2020 
Annual  
Report

What if our systems were designed to reflect the complexity of interdependence, both human and non-human? The pandemic has exposed the breadth and depth of our global interdependence, whether we like it or not. How does humanity negotiate this reality for shared well-being at a scale never seen before? Over the next 100 years, we also have to adapt to climate change and steward exponential technology to equitably provide abundance without bankrupting our planetary resources. What does that mean for leadership models and political decision-making? Perhaps our understanding of “survival of the fittest,” which fueled the Extractive Age, was immature and destructive. What actually makes our species fit for survival is cooperation and collaboration in managing resources — a path toward the Regenerative Age that honors our interdependence.

How will the pandemic continue to alter the future of capitalist structures and the ways in which we conceive of our economic interdependence? We now have centuries of data and analysis to make arguments against both unchecked capitalism and extreme socialism. We know that neither model will work to balance the abundant resources promised by emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). In order to reverse worsening social inequity and environmental catastrophe, we must explore other forms of economic organization that place our care for each other at a higher priority over relentless market expansion.

As the fourth Industrial Revolution drastically alters the jobs landscape, people will have increased time for activities not devoted solely to generating income. Imagine a world emboldened by the value of lifelong play, learning, and creativity; a world in which people are resourced to engage in learning systems throughout their entire life as a form of recreation and community engagement — not just rigid programs from early childhood development to competitive higher education. As social unrest around job losses increases, how we tackle the future of non-work will be exceedingly crucial.

The pandemic pushed the broken aspects of our health and care systems into stark visibility in 2020, opening up people’s imagination for designing new systems to go far beyond reaction and repair. How are we building infrastructure for delivering the basics of well-being from cradle to grave? How might we build circular care systems that are fully integrated with community life — from housing to food, from education to health, from social inclusion to cultural connectivity? Imagine rich relationship models between experts and communities that reverse the worst consequences of the 1910 industrialization of care sparked by the Flexner Report. How does everyone show up for mutual care?

The pandemic abruptly shifted the entire globe’s population into a very different orientation to the workings of daily lives. Perhaps there are lessons to learn to inform a future of work that doesn’t have to be at odds with all other aspects of life. The industrial age created silos between work, education, home, community, and the natural environment that may no longer be the norm in our future. Imagine ways to more fluidly engage every dimension of living to make our waking hours less compartmentalized, alleviate the public health impact of time poverty, and reorient working hours from desk-bound to full mind-body integration.

Although much has already been said about care systems that include more than the mid-twentieth century ideal of a heteronormative nuclear family, imagine an alternate reality that not only embraces and supports LGBTQIA families but also returns to non-patriarchal polyamorous family structures that have been common in various cultures in history, including indigenous American communities. What are different legal structures that support the rights and protections of families with multiple stakeholders, guardians, and parents? What are alternative housing structures that allow for more complex family norms?

In the midst of a pandemic, a presidential election, and an unprecedented racial reckoning, the U.S. government gathered data for the census. It sparked imagination on new ways to catalog our identity data. What if politicians and scholars created more complex, dynamic, and fluid frameworks for understanding people’s identities to reflect the diversity of actual lived experiences within our human populations? This could help us make more fair and equitable choices about designing for access, representation, and power. How might we go beyond essentialism so that every person is recognized and valued for their multiple identities?

Is it time for an expansion of our concept of literacy? Although we are still working on educating every person in the world to be able to read and write, we also need to catch up on technological literacy, media literacy, and “truth literacy” (or what some might call “power and justice literacy”). What if, from an early age, people are taught to investigate truth for themselves to mitigate blind allegiance to narratives? Might this literacy, combined with the greater investment in human potential, dampen the draw of extremist groups that thrive on disenfranchised and disgruntled people? Assisted by unbiased algorithmic systems that would not only surface facts, but are able to translate meaning and provide examples of cultural context in datasets, expanded literacies might better inoculate us from disinformation and division to reach a more pluralistic and liberated future.

The dynamics of 2020 brought a convergence of justice issues to the forefront and provoked ideas about how to reckon with our complicated and traumatic pasts and present. What roles did we play in allowing systems of oppression to be perpetuated based on binary ideologies of scarcity and zero-sum? What if we reoriented our systems to non-binary philosophies such as Ezumezu or Ubuntu? Legacies of oppression were designed to restrain others from using resources that the dominant group wants control over. What if we understood that the dominant group actually missed an abundance of resources by losing the untapped potential of all those who were subordinated? The Great Reckoning provides a mirror and a pathway towards unlocking the full scope of human potential. By facing our history with honesty and courage, we can learn, heal, and mitigate our worst tendencies.

Addictive design, biased algorithms, the misinformation crisis, and social media’s impact on mental health are just a few of the issues that our technology and media systems are being called to rectify. How might we design more responsible public and private spaces for communication? Beyond taking a defensive posture against the worst pitfalls, can we shift our design imperatives to explore the best possibilities in a just and equitable manner? Without a healthy media and technology infrastructure in our hyper-connected world, every other system is at risk of being manipulated for injustice and oppression.

In a time of rapid technological, ecological, and economic change, people are increasingly afraid of an uncertain future. Additionally, some are responding to layers of legacy trauma from previous rapid change cycles (i.e. family farms to factory farms in the 1970s; or factory work to computer work in the 1980s). Many of our polarizing politics may be caused by a feeling of losing control coupled with a poverty of imagination. What if instead of having the future prescribed by others, we created processes for people to feel a part of the design of their own futures? What if social media was used to facilitate co-creation, so people feel agency in the way we adopt and adapt to changing circumstances?

A convergence of factors is catalyzing a deep re-evaluation of the politics of knowledge. The dominant system has marginalized or appropriated important information from non-Western and non-male sources. It demonstrates a bias toward hierarchical structures that offer ownership and authorship legitimacy to one source or figurehead, failing to recognize knowledge generated and maintained through collective wisdom and complex scaffoldings of contributors. A more sophisticated accounting of knowledge production is crucial in a communication architecture that is more dynamic, expansive, complex, and intelligent than ever before. How might knowledge stewardship look different than knowledge ownership? Perhaps the benefits of intellectual property could be re-distributed. Perhaps collaborative knowledge generation could be tracked and made more visible with advanced blockchain and smart algorithmic systems.