John Rapley of the London School of Economics’ International Growth Centre gave our primer presentation looking at potential routes out, finding that we may either have to migrate to where opportunities lie (just as Portuguese are moving to Brazil, Angola and Mozambique) or mutate our current labour market to allow for more social enterprise. This provoked a forthright response from our panellists, some of which can be heard on a forthcoming episode of The Future Human Podcast. For now, if you want to learn more about our panellists and their work, Birgitte Andersen’s Big Innovation Centre project is here, Geoff McCormick’s design firm The Alloy is here and the Technology Strategy Board is here, and Nesta, the public-body-turned-charity that Albert Bravo-Biosca works at is here.

Thanks go out to our similarly innovation-obsessed friends at Abstrakt, a book-cum-magazine produced by Swiss thinktank W.I.R.E. that provided free copies for our salon attendees.

Below is a selection of the best Twitter discussion from the night. Future Human is off for two months, but will return in August for Smash Publishing, where we will discover how self-publishing authors are rewriting the financial model of the book industry. We’ll see you then!

[Picture by @RingoRobbo]

The World Wide Web has increasingly become the battleground of a secretive ‘information war’ between the world’s leading powers. Practises range from the subtle, such as the the Russian government’s use of mafia hackers to attack Georgian websites, to the obvious, such as China’s censorship of Western news sites.

The picture has grown more complex, however, as anonymous hackers have targeted governments, corporate giants and their shadowy proxies in the information security industry. Reacting to this threat, states and corporate giants alike are developing new tools of digital surveillance to monitor the activities of the ‘information anarchists’. Increasingly though, these new tools are being used to surveil the general public, and to suppress dissent on a mass scale.

Is ‘digital vigilantism’ here to stay? Can the utopian ideals of the Web – of openness and universal expression – ever be realised in a meaningful sense? And to what extent will information conflict fuel new forms of criminality and terrorism in the UK?

Joining Future Human’s Ben Beaumont-Thomas to address these vital questions is Sam Jordison, presenter of the Closing Net salon, and Gabrielle Guillemin, a lawyer from the free speech NGO Article 19. They hear from Article 19 head Agnes Callamard, the information security expert Daniel Cuthbert and from the Occupy London activist Samuel Carlisle, and attempt to understand this complicated picture.

Ben also meets Jim Killock, chairman of the Open Rights Group, at the London headquarters of the digital liberty organisation, where he learns about the UK government’s plans to monitor social networking activity.

You can listen to the podcast below via Soundcloud – head here to listen to all of our podcast episodes and leave comments. Alternatively, you can listen and subscribe in iTunes.

If you want to learn more about our guests last night, Deyan Sudjic’s plans for the relocation of the Design Museum are here, and you can pick up his wonderful book The Language of Things here, which was referenced during the primer presentation. Find out about James Moed’s work at IDEO here, and Samuel Wilkinson’s studio is here, featuring all of his work – you can buy his Plumen bulbs here. Finally, Dominic Wilcox, who helped with our Speed Creating workshop, has info on all his work here.

Below is a Storify featuring all the best tweets from the night – thanks to everyone who got involved. We’ll hopefully see you at next month’s Future Human, Destructive Innovation.

With the UK economy depressed, the Coalition government has been talking up the possibilities of private entrepreneurialism, particularly in the high-growth digital and financial services industries. But the reality is that these companies employ very few people in relation to the revenues they generate– a notable example being Facebook, which is widely projected to have a valuation of US $100 billion yet employs less than 4000 people. Meanwhile the disrupted workers of the 2010s – bricks and mortar retailers, journalists, accountants and tube train drivers – are in danger of going the way of lamplighters, coalminers and milkmen.

Could Britain’s brave new industrial future lead to inequality and social division on an unprecedented scale? Will aspirations to deliver ‘progress’ and ‘globally competitive’ companies lead to joblessness and increasingly casualised labour markets? And should we be scared or excited that economic and technological innovation is tearing down the calcified institutions and certainties of British life?

Gus Desbarats is a designer who co-founded The Alloy, a digital agency who create interfaces for the likes of BT, Intel and Virgin Atlantic. As the chairman of British Design Innovation, as well as an acting ‘champion’ for innovation on the UK government’s Technology Strategy Board, he is an expert on what it takes to nurture innovation. In his work for these organisations he promotes British ideas and designs, and advocates for the development of a homegrown digital sector.

