MISC: Women: Shattering Expectations

a journal of strategic insight and foresight SUMMER 2016 $12 USD $12 CAD ÂŁ7.50 GBP Display Until 09/30/2016

Women in Leadership P.14

Exploring Gender in AI P.20

The Future According to Women P.36

Women: Shattering Expectations

Motherhood in the Digital Age P.116

1 The all-new BMW X1

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uh.edu

The University of Houston’s Foresight Program offers a Master’s Degree in Foresight, a four-course Graduate Certificate, and a week-long intensive bootcamp overview, each of which prepares students to work with businesses, governments, non-profits, and others to anticipate and prepare for the future.

Established in 1974, it is the world’s longest-running degree program exclusively devoted to foresight. Some students enroll to become professional futurists, while others seek to bring a foresight perspective to their current careers.

Students have three major areas of focus: understanding the future, mapping the future, and influencing the future, blending theory and practice to prepare graduates to make a difference in the world.

kaospilot.dk

Kaospilot is an international school of entrepreneurship, creativity, and leadership. It was founded in 1991 as a response to the emerging need for a new type of education – one that could help young people navigate the changing reality of the late 20th century.

The program’s main areas of focus are leadership, project management, creative business, and process design. Promoting a hands-on approach, case studies are replaced by immersing students in real projects with real clients. Out of more than 600 graduates, one third have started their own company, NGO, or other similar initiative, the remaining hold management positions.

Kaospilot also offers a wide range of courses for professionals in creative leadership and educational design.

Co-Publishers

Publisher

ideacouture.com

As publishers of MISC, our aim is to provide a new level of understanding in the fields of insight and foresight. We navigate the blurred boundaries of business, design, and innovation through in-depth articles from some of the preeminent voices of design thinking, technology, customer experience, and strategy.

Idea Couture helps organizations navigate and innovate in complex and uncertain environments. We use design thinking methodologies to solve problems and exploit business opportunities – generating new growth, meaningful differentiation, and economic value.

By taking an insight and foresight lens to our explorations in MISC, we can thoroughly examine the impacts and opportunities for change in a vast range of industries, allowing businesses to plan for the present and the future.

Theory, So What? 8

Publisher / Editor-in-Chief Idris Mootee

Insight, So What? 12

Publishing Advisory Council Dr. Andy Hines Michael Novak Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius Lenore Richards

Women in Leadership: Angela Ahrendts 14

Guest Editor Emily Empel

Exploring Gender in AI 20

Head of Media & Publications Ashley Perez Karp

Signal, So What? 10

How Female Consumership is Changing the Future of Cannabis 24 How to Rescue Strategic Foresight 28 Disrupting the 15-Billion Dollar Menstruation Industry 32 The Future According to Women 36

Managing Editor Esther Rogers Editor Mira Blumenthal Art Director / Design Sali Tabacchi, Inc. Additional Design Rachel Min Illustration Jen Backman

Your Breasts Are No Good Here 84 Rethinking Leave and the New Parent Experience 88 Fashion and the Gender Spectrum 120

Distribution (US/Canada) Disticor International Distribution Pineapple Media Subscription Enquiries subscription@miscmagazine.com Letters to the Editor letters@miscmagazine.com Contribution Enquiries contribution@miscmagazine.com Advertising Enquires advertising@miscmagazine.com MISC (ISSN 1925-2129) is published by Idea Couture Inc. Canada 241 Spadina Avenue, Suite 500 Toronto, ON M5T 2E2 United States 649 Front Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94111 United Kingdom 85 Great Eastern Street London, EC2A 3HY

Contributing Writers James Aita Cheesan Chew Jonathan Cohen Laura Dempsey Jamie Ferguson Dr. Morgan Gerard Terry Grim Nadine Hare Paul Hartley Michelle Jacobs Stephanie Kaptein Elinor Keshet Jessica Konzelmann Kelley Kugler Jayar La Fontaine Dr. Marc Lafleur Derek Last Courtney Lawrence Melanie Levitin Mathew Lincez Kate Morgan Will Novosedlik Ilya Parkins Lotte Rystedt Shane Saunderson Dr. Wendy Schultz Victoria Scrubb Dr. Maya Shapiro Tania Sheikhan Valdis Silins Dr. Michelle Switzer Martha Twidale Lindy Wilkins Dr. Ted Witek

Based in Monterrey, Mexico, CEDIM takes a design, innovation, and business comprehensive approach to education. Design is promoted as a core philosophy, and the faculty consists of active, young, and experienced professionals who have expertise in a broad range of fields. Students are engaged with real and dynamic work projects, and are encouraged to immerse themselves in these active projects in order to participate in the realities of the workforce long before graduation.

As a result, students at CEDIM develop an extensive sensitivity to their social, economic, and cultural environment, and go on to make real, pragmatic change in the world of design and innovation. cedim.edu.mx

All Rights Reserved 2016.

Email misc@miscmagazine.com The advertising and articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publisher or editors. We are not to be held accountable for unsolicited manuscripts, artworks or photographs.

All material within this magazine is © 2016 Idea Couture Inc.

photo: matthew jolly

Contents

ocadu.ca

OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program (SFI) can claim a place at the leading edge of pedagogy and foresight practice. The SFI program is creating a new kind of designer – a strategist who sees the world from a human perspective, rethinks what is possible, and imagines and plans a better future.

Recognizing the increasing importance that design thinking can play in positively impacting society, enhancing business success, and managing organizational change, students in the program address the complex dilemmas of contemporary society. This interdisciplinary program interweaves design and foresight methods with social science, systemic design, and business, while providing the skills and knowledge to identify critical issues, frame problems, and develop innovative and humane solutions to better implementation plans.

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Women: Shattering Expectations

This is the 22nd issue of MISC. Out of all the issues we have done, this is the first time we have ever received such a strong reaction to a theme – so much excitement, so much nervousness, and so much payoff. The Women: Shattering Expectations issue has easily been the most challenging and the most rewarding. When we went to print, we felt both a sigh of relief at having finally executed what – we hope – is an inspiring glimpse into the topic, and a certain sadness, like a close friend leaving.

I say “glimpse” above because that is all that we can realistically fit into 136 pages. There were endless meetings and debates of what should go into this issue, but to ever do the topic of women justice, to examine it from every angle and unpack every argument, would take thousands upon thousands of pages. There is so much to cover that I feel like we should already start planning the next Women issue now.

Consider this issue, though, as a response to women in leadership trends. In 2006, when Norway was the first country in the world to introduce a 40% quota for female directors, it was seen as bold and controversial.

But soon, countries like Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain followed, and, in 2016, Germany passed a law requiring some of Europe’s biggest companies to give 30% of supervisory seats to women.

Meanwhile, women make up the majority of graduates almost everywhere in the developed world – yet they only make up a smaller share of the workforce, which further dwindles as they move up the corporate ladder.

According to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), women with MBAs currently represent an average of 36% of their graduating class. We would be right to think that there should be a larger number of women in the C-suite – and yet we’re still relying on imposing gender quotas to promote women leaders. Shouldn’t we be further ahead by now?

Perhaps we’re not because we’re still unable to move forward with other aspects of how we relate to women.

For example, some of our regular contributors were initially nervous about the topic – about saying something wrong. In “You Can’t Write About That” (pg 16), Derek Last explores these feelings with unrestrained honesty and openness, and why this awkwardness is something businesses need to be aware of in their own approach to women. Other contributors took this as an opportunity to examine issues that are making surprisingly little headway, despite public calls for change. In “Rethinking Leave and the New Parent Experience” (pg 88), Michelle Jacobs explores the lack of options for new parents in the United States, and what a new system could do to benefit us all. And in “Disrupting the 15 Billion Dollar Menstruation Industry,” (pg 32), we look at how surprisingly little innovation has happened in one of the biggest and most consistent consumer industries in the world – and who is changing the game.

You may also notice a large section of this issue is devoted to a topic both broad and specific at the same time: “The Future According to Women” (pg 36). Like this issue, this has been our most ambitious feature to date. We reached out to well over 200 women, and selected over 40 to interview so that we could get their unique takes on the future of their respective industries – be it technology, sustainability, family, girlhood, innovation, sex, and a slew of other topics. It got so big at one point that we were faced with having to make extensive cuts, or else the entire issue could have easily

consisted of only this feature. Because there was so much exceptional material from these interviews, the full conversations with the women we spoke with can be enjoyed in their entirety on our website, miscmagazine.com.

One of the most heartwarming things about “The Future According to Women,” however, was actually the response we had to the idea of the feature itself from the women we reached out to, even those who were unable to be involved. They were excited, they felt it was important, and they couldn’t believe a feature like this had never been done before. It reaffirmed the entire reason for choosing this theme now, which is that, even in 2016, there is still a lot of work to be done for women to be truly seen – seen for their capabilities, their contributions, and their importance to the world.

I would also like to take a moment to thank Emily Empel, Head of Futures at Idea Couture, for joining us as Guest Editor for this issue and taking an especially poignant role in bringing “The Future According to Women” to life.

Never before had we had to consider so many details in an issue. From the cover design, to the use of colors throughout the magazine, and the difficulty we had sourcing the right images, we had to treat every decision with a level of precision never required in previous issues. I’m sure we still made some missteps, but I’m also certain of this: every step counts in the conversation.

Please enjoy this very special issue.

Idris Mootee Publisher / Editor-in-Chief

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Theory, so what?

9 In this regular feature, we pick a social theory, explain its relevance to everyday life, and then explore how the theory’s implications could impact the future of your business, industry, or category.

Invisible in Plain Sight How Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality can uncover unseen innovation opportunities for your business.

More than the sum of our parts.

People are complicated. How we socialize, how we develop our cultural and political institutions, and how our individual and group identities powerfully shape all of those processes is complex. We are never just one type of person presenting ourselves to the world according to a single script. Nor could we simplify or ignore our shifting and complicated identities even if we wanted to, as other people are continuously stepping in to categorize us in ways that reflect their own backgrounds and suit their own needs.

So when marketing and brand management teams design surveys, establish personas, or work with segments to “get at” one kind of consumer – The Hispanic, The Soccer Mom, The Millennial – they are truly missing the mark. When they explore opportunity areas or develop strategies that are based on this

type of work, they perpetuate the problem, ignoring important differences within and across identity categories and leaving large parts of the story untold.

Consider the commonly cited statistic that, on average, American women earn 78 cents for every dollar that men earn. While this gives us some picture of gender inequality, when we zoom out a little further, we realize that the picture becomes blurry and incomplete. In fact, it is white women who earn 78 cents for every dollar that white men earn. African American women make 64 cents on that same dollar, and women who identify as Hispanic/ Latina make 54 cents.

And so, a new product offering or marketing campaign that hopes to resonate with real women would have to go a step beyond traditional research and innovation methods to get at the diversity that exists within that category. Turning standard consumer segmentation on its head in this way allows us to understand the complexity of identity formation as well as the layered social context within which it exists.

Signs that we’re finally crossing the intersections:

Intersectionality – the theory that people are subject to multiple and overlapping forms of discrimination – is a concept that truly emerged from the ground up. In 1977, as legal counsel on the case of DeGraffenreid vs.

General Motors, Kimberlé Crenshaw represented five black women claiming that they could not get work at GM because of the company’s discriminatory hiring practices. While GM hired black men for manual labor on the factory floor and white women for secretarial positions in the head offices, the complainants brought forth charges that black women were not considered for either position and, therefore, suffered discrimination based on their race and gender. Crenshaw, herself a black woman, saw a glaring gap in the legal language that was available to her in this case. There was no terminology, or indeed, concept, that expressed the clear and present effect of two different but simultaneously applied forms of discrimination. In 1986, as a Professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, Crenshaw developed this language and built a social theory around it, stressing the applicability of intersectionality to any group that is similarly “invisible in plain sight” to society and the judicial system. Crenshaw’s notion that race, gender, age, sexuality, and other aspects of our identity must be clearly marked, acknowledged, and understood as more than the sum of its parts has resonated strongly with people whose marginalization comes from one or more aspects of their identities.

Although marketers acknowledge, and sometimes fervently pursue, certain ethnic groups or generational cohorts, it is all too often done in shallow or one-dimensional ways. Considering how important identity politics has become in our culture today, and in light of the varied ways in which people are labeled and categorized without their participation, it is hard not to wonder what a future would look like if products and services responded to the intersectional manner in which people experience the world.

Izzy Camilleri A Toronto-based clothing designer who has developed a line of stylish and adaptable wardrobe basics for women who use wheelchairs, Izzy Camilleri is responding to the needs of women who are tired of having the limits on their mobility create limits for how they express their personal style. izzycamilleri.com

What if…

How would your business measure up in an innovation space where multiple forms of difference are clearly marked and accounted for? photo: Oscar Keys

b y d r. M aya s h a p i r o

So what?

Kimberlé Crenshaw and the theory of intersectionality.

01 How could you sharpen your understanding of how people relate to their personal and group identities? What practices could you employ to set that understanding as a foundation for innovation?

Prime Timers Worldwide With over 80 chapters throughout North America, Europe, and Australia, Prime Timers is a leading organization for “mature gay and bisexual men.” Through the facilitation of regional gatherings, global conventions, and chartered cruises, the organization provides a space for gay seniors to meet their social needs in ways that acknowledge both their sexuality and their age. primetimersww.com CARA B Naturally A line of chemical-free, plant-based hair and skin care products for “ethnically diverse” children, CARA B Naturally situates itself in the space of overlap between black hair care and baby hair care product lines. mycarab.com

02 What needs and desires of your consumers are currently not being considered within your product or service portfolio?

How might you modify or market your offering differently to either acknowledge or fill this gap?

03 In what ways can you ensure that your marketing strategies are engaging real people on a level that makes few assumptions and multiple accommodations?

Dr. Maya Shapiro is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

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Signal, so what?

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In every issue, we highlight a weak signal and explore its possibilities and ramifications on the future of your business, and how to better prepare for it.

Digital Assistants M, Alexa, Siri, Clara, Cortana, Nina, Cloe, Julie, Riley, Amy, Amelia, Viv

by Va l dis Sil in s

Overview

So what?

