Prototyping Near-Future Worlds w/ Liam Young
BONUS | Dubai Future Forum #06
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Bonus episode recorded live from the Dubai Future Forum at the Museum of the Future in partnership with the Dubai Future Foundation on 20 November 2024.
Summary
Architect Liam Young shares his thoughts on how science fiction can be a powerful tool for prototyping new possibilities, why problems like climate change urgently need planetary-scale solutions, and how speculative design can inspire meaningful cultural transformation.
Guest Bio
Liam Young is a designer, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer who operates in the spaces between design, fiction, and futures. Described by the BBC as ‘the man designing our futures’, his visionary films and speculative worlds are both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today. As a world-builder, he visualises the cities, spaces, and props of our imaginary futures for the film and television industry. His own films have premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, Apple+, SxSW, Tribeca, the New York Metropolitan Museum, The Royal Academy, Venice Biennale, the BBC, and The Guardian.
Show Notes
01:11 The Influence of Hollywood on Our Future Visions
02:17 The Role of Science Fiction in Shaping Reality
09:15 The Impact of AI on Future Narratives
10:49 Addressing Climate Change Through Imagination
11:43 World Building and Prototyping Future Scenarios
14:22 Planetary Scale Solutions
20:11 Productive Dystopias and Cautionary Tales
22:46 Creating New Narratives
Links
Transcript (AI-Generated)
NOTE: This transcript is AI-generated and unedited. It may contain errors. A human-transcription is coming soon.
Liam Young: Science fiction has this extraordinary capacity to act as a mirror through which we can see ourselves. We have this extraordinary capacity to assimilate strangeness and weirdness and difference. The new normal is constantly being evolved and updated, and something like science fiction allows us to kind of get outside ourselves and look back in on it.
Luke Robert Mason: You're listening to the Futures Podcast, live from the Dubai Future Forum at the Museum of the Future, a building that looks like it belongs in another world and another time. On this show we meet the scientists, technologists, artists, and philosophers working to imagine the sorts of developments that might dramatically alter what it means to be human.
Some of their predictions will be preferable, others might seem impossible, but none of them are inevitable. My name is Luke Robert Mason, and I'm your host for this session. The future is franchised. Big budget Hollywood movies often shape how we envision the world of tomorrow. These cinematic aesthetics don't just inspire our imaginations, they frequently drive the design and implementation of the innovations that we see in real life.
It's proof that imagery really does shape reality. Fictional prototypes in film often become the blueprints for the technologies and the environments that we inhabit today. Now, someone who's directly influencing these visionary narratives is filmmaker and architect Liam Young. Through his practice in speculative design, he doesn't just imagine future worlds, he vividly brings them to life.
So, Liam, I just want to welcome you to the podcast lounge here at the Dubai Future Forum. Now, I mentioned that statement there, this idea that the future has been franchised. I mean, in what way has Hollywood kind of captured our imaginary of whatever the future could or can't be? I think.
Liam Young: In many ways how we vision the future in popular culture has always shaped our relationship to tomorrow in various forms the futures that we make the futures we activate the futures we tell stories about the futures that ultimately we live in and what's clear though is it although popular conception would have that these futures somehow a prophetic or predictions really.
Prediction is just a side effect of science fiction, and really, these stories are about setting in motion and prototyping certain ideas that have their gestation and their form in the landscapes of the present. Like, ironically, you Orwell's 1984 is not a great work of literature because he got it right.
You know, the fact that we're living in an Orwellian big brother mass surveillance society is not indication that he was some kind of prophet, but rather it's more the case that We didn't listen, you know, 1984 is actually about 1948 the year it was written and Orwell trying to talk about certain totalitarian tendencies he saw happening at the time and projected those forward as a kind of cautionary tale as a means to instigate action in the present.
moment. And I guess maybe he just didn't speak loudly enough or we just didn't listen, but here we are. So I think really that's the way that I engage with fiction and the way that I see Hollywood or science fiction narratives of all stripes playing out. They're a way of diagnosing the fears and wonders of the present moment and helping us to exercise Certain ideas to play out multiple intended or unintended consequences of certain technologies or ecologies and we can use these imagined fictional worlds of popular culture as sites in which to prototype ideas around emerging cultures or technologies.
Luke Robert Mason: You said there that prediction is not always possible, it's very difficult, but do you think we should be scared of self fulfilling prophecy? In other words, be careful what we wish for, because it might actually come true. You know, it's always fascinated me that Black Mirror, the Channel 4 series originally by Charlie Brooker that got transferred to Netflix, people use that title, Black Mirror, both as a noun to refer to the TV show, but as a verb.
They look at something that's happening in the present time and go, that's a bit Black Mirror. So, do you think if we have that power to manifest these futures, that we should be careful with that gift of self fulfilling prophecy? I
Liam Young: don't think it's self fulfilling prophecy, I think what's happening is that something like Black Mirror just gives us a language through which to talk about something that we know is already happening.
