Welcome to Emerging Futures - Volume 3! This week we focused on the book launch and our innovation workshop at Montclair Design Week – Tuesday, October 5, at 4p.
First the book!
Innovating Emergent Futures – The Innovation Design Approach for Change and Worldmaking is the result of two significant frustrations:
The confluence of these two points led us to address the gap: Everyone agrees on the importance of innovation – but no one tells us how to innovate. Particularly really disruptive forms of novelty — the making of new paradigms.
Our book sets out to address these issues. First by defining what innovation is. Then by providing a unique process to innovate.
Finally, we added our innovation playbook so anyone with a copy in their hand can generate novel worlds and / or invent new problems worth solving.
For our newsletter subscribers only we are providing a few of our favorite elements from the book:
First, a favorite diagram (we hand drew 185 diagrams and sketches to support the text) based on Steven J. Gould's development of the concept of Exaptation as the driver of innovation in evolution (this diagram isn’t something he developed, but is based upon a close reading of his final masterpiece The Structure of Evolutionary Theory). In our book we go into detail about how the unintended is fundamental to all innovation, and how Gould lays out the most detailed explication of what this actually means:
Second, a favorite quote page (these exist throughout the book) — yes we really did want to make it a thing of beauty...
Finally, here is an excerpt we thought you would enjoy. From pages 63-64:
“creativity involves attunement to realities' ongoing inventiveness...
Once we understand these intertwined concepts (creativity is a worldly more-than-human process) it makes no sense to talk of creativity as having a singular author, or being an internal human property.
Now, for many, this might feel interesting but beside the point — “sure the world is also creative, but how are humans creative?”
Which is a fair point, if creativity is an environmental and worldly phenomenon then our practices of creativity cannot be thought of as being in a separate realm. Human creativity is the skillful participation in and collaboration with dynamic systems and emergent phenomena.
Thus human creative practices are first and foremost processes of active attunement and experimental engagement with these complex worldly events of ongoing creativity. We are less the originators than the skillful joiners and participants in journeys that will shock all of us. To love and become actively creative is to shift our senses from a focus on the self, ego, or any one thing, to an emancipatory vision of ourselves swimming in, carried forward by and changing in response to a vast creative engaged open-world bubbling with inexplicable novelty.”
Look, we think this book is something special, but hey we get it — you might not. So, here is our deal:
Purchase the book on our website, read it, if it fails to deliver — well give you your money back.
One last thing about the book — we are experimenting with augmented digital content and discussion. Many parts of the book will point you to exclusive digital content and discussions — we want to make this something bigger — we want to foster community and dialog. We hope you are interested in joining us!
On to other news:
Montclair Design Week: “Other Worlds are Possible” The Workshop
On Tuesday October 5th at 4p we’ll be running an innovation workshop – we’d love for you to join us.
Here’s what you can expect:
In less than an hour we’ll plunge headlong into the power of embodied and emergent approaches to innovation by developing a novel world.
We’ll examine one of humanity's most vexing challenges where your mindset will shift from the dead-ends of solution thinking to open possibilities of problem invention.
You’ll walk away with a set of innovation tools and skills you can immediately apply to any innovation challenge (product, service, experience) you are working through.
After the workshop we will be giving away a few books and hanging out to discuss all things innovation and worldmaking — so please come join! (And if you can’t tell a friend who might be in this neck of the woods…)
Here’s the link to register and location details – we hope to see you there!
Date: October 5, 2021
Time: 4 -5:30pm
Location: 641 Bloomfield Avenue (Montclair Design Week Hub)
Till next week we stand alongside,
Iain and Jason
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate
