Liam Young

“The future is a verb, not a noun. It's not something that we passively stumble into, it's something we all actively shape and define”

In this episode, David Johnston sits down with director and architect Liam Young, co-founder of the Urban Futures think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today and the nomadic research studio Unknown Fields.

The pair discuss how ‘humanness’ in the future will exist in tech blind spots, the importance of visual language to best detail a story, and the power of using fiction as an emotional Trojan horse to travel through potential futures in order to build the correct infrastructure today.

Transcript

AP_EVA_LiamYoung 

David [00:00:12] Welcome back to Endless Vital Activity, conversations to inspire radical action. I'm David Johnston, founder of Accept & Proceed and at A&P we believe the cross pollination of minds and ideas is vital and that we can't find solutions in isolation. Connection and collaboration are critical, so throughout this series, we will engage in wide ranging conversations with radical thinkers, artists, scientists and activists about the problems we have been given to solve. We are seeking new perspectives to reimagine our world. Today I am honoured to be in conversation with storyteller and world builder Liam Young. Liam is a speculative architect and director who occupies the spaces between design, fiction and futures. His focus is about moving beyond human centred design and starting to think about the fact that we now share our lives with machines and autonomous systems, a truly radical individual. What I find so powerful about Liam's work is the way he harnesses the power of fiction as a mode and framework for building conversation around important ideas impacting humanity today. So there is so much to get into. But let's start at the beginning. 

David [00:01:30] What unites all the different things that you do is the act of world building and thinking about our futures. What drew you to this work? 

Liam [00:01:38] So I guess I would define myself as a speculative architect and what that means is that I don't design buildings, but rather I tell stories about the global, urban and architectural implications of new technologies. And I began my life as a very traditional architect. I studied in Australia. I moved into the star architect system. I worked for Zaha Hadid in London. But across time I began to realise that the forces that were shaping cities that used to be the domain of architects, things like large permanent infrastructure, public squares and spaces, buildings in cities were really being marginalised in terms of what was really defining urban experiences. Things that were shaping our lives were mobile technologies, access to the network, autonomous systems, and governance. These were things that traditionally fall outside of the domain of architects. So I started to look for ways that I could stay relevant as an architect and urbanist, and telling stories about technology; technologies that are arriving to us faster than our cultural capacity to understand what they mean is... Technologies I would define us before culture technologies became really critical. You know, architecture is inherently slow, medium, so telling stories, making films, speculating about the implications of these technologies, and putting these fictions about what they could do, presenting worlds that are shaped around them becomes a space, a prototype, what they can mean. And it allows us to get ahead of the technology curve. It allows us to really imagine what our futures might be as a means to start to think about the decisions that we're making today. In the present moment. 

David [00:03:33] Your work really feels like a conversation starter this this way of kind of instigating debates about the social and architectural and political consequences of those emerging biological and technological futures. Can you unpack some of the themes that you're focussed on? 

Liam [00:03:49] These technologies are really shaping and fundamentally changing our lives, yet generally they're sold to us through media narratives. And the way technology comes into our world is is is based on a return on investment. So technology will come. When it went into the point that can be monetised, not at a point when we know it's going to be valuable and change our lives. So what we try and do is, is sort of use film. We use fiction as a site in the same way that an architect uses a piece of vacant land. We use film as a site in which to project and prototype what these technologies might mean. So if you 

take something like driverless cars, you know, we've done some work around that in a film called Where the City Can't See, and it's a film made entirely using light scanners, the first film made using this latest scanning technology. And that's how driverless cars see and understand the world. They use these laser scanners to map space and to navigate. And so much of the autonomous systems like drones, driverless cars, surveillance networks, all use this, the scanning technology to map and understand space. So we're at a point where the dominant systems that are shaping our urban environments are no longer human. It's machine vision systems. So a lot of work around what that actually means. If we're designing our spaces not for human occupation and for human eyes, but for the patterns of how machines understand space that fundamentally changes what our role is as designers. So in that in that in that film, we were it was said in a future Detroit, we were thinking about what happened in a city that's mapped within millimetre precision, where there is no spaces unseen by these systems. Where are the sites of exception? Where are the warehouse raves? Where are the the spaces where you can have sex, listen to music, do drugs like be human? So the film follows the the story of a group of young factory workers who by day work on the automated production line by night, go and party and dance. And they end up partying in the gaps between how the machine sees, these machine vision systems and not necessarily all encompassing that they they have flaws and glitches, and they have blind spots and that becomes these new sites of exceptions. So we created camouflage clothing that they would wear that disguise their body from laser scanning systems. We looked at how a lot of scanning work, which is based on line of sight. So you could create these sort of gaps in vision that become new kinds of spatial opportunities. And these are sites that in plain sight, without human eyes don't exist. You can't see them. But when you see the world through the laser scanners, which is how we we made the film, all of a sudden these spaces get revealed. So that's one of the themes we're interested in, is moving beyond human centred design and starting to think about the fact that we now share our lives with machine and autonomous systems. That's one of the stories we're interested in. And we're also interested in like the radical shifts that are going to happen to our lifestyles based on impending climate collapse and how we can start to look at a whole lot of systems around renewable energies, large scale planetary infrastructure, carbon sequestration things, systems that might play a role in regenerating our climate. What does that mean for our cities and spaces and our lifestyles? And how do we, again, adapt and and reimagine our cultures in response to these to these new systems? So, you know, basically we we engage with the technology of the moment, what is coming, what is here, what is optimised guys that everyone is trying to engage with and talking about. And then what kind of stories emerge in that context? How can we explore the cultural implications of these technologies? That's what we do. 

