Other Futures
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"In theater, the old star actors never liked to come in until the end of the first act. Mister Wu is a classic example--I’ve played it once myself. All the other actors boil around the stage for an hour shrieking, “what will happen when Mr. Wu arrives?” “What is he like, this mister Wu?,” and so on. Finally, a great gong is beaten, and slowly over a Chinese bridge comes Mister Wu himself in full mandarin robes. Peach Blossom (or whatever her name is) falls on her face and a lot of coolies yell “Mr. Wu!!!” The curtain come down, the audience goes wild, and everybody says, “Isn’t that guy playing Mr. Wu a great actor!” that’s a star part for you! What matters in that kind of role is not how many lines you have, but how few. What counts is how much the other characters talk about you." (Welles, 1998, pp. 220-221)
The future lives inside the human mind. Trillions of visions flicker within billions of brains. In regards to ‘images of the future,’ the job of the futurist is threefold: 1. to find and study images freely pouring forth from the human mind, 2. to invent tools to crack open the head if the images are imprisoned, and 3. to contest, extend, or invent alternative images and find a way to make them flourish in the global cognitive ecology
The collaboration between our organizations was to create the Seeking Silicon Valley map to visualize not only the expansive network of Biennial activities and locations, but also to offer a landscape of four alternative future visions for the region.
Pro bono is a way to both describe a practice and an ethos. It is a big idea. It has enough clarity to be understood broadly, but it is capacious enough to include many variations of how “good” can be done. Ultimately, pro bono is about giving — time, services, and other resources — with the manifest goal of improving society in some direct way. It can be more or less formalized, and it can scale from the level of individuals (such as legal representation) to global initiatives for social impact (such as volunteer programs like the Peace Corps).