What if...

A rising tide of digital assistants promises to lift – or drown – all. Advancements in artificial intelligence, including natural language processing and deep learning, are helping create virtual assistants that simplify your life. No longer will you be stuck in time-consuming activities like scheduling meetings and conducting basic research – you’ll outsource it to your digital assistant.

Notice anything about the bots? M, Alexa, Siri, Clara, Cortana, Nina, Cloe, Julie, Riley, Amy, Amelia, Viv… binders of women to choose from. There are exceptions, of course. For manufacturing, you can purchase the “Iceman” bot – a bot with the same brawn as Val “Iceman” Kilmer in Top Gun. We know diversity is lacking in Silicon Valley, that it impacts the kinds of products created, and the various efforts underway to address it. But the design and naming of female bots reflects broader issues around changing gender roles, which, in turn, reflect critical uncertainties around future socioeconomic structures.

Growth remains our mantra, driven by increased productivity. The emotional work of female bots take their cue from the historically gendered division between productive and reproductive labor. Take away the tasks of daily maintenance, of running the household, managing schedules, and setting meetings, and you’ll have more time to do productive work. That’s the promise of these bots.

The question of how these bots will shape the way we valorize care and maintenance in the future remains open.

The issue is whether externalizing the work of care might blind us to the need to reset paths for different kinds of growth, with new metrics for productivity. It’s a question the gendered division between productive and reproductive work has long pointed to, with no clear answers, but plenty of work left to be done.

Personal

photo: David Noah

Most of these assistants use conversational user interfaces that rely on voice inputs.

For the visually impaired, the elderly, and those who use logographic languages like Chinese and Japanese, graphic user interfaces have never been the most efficient or intuitive. With a conversational interface, you’ll simply ask your assistant to do something. This increasingly colloquial nature will not only bring broader swathes of users into the technological fold, but it will also make the relationship to technology even more intimate and personal.

The more you use your digital assistant, the better it will get at anticipating and adapting to your needs. It will come to know you better than you know yourself.

Of course, this will happen a lot more effectively when you develop a personal relationship with it – when you trust it with knowing everything about you. Which, in short, is why companies are competing to make these bots more and more likable. They are data miners with emotional algorithms as spades.

/ The age of AI will bring profound privacy challenges. Bots will know everything about us, with marketers and others having every incentive to access it. / How will the idea of trust change when it’s no longer you or your mother, but an organization that knows everything about you?

Brand / Data is currently abundant, while the means to make sense of it remains scarce. As algorithms become smarter at parsing data, it could be that insights are what suddenly become abundant. / The threshold of any material’s abundance signals a qualitative shift in how they get used – what will become of consumer insights when there’s enough of them to waste? How will they be prioritized, and what new modes of sensemaking will emerge? Will we have to reverse the productive-reproductive dichotomy and become data janitors for AI, throwing away the less useful outputs while scrambling to clean up the data inputted?

Organizational / Whichever way AI develops in the future, it’s unlikely to behave like a human mind, occupying a different role in the “space of possible minds,” to borrow a useful phrase from Murray Shanahan. / How will your organization develop strategies to train, try, and tame augmented ways of thinking and acting that are fundamentally different to the ways we think now? Will we be caught in a perpetual catch up loop with machines, an issue that already exists in the field of computational humor, where we often have to reverseengineer it before “getting” the joke? ////

Valdis Silins is a foresight analyst at Idea Couture.

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Insight, so what?

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In every issue, we explore a topic through an anthropological lens in order to better understand its impacts on a wide range of industries.

By Courtney Lawrence

In retail, fashion, or even wearable tech spaces, it’s easy for designers and design researchers to focus either on the technical innovations of fabrics and clothing, or on the aesthetic and expressive aspects of a garment. Innovation in these spaces largely focuses on the created object and its production, rather than the cultural consumption of the product, or, more importantly, the experience of the wearer and their body.

And when clothing manufacturers do turn the lens onto the body, it is often with a highly technical or functional orientation, rather than an experiential or social one.

In the territory of innovation, understanding both the cultural context and the phenomenological experience of the body are crucial to disrupting and elevating clothing in any retail, fashion, or wearable space. Sociocultural understandings of the body offer valuable insights to support clothing and retail brands in moving beyond functional understandings of materials and finding deeper meanings, relationships, and interactions between people and what they wear.

photo: susan402

Understanding Body Politics in Retail and Fashion

Beyond Size and Style

One Size Fits All – or Else

“Woman” Enough for You?

Implications for Clothing Brands

Within the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and material culture, there exists a large body of research and literature around women’s bodies – including the objectification of the body, body politics, phenomenology of the body, and power structures played out through the body.

Other studies focus on personal identity, individualism, and agency as expressed through body and dress.

