Andrew is a forecaster, design strategist and author, working at the intersection of culture, creativity, technology, and futures research. He's the lead partner of Z + Partners, a forecasting and design company. He also edits the Z + Blog, which tracks the future of design, branding, sustainability, and other emerging issues. His most recent project was editing The Catalog of Tomorrow, a book that examines more than ninety critical future trends and technologies, and explores how they will shape our lives, our society and our planet in the next 20 years.

Baghdad2028: A Conference Whose Time Hasn't Yet Come

Hopefully, this website introduces itself. Comments welcome!

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 11:49 AM | permalink

Anti-war Activists Go For Broke

In an effort to prevent the seemingly inevitable conflict, British peace activists are mobilizing to go to Iraq to act as voluntary human shields. More than 50 such activists will fly to Baghdad via Paris, which has recently signalled its own ambivalence over the approaching conflict.

The group has received endorsements from Noam Chomsky and the ghost of Mohandas Gandhi.

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 10:29 AM | permalink

Architects... in... Spaaaaaaaace

Constance Adams is going where no architect has ever gone before: Up There. As the first architect ever hired by NASA, Constance is designing a new generation of innovative spacecraft that NASA hopes will carry the first humans to Mars.

Adam's TransHab is a revolutionary inflatable spacecraft, whose skin is made of a stronger-than-steel, kevlar-like material that expands in the vacuum of low-earth orbit. This design feature overcomes two critical hurdles of space travel - the high cost of moving materials into space (currently $22,000/kilo!) and the limited width of the shuttle's payload bay. And most importantly, it allows for crew qurters that are actually liveable, not just surviveable. Such spaces will be critical on 180-day round-trips to the Red Planet.

You can learn all about her take on the project here.My favorite quote from Constance: "all architecture is space architecture; terrestrial architecture is just the specialized subset with which we are most familiar."

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 2:43 PM | permalink

Neoutensil Boosterism

No, it's not the Spork. It's the Popcorn Fork^TM - a utensil solution in search of an eating problem.

Predicted by its inventor to become the "the 4th commonly used eating utensil in the home", the PopCorn fork facilitates the complex ballet that is moving popcorn from a bowl to your mouth. No longer suffer the shame of accidently tossing popcorn over your shoulder and into the lap of moviegoers behind you. And be sure to check out Popcorn FunDo: fun for the whole family.

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 12:27 PM | permalink

The Art of Golan Levin

Golan Levin is an artist, composer, performer and engineer, and one of the most incredible digital artists working today. He trained at the now-defunct Interval Research, and in John Maeda's Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab - a group which gives artists and designers the coding and hardware development skills to make truly next-generation art.

Golan is one of a handful of polymaths (see also: Daniel Rozin) who are exploring the intersection of mathematics and form and extending the formal language of interactivity to create new kinds of art. Unfortunately, much of his work requires very advanced hardware to experience properly, but his online experiments are absolutely worth checking out. My favorites: Yellowtail, Ozbok, BP, Floccular Portraits, and, especially Ribble.

Also, be sure to check out RE:MARK, an augmented-reality art installation where up to six participants are able to "see" each others' voices, in the form of animated graphic figurations that appear to emerge from their mouths while they speak!

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 9:14 PM | permalink

Democracy and Media Deregulation at the FCC

Media Ownership Chart. Click to view.

As many BoingBoing readers will know, the FCC is currently considering all-but-abolishing its vestigal rules limiting the number of media outlets a single company can own. This could have as large an impact on your everyday media experiences as the recent Eldred fiasco.

Prior rounds of similar FCC media deregulation have had a disasterous effect on radio, where the resulting concentration of ownership (by "roll-up" companies like ClearChannel Communications) has turned the airwaves in many cities into a cookie-cutter clonescape of formulaic pop stations. The corporate free-for-all hasn't just restricted listener choice among formats, but limited the diversity of what one hears on any given channel. That's because, in the face of fewer, less-distinctive outlets, music producers have been forced to push (read: engineer) pop musical 'acts' that they think the corporate media will buy, virtually sterilizing the dial. (And that, as much as anything else, is why CD sales have been declining.)

Now, under the infamously free-market-oriented FCC Chairman Michael Powell (actual quote: "My religion is the market.", ) the FCC is considering deregulating other, more vital media like newspapers and TV. Powell espouses making a decision based largely on a series of studies which he himself sponsored, and which conclude that removing limits to corporate ownership will have a positive or negligible impact.

Powell's FCC has been incredibly cagey about holding meetings with the public on this issue. They have announced (pdf) a public hearing in Virginia "sometime in February" although they have not announced a date, (or provided one in several email exchanges) and they then held an unannounced meeting at Columbia University in New York two days ago which was (surprise) poorly attended. Powell's own press releases read like exercises in Newspeak, and are worth comparing to those of another FCC commissioner, Michael Copps, the lone FCC dissenter at this point.

I'd like to encourage any BoingBoingers interested to read up on the issue, and consider attending the February meeting when it is announced; those who can't attend can file a public comment via the FCC Web site by following instructions here.

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 11:56 PM | permalink

"I poisoned P2P networks for the RIAA"

Like many, I tend to consider the (occasional) stories I read in the UK Register with the same bemused suspicion with which I read the contents of the New York Post.

With that caveat out of the way, I was fascinated by the recent Register story on 'Matt Warne', who claims to have inflected P2P networks with useless junk on behalf of the RIAA and its international cousin, the IFPI:

"I suggested that they should put out files with legitimate titles - and put inside them silence or random noise - and saturate the file sharing networks with those files. That did start the poisoning."

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 10:24 PM | permalink