So, science fiction has this extraordinary capacity to act as a a mirror through which we can see ourselves and oftentimes, you know, we have this extraordinary capacity to assimilate strangeness and weirdness and difference. You know, um, the new normal is constantly being evolved and updated and something like science fiction allows us to kind of get outside ourselves and look back in on it.
Black Mirror is just a reflection of the current moment and the fact that it's Horrific, daunting, very often terrifying, is more an indictment of who we are and where we are today than any kind of imagined future. And that's what I find fascinating about About science fiction, is that, you know, it's much better thought of as a chronicle of the time in which it was made.
You know, take something like Black, uh, Blade Runner, for instance. Like, you know, I think it's problematic that now, so often when we see science fiction futures, we're seeing some version of a cyberpunk reality. It's become kind of the shorthand, the sort of cliche that we know we're looking at a future if there's sort of Japanese neon reflecting in the, in the rain soaked streets.
That's really a problem. I think a lack of imagination of contemporary directors or concept illustrators or artists, whatever it may be, because cyberpunk and Blade Runner is an example of it was actually more precisely and. Icon of the time in which it was made, you know, Blade Runner, the original 1982, this is the height of the personal electronics boom where everyone's walking around with a Sony Walkman and shooting on a, on a, on a new type of camera made in Japan, they're, they're taking, um, shows on VHS video recorders, everything cool was made in Asia.
And there was this fear in the U S of this rising superpower. And cyberpunk was this exercise in exploring that. Fear of this, of this alien other, you know, and that's why all of the science fiction of that moment imagined this hybrid reality when, when an Asian culture would kind of permeate all landscapes across the planet.
And now it's just become this kind of shorthand removed from that critical moment in time where it operated. So. I'm much more interested in what would it mean for the designers of Blade Runner 2049 it's sequel and soon to be the the TV adaptation. It's much more interesting to think if you really wanted to be true to the spirit of how that was made you wouldn't just project that reality 10 more years into a future and make your film then but rather you would look at.
Maybe some of the brick economies like India, China, Brazil, and you would imagine them as projected futures and hybrid realities in the US. That would really be true to the vision. So I think that we need to be clear that the great science fiction, the really meaningful science fiction is Really about the moment in which it's created.
I think what happens in the problematic, maybe related to your self fulfilling prophecy question, the problematic that does come sometimes is when someone like a tech bro reads Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash, reads the metaverse and thinks, Oh, that's a great idea. Let's do it. Totally missing the point that it was a cautionary tale and it was an exact example of what could happen if tech companies were allowed to continue unregulated.
So there's lots of examples of misreading science fiction but that in many ways is just an extension of the values that we have at the time where someone can legitimately risk. Misread a dystopia because I think they can make a few bucks out of it. You know,
Luke Robert Mason: it's interesting what you say there about using both the present and the past as the raw material to, to generate these futures at the moment.
And with the rise of things like AI creativity, if that. There's even a juxtaposition in terms. It feels like it's not who gets to create these visions, but what gets to create these visions. And often that training data is based on those past interpretations of how we imagined the future. So how do we contend with, with dealing with AI generated tools to create the sorts of work that you create both as a filmmaker and as someone who's interested in virtual spaces?
Liam Young: Yeah, I think at the core, AI just brings into focus a whole lot of problems that exist everywhere, uh, in, in all, in all facets of, of culture, right? Like you can't separate technology from culture. It's technology is just an extension of who we are and no technology is inherently good or evil and it really just exaggerates.
And extrapolates on certain tendencies that and contradictions that are lying in the present, you know, AI again is this strange mirror to ourselves and it reflects both the wondrous good and potential that we have, but it also reflects the horrors that we do to each other. So, uh, It's not about fixing AI.
It's about fixing us. Um, and again, that's why I think the power of these future narratives to prototype other possibilities that sit outside of the ones that sometimes feel all too inescapable. That's the real value here. Like, I think if we take an issue like climate change, I often talk about that in my work.
Climate change is no longer a technological problem, you know, all the solutions that we would need to dig us out of the holes that we've created for ourselves are actually already here. They've been here for 10 or 15 years. Climate change is now a crisis of the imagination. It's a, it's a crisis of politics and culture and we need to be Telling new kinds of stories that help free frame our relationship to these kinds of problems, AI being one of them, climate change being another, and trying to figure out how we can look in on ourselves and prototype different ways of being, and the technology will flow from those kinds of reassessments of ourselves.
Luke Robert Mason: So what are some of those methods? How do you, I guess, prototype these ideas? How do you. Do the process of world building towards the source of visions you're describing
Liam Young: so my strategies of world building is is literally one of exaggeration and extrapolation you know like every every future narrative I develop begins with a documentary you know I travel around the world seeking out.
