevention. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business, says companies are completely missing the point. He argues that the costs have become so great that it’s time for companies and the government to take responsibility and create real change.
The Blindness of Social Wealth by David Brooks
The quality of our relationships has been in steady decline for decades. In the 1980s, 20 percent of Americans said they were often lonely. Now it’s 40 percent. Suicide rates are now at a 30-year high. Depression rates have increased tenfold since 1960, which is not only a result of greater reporting. The mass migration to online life is not the only force driving these trends, but it is a big one. It’s very hard to quantify and communicate the decline in quality of relationships. But it is nonetheless true that many of us who are socially wealthy don’t really know how the other half lives.
Why the Future Belongs to Polymaths
What makes the world interesting is the interaction between objects and not the objects in and of themselves. If we’re always restricting these interactions by creating boundaries, we’re also taking away from our comprehension. Nothing exists independently of its surroundings and that fact doesn’t change just because we decide to be blind to it with narrowed disciplines.
In an evolving world, those who can see that will have the edge.
Why we should bulldoze the business school
If we want to be able to respond to the challenges that face human life on this planet, then we need to research and teach about as many different forms of organising as we are able to collectively imagine. For us to assume that global capitalism can continue as it is means to assume a path to destruction. So if we are going to move away from business as usual, then we also need to radically reimagine the business school as usual. And this means more than pious murmurings about corporate social responsibility. It means doing away with what we have, and starting again.
Future of society
Why Capitalism is Obsolete by Umair Haque
Capitalism can’t solve humanity’s problems anymore, and that is why it’s obsolete. We need a way of organising human effort, ingenuity, passion, time, and dreams. In fact, capitalism is so obsolete that it’s doing something so toxic that we barely notice it at all. It’s blinding us to the above — and making us believe that trivial inconveniences are our biggest problems.
This Startup Lets Neighbours Pool Their Money To Invest In Their Communities
Cooperative Capital lets people pool small amounts of money, vote on how they want to invest it to improve their neighborhood–and then generates returns.
Life in 2030: these are the 4 things experts can't predict
Alvin Toffler predicted a future in his 1970 bestseller Future Shock that looks much like today’s reality. He anticipated the rise of the internet, the sharing economy, companies built on “adhocracy” rather than centralized bureaucracy, and the broader social confusions and concerns about technology. He foresaw that the evolving relationship between people and technology would shape how societies and economies develop. Here are some of the uncertainties that policy-makers, corporate executives, and civil society actors face as they move into this new world.
Top 20 art exhibitions to visit in Europe in 2018
Top 20 art exhibitions to visit on a European city break in 2018
Stretch your legs and enjoy the beauty of art! From Grayson Perry in Helsinki to Frida Kahlo in Budapest, an exhibition makes a brilliant focal point to a city break. Here are 20 of this year’s best.