How to Be a Better Human - How to re-spark your imagination (w/ Anab Jain)

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

How often do you use your imagination? Anab Jain is on a mission to help us all dream bigger. As the co-founder and director of Superflux (a design and experience-creation company), she creates spaces and events that help people see, touch, and feel potential futures they may not have ever considered. In this episode, she discusses why exploring ideas that challenge your current reality can help you envision–and create–a brighter future.For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I can remember when I was a little kid hearing so much about the invention of the Segway scooter. There was all this talk about how the Segway was going to be the future of mobility and transportation would never be the same. Cars were going to become obsolete as we each zipped about in our own personal mobility device. We'd climb stairs without ever bending our knees, and city streets would be silent except for the sounds of laughter and friendly hellos. Well, I think it's fair to say that that has not panned out. Transportation successfully held out against the revolutionary

power of the Segway scooter. And whether it is flying cars or VR headsets or giant two-wheeled electric scooters, there's often a lot of talk about what the world is going to look like in the future. And the truth is that there are always multiple possibilities, right? Which hypothetical future world is the one that we are going to end up living in? So many of our biggest decisions and our most important life choices are based on us trying to figure out the answers to those questions. Today's guest, Anab Jain, spends her days trying to separate out signals from noise when it comes to predicting the future. And on today's episode, she's going to share her strategies and her philosophy about planning

and predicting for the worlds that may be coming down the road. Here's a clip from her TED Talk. I visit the future for a living. Not just one future, but many possible futures, bringing back evidences from those futures for you to experience today, like an archaeologist of the future. Over the years, my many journeys

have brought back things like a new species of synthetically engineered bees, a book named Pets as Protein, a machine that makes you rich by trading your genetic data, a lamp powered by sugar, a computer for growing food. OK, so I don't actually travel to different futures yet. But my husband John and I spend a lot of time thinking

and creating visions of different futures in our studio. We are constantly looking out for weak signals, those murmurs of future potential. Then we trace those threads of potential out into the future, asking, what might it feel like to live in this future? What might we see, hear and even breathe? Then, we run experiments, build prototypes, make objects, bringing aspects of these futures to life,

making them concrete and tangible, so you can really feel the impact of those future possibilities here and now. But this work is not about predictions. It's about creating tools, tools that can help connect our present and our future selves, so we become active participants in creating a future we want, a future that works for all. We're going to talk about how to become active participants and how to build that hopeful future in just a moment, so don't go anywhere because we will be right back in the very, very, very near future.

Today, we're talking about designing for the future, planning for hypotheticals and being open to the unknown with Anab Jain. Hi, so I'm Anab Jain. I am a designer, a speculative designer of sorts. And I'm also a professor of a department called Design Investigations at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. And I am a co-founder of Superflux, a design feature studio based in London. How did this start? How did you get into this work in this field? So I studied filmmaking in India and went to the Royal College of Art in London to study interaction design. And that's where I met John Arden, my partner, life partner. And a few years later, we started Superflux after graduating from the Royal College.

It was around 2008. There was the credit crisis. We were these wide-eyed, young, idealistic graduates wanting to change the world. And we could see the world collapsing before us. There were queues of people outside. But the banks here in London, we could see boxes of people, like people leaving with boxes of this stuff from Lehman Brothers. It was like, you know, what has just unfolded? And I think at that point, we started exploring the idea for a studio, wondering how can we as designers, artists, creative people, what contribution can we make with our skills to say that this doesn't have to be the way forward.

We don't have to accept this as our reality. And so that's how our journey started. We were interested in exploring narratives that were outside of consensus reality, as we know it. Over the years, we've explored that trajectory through working with clients, businesses, governments, cultural institutions who are interested in imagining visions, strategic or simply inspiring. Why did you choose the name Superflux? I'm a big fan. We're big fans of architectural, radical architectural studio in Italy called Superstudio. And of course, they are well in Italy called Superstudio.

