Sylvia Gallusser is a futures researcher based in Silicon Valley. Her practice is grounded in philosophy, futures and strategy. Her research company studies our human nature and our social future and how technology is helping or hindering that. Her research topics include the future of health, well-aging and social interaction, the future of work and life long learning, as well as transformations in mobility and retail.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
Contact Sylvia
Resources:
“What is a Futurist? How future-thinking may influence our Psychology and Philosophy” (The Intentional Clinician Podcast) https://youtu.be/2GB50-OaKRA
“Listening to signals of the future” (Silicon Humanism) https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/2020/07/03/how-do-you-listen-to-signals-from-the-future-heres-how-i-do-it/
“Growth, Collapse, Constraint, and Transform” (Future Hacker) https://open.spotify.com/episode/59oYZPenOaTAb1DBX5ZDaO?go=1&utm_source=embed_v3&t=0&nd=1
“We will remain social animals”(Grey Swan Guild) https://www.greyswanguild.org/post/we-will-remain-social-animals
“No-tech-land: Remains of the human nature” (Silicon Humanism) https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/2019/12/12/no-tech-land-remains-of-the-human-nature/
“A Philosophy of the Future(s)” (Lecture at the Global Foresight Summit 2021) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBRjK3Dbzms
“Philosophy of the Future — 12 Conceptions of Futurity” (Predict) https://medium.com/predict/philosophy-of-the-future-12-conceptions-of-futurity-in-70-quotes-8dbd5f542a51
“Generation Zoom children learning about their roots” (Future Fiction) https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/2020/07/31/generation-zoom-children-learning-about-their-roots/
“Aftershocks and Opportunities – Scenarios for a Post-Pandemic Future” (Fast Future Publishing) https://fastfuture.com/shop/aftershocks-and-opportunities/
“A multidisciplinary approach of remote work vs. workplace” (Harvard Business Review France) https://www.hbrfrance.fr/chroniques-experts/2021/01/32958-la-confiance-facteur-cle-de-succes-du-teletravail/
“Reopening schools in the midst of the pandemic” (La Tribune) https://www.latribune.fr/opinions/tribunes/comment-repenser-l-enseignement-experientiel-au-dela-de-l-ecran-853972.html
“The Pandemic Home Hotline: Contamination Anxiety” (Silicon Humanism) https://open.spotify.com/episode/3ZBcm1prxTmTHtC08LIcWJ
“The Pandemic Home Hotline: Aging in Place in times of COVID” (Silicon Humanism) https://open.spotify.com/episode/3aRg5RjakNPwwOO8huNuIj
“The Pandemic Home Hotline: Domestic Violence under Lockdown” (Silicon Humanism) https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Q1Z30hRYdCexehqaN4AEx
“X-ing From Home: Work” https://youtu.be/I5h3t_hqHlU
“X-ing From Home: Leisure” (Ludogogy) https://www.ludogogy.co.uk/article/leisuring-from-home-the-future-of-social-life-entertainment-and-culture/
“X-ing From Home: Consume” (International Market & Competitive Intelligence Magazine) upcoming
“How close are we to abolishing aging?” (Predict) https://medium.com/predict/how-close-are-we-to-abolishing-aging-2b59da35b259
“Live longer, but live longer in good health!” (Silicon Humanism) https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/2020/03/13/live-longer-but-live-longer-in-good-health/
“The Roadmap to Abolishing Aging” (Future Hacker) https://anchor.fm/future-hacker0/episodes/16---Episode-2--The-Roadmap-to-Abolishing-Aging-Sylvia-Gallusser-eoj219
“A Holistic Approach of Well-Aging” (Silicon Humanism) https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/2021/01/25/a-holistic-approach-to-well-aging/
“Information and Communication Technologies to Empower the Elderly” (Online Masterclass on SynapsAcademy) upcoming
“Senior Villages to brighten the Future of Aging” (Silicon Humanism) https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/2019/12/15/senior-villages-to-brighten-the-future-of-aging/
“Transhumanism and the Future of the Mind” (peopleHum) https://www.peoplehum.com/videos/transhumanism-and-the-future-of-the-mind-ft-sylvia-gallusser
“Artificial General Intelligence and Ethics: Wisdom of Code” (Future Fiction) https://medium.com/predict/future-fiction-artificial-general-intelligence-and-ethics-wisdom-of-code-a66824229f8d
“From Product-Market fit to Product-Zeitgeist Fit to Product-Futures Fit” https://siliconhumanism.home.blog/2020/01/22/what-is-product-zeitgeist-fit/
“Four Archetypes of Future Home” (Future Magazine) upcoming
“The Tetris Home” (Grey Swan Guild) https://www.greyswanguild.org/post/the-tetris-home-lifestyle
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward
Hello, and welcome to Futurepod I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the International field of futures and foresight. Through a series of interviews, the founders of the field in the emerging leaders share their stories, tools and experiences. Please visit Futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today, our guest is Silvia Gallusser. Sylvia is an Inquirer of our future, conducting foresight research on the future of health, well-aging, social interaction, the future of work, and lifelong learning, as well as transformations in mobility and retail. She graduated from HEC, Paris in 2003. And she settled in San Francisco in 2005, where she has developed a special interest in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. Sylvia is involved in the future of our oceans and sustainability, and supports positive ocean tech startups. This year, she focused her research on mental health and the home of the 2020s developing a resilient housing framework and four archetypes of future homes. Welcome to Futurepod Sylvia.
Sylvia Gallusser
Hi, Peter, thank you so much for having me here. I'm really fond of the show, I do get a lot of inspiration from you and your guests. So it's a true honor to be part of it today.
Peter Hayward
It's always great to hear from satisfied listeners, Sylvia. So as a listener, you know, the first question which everyone enjoys is of course, the guest tells their story. So what is the Sylvia Gallusser? How did you become a member of the futures and foresight community?
Sylvia Gallusser
One reason why I love the podcast is especially to hear the many ways that being one person, the twists and turns in one's career or personal journey to Futurism. Actually, on my end, it was not so straightforward. From the start, I couldn't say I was meant for it. Even if I find it a fun exercise now to reflect on my childhood or education and try to identify seeds of futurism in my background. I was just thinking about a few anecdotes that come to mind regarding to what shaped me as a futurist. Probably one of the main things that characterized me as a teenager growing up in France, in the Paris suburbs, was that I was thirsty for knowledge, thirsty for science for culture. And it was both a fabulous driving force, but also a cause of profound anxiety. Driving force because I just want to ingest all the knowledge in the world at a time where there was no Google yet to reference it all. I would set goals and expectations to myself, such as reading a book per day, or listening to radio show every morning. I would go through the encyclopedia one by one, or watch investigative shows on on TV. I also wrote a lot in my journal to reflect on it. I contributed to the high school newspaper. And finally I started writing on the internet even before blogs existed, because that was a way to digest and share with others what I had learned. It was also a cause of anxiety, because these mountains of knowledge and the rows of encyclopedias at the library were intimidating. I was wishing I could have a long life to be able to catch up with everything that happened in the world. I realized that discoveries and knowledge with were produced faster than I could really keep up with learning about them. It's actually how I started dreaming about life extension and having parallel lives. I was desperate to follow what would become with humanity in the future, with our Earth and with the universe. And the second anecdote that comes to mind is around 14 or 15. I discovered philosophy. It was a true revelation. I had a phase where I wanted to build a political party based on philosophy and wisdom. France, where I grew up, was and probably still is a very political country. People talk a lot about politics, at family dinners, with friends, at work with colleagues. I felt that philosophy could be the answer to building such a better society. But I was quickly discouraged by people around me. The message I got was that intellectuals think in their own ivory towers, while politicians do actual stuff. In the European culture, we are still collectively wounded by idealists willing to build better, more equitable, societies, and how that led to some of the worst tragedies in history with communism and socialism. We are very careful with utopian ideas that would be too close to forms of totalitarian systems. In addition, I grew up in a family of engineers, so with more Cartesian minds, where we would observe phenomena and discuss the physics of everyday things on Saturday evenings. My father would make lecture about liquid physics. So I was pushed towards scientific studies. And I have to admit that I developed a taste for maths and logics