Thinking

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Possibility Dilation: Why the Space of Possible Futures Is Opening Faster

Possibility Dilation is the widening of the set of futures reachable within any given span of time. The space of what is conceivable has not changed much. What has changed is how quickly a point in it can be reached — and how quickly it can reach you, whether or not you chose it.

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Futures Cones: Probable, Plausible and Possible Futures Explained

The futures cone shows the space of possible futures widening as you move away from the present, sorted into probable, plausible and possible bands. It is one of the most reproduced images in foresight, and one of the most misread. Here is where it came from, what it is good for, and where it misleads.

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The Futures Wheel: Mapping Consequences of Consequences

A futures wheel maps the consequences of a change, and then the consequences of those consequences. Developed by Jerome Glenn in 1971, it is the simplest useful method in futures work and the most commonly misused. Here is how it works, why the outer rings carry the value, and where it fails.

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Backcasting: Working Back from a Future to the Decision in Front of You

Backcasting starts from a described future state and reasons backwards, asking what would have had to change for it to exist. It is not a prediction of how things will go. It is the move that turns a speculative artefact into a set of decisions available to you this quarter.

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Amara's Law: Why We Overestimate Technology in the Short Run and Underestimate It in the Long Run

Roy Amara's observation that we overestimate a technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run is usually quoted as a curiosity. Its real weight is organisational: the disappointing near term is what makes companies dismiss a technology, and that dismissal leaves them unprepared.

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Signals, Trends and Megatrends: What the Difference Actually Is

A signal is a specific event that has already happened — a who, a when, and an outcome. A trend is an abstraction across many signals. A megatrend is a trend at much larger scale, or several trends converging. Teams use the three words interchangeably, and it costs them the most useful one.

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Time Horizons: Why Speculative Design Works Best Beyond Ten Years

The time horizon is the first decision in any futures project and the one that governs everything after it. Set it beyond ten years and current budgets, org charts and market positions stop binding the conversation. Set it past twenty-five and people disconnect. Here is why the band exists.

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Notes on World-Building and Implication: Ideas We Are Working With

Working notes rather than course content. Four ideas we have been developing in client work: a layered way of building futures we call the World Stack, implication ladders, pre-mortem briefs, and the case that an artefact's register is rhetorical rather than aesthetic — with the limits of each.

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NKD in Practice: An Introduction to the Series

The seven principles of New Kind of Design are not slogans. They are tools — each one a lens that exposes a different kind of mistake organisations make when they treat the world as simpler than it is. This short series walks through what each principle changes when you take it seriously in practice.

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The Speculative Design Methodology: A Practitioner's Workflow

Speculative design has a working pipeline: a brief, signals, trends, a future wheel, scenarios, future personas, concepts, prototypes, implications, backcasting, strategy. Here is what each stage is for, why the time horizon governs everything, and where the method reaches its limits.

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NKD_1 — The Trap of Partial Consideration

The first principle of New Kind of Design says: anytime we consider anything less than everything, we are missing something. This is not a counsel of paralysis. It is a discipline that changes how you scope, brief, and decide — because every project's biggest risk lives outside what the brief is willing to look at.

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NKD_2 — Designing for Connection

Nothing can ever be isolated from anything, because it's always connected to everything. The second principle of New Kind of Design refuses the seductive idea of the contained product, the standalone feature, the clean intervention. In practice it changes what we measure, what we ship, and what we monitor after we ship it.

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NKD_3 — The Moral Irreducibility of Outcomes

Good is good and bad, and bad is bad and good, and often we can't tell the difference. The third principle of New Kind of Design dismantles the comfort of clean ethical sorting — and replaces it with a working discipline for designing under genuine moral ambiguity.

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NKD_4 — The Limit of Intention

Anytime we do something, we don't know exactly what we've done. The fourth principle of New Kind of Design closes the gap between what teams think they shipped and what they actually shipped — by treating every release as a hypothesis whose truth value is determined by the world, not the team.

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NKD_5 — Designing Under Epistemic Humility

We'll never ever know everything, and never even know everything we don't know. The fifth principle of New Kind of Design replaces the strategist's dream of complete information with a practical discipline for designing well under permanent and irreducible uncertainty.

