If You Want The Future To Be Good, Make It So.
"If you want the future to be good, you must make it so. Take action to make it good, and it will be." - Elon Musk
During an interview with Chris Anderson of TED, Elon Musk was asked about the pessimism many younger people express about the world they are coming into, and what they should do about it.
His answer was simple:
"If you want the future to be good, you must make it so." -Elon Musk
It's a statement of inspiration toward a common goal, a call to action, and an implied belief in our individual & collective agency to make a meaningful & positive impact on the future.
A pessimist might ask: "Yes, but how do I do that?!"
An optimist might ask: "Yes! But how do I do that?!"
Either way, the answer is the same: Learn to design.
What is design?
Design is a process, a way of understanding a problem and coming up with a solution that can be made real.
In it's most basic form it can be described in three steps:
Understand the problem
Generate ideas
Organize the best ideas into a solution
Problem --> Ideas --> Solution
Sounds simple, right? It is in principle, although there is a bit more to it.
Yet why not write a report instead?
Why reports don't solve problems (and often create more)
In school we are taught to think logically about a problem and write out our understanding and ideas, and then summarize our findings into a conclusion.
In business we call those research reports, and consultants charge lots of money for them.
But are they useful?
Sometimes. (Occasionally? ...rarely?)
How many times have you gone back to re-read a paper or a report after the first time through?
The problem is the format- Text is slow.
Text is slow for capturing and communicating large amounts of information about a problem. It is slow for capturing and communicating ideas for possible solutions. It is slow for capturing and communicating the solution.
Where text is really slow is in evaluating ideas in relation to one another, and in relation to our understanding of the goals and problems.
Text is also really slow as a reference as we are testing and/or implementing our solution (and thereby gaining new insights along the way).
The solution is the format of design- graphics.
"A picture is worth a thousand words."
Regardless of where this common phrase originated, the principle is sound.
A tremendous amount of information can be conveyed in a simple graphic that can then be quickly understood even without a shared language.
Think of all of the infographics you've seen that take a complex topic and distill it down onto a single sheet of paper.
Think of the signs that reliably guide us on how to move through the world, even as we land at an airport in a foreign country.
Think of how a small child can pick up and use an iPad without having someone explain how to use it.
All of these work because they rely on graphics to capture and communicate information.
So how do we learn to how to use graphics?
Moreover, how do we use them to design positive changes in the world around us? (Thereby making the future 'good')
Create a garden
The process of creating a garden starts with creating a vision for what that garden can become.
To do that we use a process that may look familiar:
Understand the problem
Generate ideas
Organize the best ideas into a solution
Problem --> Ideas --> Solution
By creating a vision for our garden we are practicing using design as a process to come up with a solution that will make the future (of our garden) good.
And while we may use text to support the process, most of the process relies on using graphics to accelerate our progress toward finding a preferred solution.
In fact, our vision for our garden is just that- an image that summarizes our design intent so that we have a clear destination to keep us on track and to inspire others to participate in making our vision a reality.
Why a garden?
When we design our outdoor living space (aka our garden) we are taking action to make the world around us better, literally in our own backyard.
The great thing is: We (mostly) don't need permission from anyone to make whatever changes we decide to make. In other words- we have agency.
The even better news: We get lots of benefits with very little downside risk, so there is ample opportunity to practice and to correct mistakes as we learn without worrying about whether we will get it right the first time.
That means we can take action now, so that we can get results, so that we can learn, so that we can take action, so that... you get the idea.
Design is a practice, which means that the best way to get better at it is to practice.
By creating our own gardens we are cultivating our ability to use design in a setting in which we have nearly unlimited agency, with tangible results that meaningfully benefit our own quality of life, and where the rewards of taking action far outweigh any risks that might hold us back.
It is the perfect opportunity to grow our own capacity to make the future good- by starting in our own yard.