OCTOBER 24, 2006
Design
By Jessie Scanlon
Will Wright's Dangerous Idea
The game designer was one of some thirty paradigm-shifting thinkers and doers who took the stage at this year's Pop!Tech conference
There's something about Pop!Tech, the annual three-day conference in Camden, Me., that makes one very aware of time. First, there's the time that it takes to get there, which is significant for most all attendees. It takes even the relative "locals" driving up from Boston roughly four hours, and some speakers traveled from Tokyo and Durban.
The road to Camden is right now lined by trees whose gold, amber, and flaming red leaves are another marker of time. The eventual arrival in Camden, and the start of the conference, brings on a more unusual experience of time. It's as if the Maine coastline, with its infinite curves and folds, has molded itself to the space-time continuum, causing past, present, and future to fit within the frame of a postcard.
If the past is represented by the Camden Opera House, the 19th century hall that the three-plus day conference calls home, the future appears on stage, where speakers present ideas and technologies that could shape the next year and the next century.
A Global Who's Who Five hundred entrepreneurs, thinkers, designers, educators, and inventors attended this year's conference, which closed Saturday, and which focused on the theme of Dangerous Ideas—ideas that upend conventions, challenge assumptions, and break taboos, ultimately causing a paradigm shift in the way we view ourselves, our companies, our communities, our nations, our world, and our future.
While a glance at the Pop!Tech program suggests an eclectic, almost random assortment of interesting people—co-founder of the Global Business Network Stewart Brand and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; a Tibetan singer and an African-born, Oxford-educated philosopher; a science-fiction writer and an AIDS activist—the conference held together surprisingly well, in part because one particular "dangerous idea" kept coming up again and again.
In the kick-off session, Brian Eno, the British experimental-music pioneer and theorist, presented an idea which shocked society when it was first introduced and which, although now widely accepted, continues to reverberate through culture and business: the theory of evolution.
From Single Cell to Species "We only gradually accepted the idea that complexity could grow from simplicity rather than from greater complexity," he said. "But that idea that simple rules can lead to complex results, that is Darwin's core theory." And it's a theory, he argued, that applies as much to culture as it does to natural history.
Game designer and Maxis co-founder Will Wright followed Eno with a discussion of evolution in games, from John Conway's The Game of Life through Wright's original SimCity to his eagerly awaited current project, Spore. In Spore, the ultimate simulation game, players guide a single-celled organism through multiple generations. As the game evolves, the species gains intelligence, develops a culture, and begins to explore the larger universe, populated by species developed by other players.
"We're used to the idea of industrial production, in which goods are designed by professionals and mass manufactured," Wright said. In contrast, the world of Spore is created by its users, using simple tools developed by the designers. Not only is each player defining the look of his own world, but his creatures and landscapes and entire planets are uploaded to the Spore server and then downloaded into the games of other players, a richly complex game world sprung from the minds of its players.
Vibrant Planet Lexicographer Erin McKean, editor-in-chief of American dictionaries for Oxford University Press, described dictionaries not as prescriptive rulebooks but as catalogs of an evolving language asking what new words have emerged or how are old words beginning to be used.
And although Alex Steffen, co-founder of Worldchanging.com, a collaborative blog dedicated to sustainability, and author of the new book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century, spoke about some of the new green technologies that can help save our planet, the more powerful takeaway was the sense of an emerging movement, "a vibrant, influential entity that a mere 10 years ago would have been unimaginable," in the words of science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, another speaker.
Juan Enriquez, author of As the Future Catches You, pointed out that companies on the Fortune 500 in 1935 could expect to remain on the list for 90 years, while companies on the Fortune 500 today remain an average of only 15, a churn that reflects a higher "emergence score," if you will, of today's marketplace.
Access to Cheap Tools And Wired Editor-in-Chief and Long Tail author Chris Anderson contrasted the "scarcity" model of old media, in which decisions—whether to greenlight a television pilot or publish a magazine article—are made at the top, with the 21st century mediascape defined by abundance, in which decisions are made bottom-up.
So emergence is a story of media, of culture, of business, and of the creativity of nonprofessionals with access to cheap tools. It's also, in a way, the story of Pop!Tech, which— in its 10th year—seems to have a growing energy and intensity.
There are an increasing number of conferences like Pop!Tech, starting with what is perhaps the original: the TED Conference, founded by Richard Saul Wurman and now run by (a different) Chris Anderson's Sapling Foundation. There's also Art Center's biannual Design Matters, the Push conference, and GEL (Good Experience Live). To some extent even the AIGA's biennial and GAIN conferences fall into the same category of high-IQ, multidisciplinary gatherings.
Learning Over Lunch Pop!Tech isn't the only one to emphasize community and the power of the network, but it walks the walk more than some. Its focus is less on high-power networking—there's no equivalent of the exclusive "Billionaire's Dinner" that publisher John Brockman hosts for TED muckety-mucks every year—and more on the network. Every session is followed by an audience Q&A.
At every lunch, attendees and speakers alike are assigned at random to one of 20 local restaurants as a way of creating new links in the Pop!Tech community. And in order to reach a broader audience, the sessions are broadcast on a local cable-television station and streamed on the conference Web site (this year, some 5,000 people watched the event electronically).
For Pop!Tech, emergence is a powerful but dangerous idea. Like any small company with a strong community identity, it faces the challenge of how to grow without weakening the network. Movements such as Worldchanging prove that a community can be large and distributed and still strong. But that community began life online. Pop!Tech's community still has its roots in a 19th century opera house set in a small town on the coast of Maine, a rare place where the present connects with both the past and the future.
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