and physics and dreamed of becoming an astronaut. My father was a computer scientist, we had internet at home very early on, probably 1994-1995. I would spend hours on it, watching pictures of the universe or reading about science. To sum it up, I had myriads of interest and potential careers, but also a sort of paralysis to choose one single path. Because choosing one would mean renouncing all the other options. I lived that impossibility to choose one vocation over the other as a frustration. Then I found a solution, or at least a way to channel this multidisciplinary thinking or to silence it for a while. I was probably 17, or 18 as I came up with an idea of a series of books. I had 10 books in mind. In each of the books, I would explore one career - I would be a astronaut in one, an artist, a journalist, an engineer, an entrepreneur in another one, and so on. However the rest of the world in the book would not change. My perspective on the world would change, the story would change, but the other characters and the word itself, in which the stories would happen would be fixed or slowly evolving, if my narrator had an action on it. It meant a lot of worldbuilding to be consistent from one book to the other. My idea was that the last book of it all, would be the key to the rest of the series. Because by spending my own life writing this 10 interconnected books on researching these careers, I would be older and have become a writer, which was kind of the encompassing vocation for all others. I had this Proustian project, if I may say so. I started writing it. And then life happens, which means I needed a degree, I needed a real paying job, I needed a more stable career path. And this project ended up in a drawer for a while. Flash forward... I finally opted for diverse studies, a mixed maths, literature, and social science program in Paris, which led me to graduate from business school HEC Paris, with a specialization in management of arts and culture. For a while, I worked for radio shows and TV networks as a production assistant. Finally, I landed a stable consulting job at Accenture in strategy and product launch for telecommunication, media, and entertainment companies. Another twist in the story happened in 2005. I had the opportunity to leave that stable job to go live in San Francisco to work for the French Embassy as a trade attache. specialized in audiovisual. Since then, I have been supporting technology companies in their international development as part of different government agencies, Business France, French tech Hub, and a couple of years ago I created startup accelerator with two co-founders called big bang factory. During that time, I advised more than 500 tech companies in their strategy for the US market and fundraising, covering solutions from educational platforms, employee engagement interfaces, medical devices, sleep tech, or fall detection tools for the elderly, to name a few. About four or five years ago, I started to notice that our business strategy approach was too narrow sighted. We were focusing so much on finding customers finding funding, on short term profitability (around 2-3 years) that we ended up missing true signals of change, and losing long term vision. I investigated foresight techniques to improve my strategy consulting practice and finally got certified as an expert Foresight Practitioner with the Institute for the Future. And it all made sense, I could finally reconcile my taste for science and technology, my interest in social science and philosophy, my attraction to futures thinking, my creativity, and my scenario-building abilities. There was a profession that truly valued multidisciplinarity!
Peter Hayward
So do you think about what book are you up to in your 10 book life series?
Sylvia Gallusser
Funny enough, I hadn't planned futurist within the 10 book series. I had started with artist and management consultant. I haven't thought about the book series for a while, probably been 20 years. But by investigating that intriguing question, my memory brought me back to it. There was something around this scenario building appetence by the time that is close to what I do today, when I write future fiction, or when I conduct worldbuilding to illustrate a scenario, for example. I'm not I'm no longer working on the book project - maybe one day - but it definitely influenced the way I'm writing and thinking today.
Peter Hayward
Well, the second question is philosophical by nature. So I'd like you to talk to listeners about a framework or an approach or tool even that is central to how you do your futures work and explain it to them. So what do you want to talk to listeners about.