Additional semiotic areas of study look at the attribution of symbolic values to material culture by consumers, and of consumers’ responses to symbolic values attributed to material culture by their producers.

Having recently worked with a major retail company’s innovation team to develop a new category for their business, we facilitated conversations with many women about the meaning that clothing has for them and discussed notions of femininity, expression, and identity through clothing.

What became clear is that the motivations behind why women choose to buy or not buy clothing are complex and influenced by many sociocultural factors. Buying for body type and size, style preferences, or functional needs are only part of the story.

One of the core issues that deter women from feeling great in their clothing is the normalization of clothing segmentation – or, the notion that we are easily categorized and defined by a finite size and that size should stay constant. The media largely dictates the feeling that, as women, we should aspire to a particular and unchanging body shape, creating an illusion of and aspiration to stasis.

In reality, the body is in an ever-evolving state of flux.

Whether 30, 50, or 80, women of all ages go through major transformations in their bodies.

Pregnancy, aging, stress, and many other factors continuously create new cycles for our bodies, impacting how we feel.

As designers, it is crucial to understand that body changes are more than physiological alterations that need to be accommodated by clothing, and must instead be viewed as pivotal moments of psychological and emotional transformation that require acute sensitivity by brands.

When women’s bodies naturally evolve over time, so too can their feelings of self-confidence and self-worth.

Being labeled as a “mature body” and being directed toward a certain style, shape, or sensibility in clothing can stir feelings of inadequacy.

Likewise, not having options that reflect a desired expression of identity can be frustrating when a certain shape or size further encourages shame over an “abnormal” body, or creates the sense of femininity being taken away.

The notion of “who owns” a woman’s femininity then becomes an interesting topic of discussion. For many women, clothing is used as a tool to gain control over or alter their sense of femininity.

In some conversations we’ve had with women, they purposefully reject certain items of clothing because they don’t feel they are “woman enough” to wear it.

In this way, they give up their power to the clothing companies to provide them with their female identity, instead of finding their own sources of femininity.

Another connected influencing factor behind women’s clothing purchase decisions is the tension between the feeling of objectification and the desire to feel sexy or feminine. While there is a sense of strength that comes from having presence or standing out, it also risks losing a feeling of safety. In our conversations, many women struggled with wanting to be seen wanting to be seen, but not attracting unwanted male (or female) attention. Finding the right balance between exuding female empowerment and expressions of femininity with an awareness of cultural power dynamics is an ongoing endeavor. This balance then impacts what they choose to purchase, and when and where they choose to wear it.

Fashion and clothes are communicators and mediators between self and society.

Women, whether consciously or not, are constantly negotiating levels of appropriateness, and exploring their versions of femininity through their body and the materials they wear.

For clothing brands, it is crucial to look past designs for the physical body and look to the emotional and cultural body instead.

The way that women make decisions and interact with such brands is largely dictated by socially-constructed notions of what it means to be a women – what is appropriate as we age or as our bodies change, what it means to be or look feminine, and how much we can express ourselves without being a target of unwanted attention.

While this provides a surface exploration of insights into the body, further explorations can begin with these key questions: How are women being approached in the shopping experience? Are they seen just for their statistical data – shape, body size, height, and so forth?

What efforts are made to understand who a woman is, beyond a generic clothing wearer? How can we design for how a woman wants to feel in her body? And how might we give women the space to explore and own their sense of self and womanhood within these environments? //// Courtney Lawrence is a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

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Women in Leadership: Angela Ahrendts

B y d r. M o r g a n G e r a r d

Angela Ahrendts knows something that many of today’s business leaders don’t know, and that some don’t even really care about. It’s something she knows about herself. And, given her undeniable success as CEO at Burberry and the sheer expectation over what she is quietly doing as SVP of Retail at Apple, it’s something that has shaped her ideas, her visions, her actions, her teams, and her personal growth into not just a business leader, but a great business leader.

“I’m in the human business,” she says quite matter-of-factly. “I’m in the people business.”

It might be as simple as that. Rather than reading about the big new idea in the next business bestseller, this could be the Ultimate CEO’s Secret to Success: humans, people.

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It would align with what seems to be this new age of consumer-, user-, patient-, and human-centricity, a principle Ahrendts has been practicing for years. It would align with the business world’s ongoing interest in design thinking, an approach that Ahrendts’ 50% left, 50% right brain has always gravitated towards. And it would align with calls for brands to engage in storytelling that connects and inspires people, a standard Ahrendts and Christopher Bailey set for the entire business world with Burberry’s domination of social media, the Burberry Acoustic program, and the company’s approach to using beautifully produced short films to communicate its meaning and message to both its customers and its employees.

