Playing with the Future
Scott Doorley's book continues to inspire
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
The Gift of the Drift
Back home in Sanibel from Santa Fe, I am savoring a book I heard about at South By Southwest last month. It’s Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future from the Stanford D.school by Scott Doorley and Carissa Carter.
I woke up this morning with a phrase in my head, Playing with the Future. It had must have been percolating in my mind during my dreams. Doorley’s approach to the future is disarming, sly, smart, and playful. He makes me think differently, which is something I’m always grateful for.
One idea from my recent reading of his book has to do with wandering, adjusting your compass, or drifting in the midst of turbulence. He admits that drifting gets a bad rap:
It sounds aimless. You don’t know where you’ll land or where you’ll go. Will you swirl and twirl and hurl your way forward, or sideways? But that’s the point, and the gift of the drift. The aim of drifting is to land in a new place.
At the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, I drifted for a while until I spotted a painting O’Keefe had done in 1950, the year I was born. This morning, I discovered that the epigraph for Doorley’s Introduction came from a Mademoiselle magazine article by Katherine Anne Porter published in—you guessed it—1950 .
The title of the article was “The Future is Now.”
Porter wrote:
It may be that what we have is a world not on the verge of flying apart, but an uncreated one—still in shapeless fragments waiting to be put together properly.
That gave me the idea for a Grok graphic, of a boy putting together a puzzle comprising rockets and robots. (See above.)
So I’m drifting back here on our sanctuary island in Florida. It’s a pleasant state, maybe like weightlessness. I have mail and paperwork to catch up with, and I need to start work on my taxes.
The pieces for tomorrow are all here today. I love figuring out how to put them together.