As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a great fan of creating fake newspaper front pages from the future. They are very effective at positioning people to think differently about how the future could be, and what decisions lie ahead.
Last week, The Yes Men did it again, and printed a fake IHT from December 19th 2009 to illustrate the decisions facing the Copenhagen Climate conference. Read all about it here.
From the cover story of the June 09 issue of Fast Company comes this quote from Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab:
“I like to be on the edge because it makes me vulnerable. On the fringes, I think, is where disruptive innovation begins.”
Oxman appears to be a one-person study of exploration across disciplines. She’s described as “artist, architect, ecologist, computer scientist, and designer.” Digging slightly deeper behind the hyperbole, it turns out not to be far from reality. She studied medicine in Israel, graduated from the Architectural Institute in London and is now based in the computation department of the architectural department of the MIT Media Lab. Her work has recently been displayed at MoMA, now part of its collection.
That’s the sort of background that would even make Frans Johansson’s head spin. The collision points between disciplines are often where the sparks are created that light the fires of disruption. Given Oxman’s background, she’s probably got enough spark-ability to re-start the Large Hadron Collider.