These days, this alignment is all the rage in Harvard Business Review and on LinkedIn. As they incessantly debate the merits of culture vs. strategy, C-suites around the world and their consultants are struggling to align or, perhaps more accurately, redesign some of the biggest and most complex corporations into becoming human-centric, design thinking storytelling organizations. Meanwhile, one of the few executives of the last decade that actually illustrated how a business of people for people could be so successful continues to pursue and participate in the one thing that so few brands, businesses, and business leaders subscribe to wholeheartedly: a bigger purpose.

“All I want to do is what I think I’ve been put on this planet to do: lead. I think my calling in life is to lead and to touch people.

I didn’t know that until I turned 50 and certain things started falling into place.”

Burberry was the place where those things started falling into place. As the first American to lead the iconic luxury brand, Ahrendts joined Burberry at the age of 46, knowing full well the mess she was getting into thanks, in part, to an hours-long lunch with Bailey, where the two clearly articulated their vision of the brand’s challenges and its future. Over the years, reputation had waned, product had stagnated, operations was in trouble, licensing had run amok, and the 140 year old brand was showing its age, fatigue, and lack of relevance. To begin reviving and revising the brand, Ahrendts went in formulating a much-needed hard strategy and drawing on all of the knowledge of the rag trade she had amassed over the years at Liz Claiborne and Donna Karan. But the real secret to success, she knew, would be inspiring and leading her people.

“At Burberry, we used what we had,” says Ahrendts, who left the company in 2014 to join Apple. “We had each other, we had high energy, and we had to use that to attract people to a company that wasn’t that cool. That energy was an instinct.

And we used that instinct to drive the success of the company.”

For Ahrendts, energy is emotional. In her TEDx talk, “The Power of Human Energy,” she talks about it as a kind of charge between people that inspires them towards great action and ultimately has the power to unite and transform companies. But it’s not enough on its own. Like she is giving away another Ultimate CEO’s Secret to Success for free, Ahrendts talks about intuition almost as much as she does about energy.

“I prefer to follow the signs of life,” she says, noting how she was well schooled in such signs by her spiritual mother and philosopher father while growing up in Indiana. “If I stay in that zone and follow the yellow brick road, I see the signs. They are so clear. When they are that clear and you follow them and there are more and more of them along the way, they lead you where you want and need to go. That’s the instinct. We are given the most amazing instincts – animal instincts – but I think they are taken away from us over our whole life and locked up.”

As a leader, one of Ahrendts’ goals is to unlock this energy in the people she works with. Whether at Burberry or Apple, where she assembles her teams based on a candidate’s balance between IQ and EQ, it’s how she taps into what really inspires her executives and employees: confidence, empowerment, and the deep trust that is cultivated between people when they know that their ideas and initiatives are highly valued and, if necessary to learn and move on, can fail. To do that, Ahrendts has had to not only know her employees but also know herself.

“I know who I am and I know what kind of a leader I am. I am in my comfort zone with my team and I let it all out, because the more open, present, and transparent I am, the more they feed off of my energy.”

In seeking to unlock the energy within and to establish a human connection with her teams, Ahrendts isn’t your typical corporate mogul. She is friendly. She is supportive. She is accessible. She is truly inspiring. And her ego is low, very low. She rarely talks at business events and, when asked to join hundreds of company boards during her time at Burberry and beyond, she refused them all for one simple reason.

“As a leader, my filter became: can you touch people?

Will they feel you? And will it help make them better if they do?

If I can’t touch people, I’m not interested.”

Obviously, Ahrendts thinks way beyond the bottom line. Or, perhaps, she has discovered the true bottom line of business.

It’s an approach that more executives could use to align and improve the performance of their organizations. It’s an approach that could similarly align and improve the performance of executives across those organizations. Without Ahrendts’ requisite balance between EQ and IQ, the spiritual mother, the philosopher father, and those childhood memories of flipping through copies of Women’s Wear Daily in Indiana, few business leaders will ever understand the secret to her human, people business. And even fewer of them will be able to answer the one question that keeps Angela Ahrendts going: “How does a great leader gather a lot of great followers to do great things?” //// Dr. Morgan Gerard is chief resident storyteller at Idea Couture.

// All I want to do is what I think I’ve been put on this planet to do: lead. I didn’t know that until I turned 50 and certain things started falling into place. //

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Uncomfortable Definitions What we seek to discuss, more than anything, is the shifting definition of what it means to be a woman and, by consequence, her shifting role throughout culture and business. We choose the forementioned topics because they have been deemed acceptably objective and definitive aspects of a woman’s condition and state of being. To these ends, we’ve identified these topics as “safe.”

And yet, at first glance, it is still incredibly awkward to talk about women.

Beyond the word being a political minefield and a symbol for most people’s disinterest in “being political,” I would posit that the awkwardness is mostly due to our discomfort with contributing to different definitions of “women.” Indeed, popular discourse would tell us that we have no right to shift that definition beyond the ways in which it has already been shifted. How soon we forget the struggles it took to get to our current definition of “women.”