David [00:08:16] And obviously you touched on this, but the technologies are advancing faster than sometimes the laws that govern them. And in fact, quite often we haven't got laws that can govern the types of technologies that we're developing. And indeed, we learn a lot about this through our work with data rights agency AWO, who was founded by three incredible men, one of whom was actually cited as the guy that effectively was responsible for taking down Cambridge Analytica called Ravi Niek, and he told us a lot about the realities of the legal sector, you know, and it's still kind of wig wearing archaic, in fact, in the way that we actually process and think about kind of implementing laws and things like that. So I'm really interested. Liam, does that kind of come into your work at all, the way that laws can affect the technologies that are emerging? 

Liam [00:09:10] Yeah, exactly, it's impossible to separate technology from culture. So what we do is, is take a given system and just play out its intended and unintended consequences and that's not an act of prediction. You know, we're not trying to imagine 

and and try and get it right in terms of how these technologies are going to play out in our world and how they're going to change our cities. But rather we're trying to play out multiple futures, because that is what gives us a critical understanding about what these systems might mean. We project these futures not to fetishise the distant vision that we're imagining, but rather to to travel to that place in order to come back to the place. We first started to come back to the present moment and understand it differently and understand the implications of the decisions that we might make. And then we can start to act accordingly. Because as you said, in the legal framework, just as architecture does, it moves so slowly. Yet the advances in technology moves so fast, you don't take something like file sharing. We're still in the middle of the Kim dotcom court case around Megaupload. We still really haven't developed a legal framework to understand why me reading a book and liking it and giving it to you is sharing, but me watching a film and liking it and and sending you a file is piracy. That court case is still ongoing. You know, this is this is 30 years or so after Napster, yet we're still in court cases surrounding this stuff. We take something like drone technologies. I can walk down the street and for 300 dollars I can buy a full resolution camera drone and in about half an hour, be an expert pilot. Yet we still have no idea about what happens if that drone falls out of the sky and lands on someone else's head and kills them. Who's responsible? The coder that wrote the lgorithm that failed the battery supply, that the battery that failed to build the battery that failed, me as a pilot, but it was an autonomous system that wasn't doing anything. So is it the DJI, the drone supplier, that that is liable? What happens if I run that drone all the way into the air and bring down a 747? I can easily bypass the geo fencing that that prevents drones from flying in aircraft flight paths. All of these things are like literally life dependent. Yet the barrier to entry to to engage in these systems is is so low because there is money to be made by bringing them out into the world. So what we do is try and as well builders project and imagine these types of futures. Imagine the unintended consequences around drone surveillance tech or you know, how various parties could use a drone to collapse an airport for a week. We would we would project that insights of fiction well before the tech is here and someone's actually doing it over Stansted Airport. And, you know, use those fictional projections as a means to start to prototype the legal frameworks that need to exist and prototype them before they become urgent and necessary. 

David [00:12:45] Fascinating. I'm reminded of the quote from Abraham Lincoln, who was a lawyer, amongst a few other things, who said the best way to predict the future is to create it. And what you're really talking about is creating or kind of netting out potential futures, a kind of multiverse of futures and thereby allowing us to select the one that we like. 

Liam [00:13:08] It's really about trying to imagine this idea that the future is a verb, not a noun. The future doesn't rush over us like water. It's not something that we passively stumble into. It's something we all actively shape and define. So how can we start to equip ourselves with sufficient knowledge to make the right decisions? In a way, I use the analogy to the future. Ahead of us is this dark and shadowed unknown landscape. And each of these speculative projects, these imaginary worlds, these fictions that we might create is like a torch beam shining a light into this dark landscape ahead of us. The more of these stories we tell and make and put into the world, the more of this landscape becomes illuminated and the easier it is to decide where we want to put our next step, the easier it is to decide and navigate how we move through this world. So it's not about trying to predict a singular future. Rather, it's trying to prototype multiple versions of those futures to work back from that and to start to see and have a shared discussion around the sorts of futures that we might find preferable and start to scaffold and create an infrastructure that might help us to get there. 