Sylvia Gallusser
There are two two aspect of the question: The philosophical framework and the tools. I will try to address both. Eventually, after the first step of my background, that I was just re-tracing for you, I launched a research company named Silicon Humanism, which focuses on examining our social nature and our human future, how our technology is serving or hindering our species. The philosophy behind that concept is to engage in a dialogue between science and technology on one side, and humanities, history, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, mental health, and moral psychology on the other end. The topics I investigate include well-aging, the future of work, you named a few of these topics. In each of these futures, one of our core scenarios and our core values consist in a technology-supercharged world, in which human beings still resort to social interaction, to person interaction, or connection to nature. One concept I've been developing is the concept of tech free bubbles, or no-tech-lands that we want to live in once in a while, and we were talking about dependencies previously, I believe that at some point, we want to be independent, to find back our status of independent human being. So we resort to these tech free bubbles. As for the tools, since I have this double background, both in strategy consulting, and a more recent training and certification from Institute for the future, I use most of their toolbox: The insight-to-foresight-to-action framework, the scanning of our environment, the analysis of signals and drivers, the production of scenarios, and the crafting of artifacts, until we built our own pledge for the future or action plan. Then I reconnect this futurist approach with business strategy, I don't disconnect both - they are two sides of the same thing. What I've been doing is mainly enriching my toolbox as a strategy consultant with the toolbox of futurists, so that I can help my customers with their core challenges: Designing new products, evolving their workplace sometimes, or even elaborating learning plans for the employees. I'm also influenced by my appetite for multidisciplinarity and my taste for social science on one hand, and my 15 years of strategy consulting on the other.
Peter Hayward
Scanning is a core part of the work we do but scanning is, in my opinion, an idiosyncratic process in that people have their own ways of scan. I mean, do you want to just talk to how you set up your own scanning process? I don't mean for a specific piece of work. I mean, just in terms of having a kind of framework and an approach to collect your sense of what's going on around you? How do you go about doing that?
Sylvia Gallusser
Before starting scanning, which is usually one of the first step of futurists, I really spend a lot of time on analyzing my topic. I wrote a piece on remote work recently. And even before scanning, what I did was conducting a multidisciplinary study. I went back to the history of work, when did we actually start working in the workplace - it's quite recent actually. I conduct a "looking back to better look forward" process. I include anthropological aspects as well, because I like to identify trends, but also cycles or invariants. I also proceed to a philosophical approach. Even before scanning, I like to establish a basis for what is changing, what is cyclic, and what is invariant from this multidisciplinary point of view. Its truly multidisciplinary in the sense that I use the method of a the discipline I'm using - for example, if I consider the sociological angle, I will conduct a sociological study, define work as a social fact, follow Durkheims. methodology. Or I will rely on fieldwork from anthropologists when I consider the anthropological focus. Etc. As a second step, I will scan for signals in the area that I'm studying. It can happen at the same time, but in the methodological process, I feel I am a better signal analyzer or scanner, if I am already familiar with my topic, so I like to establish the multidisciplinary foundations even before I start my scanning. To answer your question, I am mostly a radio listener. Most of my scanning comes from audio. I listen to 3-4 hours of podcast every day, because that allows me to go outside to run, do some sports, which is a way for me to consume information not from behind a screen. I listen a lot to everyday news, I love The Daily by the New York Times, for example. I also listen to shows around humanities such as the TED Radio hour or Hidden Brain and track what is going on in the fields of neuroscience. So I would not just listen for news, but also what is going on in new theories, in new ways of understanding the world, in new behaviors. In addition, I observe the behaviors around me. I try to talk to people from all over the world. And I have to say that during the pandemic, it was much easier to share and compare what was happening all over the world. Sometimes the scanning is much more structured, we conduct surveys with very specific questions to gather signals and have trends emerge from studied behaviors. Finally I report my findings in an Excel file, where I log all the signals I cross, including the descriptions, the link to the podcast or to the news article, then what is the driver or future force behind? And what would happen if this signals were to be extrapolated...
Peter Hayward
Third question should be an interesting one for an inveterate and structured scanner, like yourself. It's the question of the emerging future's around you and what you are sense making what you are sensitive to what's happening around you that really is getting our attention and getting you thinking, and both from optimistic excitement point of view and possibly even a fear or concern perspective.
