HANDS ON

BY BRUCE STERLING

Designer Futurescape

The tectonic moment — for me, anyway — came when Anab Jain, a young interaction designer educated in India, Vienna, and

London, stood up in front of seven hundred Web 2.0 zealots in Geneva and declared that she works in

“design futurescaping.”

I know that sounds plenty weird, but since this is

MAKE, I can assume that I’m addressing contemporary grown-ups here. If you’ve got the jazzy MAKE Interplanetary Internet, which, by the way, ol’ Vint Digital Edition rather than the inky real-world paper just booted up, so it’s real now. But I don’t believe mag, just click the ol’ pull-down menu, Google that’s what has happened — because this is 2009, “Anab Jain,” and in five minutes you can discover and virtuality is a corny early-90s paradigm. that this inventive personage, who is about as global We’re entering a new and different situation. as a dandelion seed, really does work in “designer Handheld internet machines are reshaping cities futurescapes.” I would challenge you to find any better in the way that cars reshaped cities in the 20th description for what she’s up to. Really: I’ll wait. century. When our cities — our real places, you Still with me? OK, now imagine you are at this know, glass, bricks, roads — become the products same event in Geneva — the Lift conference, they of “urban informatics,” why would any normal guy call it — and a guy named Matt Webb grabs the call that reality “virtual”? stage and describes his design work, too. He says Get in a car with a GPS unit and look at what that he uses design techniques to “walk the landscape does to what we innocently called “time and space.” of possibilities.” Webb deploys market research, Maybe that sounds like a Google-map detour from economic analysis, prototyping, physical models, my point here, but imagine Webb 20 years from user observation, and historical parallels, but mostly now. Graying at the temples, our Matt explains to — so he says — he uses stories: “The story is your normal people that he “walks landscapes of pos-laboratory, reading is your research, and writing is sibility” for a living. Well, his listeners are “walking your experiment.” landscapes of possibility” to get down to the grocery I can’t tell you how disconcerting it was to be a to pick up a head of cabbage. Come 2025, 2035, career science fiction writer and hear that publicly and there’s nothing rhetorical or far-out about this. declared by Webb. Mind you, he is clearly not a It’s become “real life”; it’s natural everyday behavior, lunatic. The guy’s a robotics hacker and a cogni- like punching a button on a wall and seeing light tive psychologist, and he writes for O’Reilly Media pour out of the ceiling. publications, clear signs that he’s no crazier than Now, I won’t claim that this is technologically anybody else in this magazine. inevitable, because that kind of linear technological

If you Google “Matt Webb” — of Schulze & Webb — determinism is a dead form of futurity. As Webb said you’ll discover that when he claims he’s a designer — rather insightfully, I thought — society, human walking landscapes of possible worlds through his nature, and technical artifacts are a tightly linked storytelling, he’s (a) not kidding and (b) not doing trio, like pressure, temperature, and volume. science fiction. This is what the guy does when he gets Turn up the heat with some techie gizmo, and out of bed in the morning, as an industrial practice. society and individuals will kick back tout de suite.

How did we stumble into the glimmering dawn So we’ve got a networked, interactive, increasingly of a “designer futurescape”? Maybe that’s got speculative futurity. It’s got user-centric Google something to do with “virtuality.” People who do web maps rather than officially certified paper road design are used to products and services that are maps. It’s not some Marxist road to utopia, it’s a vaporous and speculative, stuff like Vinton Cerf’s navigable global sprawl.

Handheld internet machines are reshaping cities in the way cars reshaped cities in the 20th century.

28 Make: Volume 18