David [00:14:26] I love that metaphor and I think obviously the you know, the means by which you create those spotlights onto the future is really fiction, which is a vital mode to create those dialogues. I'm really curious, Liam, what have you discovered about using fiction as a mode of thoughts and a framework for engagement? 

Liam [00:14:45] Fiction is really an extraordinary shared language. It's always been how our culture shares and disseminates ideas. And, you know, it's it's so powerful. Ever since we sit up, we're put in front of the TV consuming narrative. We fall asleep in the pages of a novel. We can be in a dark in the dark theatre and be moved to tears or, you know, heard outsides laughing so hard. And it really wraps us up in an extraordinary emotional environment. And to create fictions that do nothing more than entertain or forced to buy tickets or get bums on seats is an extraordinary waste of what is a really visceral and powerful medium for disseminating content and ideas. So, you know, that's part of why I've moved to Los Angeles, is to be a part of the Hollywood machine in a way, and try and use the mediums of popular culture as vessels for critical ideas to encode within these fictions that that get seen by millions and millions of people around the world. Important ideas about how technologies are changing our lives and what the future of our cities might look like. You know, we think of them as Trojan horses embedded within the mediums of popular culture, you know, and it's it's really extraordinary. You know, as an architect, you know, traditionally my medium is is plans and sections. And you study for five years. You know, architecture is huge, long degree five, seven years sometimes to become fluent in that language of urban diagrams and architectural drawings are exceptionally coded language, yet if we really value the work that we do and the ideas that we talk about, we need to get much better at communicating to audiences. Those ideas and the coded language of architectural drawings and the disciplinary language of architecture is wholly insufficient. So we create architecture for film and we create urban propositions for film, not as a way, hopefully, to get new clients and ultimately get a commission to make a building. But we see those fictions as endpoints in and of themselves. Know an architectural book at best has a print run of maybe 1500 copies is pretty standard. You know, I did a book called Machine Landscapes talking about some of these themes we've been going into, looking at the the the the environments that are totally inhabited by machines being the most critical cultural spaces of our age that had 20,000 copies that went out into the world. And that was extraordinary. But at any given moment at 3am on TV, watching an infomercial for a five lasta might be a million people. I made a short film called Tomorrow's Stories, thinking about the future of an Athenian apartment blocks for Documenter. And it went really well. Documenter had a great audience traffic and lots of people saw it. But then we used that same animation for a music video of a Forest Saud's, a music clip called KROT. And I think it now has 10 million views on YouTube. Again, it's it's an audience that we can tap into through things like fiction, film, music videos that is unlike anything that a designer might access otherwise. And it's part of our duty, I think, to find formats that we can connect to audiences with that that isn't kind of the rarefied spaces of a gallery or museum or the, you know, the echo chamber of a bit of a lecture theatre or a festival that I might perform at to get our work into the in front of people that it's really valuable for requires playing with the mediums of fiction. 

David [00:18:53] It really has been incredible to watch some of the kind of work you've created exploding in terms of audience size. But I'd really like to talk a bit about unknown fields. So that's the nomadic research studio that you co-founded. That travels on expeditions to chronicle the emerging conditions of new technologies. Can you talk a little bit about the business and your mission? 

Liam [00:19:17] Sure. So we've been talking a lot about one aspect of my work, which is speculation, speculative architecture, projecting narratives of the future. But the other part of my work is a documentary practise called Unknown Fields that I run out of London with another architect called Kate Davies, which is about engaging with the present moment. So even if I'm talking about, you know, the implications of drone technologies or autonomous vehicles or AI governance in cities, all of these speculations actually begin in the sort of book that Unknown Fields does a deep engagement in the landscapes and environments of the present. So Unknown Fields goes out into the world and documents the weak signals of possible futures that the great quote that's now almost a cliche in the context of futures and sci fi from the author William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer. The book Whether the Term Cyberspace First Appears. He says that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And we take that exceptionally literally. What that would mean is that, you know, it's possible to get on a plane or a boat or a train and to travel out into the world and inhabit a pocket of this future to document it and then to report back to to to audiences and to a world that haven't realised it yet. And that's kind of what we do. You know, we would go to the sites where at the moment, climate change we think of as being something of our future, something that might happen to our kids. But Unknown Fields would get on a plane, go to Alaska and visit a local indigenous community who's having to move their village because the coastline that they have created that village on for 100 years is now melting into the sea because of climate change. And their attachment to place their relationship to coastline, to hunting ground is fundamentally already shifted. While migrating migration patterns has changed and their entire life line and livelihood connected through that environment is collapsing. And we would go and and listen to them and try and capture the stories we might travel down on. Fields did for a project called Breast Milk, a volcano to the lithium triangle, which is a Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, a site of 90 percent of the world's lithium. Because Elon Musk, in presenting his new Tesla battery, which was hailed as one of the most significant tech keynotes since Steve Jobs launched the iPod, presented this vision of a green energy future, where everything will be powered by solar energy in the next 20 years, relying on Tesla battery technology, the fundamental ingredients of which is lithium. In that tech keynote, he only gave very partial reference to to to where they might get the lithium from. In reality, for this future to come true, Elon Musk must literally buy Bolivia and evolve it as a new Dubai. So we would get on a plane and go to to Bolivia and to look at this landscape where all this lithium is stored because this is a landscape of the future. This is literally ground zero for our electric energy. And we would start to meet the people there who are the indigenous cultures that that that tell stories about this landscape, that live on this landscape, that rely on this landscape. What are the ecologies and the the environments that contain this landscape and it contained within it? This is this is really our future in the present tense. And we're trying to document that condition and talk about the stories that go on there before it's too late, before Elon Musk gets in there and digs the entire thing up and shipped it to Nevada. So Unknown Fields makes documentaries about the future that's already here. And then in my own practise here in L.A., I project those weak signals and narratives into futures, prototype them, play them out as many scenarios and visualise the world they might set in motion. 

