Flash Talks: Changing the Future

Long Now Boston FLASH TALKS program provides early career individuals an opportunity to share their work and ideas with an engaged audience with a long-term perspective.

Kate Reed built her first wearable device when she was 13, before the introduction of the Apple Watch. Since then, she has designed, engineered and built hundreds of wearable computers. Kate allows nature to grow in computational space by modeling the processes and systems of nature to create algorithms that allow for predictable and replicable growth.  One example is the remarkable process by which mushrooms grow and the amazing physical properties those natural materials provide.  By programming this process and letting the computer evolve and then print with appropriate biochemicals, you can effectively build a mushroom of any shape – even a chair.  The approach provides the basis for creating novel artifacts built on natural principles.  Kate also envisions a universal digital repository for all natural algorithms, supported by blockchain technology and available to all.  The entire natural world can in this way be digitally backed  in an eternal, permanent record forever.

Alex Zhuk is cofounder, President and Director of climate-tech company Perennial.Earth. Perennial is working to build an entirely new industry – regenerative agricultural practices that promise to provide significant benefits in reducing climate impacts by sequestering carbon in healthy soils.  At the farm level, regenerative practices increase soil health and the quality of the harvest, and at the global level, carbon sequestration in soil can reduce atmospheric carbon and offset carbon emissions.  Perenniel seeks to bridge between these scales by harvesting existing satellite data sources that can measure and document soil carbon in local farms and thereby validate carbon credits in the global carbon offset market.  Those revenues can then be invested at the farm level to improve farming practices and rebuild depleted soils.  The Perennial Team has raised $25M in funding from top climate, food and technology investors including Microsoft, and Perennial’s Soil-Based Carbon Removal Verification Platform was listed by TIME magazine a Best Invention in 2022.

Jason Sydoriak is a transportation analyst and designer at the US DOT Volpe Transportation Center, the internal think-tank for creative solutions to transportation challenges.  Jason is passionate about the approach known as Transit Oriented Design (TOD), which places transit at the center of the urban planning process.  Urban planning faces the twin challenges of an embedded infrastructure based on antiquated technology and planned without appropriate forethought, and an increasingly important need for future flexibility and resilience.  In this environment we need to modify, create and deploy transportation system assets that will facilitate compact, pedestrian-oriented, mixed-use communities.  Jason also argues that such design can remediate inequities and inefficiencies created by transportation system decisions made in the past century. Through planning that integrates diverse perspectives with best practices, urban environments can be created that will increase the livability, equality and local amenities in the 21st century and beyond.

Lindsay Yazzolino may be blind, but she is also a accessibility designer, a passionate advocate for STEAM (science technology, engineering, art and mathematics) and an aspiring space explorer.  An AcroAccess Ambassador, Lindsay participated in the first zero gravity disability research flight in December 02022, with 14 disabled crew members from five different countries.  Lindsay emphasized the importance of design research that enable the broadest inclusion of people with different talents, backgrounds and limitations as we expand on efforts to explore and colonize space.  One experiment they conducted was to test tactile cabin signage that would allow blind astronauts, or sighted astronauts in a dark cabin, to orient themselves and locate emergency equipment.  She asks the rhetorical question – what if you are in a space colony and dependent on the specialized skill of an individual who becomes disabled.

Ben Soltoff is a systems thinker who is passionate about coaching entrepreneurs towards goals with social and environmental significance, and a writer / editor seeking to express ideas and visions that will lead to a better future.  Ben argues that we need to tell stories rather than simply presenting data, as data without a story has no influence on our understanding or our creativity.  The stories of the 21st century that matter will be the ones that chart the pathway to a livable climate and a better, more inclusive and more creative world.

The panelists then joined in a wide-ranging conversation exploring the basis for new design concepts and creative practices that will enhance equity, sustainability and resiliency.  This will require more bottom-up thinking and collaboration rather than traditional hierarchical top-down planning that presumes knowledge about the future that we simply do not have.  Based on their enthusiasm and extraordinary technical competencies, this group of forward-thinking innovators is an encouraging sign that the future can, indeed, be more creative, more inclusive and more sustainable.