Rocket Ships
Design for Blind Spots, the Great Progression, and Tractors
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
👩🎨👩🎤🪴 The designer, the surrealist and the potted plant:
Hire designers because you have blind spots. We all do. And because we do, the world is littered with opportunities missed. Opportunities to do better both on a human level and a commercial level [..] For every empty bank account offered via a mobile wallet as a gesture towards financial inclusion, there is a demographic left unserved. For every ‘faster horse’ we devise, there is the total addressable market of potential car owners, blissfully untapped.
6-minute read by Leda Glyptis in Fintech Futures
⤴️ The Great Progression:
So now there’s a new narrative able to come together about progress emerging all around us, about progress that’s inexorably coming as we lay the foundations for these new systems in the next 10 years, and about how they will scale in the next 25 years to help us solve many of the great challenges that appear to stymie us today. Let’s call this the story of The Great Progression. ****
54-minute read by Peter Leyden in Big Think
🚀🚜 Rocket ships and tractors:
If you are acquiring tens or hundreds of millions of users with a new kind of service, and they are attributing value and attention to you, and the users, attention and value have network effects and hence probably winner-takes-all effects, and if they come with little or no marginal cost, then the revenue can and probably should come later. It is probably more important to focus on building the value than making money from the value - revenue is a feature…
3-minute read by Benedict Evans
🎧 Listening
🫥 After Lifestyle:
[P]eople clearly want to get so much more out of brands than they can offer right now, and brands really want to get there too. They've been trying to evolve formal properties that would allow them to become the subcultures they're currently pointing to, and there's a lot of stuff in the 2018-2019 Zeitgeist especially that pointed in this direction.
44 minutes with Toby Shorin on FWB Fest 2022
🔮 How we build the future:
Part of Protopia is to envision a desirable future. The problem so far is that a lot of those visions of the future are dystopias. People have trouble imagining a world filled of technology, where it's a world that they want to live because the robots are gonna take over and kill us all: the rogue AI, or AI taking over, AI trampling us. The problem with dystopia is that it's just not sustainable.
7 minutes with Kevin Kelly on Big Think
👩🎨 The Future of Cities & Maximizing Human Capital:
[T]ech is a bigger employer than banking and finance, and even within finance, some of those banks employ 30, 40, 50 thousand software engineers. That means a whole cultural shift internally. These are no longer those traders who come to sweat on each other on the trading floor; these are coders, and they have their own habits, and they have their own options as well in terms of where they can work.
58 minutes with Dror Poleg on The Prof G Pod
📬 Suggestions?
Please send tips, comments, and ideas for the next issue by replying to this email. Or, send them directly to hello@futuring-architectures.com 🙏