And of course, they are well known in the architecture and design worlds. These to create quite sort of radical, almost technologically utopian visions, I have to admit, of possible worlds. And so I was very drawn to them at that point. And Flux was the idea of change, so big change. So how can we sort of situate ourselves in the space where change is happening? And it's constantly in flux. Your work, it combines art, technology, and data.

Just to start us off to people who aren't already familiar with your work, can you explain superflux and the speculative designs that you create? I suppose the easiest way to help people understand what we do is through examples. So imagine you are in a room with ministers and you're trying to get them to invest a significant amount of money in renewable energy to reduce pollution in our cities. Quite often when senior leaders see data about the future, they don't necessarily leap to a decision around investment. It's very difficult for them to see how that data could lead to direct action. And that's where we come in. We took these ministers in the government of UAE through a scenario where they were invited to breathe polluted air from the future. Just one whiff of that noxious polluted air brought home the point that no amount of data

can, that this is the reality your children and grandchildren could inherit. And that's the work we do. We bring the future to life through embodied experiences because we know that it is only when we really touch, sense, hear, feel, and smell something different, we truly understand its value and impact today. I love that example because I think it shows why it's so different than other approaches, because we all have heard so much data and so many reports about the dangers of climate change

and of global warming. And yet I think for even for the people who are the most compelled by that, it's very hard to viscerally understand what the experience of it would be. It's hard to feel like it's an emergency. And what you've done by bringing it into our actual senses, by bringing it into our actual body, just by having the smell of what air smells like right now versus what it could smell like if we don't change things, it shifts it into a different register. Why do you think that is? So there is a lot of research that shows that the way our cognitive wiring, the way our brains are wired is we spend a significant percentage of our brains for reasoning. And that capacity for

reasoning takes place through metaphors, stories, emotions, narratives. And that sort of really creates the circuitry in our brain to start to make connections and see possibilities. There is a well-known linguist called Professor George Lakoff at the University of Berkeley who's written a significant amount on this topic. So that is one side. The other side is that we are biological beings. We, for thousands of years, we've met the world through stories. That's how we meet the world. So knowing that we as human beings require different kinds of inputs in order to make decisions. We really feel that's something we

should really sort of harness that power of storytelling, embodied experiences, visceral experiences to create visions of the future that can help us make more informed decisions today. It makes me wonder how you think about the line between fiction and nonfiction in your work, because in many ways you are an author of short stories, an author of experiences, and they are, of course, based on facts and data and possible futures. And yet they're also fictional in the sense that they're hypothetical. They're not necessarily what has to happen. I often wonder about what we consider nonfiction.

Is it the stories we see in news? Is the way we are presented with news truly nonfiction? Or are there biases? And is this one person's view or one certain journalist's view of the world? Of course, there are facts I completely understand, but I'd like to lead into the ideas that Ursula Le Guin, a well-known author, has written about where she said,

truth is a matter of imagination. I feel that very much in our lives and the way we've constructed some meta-narratives about ideas of progress, about ideas of what is a developed country and what's a developing country. A lot of these that we tend to think of as non-fiction are actually fictional narratives that we, money, the idea of money, we've gone about believing that this is how it is. It doesn't have to be this way. So I think I like to work in that space between what we consider nonfiction and what

we consider fiction as the space of speculative realism, where you are understanding that there are some hard facts, there are some real sort of ideas about data. And even scientists would argue that anything that they are projecting into the future based on their data, historic data, is actually fiction. But it is certainly credible. Now, that's where there's an opportunity to get into fiction. If this were to happen, what if? How might we live? And the fact of the matter is that the future beams no data back to us. So all we can do is work with it creatively, with imagination. Maybe it's just the most visceral experience I had of this was at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, where all of a sudden this big, scary global event, the kind of

thing that seemed straight out of a movie or a fiction novel was all of a sudden real. And of course, the rules of lockdown, being able to only stay inside of your home, being scared about not knowing how a disease was transmitted, all of that felt like possibilities that I hadn't thought were even within the realm of probable becoming very real. But then where we are now, at least in the US, and I think in many other places, there were such huge and rapid shifts in programs, in government programs. All of a sudden, there was money to make sure that people who are unemployed didn't suffer.

All of a sudden, there was huge assistance in food. There was a huge effort to change child poverty. And these things were not just like ambitious dreams. They happened. And then they were temporary. And now many of them have lapsed and now have not been continued. So to me, I still haven't been able to wrap my mind around the fact that in the country where I live, we solved some problems and it was possible. And then we decided it's not. Having that experience of big dramatic changes are practically implementable and it's a

choice rather than it's a question of capacity, that feels very real to me in a way that it hasn't before. And I know that's a lot of what you're trying to get people to understand, if I understand your work correctly. Yeah. I could also give you an example of around the same time as the pandemic was happening, we also had a lot of wildfires in Australia. It was a really horrific time and very tragic. Now, we have created a piece of work, which is an installation where people are invited to visit an apartment in the future. future where there is broken supply chains and economic uncertainties and really extreme weather events that prevent people from getting food or access to food and often can't grow food outside. So we've, as our piece of fiction, our embodied storytelling was creating an installation, a future home where members of the home were creating ingenious ways of growing food indoors using fog bonnets, all sorts of interesting. So we built all this.

We really built all these food computers and they were growing food fully throughout the exhibition. There was fog everywhere. It was really very visceral. In which world do you imagine people will still have homes like this and live in this way and be able to grow the food? Really, that's exactly what our work is doing. Inviting people to step into a future they have not yet imagined, that future, that experience then becomes an episodic memory that is situated in people's minds. So next time they have to imagine a future or home in the context of climate change, that apartment will become part of their memory landscape, so to speak.

And they will be able to lead on it and say, OK, actually, this could happen. I might have to grow food. I might have to try this. So in a way, we are expanding and catalyzing people's imagination to start having more alternate narratives about the future in their memory scape. That question of utopian versus dystopian, of positive versus negative imagination, it seems like a few years ago, in the popular imagination, technology was going to solve all our problems. And I think there has now been a real shift in the way that people view technology, view large technological innovations, view the companies that control them in that, for example, drones, the idea that like drones are going to deliver

our packages and it's going to be so easy to get pizza. That's not the way that people talk about drones anymore. What's the balance that we should be striking between positive and negative, between utopian and dystopian? In all honesty, I'm not a fan of dystopias or utopias because they also come with associations of either apocalyptic science fiction or actually, when it comes to utopia, it gets even harder to imagine a true utopia. You know, I don't think it can really exist. So we in our studio, John, I and our team, we're really interested in that space between utopia and dystopia, because any future would be as messy and complicated as today. It's more about creating or exploring guiding visions

that can help us navigate this complexity, this turbulence, this messiness. And where do we end up? How do we reduce the losers of the world? Right now, it's really, we are living in a highly unequal world. One big problem is that is the equity of, we don't even have equity in imagination, in the voices of imagination, so to speak. So I really want to sort of say

that the future will build on our histories, on the actions, on the bones of the actions we're taking today, so to speak. So essentially, our exercise in imagining a different future is to be able to bring back learnings from it to make better decisions today.