That stuff is awkward, though, so let’s focus on what that awkwardness has produced: the comfort of our current-state conceptions of women.

When breaching this topic, many of us feel as though our opinion has limits and that our voice can only go so far before it becomes disruptive rather than reassuring. Most importantly, this suggests that the topic has limits – that there is a borderlands that a woman cannot, because she would not, dare cross. As this issue of MISC demonstrates, however, the word and the topic both elicit and generate constructive conversation and thought that is capable of taking our minds in directions that, because of bias, fear, or sheer ignorance, we otherwise would not dare engage with. Not simply a topic of discussion, but instead a conceptual frame for thought, “women” serves as an example of what can happen when we engage with discomfort and embrace awkwardness.

Significantly, our willingness to engage with the awkwardness of this topic represents the crucial first step of participating in the creative process. In this way, this issue is really about innovation, as the topics grappled within these pages are held together by the same psychology, sociology, and rule-based systems that we come up against as strategists when addressing a given organizational or business challenge.

By Derek Last

When I first brought up this topic, I was told by a few individuals that I shouldn’t write about it. Certainly not for this issue of MISC. A sense of fear and caution gripped those who listened to the idea, and I found their reactions very interesting. Call me crazy, but when people get risk intolerant, I see an opportunity to dig deeper.

To put it plainly, the word “women” is loaded. Within it, is held a complex history of relationships, meanings,

and definitions that, for most people, can bring about feelings of discomfort. Political movements, fields of scholarship, entire industries of commerce, and significant historical events all exist as iconographic building blocks of the concept of what it means to be a woman that we know today. Currently, the topics of discussion around women that capture our attention are things like wage disparity, gender roles, expectations of bodily performance, marginality through stereotype, and the ever-present “glass ceiling” of commercial capitalism.

photo: Nicholas Gercken

“You can’t write about that.”

// To put it plainly, the word “women” is loaded. It holds a complex history of relationships, meanings, and definitions that, for most people, can bring about feelings of discomfort. //

Challenges and Problems Within organizations, challenges represent near-term issues in search of short-term solutions. Challenges are not a problem, but rather symptoms of a problem. There is an important difference between the two, and organizational focus on the former blinds us from the latter.

During the character development stage of the creative writing process, an important method used to develop a person of substance is to divide a character’s psychology into wants vs. needs. Wants are surface-level desires represented by easily accessible, conscious interests that the character would self-identify as the motivation behind his or her actions. Needs, on the other hand, are the deeper psychological catalysts that drive wants.

A character’s epiphany and moment of clarity occurs when the desires of want are overcome, leaving behind a realization that all of what remains is, indeed, all that ever existed: an underlying and unmet need.

As in art, so in life, and perhaps the most important takeaway from this corollary of human psychology, is that wants (challenges) distract us from addressing our needs (problems). Needs are awkward. They represent deep-seated weaknesses that feel impossible to remedy because they require us to engage in the process of redefinition.

About “Women” and Redefinition Which brings us back again to the topic of “women.” I haven’t forgotten about it, even though some would like me to.

As mentioned above, we find this topic awkward because of the “political” risk inherent in contributing to a new or different definition of “woman.” When we shift the definition of the word, we alter and change the human(s) defined by it. The fear that causes us to turn away from approaching this topic is the struggle organizations all over the world face when the need for redefinition becomes an unavoidable and new reality.

When we alter the way in which we define a business’ purpose, we change the role that humans hold within the redefined business’ brave new world. This is what’s hard about real innovation. Not the incremental kind that helps to maintain the status quo of static capabilities, technological reliances, and siloed functional groups.

Redefining an organization’s purpose redefines every individual’s purpose and place. This is when things get awkward.

But it’s also when things get interesting, because it’s only when we play around with awkwardness that we’re inspired and pushed to think and be creative. Indeed, rather than something to avoid, engaging with awkwardness ought to be routinized as a necessity built into organizational culture. As a way to embed creativity organically into the processes, behaviors, routines, and rituals of a workplace, awkwardness is a counterintuitive approach to reaching what we’re all always after: thinking that’s different. //// Derek Last is a brand innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

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Beyond Pink: Empowering Women in the Workplace

Hofstede’s definition can be used to inform Schein’s model and its relevance for modern workplaces. Schein articulates three levels of organizational culture: 1) artifacts, 2) espoused beliefs and values, and 3) underlying assumptions. / Artifacts are those elements that are visible in an organization.

They can include dress code, policies, space design, rituals, and even organizational humor and stories. / Espoused values are how the organization represents itself to the outside world and internally to members. They encompass its philosophy, its conscious strategies and goals, the messages it communicates both outside and in, and how employees are developed and nurtured. / Underlying assumptions are the heart of the organization and the most difficult to surface internally, although they can be obvious to outside observers. They represent beliefs about the people, the organization itself, and the outside world that are often unconscious.

