Translator: Theresa Ranft Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Hello.
Audience: Hello. Matt Webb: Come on!
(Audience cheering) MW: Thank you!
(Applause)
Thank you. That wakes me up a bit,
it's been a long, absolutely terrific day.
I wanted to start with a story which was related to me
by a friend of mine named Alex,
and he knows one of those old, New York-style ad men,
you know, the kind you get on Mad Men from the 1950s.
And this ad man told Alex, and Alex told me,
that there are four ways you can get people to buy your product:
fear, hope, greed, and despair.
Despair is the way they try and get you to buy a TV dinner,
a kind of a dinner for one at the supermarket
when you don't know what to eat,
but you know you have to eat, so you have that.
Fear is the way they get you to buy vitamin pills for your kids,
because otherwise they get rickets or have disease.
You better get these pills or your kids will be sick.
Greed: they tell you to buy products for greed
when they say, "If you buy this, you can get more of the same."
"College education, fast car to meet people."
Hope: hope is the kind of product
where you're selling a life-changing experience.
The reason you go out to a restaurant,
not because you're hungry,
but because you want to experience something truly new.
That's why you go to a concert.
Early on in my career I heard this story
and I thought I'd challenge myself
to always make products that appeal to hope.
I never resort to something that was resorting to despair or to fear -
always hope.
The reason for this is I have a design company,
but I'm not a designer.
I really have no idea what I'm doing.
So I kind of have to collect these stories about design
to inform me what I should chase.
So hope is the value I chose.
Another thing I think about
is something my business partner, Jack Schultz, once said to me.
He said, "Design happens in your hands, not in your mouth."
I think he was trying to get me to stop talking one day.
(Laughter)
A great thing in design
is you can think and talk as much as you want
about all kinds of crazy ideas,
but the real invention happens
when you get the clay under your fingernails
and you get your hands dirty.
Design happens in your hands.
So that's something else I try and keep in mind.
The third thing I try to keep in mind
is an idea from the designer John Thackara,
which is a macroscope.
A something, an instrument that helps us see
what the aggregation of many small actions looks like
when added together.
Scientists have microscopes.
Astronomers and peeping Toms have telescopes.
(Laughter)
Designers, in order to see the very big -
culture which is so much bigger than any of us individually -
need macroscopes.
A macroscope can be an instrument or it can be an idea.
I think of a macroscope as something that lets me see
all of culture and feel what it's like in my heart, simultaneously.
This is the only piece of work I'll show,
but it's a piece of work we did a few years ago
called "Here and There."
It's a map of New York,
and I think to me it's what a macroscope can be.
It's a map which shows you a city.
But as you move down the map, it bends towards you
and you can see where you're standing,
simultaneously.
And to me that's what a macroscope can be,
something that shows you the very big and the very personal, all at once.
So, I thought what I'd do next is show you some ideas that I really love,
some macroscope ideas, if you like.
And we'll see where we get to.
For this next idea I don't have a picture of what I want to show,
so I want to show you this map instead,
which is pretty cool, but not relevant.
This is just a map of where in the United States of America
are what people call "fizzy drinks":
pop, soda, coke, and other.
And it's quite nicely territorial,
you know, I quite like that.
But what I really want to talk about is dandelions.
So dandelions, you know those little flowers.
It turns out that dandelions are genetically identical.
You've got one flower, you've got another flower,
and it doesn't matter which one you have
because they are the same thing, they're the same individual.
It's a bit like the way an MP3
is the same as another MP3 of the same song.
They are genetically identical, it doesn't matter which one you have.
Except, not all dandelions are the same.
It turns out, says Richard Dawkins in "The Extended Phenotype,"
that there may be as few as four dandelions
competing for the entire of the United States of America.
Four dandelions, states wide, competing in a period of decades
for an entire continent.
And that to me is a macroscope that lets you see an individual flower
and then the entire continent all at once.
This is my absolute favorite.
This is from 1959, and it's a congressman called Congressman Fulton,
in the United States,
when they were investigating vegetables in space.
