Each year at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX, science fiction author, design critic and CSI Visionary in Residence Bruce Sterling delivers an epic state-of-the-planet rant, challenging the tech industry and all the rest of us to do a better job imagining and building our future.
This year, energized by his work at our Emerge: Artists + Scientists Redesign the Future event at ASU immediately before SXSW, Bruce sheds light on Emerge as a promising flashpoint for design fiction, an example of the (questionable) triumph of practice over theory, a place to “lolcat with physical objects,” and an endeavor that still needs to come to grips with the aesthetic, social and ethical ramifications of getting hands-on with the future. We are proud to have facilitated Bruce’s newfound intimacy with lasers though we are still wondering whether being described as “TEDx with cosplay” is a compliment.
Listen to Bruce’s full address below…and don’t miss his christening of CSI as a “very twenty-teens” institution. He begins focusing on ASU and Emerge at about 41:20.