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NKD_6 — The Case Against Forecast-Led Strategy

We'll never know what will happen tomorrow, until tomorrow. The sixth principle of New Kind of Design is the practical reason speculative design exists at all — and why strategies built on prediction tend to lose to strategies built on preparedness across a range of possible tomorrows.

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NKD_7 — Why We Need a New Kind of Design

A theory of everything, applied to everything, is our only hope of saving everything. The seventh principle is the synthesis — the case for why the previous six are not optional accessories to standard practice but the basis for an entirely different kind of design and business.

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7 Failure Modes of Speculative Design in Organisations

Speculative design fails in organisations more often than it succeeds, and it almost always fails in the same ways. After fifteen years and 200+ engagements, these are the seven patterns we see most often — and what to do about each.

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Measuring Speculative Design ROI: How to Evaluate Work That Hasn't Happened Yet

The most common question from finance and procurement is the hardest one: how do you know it worked? After fifteen years and 200+ engagements, here is the framework we use to evaluate speculative design — and the reason most attempts to measure it fail.

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Speculative Design vs Critical Design vs Design Fiction vs Futures Studies: A Definitive Comparison

These four disciplines get used interchangeably in industry decks and academic papers alike, and the conflation costs real projects. Here is the clearest line we can draw between speculative design, critical design, design fiction, and futures studies — what each is for, who it is by, and when to commission which.

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What is Speculative Design?

"What is Speculative Design?" – this question opens a doorway to an intriguing and often misunderstood realm of design. Speculative Design is a design practice that has gained momentum in recent years, especially among cutting edge designers and organizations and (previously forward-thinking educati

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Circa Lunar: A conversation with Ted Hunt and Gemma Jones

School of Critical Design Co-founder and cultural semiotician Gemma Jones sat down for a long-distance chat with Fellow Ted Hunt to talk about his latest project, Circa Lunar

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Beyond Academia: Why Professional Speculative Design Training Outpaces Traditional University Programs

Several institutions have developed speculative design curricula, each bringing distinct perspectives to futures thinking:

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Navigating Tomorrow: How Design Strategy Consultancies Shape Future-Focused Innovation

Futures thinking represents a fundamental shift in how design consultancies approach organizational challenges. Rather than solving today's problems with today's solutions, futures-focused design practices help organizations explore what could be, creating strategic foresight that informs present-da

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What is Semiotics: Definitions, Origins and Applications

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, and how they are used to create meaning. It explores how we communicate and make sense of the world around us through the interpretation of signs, which can be anything from words and images to gestures and sounds. In our course Decoding Culture we have a

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Place Futures: Navigating Uncertainty and Embracing Opportunity

We live in an era of unprecedented change, characterized by extreme weather events, social and political upheavals, and rapid technological advancements. Forecasting the future with any degree of certainty feels like an exercise in futility. Yet, for those involved in shaping our cities and communit

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Future Cities: Big Topics and Macro Drivers

Cities are dynamic organisms, constantly evolving in response to a confluence of forces. This is what makes them so interesting and pivotal for futures thinking. Climate change, technological disruption, and shifting social and economic landscapes present both unprecedented challenges and exciting o

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Global Placemaking Examples

Introduction

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Placemaking: Definition, History, Origins, and Importance

Introduction

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Speculative Design vs. Design Fiction

"What is the difference between Speculative Design and Design Fiction?" – This is a question that invites us into a nuanced exploration of two closely related, yet distinct, fields within the broader umbrella of futures design. Both fields are concerned with the future and both employ imagination an

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Speculative Design Examples

Speculative Design Examples: Exploring the Realm of Possibilities

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Caps Lock: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It

Our current economic system could not exist without the number systems, coins, banknotes, documents, advertisements, interfaces, typefaces and information graphics that graphic designers have helped to create. Even speculative design and social design play their part in fueling the economic system.

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Graeber and Wengrow's 2021 book is, among other things, the strongest argument we know for why speculative design is necessary. If the past was wildly more various than the standard story claims, the future is wildly more open than the standard story permits.