We are going to take a short break right now, but we will be right back if you can imagine that. And we are back. You have a unique ability and imagination and creativity. Certainly, it feels like there is a creative framework, a way of approaching reality that you use that other people could experiment with. Is there any way that you can kind of articulate for those people listening? How do you approach one of these problems that you're trying to imagine a speculative future for? So, you know, how do we put these ideas out in the world? How do we create the cultural, spiritual, emotional infrastructure for people to be able to engage with these ideas

and start to see these possibilities. For several organizations, we've created bespoke world-building frameworks inspired by fiction writers, but really understanding the organization's kind of line of travel and understanding what is their vision, where do they want to be in whatever 10 years time? We are able to create a framework that became like a toolkit. So it takes people from across temporal scales or physical scales into the future to start to see mapping trends and weak signals to start to understand 10 years from the future, if these things were to happen, what would a person living in this part of the world experience? And then we put it out as a toolkit to 150,000 employees of the organization, actually. And they were all able to start creating stories. That really gave us

hope that we can kind of scale this in different ways and create a framework which enables people to situate themselves in a world that feels aspirational, transformative, and somewhere they can start to see how their actions could have effect. That's the other thing that very often people feel, what can I do? And whatever I do, that's not going to make any difference. But just to be able to have that seed of possibility inside of you is already action. Then you feel you have your own agency to try and do something about it. So I think, yeah, some connections there. Definitely. The idea of what can I really do about this issue, whatever the issue is, whether it's war or climate change or injustice or legal issues. Like I find it extremely easy to imagine how I could make things worse.

But it's harder to imagine the the equal but opposite positive one of I'm going to fix everything that requires more active imagination. So I think there are two points to that. One is I do want to absolutely say that it is not individual people's responsibility to affect change at scale. And I don't think people should hold them so strongly to account and feel really bad about it, which I know is happening, especially with younger people, but it feels so helpless and paralyzed. But I do want to emphasize that the biggest responsibility rests with the biggest emitters and governments and businesses who have the power and the influence to affect change.

Having said that, I know as individuals, everyone feels responsible. And so I would say that doing what you can in whatever way you can, whether you want to be vegan or whether you want to travel flyless or whether you're doing some local gardening or the community, these are all good things. It's that ability to be able to keep that duality in view that I can do what I can and I will, whilst engaging with a bigger sort of systemic trap that we are part of, like to be able to see that we're trapped in a system that we can poke holes in whilst holding dearly what we can do well and contributing. You said that we lack equity in imagination. I'm curious to think more about how we can go about changing that. How do we create equity in imagination?

It is that even though as humans, we all probably have boundless imagination, there is inequity in whose imagination becomes part of the grand narrative and whose imaginations are not included in those narratives. So I think there is inequity in the manifestation of imagination. However, people are led to believe that they don't have imagination and there's a failure of imagination. And I very much don't think that's the case. If you were to look at the world in the way that James C. Scott has written about seeing like a state, you would say, you would argue that imagination is actually dangerous. Because the way we've created our education systems of the 20th century, we are training

people for the workforce. We have trained people to be very good at answering questions, very bad at asking questions. And asking questions has always been reprimanded. Don't ask too much. Stop asking why. Why are you raising your hand and asking questions? You need to just get on with the answer. What's the answer? You got the answer wrong. Why did you get the answer wrong? So on and so forth. So I think from the time the child goes to school over the years, that faculty of imagination gets suppressed. And then you stop questioning and you get on with it.

If everybody was highly imaginative, they would be questioning everything we do. They'd be questioning our unauthentic ideas of progress. And where would that leave us? I know you as a professor work with young people. I know you as a professor work with young people, and you talked about how superflux kind of came out of this moment where you graduated and the world was not exactly what you thought it would be. I graduated in 2009, and I wanted to be a journalist, I thought. That was a year where many newspapers closed. And so I had this kind of discombobulating experience of I would send out my clips and my resume and a cover letter. And instead of even a rejection, I several times got a letter back that said,

this newspaper no longer exists. It has been shut down in the time between when you applied and getting this letter. I talked to someone who was a very distinguished journalist who had a really successful career. And the advice he gave me was he was like, I honestly think you should do something else that you should write on the side, but this is not, I wouldn't encourage you to go into this career, especially right now. I think also young people who are graduating high school and college right now are similarly,

