Humberto Schwab

The biggest challenge we face is to understand the way our communication cultures will interfere with the way we will act and be as humans in the future. This was the topic of the Eurolab we did with students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the University of Amsterdam in a honoursprogram. The synergie between these two groups is very high on designing possible futures. They draw four interesting ways of seeing the human in the communication context. The enlighted character has overcome the opposition between the revolutionairy rebel and the pompuous consumer. This character knows it is living in a world in which real and hyperreal are no longer separated, it embraces the structures that determines us, it will have a higher awareness. The transhuman embraces technology and understand the fundamenst of our communication. It sees cultures as a way of communication: new technology is incorporated in communicationspheres. The post utopian learning agent understands that we need to re-learn to use our lost senses to intensify our communication with nature and all it inhabitants. The way to get out of our crisis is to reprogramm ourselves into communicative sensibility. The momologue transhuman sees a strong value in making the world an esthetic experience using our inner and outer senses. Chips and extra sensorial devices create infinite opportunities for enriched human experiences.

There is the possibility of doing some real innovation. Innovation is not doing “new things”, it is about rethinking and reconsidering the way we organize our system that is steering us. Human beings are not fixed or closed entities. They are not like atoms (at least what people think atoms are), as most cultural theories and scientific approaches regard them, without any awareness of this fact. We are interactional creatures which in fact have their identities at the level of the skin, at the boundaries between inside and outside world. The inside and the outside world are both “objective”. We are just positioned between them. The external surroundings trigger our internal world. Different surroundings are caused by different buttons being pushed on. The funny thing is now that we can just switch on the buttons that trigger us: that is the amazing thing called human experience. Only you cannot change the buttons on your own, we need to do this in orchestrated action. Innovation is about creating new surroundings so that we can have a more satisfactory human experience, but this depends of our choice to elect the buttons we push. Therefore we need deep wisdom about our real nature and most delighted state of being. You will not find any of these wisdom in de industrial knowledge society; that is knowledge about fixed atoms (which again do not exist as such). In order to create “good” human experiences we need to question the classical and renaissance thinkers, their topic was the most delighted and happy human state of being.

Now that we are almost freed from heavy industrial thinking and wil come into i-thinking or light industrial thinking, we can start again with he renaissance and dream the best dream. The point is that most people have only heavy industrial dreams and have lost the capacity for light industrial dreams. That is why innovation is always a socratic search: we need a continuous stream of collaborative thinking in socratic dialogues. Without daily training you will fall back in heavy industrial thinking, feeling and acting.