They were very excited about space,
it was two years before John F. Kennedy made the big challenge to get to the moon.
And Fulton is interviewing a witness from the Department of Agriculture
and trying to get them to think in new ways about vegetables and space.
I have to read this out, so I'll go to my autocue just to read this quote,
because I want to get it right.
"Possibly in space the approach to vegetables might be different."
This is Fulton speaking, by the way,
he's a politician, not a designer or a scientist or an artist;
he's a politician.
And he continues:
"Did that ever strike you?
Because we are thinking of three-dimensional vegetables,
maybe in space, where you have a lot of sunlight,
you might get a two-dimensional tomato."
(Laughter)
"It might be one million miles long, and as thin as a sheet of paper.
A tomato."
(Laughter)
And there's total silence.
(Laughter)
There's total silence, there's a long pause
and eventually the witness says,
"It is an interesting thought."
(Laughter)
And they move on.
I love ideas like that,
ones that challenge to think differently, because it has to be different.
When you go to a world which is as different as having no gravity
you need to think about million-mile tomatoes.
Maybe not only that, but ... you know.
Keeping on the space theme, this is another favorite.
This is from 1966, it was a campaign by Steward Brand asking,
why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?
And he campaigned about this.
And in 1972, NASA turned the satellites back on the Earth
and they took the famous photo of the blue marble.
And suddenly we could see the entire planet.
What Steward Brand said at the time
was that people act as if the world is flat,
when in reality it is spherical and extremely finite.
Until we learn to treat it as a finite thing,
we will never get civilization right.
And it's true.
Once we saw this photo of the Earth,
we realized that we are here together, all of us together,
on spaceship Earth.
We cannot throw anything away because there is no "away."
Steward Brand was a visionary.
Around the same time he was working on a magazine
called "The Whole Earth Catalog",
"The Whole Earth" quarterly
which was a magazine of ideas and tools for people rebuilding their own societies,
their own communes,
which were many across the United States.
And this was a magazine of tools you could buy
and ideas you could apply to build your own society.
But he opened it with this quote in the introduction:
"We are as gods, and we might as well get used to it."
It's completely true.
In this age of the Internet
with the best collaboration technology we've ever had,
we do have enormous power, enormous knowledge,
and an enormous number of tools at our disposal.
And it's really important we understand what power we have
especially now seeing the world since 2008,
at least the Western world has come as close to collapse
as it has ever done,
and really nobody can give us a complete story of why that happened.
All of us are going to need to start using these tools.
When I think of the credit system and what went wrong,
I'm reminded of this science fictional idea
of something called the "space elevator."
A space elevator is this idea of how to get into space without using rockets.
What you do is you build a very, very, very tall elevator
and you tether it to Earth on one hand
and in orbit to another,
and it takes you five days to get from one to the other,
but it's as easy as pushing a button.
The thing with the space elevator
is that if you were to stand close enough to see it,
it would be 100 meters across.
You wouldn't be able to see either end,
they would be just too far apart.
But if you were to stand all the way back to see both ends of the elevators,
it would be too thin to make out.
You can't have both perspectives simultaneously.
To me, that's what the financial system is like.
If you're on the ground like us
it's almost impossible to understand
the macroeconomic trends of government and the credit system
and the flows of capital which have made this all happen.
But, if you're in government and you're in the banks
and you do understand credit and you can see the flows,
it is impossible for you to feel what it's like at a human level,
what the human impact really is.
So we need ideas like macroscopes
in order to have these two perspectives simultaneously.
You can tell two things about me:
one that I read too much science fiction,
the other that I think a lot about how to rebuild society.
How do we have these perspectives?
How, as individuals, do we help the big rebuilding?
One of the things I wonder about is how big a problem it really is.
How much effort is it going to take for us to rebuild society?
I imagine it's probably as big as the challenge set by this guy, Kennedy,
when he asked the United States to go to the moon.
1961 to 1969: eight years, 300,000 people involved.
Well, I have some stats.
This is from a newspaper at the time.