Albert Bravo-Biosca is a senior economist at Nesta, the ‘innovation foundation’ that funds projects across the creative industries, science and technology, and nurtures startup companies. After receiving his PhD in economics from Harvard, he joined the charity in 2007, where his research work focuses on how to drive innovation and productivity growth, and on the performance of venture capital.

John Rapley is a research associate at the International Growth Centre of the London School of Economics, exploring how innovation and economic prosperity affect one another. He is also a correspondent for Foreign Affairs, and was previously the head of the West Indian think tank CaPRI; regular futurehumanistas might recognise him as the presenter of our excellent New Medievalism salon last year.

Plus more guests to be announced. So join us at Destructive Innovation at 7 – 9.30pm on Wednesday May 9 at The Book Club. At the salon, you’ll be able to pose your own questions to the panel, post random thoughts on our big-screen Twitter feed, hear fascinating and interactive presentations, and of course quaff cocktails. Once again, advance tickets are available here.

Together, we will explore a troubling concept that could shape all of our lives: whether today’s most innovative companies are actually destroying more value than they create, and twisting the economic logic of our age.

Thanks to a strange alchemy of research institutions, economic and technological improvisation and countercultural rebellion, Silicon Valley has grown to become the innovation capital of Earth. Many countries have studied the unique environment and culture of the Valley, and attempted to cultivate similar conditions in their own innovation capitals, but the story of such government engineered projects is generally one of failure. Can the UK buck this trend with its ‘Tech City’ initiative, which aims to transform East London into the ‘digital capital of Europe’? Or could this grand project backfire and disrupt the informal feedback loop that has led to rapid growth in East London’s nascent tech startup scene?

Joining Jack Gwilym Roberts and Ben Beaumont-Thomas of Future Human are two of the UK’s leading figures in urban renewal. Max Nathan is a researcher at LSE Cities and the Centre for London, whose work focuses on how diversity economically enriches cities; and Eric Van Der Kleij, CEO of the Tech City project, who has been tasked by David Cameron to bring investment and major tech players to East London, as well as nurturing startup businesses.

They discuss the potential benefits of the arrival of Google and other major technology companies, the role that governments such as the UK should play in fostering innovation hotspots, and the social and economic displacements that these developments inevitably bring.

We apologise for the brief lapses in sound quality during this podcast, which were caused by a technical fault.

Deyan is a major figure in the British and indeed global design community. Initially working in magazine publishing, he became dean of the Art, Architecture and Design faculty at Kingston University, before joining the Design Museum in 2006. The museum, founded by Terence Conran, celebrates great contemporary design – current exhibiting are the shortlisted entries for Designs of the Year (a prize Samuel Wilkinson won last year), and the work of Christian Louboutin is next in line. He was awarded an OBE in 2000, and has written major monographs on Future Systems, Ron Arad and John Pawson, amongst other publications. He is currently overseeing the potential conversion of the iconic Commonwealth Institute into the new site for the Design Museum, to be restored by John Pawson and completed in 2014; find out more about the project here.

He is therefore perfectly placed to reflect on how great design is best conceived and realised, and his perspective on decades of international design excellence will be fascinating. As ever, you’ll be able to pose your own questions to him and the rest of the panel during the evening. To find out more about the event, and to buy tickets, head to our online store.

From the lessons that religion can teach us about engagement, to how frogs and pornography are surprisingly interlinked, we covered a huge amount of ground; excerpts from the talk will be featured in a forthcoming podcast. For now, follow these links to find what our panel guests are up to. Adrian Hon is the co-founder of Six to Start, and here are some of the projects he mentioned during last night: Zombies, Run!, Smokescreen, and The Code. Louise Downe works at Seren Partners and previously worked on Tate Trumps, and Anja-Karina Pahl is the founder of the PRIZM Game Company and The Gamification Network.

Anja led the audience in a ‘gamestorming’ session, using play as a way of drawing out ideas. She asked for ways that London public transport could be improved, and our audience set about coming up with as many ideas as possible. Here are some of the best (quoted verbatim from hasty marker pen scrawl):

- Canoes
- Using composites to make engines smaller
- Massage chairs
- Jogging lanes
- With happy gas we make singing on transport [?]
- Secret walkways / stairs on the tube
- Flying buses
- Slow/fast lanes on roads, like motorway
- Combine freight and people; carpooling
- Ban tourists, commuters, anyone I don’t like
- Build stories over the M25
- Chocolate fountains

So while we may not have solved the capital’s travel woes just yet, the game was nevertheless a brilliant catalyst for creative thinking – as the writer Steven Johnson notes, “it’s not what you think when you’re playing, it’s the way you think that matters. And you learn by playing.”