David [00:23:51] I can only imagine the research process must be really significant for this type of work. How do you go about finding the stories that you want to tell? 

Liam [00:23:59] What we're trying to do is capture the zeitgeist. Like we did with Iron Fields. We did a project called Rarer than which was tracing the supply chains of our technology all the way from the Apple store on on a on the high street, through the shipping yards, mega container ships, wholesale distribution sites, the factory floors, the 

mineral refinery landscapes, and ultimately the holes in the ground from which these technologies begin their lives. And we kind of trace that journey in reverse. And we did so at a moment when Apple became the largest and most profitable company in human history. Where does that extraordinary economy come from? What are the systems that bring those products into the world? Everyone was talking about Apple. Everyone was talking about the iPhone. We started to see the glimmers of discussions of Foxconn and suicide nets and deformities from the chemical used to Polish glass screens. They were just starting to emerge at the time, and it was just through hearsay and rumour and, you know, you know, some extraordinary undercover journalism that you assigned to reveal those stories. So we got again on a plane, a boat, a train, a van, and we literally mapped the entire supply chain. As I said, the lithium project came about when everyone was getting super excited about Tesla battery technology that was leaving the electric vehicle and going into our homes. And they were inventing the solar panel roof tile and telling this whole narrative about about, you know, comments in quotes, green energy, without really talking about the other kinds of sacrifices we would make, you know, to deliver that kind of future. So we went to the lithium triangle and we just recently did a project around the fast fashion supply chain. And we did that at a moment when for for a brief period in time, the head of Inditex, which is a massive fashion conglomerate, became the richest person in the world, you know, usurped Bill Gates and the head of Amazon and became the richest person in the world. And Inditex is a company that you if the most part most people had never heard of, everyone's heard of Amazon, everyone's heard of Microsoft, what the hell is Inditex? Inditex is the umbrella corporation for H.M. Zara, like all the fashion brands of of of the High Street, the fast fashion brands of our high street. So we went and kind of looked through the supply chain of Zara. Basically, we went to the south, to the textile suppliers in India and Bangladesh to try and undercover how this extraordinary wealth is generated and and made a project called Unravelled, which was a film set in the fast fashion supply chain, trying to make that story explicit so that when you walk in and buy a three dollar T-shirt at Zara, you start to understand the implications of what that means for a cotton farmer all the way back in the landscapes of India. You start to imagine the water footprint when you, you know, throw away a dress because the fashion colour of the season has changed. You know, we flew a drone over the the illegal dumping of dyes, coloured fashion dyes into the Ganges River where, you know, the banks of the river are dyed with the colour of the season, poisoning the banks in killing what is a lifeline, both spiritually and physically for our communities. So we try and, you know, find a story that that that really connect with people in the present moment and then start to narrate that. 

David [00:28:11] I'd like to I'd like to pick up on the point you made about the fact that climate change is already here in some cases. I actually had a fascinating dinner that I attended at the Royal Geographical Society here in London quite randomly. I was invited by the founder of an initiative called Necturn. And I don't know if you've heard of that, but it's basically they're working on behalf of kind of ocean oceans kind of countries to protect basically, you know, they want to protect 30 percent of the oceans, basically by 2030. So a high aspiration is a fascinating project. But I was over dinner sitting with the head of communications with the Seychelles government. And, you know, Seychelles is actually facing an existential threat because of climate change. And simultaneously, I find myself often having conversations around the fact we're doomed, mixed up with well, no, actually over the next 10 years. We're going to go through a kind of renaissance where we're going to rethink everything, so really I've got two questions for you. You know, how do you feel on a day to day basis if that's if that's something you can answer about the future? You know, are you an optimist or, you know, is it kind of doom? But also, I'm really curious about how social, political and cultural factors are really shaping your work. Do you have 

to, in a way, extrapolate yourself from the current paradigm to enable a greater sense of imagining? 