Sylvia Gallusser
I love that question. And it's a hard one. If you don't mind, I will switch it the other way around, with what concerns me first and what I'm hopeful about then. Because its how my mind is structured. I'm conducting quite diverse project, I wouldn't say I'm a "futurist of work" or "futurist of education". I conduct projects in different fields, about the home, about the future of work, mental health, and especially how it's been changing during the pandemic. Im involved with sustainability and positive ocean tech. And so on. But most of the time, these projects tend to points to two major aspects, or two emerging futures. The first focus is linked to mental health. And the pandemic has put it even more in the foreground, I'm really interested, once again in our humanity, and how we deal with change. It's a big aspect for me. And the second aspect is linked to the role of technology in making us more human or less human. This second aspect has been at the core of Silicon Humanism from the start. I will try to illustrate it with a project, which is actually quite dear to my heart: Well-aging. Well-aging is a portmanteau word between aging and well-being. After working for companies in the field of technologies to support the elderly, I developed a training model on well-aging, which I based on a 360 degree approach to aging, showing how biotechnology or communication technology can empower the elderly. It is really one important aspect to me. I don't just consider the topic of aging from the technology perspective. I try to replace well-aging into a more holistic perspective, a multidisciplinary approach again, because first of all, I do believe that everybody can work on postponing their own aging, with an appropriate lifestyle based on nutrition, healthy eating, physical activity and regular exercising, but also social bonding and enriching community experiences, stimulating intellectual activities, creative and artistic expression as well as spirituality. And then, as a second step, we consider medicine and nutritive complementation as a prosthesis when lifestyle is not enough. Finally advancements in biotechnology, robotics, bionics, intervene as a third stage or for individuals who have specific needs, following a genetic condition, a disease, or an accident. Many people are asking how transhumanism is going to impact our human species. I do believe in this last stage as the last stage of the process. I wouldn't want us to go for the easy transformation if we don't start by improving our lifestyle for better aging. Also this last stage won't be available to all of us at first, because it will be expensive. There's a lot of inequality, in access to treatment or to what we usually understand under the umbrella term of transhumanism. However there is still a lot we can do to prevent accelerated aging and to help people get empowered over their own condition through awareness campaings, ongoing education, or individualized support to improve our lifestyle. I like to imagine jobs of the future such as "holistic aging specialist" or "well-aging life coach", because these professionals could help us go through the full well-aging checklist and provide customized advice based on individual conditions. What I am scared about or concerned about is probably what we hear at the current time around what Elon Musk is trying to achieve with Neuralink and the promise brought by brain computer interfaces, because they seem to be a major component of the future of the mind. When we start to investigate this field, we project ourselves being able to control everything from our own mind, not having to make an effort anymore to express our will to interact fully with the world. And it can be indeed wonderful progress, for people with paralysis or locked-in syndrome. But for the general population, we can wonder whether it is the direction we want our species to take. Do we want to end up being wandering minds in robotic skeletons? Don't we want to be living bodies, who can express themselves through their own moves, made of organic materials, and with five senses. In VR technology, a question I was discussing was recently with other futurists was whether we can continue to create VR material or mixed reality, or BCI experiences if we are cut from first-hand experience of the world. I am really hopeful that we will continue to search for this "tech-free bubbles" that I was mentioning previously, linked to the fact that sometimes we just want to disconnect. There's a whole movement of smart villages around community living, senior villages, intergenerational initiatives, actions around making our cities accessible for the elderly, so that they can still continue walking in the streets. It is not just about helping them at home, in a super smart connected home. This is also about keeping them integrated within the society, so that they continue to be productive, to interact with other human beings, and to develop their mind in a healthy way.
Peter Hayward
I'm challenged to imagine how we can do so much with as you say the bio techno extension to well- aging. But I keep coming back to the notion that access to these things is at present controlled through people's ability to effectively have money and how do we avoid a situation? Or can we avoid a situation where we don't create classes of people who get access to this and other classes who died.