Below is a Storify collecting together all the best tweets from the night, a great collection of thoughts, ideas and links. Thanks to everyone who contributed, and we hope you can make it to next month’s salon, Grok Design – click here for all the details.

Sadly there are no tickets left for Gaming Normal, which takes place next Wednesday. If you are one of the many who missed out on a ticket, perhaps we can persuade you to join us at our next Future Human salon on Wednesday April 11?

It’s called Grok Design, and will explore the intermingled design intelligence that is revolutionising business. Click here to buy tickets, or read on for more information.

‘Grok’ is a term that was coined by the science-fiction author Robert Heinlein. It describes a complete state of understanding between two or more parties – a deeply intimate intermingling of separate intelligences. Various subcultures have adopted the phrase ‘do you grok that?’ over the years, from LSD-dropping hippies to computer hackers and, significantly, ‘grok’ was one of the late Steve Jobs’s favourite words.

Apple arguably ‘groks design’ better than almost any other company, yet it has actually gone one step further by quietly instituting ‘grok’ processes – where marketing, strategy, engineering and design teams produce products in parallel –at the heart of its operations. In so doing, it has risen to become the richest, most influential company on the face of the earth.

Smart entrepreneurs across multiple industries have observed that the simplicity of Apple’s products has added tremendously to the company’s bottom line, and are looking to emulate their design-driven, intensely product focused and collaborative methodology. ‘Grokking design’ is not just about making things look good, it’s about making them work simply and effectively within modernist principles and intermingling the design process within other spheres of production.

From small startups like Fray, which brings design, advertising and communications together in a merged creative offering, to large fashion companies like Zara who design, manufacture and distribute their products vertically to stay ‘fashion forward’, several companies are bucking the industrial logic of uniform outsourcing and specialised production, and placing designers at the heart of their output.

But how exactly does Grok Design work? Can any company enhance its output by following its principles? And could this little understood production process hold the key to Britain’s industrial future?

Join us at The Book Club on April 11 for answers to these questions and others, and to find out how some of Britain’s most innovative, design-driven companies are being influenced by the hitherto underreported techniques of Grok Design.

We have fantastic guests who will be discussing how design-led parallel production is transforming company cultures:

James Moed works at the intersection of product design and the marketplace, redesigning services to make them more effective. Having previously worked on projects with US radio stations, Japanese comic book publishers and MTV Europe, James now works at the London office of international design firm IDEO, making financial services more intuitive and comprehensible to ordinary consumers.

Samuel Wilkinson is one of the UK’s most exciting young industrial designers, and the founder of the Samuel Wilkinson Industrial Design Studio. He’s perhaps best known for Plumen – a beautiful, florid interpretation of an energy-saving lightbulb – and he’s conceived and executed a huge range of designs, from a smartphone-controlled terrarium that contains live plants to a public square in Lausanne, Switzerland that is laden with metal trees.

We will announce more guests shortly. You can join them and us for yet another Future Human mind buffet, which will of course contain cocktails, presentations, interactive games, big-screen Twitter slanging matches, and brilliant, brain-spinning debate.

Grok Design takes place at 7-9.30pm on Wednesday April 11 at The Book Club, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4RH. It’s an essential event for anyone with an interest in design, business or the peculiar philosophies behind the beautiful and indispensable tools that we use everyday.

Once again, tickets are available here and we strongly advise purchasing very early if you want to guarantee a spot.

Google revolutionised the advertising world by serving consumers with relevant advertising based on what they were looking for online. Over the last five years, Facebook has manoeuvred itself into a position that might see it offer an even more potent service, in which users perform advertising for a brand without realising it. By turning ‘like’ from a verb into a noun, it has transformed our personal tastes, alliances and communications into clickable marketing opportunities.

Elsewhere, social networks are multiplying to serve ever more niche concerns, and virtual economies of status and reputation are rising to the fore, and being harnessed by enterprising individuals and companies alike.

But exactly how are our desires being commoditised? Can our personal identity, reputation and status really be transacted? And with our lives being played out online and our complex tastes being reduced to thumbs up/thumbs down binaries, are we seeing our personalities changing as a result?

