Category: Future Design

  • Methodology – Thirty Minute Statement at my Ph.D. Oral Defense

    I will begin with some autobiographical remarks. I have a double educational background in the humanities and natural sciences. I studied the former at Cornell University and the latter at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Later in life, I worked for twenty years as a software developer. I had earlier studied literature and philosophy.

  • Biosphere 2: The Artificial Paradise of Nature

    Biosphere 2 is the enclosed artificial simulation of a natural environment in the Arizona desert. According to Baudrillard, it is the desperate project of a desperate humanity faced with its own extinction, the mania to create an artificial paradise of so-called nature and so-called reality, given that both of those nostalgic referents have already disappeared.

  • Technological Anarchism, by Alan N. Shapiro

    My intention is to write a book developing the transdisciplinary concept of Technological Anarchism as an optimistic, normative, heterotopian (a term of Michel Foucault) idea of a near-future and open-ended social, logistical, and economic system of Post-Scarcity and Post-Capitalism.

  • Mobility and Science Fiction, by Alan N. Shapiro

    The term “digitalization” accurately describes the technologies of the past several decades which we already have, like the automation of the office and other work processes, and Personal Computers and the Internet. The next wave of “futurist” technologies is better described with a term like the Fourth Industrial Revolution or self-aware technologies.

  • Gestalt-Ideas at the Interface between Theory and Practice, by Alan N. Shapiro

    The information society, the hi-tech society, the society of digital culture, the society of universal networked connectedness – where the answer to every question is seemingly available at our fingertips, by little scrolls of, and little finger inputs into, our smart devices – has brought many benefits.

  • Fiktion ist der Schlüssel zu kreativen Lösungen, von Alan N. Shapiro

    Die Beschäftigung mit Fiktionen und Utopien ist nicht gerade en vogue. Erfolgreiche Transformationsbewegungen haben jedoch als Ausgangspunkt, dass ein anderes als das gegenwärtige Leben gewünscht wird oder vorstellbar ist – statt wie zur Zeit eine Hyperrealität als Zukunft zu akzeptieren.