It says that 300,000 people were involved in the race to the moon.
20,000 corporations, 24 billion dollars - this is 1960s money.
And one problem, just a single problem about choosing the method
took one million man-hours.
So let's imagine that going to the moon, in total,
took 100 million man-hours.
That feels about right.
A big problem, it turns out,
to get this man there will take 100 million hours.
What is that?
I'll break it down a bit.
Malcolm Gladwell says that what he's looked at in his research,
to become an expert in something it takes 10,000 hours.
So to be a great concert pianist
you practice three hours a day for ten years - 10,000 hours.
That feels about right, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert.
So the moon landing was 10,000 experts -
that's hard work.
That's a lot of work.
I think we can scale it back a bit though.
Ten thousand hours to become an expert;
100 hours, I think you could become pretty good at something.
In 100 hours you could learn to draw,
you could learn to dance,
you could learn a new language.
In 20 or 30 hours you could learn to drive.
So 100 hours would be a good starting point.
So that's a million people doing 100 hours.
Our equivalent of the moon landing was Wikipedia.
Clay Shirky didn't estimate back in 2008,
and he reckons that we have, as a society,
we have put 100 million man-hours of thought into Wikipedia.
That's good.
When they went to the moon,
12 men got to spend 160 hours on the moon.
We spend that effort,
we get an encyclopedia that expands most of human knowledge,
accessible to everyone.
That's absolutely terrific.
I know which one I want.
So we have to think to ourselves, I think,
where should we spend our next 100 million hours?
We spent it on the moon, we spent it on Wikipedia.
What shall we spend it on next?
How do we rebuild society?
Well, my opinion is that it starts with 100 hours,
that we take the macroscope
and we understand that the rebuilding, the 100 million,
starts with all of us taking 100 hours each.
So what I like to talk to people about is,
where would you spend 100 hours
if you did that?
The last time I gave this talk,
this was maybe three years ago, two or three years ago,
I said maybe you could spend 100 hours on something.
And somebody did.
A guy called Florian in Germany.
He emailed me six months later and he said,
"I took my 100 hours
and I've always wanted to know where meat comes from."
He's a food fan.
And he said to me, "So I organized pork camp."
And he got together - he went to an abattoir -
and he got together butchers and food critics
and chefs and writers and food fans,
and they exposed themselves to the entire journey.
All of food, from pig to pork to plate.
And he did something real.
He said it was the most rewarding experience he'd had.
So, when I preparing this talk I thought I'd check in and see how he was doing.
Now he has a website called Food Trips, and he does this a lot.
He's organized many trips,
he has a bunch of friends he does this with.
In a few weeks, he's going off to Fez with 50 people to just look at food.
He's talking with book publishers
and he's probably going to have a television crew following him around.
From these tiny seeds, life-changing events happen.
So I'd like you to think just now,
what would 100 hours mean?
What is it? It's a day a week for the next 12 weeks?
It's one hour a day for the next three months.
It's nothing.
It's Christmas to March.
So, just in your head, just put that 100 hours aside right now.
Just keep it there.
And then, this evening and maybe tomorrow,
think about what you will use it for.
Maybe you could learn how to build a wall.
Maybe you could draw, maybe you could start dancing.
Maybe you could become a photographer,
keep a blog, start writing articles.
I think the best way of figuring out what you could do,
and I guarantee that everyone here
has something they would love to spend 100 hours on -
the best way to figure it out is to talk to other people,
ask them what their 100 hours would be.
And it will give you ideas.
I think, as a favor to me, if you take that 100 hours and do something,
I think the world will be a better place.
Because society is not something which is outside us,
it's not something we fight against.
Society is something we do - all of us.
Society is something we do, every hour that we live.
And if we want a better society,
we're going to have to do it ourselves with our hands
and with hope.
And rebuilding is going to be as big as the moon landing,
and it is going to be as Wikipedia,
and it is going to take 100 million hours.
But those 100 million start with just 100,
and they start with just you,
and they start right here.
Thank you.
(Applause)