Joining podcast host Jack Roberts to discuss these questions are fellow futurehumanista Ben Beaumont-Thomas; social networking CEO Alex Halliday, who runs the ‘make your own social network’ site SocialGo; and the London Business School’s Xi Zou, who is conducting pioneering research into human behaviour within social networks.

They discuss the commercial opportunities, status anxieties and behavioural patterns that are redefining the rapidly evolving world of interactive social networks. Listen to it below via Soundcloud (and check out the whole series here) or listen in iTunes here. Podcast die-hards should note that we’ll now be publishing one episode per month.

Below is a Storify of the best tweets from the night, complete with some eye-opening links to discover more about world of data visualisation. A big thanks to everyone involved, and we hope you can make it to our March event, Gaming Normal.

Many people associate videogaming with hackneyed storylines and chauvinistic characters, yet for all the flaws of the medium, it’s an active form of storytelling that forces us to think in an original and frequently tangential manner. ‘Play’ is a state in which we’re forced to be creative, competitive and guileless – qualities that also characterise many of the world’s most productive and innovative work environments.

More industries are beginning to recognise the creative benefits of facilitating ‘play states’ in the workplace, and how the installation of game-like structures can incentivise productivity and inspiration. Services like Seriosity and Badgeville use the psychological and economic principles of online multiplayer games to drive productivity; employees can win ‘points’ by completing training videos and other workplace tasks, while firms with geographically diffuse workforces use gaming techniques to make their staff work together effectively.

And with Angry Birds becoming almost as well known as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, the wider populace is becoming accustomed to gaming interfaces, something that the smarter, early adopting entrepreneurs and brands have noticed. By sucking consumers into worlds of task and reward, they are finding new ways to retain customers and more deeply engage them. Meanwhile ‘gamification’ techniques are being used to desensitise soldiers to the chaos of battlefield experience, and education and health organisations are also offering fun, game-like instructional programmes to engage students and patients.

Is this blurring between the worlds of work and leisure just a fad or will the ‘gamification’ movement continue apace? Are services like foursquare, which invest our everyday interactions with a gaming reward system, genuinely useful or an infantilising force? And how do our brains behave when we’re playing games, and how can knowledge of this cognitive science be harnessed to help us work more effectively? From Oblique Strategies to World of Warcraft, we’ll explore the games across history that have enhanced our problem-solving capabilities, and discuss the psychological implications of ‘gaming the normal’.

We have three fantastic gaming professionals as guests, who will be discussing this shift and sharing new ideas of where it should go:

Adrian Hon is the co-founder of Six To Start, a gaming company which eschews the traditional console in favour of the smartphone, the Internet and the great outdoors. One recent crowdfunded project called Zombies, Run! turns jogging into an escape from the undead. He’s also overseen games for clients including Channel 4, Disney and the BBC and blogs each month for The Daily Telegraph.

Louise Downe is a senior consultant at Seren Partners, designing interactive learning experiences for the likes of BBC and Nesta, as well as honing the mobile services of O2, Vodafone and Visa. She previously worked with the Tate, helping create interactive installations, locational games and audio tours that filled the potentially dry space of the gallery with inquisitive new audiences.

Anja-Karina Pahl is the founder of The Gamification Network, the UK’s first collective dedicated to sharing and exploring the strategies of gamification. She is also the founder of The PRIZM Game Company, who use games to draw out creativity and solve problems in the workplace.

So join them and us for Future Human’s unique cocktail of cocktails, presentations, interactive games, big-screen Twitter slanging matches, and of course brilliant, mind-expanding debate.

Gaming Normal takes place 7-9.30pm on Wednesday March 14 at The Book Club, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4RH. It’s an essential event for anyone who works in digital media or is interested in the ‘gamification’ phenomenon – or, for that matter, anyone who has ever turned their tax return or weekly swim into some kind of hairbrained competition. You know who you are!

Once again, tickets are available here and we strongly advise purchasing early to secure a spot.

If you do have a ticket, we’ll be opening the doors at 7pm at The Book Club, and the event will go on until around 9.30-10pm. As was mentioned on the shop page, no tickets will be mailed out ahead of the event; we’ll have your name on the door so please bring name I.D. If you missed out this month, don’t worry – we’ll be announcing the details of our next event, Gaming Normal, in the next couple of days…