In futurist terms, what we might describe as weak signals of the possible future, um, uh, signal scanning, looking for certain trends as they emerge, and going out there and documenting them in real time, meeting people on the ground, investigating and spending time with people that have devoted their lives to certain problems or technologies, um, scientists and technologists who are in real time are shaping and inventing the systems that are going to define our future 10, 20, 50 years in ahead.
I then gather all that stuff up and play it out in multiple scenarios and in many ways just give visual form to it, you know, so I mean, I'm one of my recent projects. The great endeavor is looking at the necessary planetary scaled infrastructures of, um, carbon removal that we're going to need to do in our generation and.
To make that speculation, I spent a lot of time with the world's leading scientists and technologists who have developed these systems, who have piloted these systems in countries like Iceland, and who are waiting for regulation to change that will allow them to scale up to the scales that are necessary.
Those scales are daunting, you know, like in our generation, we need to build A planetary wide carbon removal infrastructure equivalent in scale to the current oil and gas industry. If you think about it, that's every pipeline, every gas plant, every oil rig that currently exists on Earth we need to build again to do the reverse.
And we don't even talk about it. Um, so all I would do is, is get the report, get the, the paper that's buried in the peer reviewed journal somewhere that talks about what this, Infrastructure might look like I take that I work with the scientists and I visualize it and it looks like some crazy wild science fiction because the way that we think about our futures doesn't include these types of infrastructure but if it doesn't it really is nothing but extinction and I visualize that on screen.
As a means to try and connect people to these ideas that are really going to shape their lives. So, that's really the interest for me is to find ways to, um, Uh, get these narratives, these necessary narratives out into the world and in front of people in a way that's compelling and engaging.
Luke Robert Mason: And what I found so fascinating about the work that I was able to see of yours was the scale.
You are fascinated by scale. You mentioned an example project there and of course there's Planet City as well. Planetary scale redesign, does it have to be a scaled solution? I often hear that scale is actually the problem, not the solution. So how are you contending with scale? Right now,
Liam Young: if we all were to close our eyes and think about hopeful or utopian visions of the future.
I think we'd all go to the same kind of place, you know, we'd see trees on rooftops, we'd see community gardens and people growing their own food and, and people getting up at sunrise and milking the chickens. And, um, we'd see, you know, people driving electric cars and recycling. And these are narratives that, that are built out of a certain model of boomer environmentalism that came out of the 60s and 70s.
And whether we like it or not, The great tragedy is that emphasis on localism and small scale gestures just doesn't scale anymore against the scale of crisis that we've created for ourselves. Maybe in the 60s and 70s, if we listened, we had a chance. But generations on, of inaction, they just don't work.
And in contrast, the planetary scale visions that we see in popular culture, they're the work of the Bond villain, or the evil megacorporation, you know, it's like someone, some Bond villain trying to damn a river, or Thanos trying to wipe out half the population, but really, there is no future without some kind of planetary scaled collective action, some sort of global collaboration that comes together to ban fossil fuels, create a carbon economy, to suck the carbon that's already in the air down into the ground, to re imagine food production that isn't massive scale industrialized agriculture, very water hungry, very land hungry, but is instead vertical farms and forms of aeroponics and hydroponics.
These images don't fit into what culturally Told ourselves a hopeful future is supposed to look like and that's really the way that I work and the type of work that I'm trying to make is to create new planetary imaginaries because we are in desperate need of new visions of what our futures could be a lot of times of my show work like planet city which is the super hyper dense city for the entire population of the earth um.
People get angry and i wouldn't want to live there you know i've got a beautiful house in the woods i've got you know space for my dogs and i've got three car garage and eight bathrooms they don't want to give that up but really we're faced with a very stark choice either we hold on to those things.
But we stop having children and we shrink down to about three billion people. That's kind of sustainable in terms of our current lifestyles. Or, we somehow have to consolidate and live more compactly, which is, you know, the extreme version of what Planet City is. And We have to have that conversation. Um, we have, and Planet City is really just a thought experiment as a way to, to get people to talk about what futures they want to live in and what values are going to govern those futures.
And these are really the conversations of our generation. We need to be talking about these things as opposed to sticking our head in the sand and presuming it's all going to work out just fine or Elon Musk is going to invent some technology that's going to save us all or we're going to piss off to Mars.
We need to take these ideas and debate them and discuss them and talk about where we want to go. And that's why I think the, you know, the science fiction narratives that we've been talking about are so critical because, again, in popular culture, density is seen as being congested. But if we look in reality, the most vibrant, most extraordinary cities on Earth are the densest.
Um, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, these are things, the city forms that are held up as being extraordinary. That we all want to live in at some point in our lives. And they're extraordinary because they're dense. So we try and make, you know, a work like Planet City to talk about the ways that cities could look differently.