Liam [00:29:41] That's great question. I guess I would describe myself as an optimistic realist. You know, I think the sorts of narratives that we normally associate with our futures, things like, you know, utopias or dystopias, these sort of binary opposites are extraordinarily problematic. I'm interested in kind of, you know, real and messy futures that that are ambiguous, that are somewhere in between, that are that are equal parts, utopia and dystopia at the same time. So typically, our vision of the future fall into those camps. You know, it's the cyberpunk dystopias. Megacorporations run wild dictatorship, governments forcing control. And then, you know, I understand why that works in in a place like this. Why am Hollywood? Because it creates the scene for heroes narrative, you know, a singular white male generally to rise up against the megacorporation and take it down, you know, makes for a great story. You know, the Joseph Campbell's Monomyth plays well in dystopias. It's hard to tell stories in a future where everything's kind of great. Where's the conflict? But where's the narrative opportunity? Yet we're faced with these extraordinary cyberpunk dystopias or it's absurd. It's techno solutionism. It's designers or technologists like, 'Hey, I've invented this new thing and it's going to solve everything for us. It's going to make our lives better. Let's invest in it. Let's go, let's bring it out to the world. 'And again, they're just as problematic that generally kind of, you know, again, very white, very Western centric visions of a future singly built around this new technology that's going to change our lives. They don't talk about the unintended consequences of these systems. They don't talk about the messiness that surrounds technology and the multiple narratives that it generates. These futures are just as singular in their vision. They just repeat the colonialist project just like the dystopias do. But really, like, you know, what we try and think about is the low technology, the solution to the problems we've created. Technology just exaggerates and extends the problems that we already have. They become extensions of ourselves filled with our own contradictions, failed frailties, quirks and charms. And we try and present that complicated view of a future, one that drone technologies can do extraordinary things. They can deliver vaccines. They can deliver me a package faster than I ever thought possible. They can also be used to spy in the window. A 14 year old girl changing. They can also be used to drop bombs or to surveillance without us realising any future is really going to be both and and neither of those things. It's going to be all of that stuff wrapped up into one. So that's what I mean by kind of, you know, an optimistic realist. I, I do think that there's there's hope and that we can change the the the the crises we've set in motion. But at the same time, I don't think there's any magic bullet that's going to help us to do it. I don't think that if we make the right decisions, we're going to usher in some kind of perfect, flawless utopia. I think it's always going to be messy and that is both interesting and scary. I'm interested in telling stories about futures that don't normally get told in Hollywood about communities and cultures and subcultures, about places that don't normally fit that that Hollywood narrative. I think all those stories are really valuable because they're probably more accurate than than than the other features that we that we more generally share in popular media. So I don't know that necessarily asking a question about, you know, whether I see the world through rose coloured lenses or not. It's I think how we act to make the world that we do is is to try and see them in that in that really complex way. And in a way, that's also why fiction is a tool is really useful because it somehow stories allow us to cut through a really complex subject matters in a way that just just analysing the data doesn't. And just to expand on that point a little bit, ou know, you mentioned climate change. And in a way, we we all know climate change is upon us. You know, these are truths that are sort of hiding in plain sight. We all understand the data, the bar chart, but the little red line for carbon parts per million, little red line for temperature that keeps on rising and rising and rising, you know, and data 

visualisation, not as graphic designers might spend a lot of time trying to visualise patterns in this data to try and help us to understand those systems are really, really complex systems, trying to make sense of the data so that we can connect to it our work. I would define not as data visualisation, but rather I use the term data dramatisation. And that is to say that to really effect change, we need to take those complex data sets, not just visualise the patterns within them, but imbue them with emotion and imbue them with drama, because then we see ourselves in those systems. We can be become complicit in those systems, they affect us much more deeply and that's the way that you start to instigate change, is by wrapping someone up in an emotion story as opposed to like throwing facts on us in a news broadcast, to really kind of talk about what this means to people on a deeply personal and emotional level. That's the power of fiction to present these complex ideas through. That's the power of fiction to to make sense of really complex and nuanced stories about our world. 

David [00:36:22] Yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic. Data dramatisation. I love that phrase. We so we as an agency, funnily enough, have spent many years kind of honing our our skill, I suppose, of data visualisations, often in our spare time. So we were actually founded on a project essentially called the Light Calendars, which are data visualisations of the amount of light and dark are seen from London's perspective. And I suppose in doing that, what we were trying to do was also create an emotional connection, but more through the aesthetic of the graph and, I suppose remind people that we have this spectacular occurrence every day, you know, and you see it less in cities. But certainly it happens where the sun rises and sets. And it's a remarkable reminder of the magical world that we live in that you kind of just take for granted, actually. And I think through the Light calendars, what we're hoping to do is remind people of that spectacular occurrence. But I suppose we build our graphs in a way that hopefully we entice people in and then allow them to sort of discover a narrative within the printed piece itself. But data dramatisation, I really love that as an idea, and I can understand how that can be profoundly emotionally connective with your audiences. I'm really curious about how you think about your audiences in your work and how how do you find people respond to the work? 