Sylvia Gallusser
Once again, when I think about this topic, I try to look into the past when new technologies rose in other fields, and let's just think about the first personal vehicles. they were not accessible to all at first. But at some point, we need funding, we need customers who pay to use technology, to test it also. Very often it will be either desperate people because, for example, there's a genetic condition and they will be open to try new treatments, or wealthy people who want, like Jeff Bezos, to travel around the Earth. So of course, it's not accessible to most people at first, but the first users will get the market started. Following the law of supply and demand, the more people will be interested in it, the more we will produce of it. Then we will be able to scale and have the cost decrease so that it gets accessible to more people. At some point the market force is at work to help technology advancement be accessible to a lot. In addition, there ar e lobbies. And finally I like to distinguish the scientific aspect of things, and the social equality aspect of things. It's not because not everybody has access to a scientific breakthrough that we shouldn't achieve it. As we think it's ethical, that the technology enables ethical developments of our human society, we should push for scientific progress. And then as a second step, we consider social equality with different players helping achieve it: lobbyists, politicians, activists. If there's a technology that is truly revolutionary for the human species, then all these groups, all these activists will push to make it more available to others. In addition we will work with the help of insurance companies or employers, to have it covered and to have it accessible to more people. But I like to really cut the debate in two parts, the scientific progress - os it a progress for humankind from an ethical and technology point of view - and the social equality part - how can we make it accessible to most of us?
Peter Hayward
I'm gonna keep pushing you because I think you're good I think you can handle a challenge. If we look back at the impact that science and technology had, and I'm thinking back to 18th and 17th centuries, how it, it reinforced a cut a racial superiority over effectively for the societies that, if you like, created the technology, they felt themselves superior, they felt themselves to be a more significant human than the people who didn't have the technology. And yeah, we look back at how colonization was often led by technology. And I wonder how do we prevent these technologies? recolonizing indigenous cultural perspectives on things? Do you think it's possible that with the awareness of all technology has a set of embedded cultural and social interests? One of the things that's happening so for example, in Australia, we're slowly, very slowly starting to honor and recognize the existence of an indigenous culture that's been here for 70,000 years. And it's starting, it's well overdue. There have been tragedies on the way, but we're starting to, to appreciate their knowledge of the landscape, Nigeria relationships, they starting to teach us things. How will we not extinguish that?
Sylvia Gallusser
It's really good and really tough question. I wouldn't mean to sound like I have all the answers, but I would say my position on this - and that's why I like philosophy from the start and I tried to still keep an ethical point of view on what the future is going to look like. In the realm of scientific progress, I do believe in ethical committees, in multidisciplinarity, once again, because it's not just about technology driving change. Also coming from this European culture, we are so scared about this idea of superiority of some kind of "ubermensch". We are really, really, really scared about this. That's why when there's scientific progress, we need to always add ethical committees which shouldn't be just made of people in the field of science, but really, in the field of other disciplines. Let's say, for example, it can be if it's about a new treatment for children, you need to have psychologists involved, parents of patients with this disease, legislators and lawmakers involved in the decision - so not limited to a closed set of scientists thinking together, but really gathering as many different point of view as possible. And with the cultural aspects you mention such as the preservation of indigenous culture, it is similar - you need to have anthropologists, ethnologists, people living this reality, involved in the conversation. It's not just about discussing their future without themselves be part of of the dialogue. My recommendation on all these topics is here again about multidisciplinarity. Because it's always a way to balance different points of view with different types of analysis, because I don't believe that just one analysis, one approach brings all the answers. Thanks.
Peter Hayward
Sylvia, how do you describe what you do to people who don't necessarily understand what it is you do?