They could be more compact, but they also might be riddled with vertical orchards, and, um, have, you know, algae canals and fish farms wrapping through them, and you might nomadically operate and exist in these cities following the fruit blooms, and so on. You know, there's other ways of thinking about city ness and thinking about what our future is.
And that's really, again, I think the project of our time is to create viable planetary imaginaries that operate at scale, that aren't naive, that are pragmatic and real, based in science, but at the same time are captivating and engaging. so that we want to invest in them, and we want to live in these futures that we're seeing.
But that requires a radical realignment of our values and our aspirations.
Luke Robert Mason: That's what's so, I guess, hopeful about your work. You see that there's a way through, there's a way for humanity to survive. But let me ask the question slightly differently. Do you think there's a possibility that we should begin the world anew?
In other words, is there something productive in dystopia? Could creative destruction actually be the thing that leads us to where we don't want to be in the short term, but perhaps need to be in the long term?
Liam Young: I mean, I often use the phrase productive dystopias, but I wouldn't use it in that, in that way.
I mean, I think about productive dystopias in terms of the value of the cautionary tale, right? Like you project a certain reality forward, um, as a means to see that, you know, if we, if we start walking down this path, we're going to end in a place we don't want to. Um, I don't think there's. Much of a case for some global reset or a planet B or a starting again, primarily because the solutions required to solve our current crises here in reality are already here, you know, that's an extraordinary place to be.
We could wake up tomorrow and we could solve everything. We're not waiting for some tech billionaire to do it for us. We're not waiting for a TED talk to offer some great revelation that we can buy into. It's here. We just need to, you know, get over ourselves and our own political blind spots or cultural prejudices.
And that's both terrifying because we're not doing that, we're not changing, but it's also extraordinary as a hopeful position because we could. Um, and that's a really powerful place to be on the cutting edge of the potential for change. So I don't subscribe or buy into the, you know, break it so that we can fix it again model.
We don't really get second chances in these contexts, so we need to fix what's here. Um, I mean, there's various narratives in science fiction, you know, Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future starts with a great catastrophe. Um, you know, there's some heat bulb event that wipes out so many people that the world can no longer ignore climate change.
And there's a certain logic to that thinking. That, you know, things have to get so undeniably bad that we're forced to do something. But at the same time, the pandemic was pretty undeniably bad. Um, you know, there's people in extraordinarily tragic events all over the place. Um, we're still not doing anything, and probably with the way that network culture is working today, even if there was such a catastrophe, there'd be some counter narrative that would be presenting it as a hoax or telling us why it didn't actually happen or why it wasn't climate change that caused it.
So I don't think that there's some kind of Single event that's going to do it for us what needs to happen is a slow gradual and very hard cultural and generational shift
Luke Robert Mason: so how can we start how can we I guess start small so. As a methodology, I guess, as individuals, people who may be listening to this, how can they tell a compelling story about the future that can, as you so wonderfully put it, help us to get over ourselves?
Liam Young: Yeah, I mean, I think that we all need to make stories, you know, like, I'm sitting here on this podcast with you, and I'm the author of several projects that people can watch and experience in various forms, but, Really, if anything, these works are a rally cry, they're a call to arms to say that we all need to be telling stories and talking about what we want to see in our futures.
You know, I use this analogy that the future's ahead of us, the future landscape is this dark, shadowed and unknown territory. And every story we tell, whether it's positive or negative, utopian or dystopian, is like a tiny little torch beam that illuminates a piece of that landscape. And the more stories we tell, the more of that landscape.
Comes in the light and the easier it is for us to understand the next step we want to take and you know to see on the other side and how you might start to navigate to get there the other side being hopefully some kind of preferable future so there is no singular narrative. But really, we need to understand that the future is a project again, it's our generational project.
We need to be thinking long term, and we need to be having very honest, very pragmatic conversations about values we want to see in our futures. Um. And who we want to be in that future and that exists everywhere from a political conversation to, you know, imagery that we see in popular culture and in film and TV and LA where I'm based in music videos in video games like, you know, fiction is an extraordinary shared medium.
It's how our culture has always shared and disseminated ideas, and we're all literate in stories, and I think there's great power. in telling stories that, um, can help to, to make this change. Because ultimately, as we started with the, the, our relationship to the future is highly conditioned by the, the futures that we see in popular culture.
Luke Robert Mason: Liam, what a wonderful call to action that it is time to start writing those new narratives. And on that note, I want to thank you for joining us for the Futures Podcast live from the Dubai Future Forum. If you like what you've heard, then you can find out more by visiting futurespodcast. net. Liam, thank you again for joining me on the podcast lounge in the Museum of the Future.
Great. Thanks for the conversation, man. Thanks.
Credits
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Producer & Host: Luke Robert Mason
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Transcription: Beth Colquhoun
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