Your comments always push the thinking a little further than the author ever intended or conceived.

I realize that my review is probably too superficial, side-stepping some of the real issues this exhibit raises. The designer in me willingly bought into the spectacle, absolutely loved it and wanted to tell the world about it (yes, I know, pictures would have helped). My more curmudgeonly critic side dismissed it as nothing more than a long, expensive commercial to make IBM feel relevant again. Besides, how much can we reasonably expect of an experience that lasts less than an hour?

While I am content to take this event at face value, your comment stirs an uneasiness with how we might be allowing entities like IBM to sweep us off our feet with big promises for a better future, only to set ourselves up for disappointment or worse if it never comes to be.

Going deeper, I think these questions might yield more substance:
• What future is IBM really working towards and rallying us around?
• Is IBM just optimizing today’s technology to safeguard tomorrow or truly innovating technology to create tomorrow?
• Do people get to co-create the future with tech giants like IBM and inform the solutions that make their lives better?
• How does this whole affair alter our notions of trust? In this age of deceit and corruption at the core of our economy, can we trust companies like IBM to do what’s in everyone’s best interest?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but as I mention at the end of my post, I’ll be keeping watch. At least for now, it doesn’t seem that IBM plans to churn out “more of the same” a la Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.

Thanks for the nudge! And don’t sweat, the comma.

I wish I could have gotten to see this exhibit myself, though your descriptions will have to do. As I started reading this I wondered if you had found out how IBM might make this information available after the exhibit is taken down–whether online or elsewhere. But you remarked that you also wonder the same thing, so I guess that’s a mystery for now.

The cynic in me reads these words from IBM’s THINK exhibit statement, “…more livable, safer, more efficient, more sustainable…,” and disregards them as shallow and obligatory corporate acknowledgements of what the peasants want to hear. But IBM, as you point out, has demonstrated a long history of long-term thinking. Sure, they share the concerns of any business–namely, continued profitable operation–but they understand the ebb and flow of technology and culture over the relative long-term, as apposed to the big four tech companies that have largely achieved their dominant ubiquity in the last decade alone. So, they’ve got some cred, and, in turn, I’m willing to read those words and believe they mean it.

What I hope that means is an investment in the kind of technology we need right now and tomorrow–unseen technology, motivated by infrastructure, not marketing as an end.

Clearly, IBM gets the contemporary technological parlance. The minimalist aesthetic of this experience–a la 2001′s monoliths that manifest the story while sublimating the vast array of hardware and software that make it possible–speaks to that. It all just works, right? Indeed, while doing so–after all, how can you have a futurist exhibit without screens?–perhaps it is more subtly nodding to what the real future of technology should be. Unseen. Felt, heard, understood, but not necessarily a primarily visual experience.

This is my hope for the future: that we get over the self-absorption of screens, which are so naturally employed to reflect back upon us our own story *almost* in real time, but in doing so, rob us of the present and the future. When we are so fully occupied with keeping up with the flow of information, as we are today with the constant beckoning to manage the streams of personal data all around us–our own and that of our “friends”–we don’t really experience the now. It’s mostly the “just now.” But what can a mirror say about the future? If we can begin to detach ourselves from this kind of experience and dream of ways that the same technology can be used to reduce fixation upon trivial data streams, marketing-catalyzed experiences, and ultimately, ourselves as individuals, we might employ it to rebuild. Smarter roads, smarter utilities, smarter dwellings, all so that we can do less of the rote work we do today and be free to let our minds wander again. That is how tomorrow, is built, don’t you think?

- Chris

It’s easy for folks around here to get jaded about arts events in NYC, but given the social and economic context, the Festival of Ideas was symbolic of what art and design do to bring all kinds of people together. And it showcased the many ways people are already working towards the greater good, which often get overlooked. I’ll be sure to keep you posted if there’s another in the works for 2012.

If there is one… keep me posted so I can plan to be there, too! This looks like it was a lot of fun and from the bits you shared via Twitter, pretty thought-provoking as well. (Or was that a separate thing?)

Anyhow, I love this: “reaffirming the power of creativity to help build community.” I find it incredible that creativity can build community despite all kinds of obstacles–distance being only one of them.

CB

Really well written. Hard to argue against.

I can see why so many people has taken the time to digest what you’re saying and looks like many have internalized it as well.

thank you for putting this together.

I’d like to think that the worst is behind us and there’s nowhere left to go but up (with a little guidance), but only time will tell for sure. Guarded optimism is the way to go in 2011!