Sylvia Gallusser
Perhaps to answer this question I need to identify first who doesn't necessarily understand what I do. And I'd say there are probably three categories of people - the professionals with whom I have worked under another identity before and who saw me change careers, then my family and friends who already didn't know what I was doing before, and then naturally my prospects or my customers whom I need to serve with my elevator pitch. Talking about the first category, coming from strategy consulting and business development, I made this change to futurism, whereas most of my colleagues went on looking for more customers, or more funding. I was watching in the opposite direction of the value chain aiming to do better strategy before we move to researching customers or funding. My focus so far had been really about finding customers, helping my customers make revenue, finding investors. And a major step in that process was what we call identifying the "product market fit", i.e. the fit between the product they developed and the markets that existed. And when I started pivoting and conducting strategic foresight projects, I did not get much enthusiasm, not interest from my former colleagues. Many considered it life crisis or temporary fad. And I have to admit there's some confusion around the title of "futurist" because it sounds more like science fiction or palm reading. In Italy, I even got some questions about the art I was making, because futurismo is an art movement in Italy. Once a former investor colleague asked me how things were going, and he told me "I see you get a lot of traction with your new job, I mean, it's great what you do, the future, it's important." What I realized is that it was super supportive and nice, but also a sign that my former business consulting community didn't really get what I was doing. So I started to explain it with their own terms from the entrepreneur investor community. I would recall the famous VC Andreessen Horowitz who made the concept of "product-market fit" famous, the one I was just mentioning, and then evolve it into what they called "product-zeitgeist fit" - having a fit between the spirit of the time and the product. So I would pitch my colleagues with the natural next step, explaining that what I'm doing is "product-futures fit", developing products that will fit not just a target market, or not just the momentum but a future need. That was a way to introduce them to the pull from the future, and so on. As to my family and friends, I try to illustrate what I'm doing. I talk about signals, explain what are the signals from the future. And it's funny because I started getting genuine interest from my friends after this career change. And this concept of "signals from the future" is a really good marketing concept to engage people around futurism, the idea that the future is already here around us, sparse and discrete, and that each of us is able to gather signals. Finally I had friends sending me sending me news or articles and asking me "Is it a signal? Is it a signal?"
Peter Hayward
Extended scanning network
Sylvia Gallusser
Exactly. Also, the artifacts from the future. People love the idea of artifacts. It's always fun to talk about potential artifacts. As for the last category, my prospects and customers, people who actually pay for my services... when I sell my services, I present an initial value proposition. But then there's what they actually get out of the experience, the actual value produced. At first, they probably look for new approaches to conduct innovation, they want to challenge their way of doing their job, but they end up enjoying foresight as a team building activity, or as a way to align their teams along a vision or an extra curricula r activity for the career development teams. And that's absolutely fascinating. Somehow futurism brings colors to corporate seminars, that's kind of the new fun thing to add to your corporate world.
Peter Hayward
The way I explained it to myself, Sylvia, was that talking about why we're here and what we could do releases, I think, the best part of our nature, our creativity, our purpose, or most people love the chance to have that conversation occasionally. And that's what I always found whenever I was doing a four side processor search conference or whatever else, that people would invariably start talking about themselves, their lives where they were going, that kind of thing.
Sylvia Gallusser
Yes, because traveling to the future is is quite appealing, right? In the end they enjoy the visual aspects, the activation of their imagination, and they have the impression that you help them see or visualize or sense the future. They like the collective worldbuilding, the envisioning. I have to say sometimes I receive comments such as "you're so lucky to do that as your everyday job" because when you give them a glimpse of it like it sounds exciting. I had friends actually telling me they want to change to have the same career change.
Peter Hayward
It takes a lifetime. Yeah. Right. Thanks, Sylvia. Last question, what are your perspectives on our post pandemic homes? your latest research?