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Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos

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Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution

*Carrion crows in the Japanese city of Sendai have learned to use passing traffic to crack nuts.*Lizards in Puerto Rico are evolving feet that better grip surfaces like concrete.*Europes urban blackbirds sing at a higher pitch than their rural cousins, to be heardover the din of traffic.How is this

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Anthropocene or Capitalocene? : Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism

The Earth has reached a tipping point. Runaway climate change, the sixth great extinction of planetary life, the acidification of the oceans - all point toward an era of unprecedented turbulence in humanity's relationship within the web of life. But just what is that relationship, and how do we make

Events

Futures, Power & Privilege

Evening lecture/ 6 August 2020

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Semiotics of Disaster

At the start of 2020, disaster of a certain type loomed large in our collective consciousness - catastrophic events created by an evolving environmental crisis seemed suddenly to be terrifyingly close to home. This disaster narrative still looms large, but the Covid-19 curve-ball thickens the plot i

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Parable of the Sower

The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORI

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Utopia as a Method

In this major new work by one of the leading writers on Utopian Studies, Ruth Levitas argues that a prospective future of ecological and economic crises poses a challenge to the utopian imaginary, to conceive a better world and alternative future. Utopia as Method does not construe utopia as goal or

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Are Prisons Obsolete

Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour

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Manifestly Haraway

The collected manifestos make Haraway's case for a different relationship between humans, animals, machines, and the natural world. For speculative designers, the book is a permission slip and a methodology — the discipline of thinking about who is allowed to be in a future and on what terms.

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The Future We Choose: Surviving The Climate Crisis

Everyone should read this book' MATT HAIG'One of the most inspiring books I have ever read' YUVAL NOAH HARARI, bestselling author of SAPIENS'Figueres and Rivett-Carnac dare to tell us how our response can create a better, fairer world' NAOMI KLEIN'Inspirational, compassionate and clear. The time to

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Being Ecological

'To read Being Ecological is to be caught up in a brilliant display of intellectual pyrotechnics' P.D.Smith, Guardian

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Lo-Tek: Design by Radical Indigenism

Three hundred years ago, intellectuals of the European Enlightenment constructed a mythology of technology. Influenced by a confluence of humanism, colonialism, and racism, this mythology ignored local wisdom and indigenous innovation, deeming it primitive. Today, we have slowly come to realize that

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Objectivity

The emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences, as revealed through images in scientific atlases-a story of how lofty epistemic ideals fuse with workaday practices. Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart th

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The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change: Losing Earth

'The excellent and appalling Losing Earth by Nathaniel Rich describes how close we came in the 70s to dealing with the causes of global warming and how US big business and Reaganite politicians in the 80s ensured it didn’t happen. Read it.' John Simpson

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Choices, Values and Frames

This book presents the definitive exposition of 'prospect theory', a compelling alternative to the classical utility theory of choice. Building on the 1982 volume, Judgement Under Uncertainty, this book brings together seminal papers on prospect theory from economists, decision theorists, and psycho

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Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity

A classic of utopian literature, more urgent than ever: Buckminster Fuller's provocative blueprint for the future

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The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth History and Us

Dissecting the new theoretical buzzword of the AnthropoceneThe Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years.How

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How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Nothing is harder to do these days than nothing. We find every last minute captured, optimised, or appropriated as a financial resource for the technologies we use daily. We consume algorithmic versions of ourselves, submit our free time to numerical evaluation, and maintain personal brands in digit

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Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to play itself out?

This is Bill McKibben at his glorious best. Wise and warning, with everything on the line. Do not miss it' Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

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Speed and Politics

With this book Paul Virilio inaugurated the new science whose object of study is the "dromocratic" revolution. Speed and Politics (first published in France in 1977) is the matrix of Virilio's entire work. Building on the works of Morand, Marinetti, and McLuhan, Virilio presents a vision more radica

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Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economy

Economics is broken, and the planet is paying the price.Unforeseen financial crises. Extreme wealth inequality. Relentless pressure on the environment. Can we go on like this? Is there an alternative?In Doughnut Economics, Oxford academic Kate Raworth lays out the seven deadly mistakes of economics

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Mythologies

No denunciation without its proper instrument of close analysis, Roland Barthes wrote in his preface to Mythologies. There is no more proper instrument of analysis of our contemporary myths than this book--one of the most significant works in French theory, and one that has transformed the way reade

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A Sustainist Lexicon: Seven Entries to Recast the Future - Rethinking Design and Heritage

