With Intent

Mushon Zer-Aviv is an activist, artist, and designer. He's currently at work on devising new ways of understanding change and the future—ways that account for the limits of forecasting and consider the "darkness" of the future as a place for hope and possibility. He also discusses systemic bias, the value of small talk, his appreciation for Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein, and Milton Friedman, and how his work brings provocation and action together.

Marina Gorbis is executive director of the Institute for the Future, a place where business executives, policymakers, nonprofits, and others use foresight and futuring techniques to make better long-term decisions. For example, you might work with the Institute for the Future to anticipate and be able to plan for a worldwide pandemic. In fact, Marina worked on just such a project years before COVID hit. Now that the pandemic is real, interest in futuring has spiked. Marina talks about what futuring is and the trends she's seeing—in particular, how our relationship with work is changing. She also talks about how she defines value creation, that project that anticipated the pandemic, and her current project, the Equitable Enterprise Initiative.

Jon Veal is co-founder of alt_, an organization that focuses on the power of community. The alt_ market is the organization's flagship program. Their first market transformed an abandoned space into a communal free market, encouraging community members to give, take, and take care of one another. Jon talks about how serving his community and making art come together for him, the importance of faith in his work, and the planning he and his co-founder, Jordan Campbell, have done to help secure their organization's longevity.

Kenneth Bailey, co-founder of the Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI), and co-author of Ideas, Arrangements, Effects, talks about his approach to building a better possible world. Talking about specific projects like Public Kitchen, as well as the thinking and pragmatism shared in his book, Kenneth presents an approach to building that new world. As he sees it, one must go beyond the problems we see and experience every day to understand the systems, infrastructures, or "arrangements" that underpin them.

Michela Magas has had a nonlinear career path driven by a focus on bringing people together to make deliberate decisions that enable long-term creativity and innovation. Those decisions may reside in the realm of intellectual property, as in the Industry Commons, or music technology, as in the case of MTF (Music Tech Fest). Michela talks about how to foster innovation by bringing people from disparate fields together, why nonlinear career paths are the way forward, and the kind of skills people need for navigating our changing world.

Episode 5 of With Intent is available now. Ruth Reichstein is part of the European Commission's Presidential Advisory Board on the New European Bauhaus, or NEB, which was developed to help the EU achieve the goals set forth in its Europe Green Deal. The NEB aims to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. We at IIT Institute of Design (The New Bauhaus) announced our partnership with the New European Bauhaus earlier this year.

An organizer in Chicago for more than a decade, Richard Wallace, founder and executive director of EAT (Equity and Transformation), is focused on supporting Black informal workers—people like George Floyd, who are boxed out of the formal economy. Richard explains the historic rivalry between Hispanic and Black informal workers, his confidence in democracy, the reasons we have an informal economy in the first place, and why the informal economy is tied to issues of equity and race. 

Last week we talked about technology as medicine. This week: food as medicine. Rita Nguyen, Assistant Health Officer at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and founder of the Food as Medicine Collaborative, explains why doctors should be able to prescribe food—and why the healthcare system should pay for it.

As Global Head of Employee Digital Experience at the Kraft Heinz Company, Tope Sadiku describes herself as a corporate doctor. To extend the metaphor: her patients are Kraft employees, and her medicine is technology. Tope considers the evolving employee experience—really, how an employee spends their everyday—and how technology can enhance it.Tope is a 2021 Latham fellow at the Institute of Design.

In the first episode of With Intent, Kristin Gecan talks to Morgan Ames, author of The Charisma Machine, about One Laptop Per Child—a hugely ambitious, or as Morgan defines it, charismatic—project with good intentions: to bring a laptop to every child in the developing world.We talk about why that project failed, how it connects to utopianism, and what design might learn from it all. Morgan is a 2021 Latham fellow at the Institute of Design.