Sylvia Gallusser
Thank you for that question. Indeed, I've been dedicating so much time to that topic this year. And we have built a framework to think about it because the pandemic has redesigned our home landscape and transformed our everyday environment while exacerbating changes that were previously underway. We noticed that two levels are now morphing. First the "structures" - such as the home design, materials, furniture, appliances -, but also what we call the "intangibles" - schedules, behaviors, mental health at home, social bonding at home. We wanted to create a model that included both the structures, the "physical home", and the intangibles, what we call "home life". To conduct that analysis, I mapped the future of the home along two dimensions, one of them would be the "threat dimension": Is the threat coming from outside, such as a pandemic, social chaos, economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, or war? Or is the threat coming from inside the home, such as domestic violence, physical or verbal abuse, toxic work-from-home environment or loneliness? The second dimension would be the reaction dimension: do people and does the home present a fragility reaction or resilient reaction? Out of this, we built our quadrant, producing four archetypes of future homes. First you'd have the "toxic home" when there's a threat from inside, but the reaction is fragile. You'd have the "bunker home", the threat is from outside but the reaction is mostly fragile. Then you have to "Tetris home" from the game Tetris, your reorganize the places, the equipments, the resources, the people, you repurpose the rooms and furnitures. The threat is from inside, but you are resilient because you realign things. And then you have the "safe heaven". The threat is coming from outside, but the reaction is resilient. The toxic home presents hazard to the health of the individuals, thereby favoring toxic relationships. If we refer to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the toxic home doesn't allow the individuals to meet their most basic needs, such as physiological needs or security needs or healthy social interaction. Many signals point in that direction, such as increase of house fires, child injuries, intimate partner violence, cruelty towards pets, depression symptoms, suicide rates, medical ingestion, alcohol consumption, obesity. To bring awareness around these topics and share a first level of resources, we have worked with a mental health team to create audio fiction simulating pandemic home hotline conversations for individuals to express their distress. We would include in this fictions, real resources, so that was a really meaningful project to illustrate the toxic home. When the house presents a higher resilience to inner threats, we call it the Tetris home. The Tetris home is about flexible floor plans, multitasking, mental resilience, process streamlining and community living or what we call a “WeLive” space (similar to a WeWork at home). Whereas the Toxic Home is closer to a Collapse archetype of home, the Tetris home is all about Constraint. Because of different constraint factors such as the accumulation of home-led activities, cohabitation of family members from different group ages with different rhythms and needs, space constriction, time constriction, and senses overload (noise, physical proximity, scents, tensions), individuals adapt the home environment through different tactics. Among these tactics: repurposing of rooms, furniture, apparels, electronic equipment, quick design upgrades, mobility of objects and people, sharing of resources, timeout options. New rooms, new habits, new designs are created, some of which are going to last - the zoom room, the zen room, the garage gym, better ventilation, more storage, indoor garden, utility cupboards, and mud room for decontamination. To sum up, it's really interesting to connect the evolution of the intangibles with the evolution of the structures. Feel free to connect me to jnow more about the two other archetypes or receive the complete study. One important insight from this study is that whereas for the past decades, the design word was leaning towards more sustainable residential buildings, with the beginning of the 2020s and the pandemic, we've been reminded that, in times of chaos, natural disasters or economic crisis, the core function of the home remains its capacity to provide shelter. As a consequence it has challenged us to rethink home design and related industries. But it has also revealed that we were unprepared. After all, the pandemic is acting as a disrupter and driving home designers to rethink trends, functions, and features of homes.
Peter Hayward
Now, it's, I think it's a good point. I mean, sustainability was always a nebulous term anyway, because of course, you had to ask the question, what exactly are you sustaining? And what are you letting go? And I think the pandemic has actually made us start to question well, what is it we sustained? And what is it we promote? What is it we try to prevent? It's the combination of promotion and prevention that creates sustainability in my thoughts.
Sylvia Gallusser
That's a good point. And what's fascinating, it's not just happening in the home, I also worked on the future of beauty for another customer. We noticed a similar evolution from sustainable beauty. These past years, the trend was towards natural beauty products, and now we return to products that are truly efficient, lab-intensive, with proved efficient features to make sure they are antibacterial, for example. So back to health, before sustainability, health before natural.,, Or resilience in the case of the home, before sustainable. We constantly deal with this debate between what is a resilient home and what is a sustainable home. Because if you want the home to be resilient, for example, you will be multiplying energy sources. But if you want your home to be sustainability-oriented, you will try to limit consumption of energy. Right now, in the field of the home, architects and home designers are really imagining new ways to think about sustainability in relationship to resiliency, to integrating both to create our future home. The upcoming years promise to be exciting!
Peter Hayward
Thanks, Sylvia, it's been great to catch up and have a chat and hear about your, your journey through the 10 books. Sounds like you're you said, You're certainly sketching out the philosophy text, I'm pretty sure. But thank you very much for taking some time out to talk to the Futurepod community.
Sylvia Gallusser
Thank you so much, Peter, that was really a pleasure. And thank you for making me think back about that book project. I truly enjoyed the conversation. Thank you so much.
Peter Hayward
This has been another production from Futurepod. Futurepod is a not for profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support Futurepod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This is Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.