Words are our first tools for making sense of the world. A SUSTAINIST LEXICON presents seven words for a changing time. In this timely exploration of our cities, heritage, civic initiatives, urbanism and the future, Michiel Schwarz, co-creator of the Sustainism manifesto, charts how a new ethos and

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The Anthropology of the Future

Study of the future is an important new field in anthropology. Building on a philosophical tradition running from Aristotle through Heidegger to Schatzki, this book presents the concept of 'orientations' as a way to study everyday life. It analyses six main orientations - anticipation, expectation,

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Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics

The interpretive science of semiotics offers powerful analytical tools for the application of many disciplines to the study of perception. Semiotics is the study of signs, and as such, is of relevance to a wide spectrum of scholars and professionals, including social scientists, psychologists, artis

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The Architecture of Collapse: The Global System in the 21st Century

Why are there so many crises in the world? Is it true that the global system is today riskier and more dangerous than in past decades? Do we have any tools at our disposal to bring these problems under control, to reduce the global system's proneness to instability? These are the tantalizing questio

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The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future

**SUNDAY TIMES AND THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**'If you read just one work of non-fiction this year, it should probably be this ... what this book forces you to face is more important than any other subject' David Sexton, Evening StandardIt is worse, much worse, than you think.

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Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design

How design can improve the quality of our everyday lives by engaging the invisible electromagnetic environment in which we live. As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products-from "intelligent" toasters to iPods-it is the design of these products th

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Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature

As synthetic biology transforms living matter into a medium for making, what is the role of design and its associated values? Synthetic biology manipulates the stuff of life. For synthetic biologists, living matter is programmable material. In search of carbon-neutral fuels, sustainable manufacturin

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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief

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Extrapolation Factory - Operators Manual

Conversations about the future are often overly simplified and based on popularized visions of what could be. In The Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual, Montgomery and Woebken illuminate their work to democratize futures research, elucidating strategies culled from think tanks and futurists as

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The Value of Everything

WINNER OF THE 2019 MADAME DE STAËL PRIZE AND THE 2018 LEONTIEF PRIZE FOR ADVANCING THE FRONTIERS OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon,he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but ber

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It's not about carbon - it's about capitalism. The good news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.

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Speculative Everything

Dunne and Raby's 2013 book is the closest thing the discipline has to a founding text. We disagree with parts of it. We teach from it anyway, because it is the document that gave the next generation of practitioners — including us — permission to take this work seriously.

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This is Not a Drill

It's time. This is our last chance to do anything about the global climate and ecological emergency. Our last chance to save the world as we know it.

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New Kind of Design

Current business & design practices optimize for profit and fail to consider the larger cumulative impact of these activities over time, which inevitably lead to catastrophic collapse of systems, like the opioid & obesity epidemics, global political & financial instability, and climate & ecological

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Introducing our Institutional Partnerships

We have created an institutional partnership package for organisations looking to engage in next design and business practice as a part of their strategy and culture. LECTURE ACCESS - We host regular conversations around critical issues, and we give members of your staff access to these events and w

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Visions from Latin America: Critically navigating uncertain futures (Part one)

Evening lecture/ 26 November 2020

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Quantum Computing Futures

Quantum computing is an emerging technology that will have dramatic implications for many kinds of computation across industry and society in the future.In this lecture with Matthew Neeley, PhD in Quantum Physics, and Head of Software at Google's Quantum AI program, you'll get up to speed on the lat

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Reimagining Time

After centuries of an almost total stasis in time-telling there is an opportunity for new designs of time that reconnect us to the 'nature of time' found within our enduring relationship to the Sun. Our current frames of time have critical impacts on life, work & labor, business & markets, politics,

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Optimizing Happiness: Me

Current business & design practices optimize for profit and fail to consider the larger cumulative impact of these activities over time, which inevitably lead to catastrophic collapse of systems, like the opioid & obesity epidemics, global political & financial instability, and climate & ecological

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Thinking in Systems: A Primer

Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem-solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. This essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-

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Exhalation

'A collection of short stories that will make you think, grapple with big questions, and feel more human. The best kind of science fiction.' – Barack ObamaFrom the acclaimed author of Stories of Your Life and Others – the basis for the Academy Award nominated film Arrival – comes a groundbreaking se