Liam [00:37:45] Yeah, it's funny we try and as I said, we try and put our futures into the world in such a way that they connect to audiences that normally don't go and see some of our shows or some of my lectures and those features, as I mentioned, you know, a kind of ambiguous and what it does is actually bring out the sensibilities of the people who are watching them. You know, I'll do a performance or a lecture or a show, a film at a festival. And generally there'll be two types of questions from the audience. One will be, why are your visions of the future so dark and dystopian? But the same work, the same performance, same film will also at the same time get a question. Do you really think things are going to work out that? Well, you know, you seem like an optimist about a lot of these technologies. I'm much more of a pessimist, I think it's going to be much worse than what you say. So in a way, that to me is is a measure of the success of the project because they force us to develop our own relationships to the work and some people are inherently pessimistic, then they're going to see the work in one particular way. If someone is inherently optimistic about these systems, they're going to see it another way. And that's why I think it's that that's why I think it's valuable, because it draws an audience into a conversation rather than just like presenting something to someone and saying, hey, this is what I reckon. What do you think it's to say this is possible? Is this a future that you want to be a part of? Is the future that you want to run away from probably a future that might be coming in some form of what kind of action does that generate in you? What kind of emotional responses that generate in you? And in turn, you know, what kind of decisions might you make about your life right now that you're going to try and set that in motion or 

try and prevent it from happening? So, as I said, futures and the production of futures is something that is a very active process. And we are trying to educate as many people as possible in that process to to get them talking about the futures they want to live in, to either excite them or to scare them. In many ways, really what we do is put into the world counternarrative. You know, again, a lot of these technologies that we talk about that come into our world through particular singular world visions because, you know, there's there's a whole lot of value being wrapped up in them. And they're being presented in particular ways through the interests of the people that are producing them. And our role is to try and talk about the alternative stories, the counternarrative, and to wrap audiences up in all of that complexity so that we can be more informed and we can be a more informed public. And hopefully that's what we're trying to do in relation to the audience. 

David [00:41:05] I think so for our design audience. I think, Liam, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about what informs Unknown Field's design aesthetic in the visual language and how has it evolved over the years? 

Liam [00:41:17] Yeah, I mean, we've worked a lot with a collaborative Neasden control centre and Winfield's have got a book series called 'Tales from the Dark Side of the City' at the moment, it's six books and has been collected into a box set. Each book is a different expedition, a different journey, a different landscape that we've travelled through and a different story that we uncovered in that landscape and Nesat Control Centre to develop the aesthetic for that book. They develop the aesthetic for our website, the branding for Unknown Fields. And, you know, we've we first met Steve Smith, who is the control centre when we did one of our very early journeys, which was to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. This was the the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. And we wanted to think about this idea of the world without us, the idea of posthuman landscapes. What happens when humans have been evacuated from a site and and nature moves back in? What happens when we see the consequence of certain technologies that have the dreams of atomic energy all play out in this extraordinarily charged, tragic landscape? And whenever we go now journeys, we we look at who are the people that we want to tell these stories with. We invite filmmakers, artists and in this case, graphic designers with us to to explore these landscapes together and make work together. And each of our journeys has been extraordinary collaborative process. And it's interesting. They came with us to Shinobu and that's where we started our collaboration. And we've been working together ever since. And, you know, we embraced the messiness of the new synaesthetic. It's not clean lines and slick digital prototyping. It's rather handmade and collaged and messy. It's you can almost see the the the dirt of the landscapes we are in in. A lot of that graphic language, and that's what we were trying to play with, you know, we go out to the world, we collect all these stories, we collect all the content mediums, little fragments of of of objects and materials from these sites. And then, you know, through Neasden sort of collage aesthetic, they start to be woven into to a new story. So, yeah, it's been a it's been a really interesting relationship across the years. And then my own work, you know, I define my static language really from the meanings of popular culture. There's a lot of designers, you know, in the design critical design scene that spend a lot of energy trying to define a new aesthetic language for for which we can talk about the future. Whereas what we do is sort of co-opt the language of science fiction, co-opt the language of of comics and the language of Hollywood, because that's a kind of a shorthand. You know, people know they're looking at something of the future. If they see kind of high end visual effects and certain rendering techniques and certain aesthetics from concept, design and concept, we co-opt those aesthetics, but use them to tell different kinds of stories because we think that, you know, that's the power in a way of cliché, is that it's a shared language. Everyone can start to understand it. And and we use kind of, you know, these these aesthetics of the 

future as vehicles to disseminate ideas. So, you know, all the people that that that work on and I collaborate with on my speculative projects, you know, that most recent work, Planet City, for instance, a single city for the entire population of the earth, everyone that I was collaborating with on that by day is working in the Hollywood machine, the visual effects artists making mega blockbusters, the costume designers working on all the sci fi shows that we know and love. The costume designer for Planet City was Ann Crabtree, who did the costume design for Handmaid's Tale and Westworld, the TV series. So we use those aesthetic languages of popular culture to get tell counter narratives. 