they're at this moment that we're kind of told is supposed to be this hopeful start of the wonderful rest of your life. And yet the world, the broader world does not feel like the hopeful start of the wonderful rest of your life. And yet the world, the broader world does not feel like the hopeful start of the wonderful rest of your life. It feels very dark and ominous and scary in so many ways. So what would you say to young people right now who are just starting their personal and professional adult lives? Yeah, that is hard, isn't it? We have to do what we have to do because every act matters. So around the world,

people are in such difficult situations. And yet, despite that, in the middle of war right now, as I'm saying this, and yet you see them cooking together, sharing recipes, talking about communities. At the heart of all of this is the human spirit that is recognizing that actually there are ways forward. And that's the spirit of sort of active hope, the spirit of recognizing that in each of us is the capacity to collectively affect change that they should hold on to. And I think that faith, that understanding of self-agency coupled with a sense of doubt and humility can really hopefully give them the sort of emotional grounding needed to kind of get into a world that is going to be very chaotic. So thinking about the future, one of the big shifts that I personally just totally honestly

do not know, I don't know if it is complete hype or if it is actually a radical shift, but there's so much talk right now about artificial intelligence. And I'm curious more broadly thinking about the line between human and machine and the way that is being blurred in a way that it hasn't before. What do you see in the future of creativity, in the future of human autonomy, in the future of the lines between what makes us unique and what makes a machine simply a tool

or not a tool anymore? Yeah, and I think that's such an interesting question and very rarely asked because everyone gets caught up in the sort of dystopian vision technology and it's going to take our jobs. And I'm really glad that you're asking that question. I am interested in that space.

I'm interested in how might machinic intelligence extend my cognitive capacities for imagination? How might it sort of inspire me to think in ways I have not thought before, to create in ways I have not thought before, to question the world in ways I've not done before. And that's the sort of machinic intelligence I'm interested in. I'm not interested so much in the machine intelligence that is going to do the chores for me that I already kind of do. I'm interested in that sort of machinic, artificial, synthetic, ecological intelligence that will become my companion in a kind of a collaborative effort to explore new cognitive

frontiers, so to speak. You created a really beautiful piece about AI as more poetic and focused ecological flourishing and how art is going to play into this future technological innovation and survival. Yeah, in that instance, we were really interested in asking what if AI spoke for a river. So we are casting doubt on the way we think about large language models and their sort of understanding of truth, of the truth. So I'm interested in ecological intelligence because I genuinely believe that intelligence is also capricious. Nature is capricious, so is intelligence. Ecological intelligence can share with us a wisdom of interconnectedness, of reciprocity, of the deep impact a small action by a little insect under a

tree can have on the forest. And that was what we're trying to talk about with policymakers, that if they were going to make the decisions about policy around the future of our freshwater systems, what if we had an AI that spoke for a river and foregrounded the river's deep ecological interconnectedness with all the different species that it interacts with? And just foregrounding that interconnectedness and intelligence, could that enable the decision makers to consider the policies that not just foreground human communities, but the more than human communities as well? not just foreground human communities, but the more than human communities as well. What can we all do to be more active participants in what our future looks like? Question everything. I think be curious, notice more, question everything. Well, it was truly, Anabha, such a pleasure talking to you. And I'm such a fan of your work. And I really hope that people listening will go out and watch the movies and read the writing and also just witness. And if you have the chance to in-person experience it, please don't miss that. Superflux is doing incredible work and you are doing incredible

work. It was such a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much for making the time. Thank you for having me. Thank you. That is it for this episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Anab Jain. Her company is called Superflux. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you from the past to the future by a group from TED that includes Daniela Balarezo,

Ban Ban Cheng, Chloe Xia Xia Brooks, Lainey Lott, Antonio Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who forced me to smell a small sample of the air that is created by exaggerated details. On the PRX side, we've got a group of superstars who take my regular flux, and they do their best to make it super. Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Maggie Gorville, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible.

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We all really appreciate that. We will be back next week with even more how to be a better human. Thank you so much for listening and take care.