David [00:45:59] I wanted to talk to you about notions of wilderness. So you created the book you mention this fascinating book and now film 'Planet City', which explores the potential of extreme densification. So in a speculative future where 10 billion people surrender to the rest of the planet or surrender the rest of the planet to a global wilderness, it's such a powerful work. What was the catalyst for the book? 

Liam [00:46:24] Yeah, basically this project began in the early stages of a pandemic when, you know, all over work, they said it's about creating counternarrative. And for the most part, narratives around technology were really one sided be optimistic because again, they're made by tech companies that are trying to sell us stuff. So our general role has been to complicate those visions, to create counternarrative. But at the beginning of the pandemic, the dominant narratives around our futures were dystopian. The future was broken. We didn't have a future for a year. And as we started to live out and live action dystopia and look at everything that happened across that year, you know, obviously the global pandemic, you know, the the the horrors of systemic racism became more and more obvious. The pandemic, you know, brought a lot of issues that were kind of latent behind the scenes before, like, you know, massive income inequality, people that could afford to sit at home and not die, as opposed to people that had to go out and deliver a takeaway food. So as we are living out this dystopian film in real time, it became much more critical to develop a counter narrative to that which was actually thinking about a shared vision of a future that we might all be able to buy into in some ways. So Planet City was born out of that moment trying to create a vision of a future where we could prototype the necessary lifestyle changes that might be required in the context of climate change to continue to sustain human life on the planet. But there would be presented not as massive sacrifices, but we can present that as some kind of shared urban vision. And it could be aspirational. It could be joyful. It's still messy and complicated, as I mentioned. But but at the same time, it's culturally rich and diverse and active as an urban environment, not a kind of a postapocalyptic post climate. Blade Runner universe where we've all escaped to the off world colonies, a few kind of slug farmers, police people and and androids left behind on Earth. So that was the impetus for Planet City. And as a story, it began with Edward Wilson, the seminal biologist, his he has his vision for how to save our world, called Half Earth, which he describes as being a plausible and practical approach to continuing human life. Half Earth implies that we restrict human development to 50 percent of the planet, leaving the other 50 percent to wild to return to nature. We can do what we want with that 50 percent, but the other 50 percent we don't touch. We'd leave to recover and a lot of people spend time, he's a biologist, a lot of people spent time thinking about what happens to the 50 percent we we we leave alone. How do you re - wild? How do you bring back nature as an architect? As an urbanist I'm really interested in the 50 percent that we can use because we currently live in it already in a planet city, you know, a planetary scale city the size of the planet, when we've urbanised every inch of our globe to shrink to 50 percent requires a massive effort of growth, a massive global migration of consolidation. So we start to look at that. What would it mean to design, to build the world of that 50 percent city? And through that process, we started to look at what are the dentist 

cities on Earth right now? What are the dentist cities? In all of our existence in Manilla right now is a dentist city on earth. But the densest piece of urban fabric of every constructed is Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished in the late 80s 90s in Hong Kong. If you were to put the entire population of the Earth in a city, the density of Kowloon walled city, it would be this a city that's half the metropolitan area of Tokyo. At the density of Manilla, the current Danto city on Earth, seven billion people can fit in the city the size of a single US state rather than 50 percent earth. What we're talking about is the potential four point zero two percent earth, leaving ninety nine point eight percent of the planet to return to wilderness to be wild. And we've just been talking about Chernobyl, you know, another post human landscape that has been allowed to require to be wild. What would it mean to evacuate 99 percent of the planet and to just live in one city? And that was the thought experiment. The planet city is built around. And it's not a proposal, it's not to say, hey, this is a great idea. Let's all build this city and move to it. But rather, you know, if we can get something like Planet City working at that extraordinary and provocative scale, surely the small scale consolidation and densification that we need to do in our more familiar cities like L.A. and London is totally possible because the big story we're trying to get into is Planet City. The big narrative we're trying to tell is that climate change is no longer a technological problem. All of the technologies and the systems required to dig us out of the hole we've created for ourselves are already here. They just lack the cultural and political investment required to make them happen and to roll them out at scale. So the front line of climate change is not technological. It's cultural, political, it's ideological. And Plant City is trying to operate in those terms. It's trying to present a cultural debate and discussion about what are the necessary lifestyle changes that might be required, what are we willing to do in order to continue to live on earth? 

David [00:52:48] Yeah, and of course, the book is a collaborative work of multiple voices and cultures supported by an international team of acclaimed environmentalists and scientists and theorists and advisers, you know, what was the creative process like on this project? What did you discover in the process of making it? 

Liam [00:53:08] I mean, if we're making a vision of the entire planet, what we need to do is bring voices from around that planet together in order to make it. A lot of times when the design industry tackles problems of this scale, they do so through the outdated colonialist mythology of the of the genius designer, you know, the singular vision of of I figured it out. I know what we can do. Here's my vision for how the world can be different, and it just repeats the problems of the past. You know, today, those same sentiments that got us into this situation in the first place. What we do instead is trying to author a work through collaborative discussion, sort of make Planet City. It wasn't about me sitting in my studio in L.A. designing the city. Rather, it was about me kind of scaffolding, a conversation. I put together what I described as the city council, which was a collection of scientists and technologists and science fiction authors, theorists, anthropologists from all over the world. We had scientists from Brazil and from Australia, from the Middle East as well as UK and America. We had science fiction authors from the Caribbean, indigenous Australian authors. Chinese sci fi authors all coming together to collectively also this city, to the book Planet City, which is just out now, is a collection of non-fiction essays written by some of these science and technologists that are sort of making a case in an argument for why we need a provocation like Planet City now, the sort of laying the groundwork for why this kind of vision is necessary and urgent and a series of fiction texts, short stories written and set inside Planet City, written by people like him. Stanley Robinson, you know, the seminal voice in climate fiction right now, written by Chen Krippen, notable as they describe as the Chinese. The Chinese, William Gibson. I mean, I think he has his own voice totally in his own right. But, you know, he's telling future stories of China, which are really extraordinary. 

Chioggia. Another Chinese science fiction author. Her stories are extraordinary. And she based her Planet City text on reimagining an experiment which is going on in the Chinese landscape right now for Mars habitat like a closed loop city. She was writing about because Planet City is a closed loop city, all the resources and systems required to sustain the city occur on its same footprint. We have Milo Hopkinson, who's a Canadian Caribbean science fiction author. We have Ryan Griffin, who's a writer and director from Australia, an indigenous Australian creator who made the extraordinary TV series Clever Man, which is kind of the first of, um, Aboriginal superhero story produced for ABC in Australia. And the list goes on. But but, you know, it's about trying to create a vision of a future, a sci- fi city that does the opposite to all the sci fi cities we see in Hollywood and includes the sorts of voices that those stories negate or ignore or deliberately exclude. Yeah, it's a collaboration. And I think that's really where you can get the most interesting stories about our future as they become collectively set, because in a way that's, like I said, how futures are really going to be coming into the world. 

David [00:57:11] Well, yeah. I mean, Panama City is is a phenomenal piece of work. And I just I just really wanted to say thank you for all you do. Liam, your work truly is radical and an absolutely fascinating and I've I've really enjoyed listening to you talk about it today. In closing, I really just wanted to ask you one final question. What advice would you have for the creative community in terms of how they could better activate their own practise? 

Liam [00:57:36] I think something that's critical for us as creators and designers is to really understand the implications and the power of the work that we do and to be in charge of putting meaningful stories into the world, but also to seeing us and the work that we make as being part of and wrapped up in much larger systems. You know, if you take something like a product designer, you know, where we're at a moment where the scale of product design and the scale of landscape design have really collapsed together, where the choices we might make designing something like a phone, you know, something something the scale of our hand or something to slide into our pocket. Those choices echo across the other side of the planet in a hole in the ground or a factory floor. So there's this real power in thinking about, you know, even the smallest design choice as being part of a planetary scale system and to be mindful of that, what does it mean to reimagine the idea of the sites that we're designing for or the objects that we're designing not as being singular things being singular point on a map, see the objects on a desk, but being complicit in and and productive of a planetary infrastructure on a planetary scale network. How can we imagine intervening in and redesigning that idea of an object, that idea of site thinking about the supply chain that produces it, thinking about the supply chain that in turn produces everything we make of the stories we tell about products of culture, but also in turn produce culture. And that's an extraordinary place to be. You know, having that kind of awareness and on field has been about kind of trying to map out that landscape in a way, really as a means to create a site and a condition through which to engage and intervene and to work on your own. Speculative projects have been trying to operate within those sort of sites are unknown, fields visualises and illustrates and the rates and try and project their implications. So I think we can all do much better at just being self-aware and and yeah. Trying to put into place and put into the world stories and narratives that are productive at the kind of scales that we're been talking about throughout this whole discussion. 

David [01:00:34] Thank you. Thank you so much, Liam. 

Liam [01:00:36] Fantastic. Thanks so much, David. Really, really enjoyed the conversation. 

David [01:00:40] Thank you for listening to our conversation today. Liam is a truly radical and hugely exciting individual. I hope you find his journey, work and perspective as inspiring as I do. Endless Vital Activity is brought to you by Accept & Proceed. Remember, creativity can reimagine our world.