Schein’s three-tiered model can be applied to key questions about the role of women – and “feminine” approaches more generally – in companies. In a model I've developed called “Beyond Pink,” the three tiers parallel three levels of acceptance of the feminine.

I’ll explain each level below.

US companies are challenged by increased complexity, rapid change, and a need for leadership that thrives in a dynamic environment. Women, by both nature and nurture, possess many qualities to perform well in that climate – and “feminine” qualities more generally, whether practiced by women or men, have become crucial for competitive success today.

A growing mountain of evidence shows that women’s leadership can be hugely beneficial. Just recently, The New York Times published a study showing that putting women in top management results in stronger profits. Yet, according to a 2016 report from Mercer, “The traditional methods of advancing women [in the workplace] aren’t moving the needle, and under-representation of women around the world has become an economic and social travesty.”

Top corporations know they need to do more. But what does it really mean to engage women? Cultural analysis is a useful

way to look at the layers of acceptance of women, and how this understanding can offer valuable direction. Edgar Schein, MIT guru of organizational development and culture, provides a helpful framework for workplaces – a pragmatic template that allows us to clarify both what contemporary organizations are already doing to make their culture women-friendly, and how they might truly gain from the feminine perspective.

First, we need to briefly define the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” Simply equating them with “men” and “women” is clearly inaccurate – and unfair, as an organization may successfully apply feminine approaches without having significant female leadership, and vice versa. A more nuanced definition is required. Here, we’ll use the one put forth by Gerard Hofstede, the celebrated social psychologist: “Masculinity stands for a society in which social roles are clearly distinct. Men are supposed to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success. Femininity stands for a society in which social gender roles overlap. Both men and women are supposed to be more modest, tender, and concerned with the quality of life.”

Implications for Women in the Organization

Artifacts

Pinking the Organization

Espoused Beliefs and Values

Empowering Women

Underlying Assumptions

Embracing the Feminine

Let’s remember that, for many companies, integrating women into their workforces is very new – a profound institutional and social adjustment since the Civil Rights Act first barred sex discrimination in 1964. So all three of these levels are valuable; all represent progress and difficult advancement.

However, the model shows that companies can choose deeper and more insightful acceptance of women and feminine values/ approaches, if they want to reap the full benefits of the feminine contribution. And this is, of course, not only about women; men are equally affected by the changes.

Pinking the Organization Pinking the Organization looks at the artifacts in the organization – from the relatively trivial (women’s bathrooms) to the weighty (family-friendly benefits). In organizations at this level, there is an awareness that women are needed, and effort is made to ensure that they are accommodated in key ways. Men also benefit by gaining time off for births, flexible work conditions, and an increased focus on communication. photo: B & J

By Terry Grim

Three Levels of Organizational Culture (Schein)

Empowering Women Empowering Women goes further: core beliefs about the value of women are turned into formal action. In organizations at this level,

there is real energy around enabling women to be successful.

Companies promote and mentor women because they get a lot of value – including, most tangibly, in the bottom line – from the skills and knowledge they bring. The enthusiasm at this level is genuine. Women appear at all levels of management, with some rising stars running major areas.

Embracing the Feminine Embracing the Feminine is a transformational level: much more than empowering women, it’s about enabling a feminine culture.

It reflects a different set of underlying beliefs about how a company should do business, and requires deep questioning of prevalent business models. Instead of the masculine values of win-lose, the focus is on win-win. Referring back to Hofstede, this organization solves conflict through negotiation, is relationship-oriented, and places a high value on people. Whereas in Empowering Women, women compete on equal footing with men in the existing organizational model, Embracing the Feminine encourages both men and women to solve new problems with new behaviors.

While it’s difficult to find actual metrics about where companies fit on this spectrum, general reading suggests that major US corporations have “pinked” the organization. They know it’s critical to attract female talent and have attempted to create womenfriendly environments. The most advanced companies have moved into “Empowering Women,” with strong female leadership and presence.

But (again, based on readings), even those that are farthest along are making only tentative steps into Embracing the Feminine.

One example is Google, which has a Chief Culture Officer whose job it is to infuse fun (fun reflects “feminine” values of health, connection, holism, etc.) into the organization. PepsiCo gives employees plots of land to start organic gardens. IBM has found that encouraging social interactions pays big dividends; a recent internal survey there suggested that for each additional internal email contact, $948 of revenue was generated. And a decade ago, Deloitte LLP began rolling out its Mass Career Customization program, which lets employees of either gender ramp up or ramp down their careers for the different stages of their lives. Deloitte’s initiative has become a model for many other corporations.

Yet, according to Catalyst, only 20 Fortune 500 companies are currently run by women. These include heavy-hitters such as General Motors, IBM, Yahoo, Xerox, PepsiCo, and Campbell Soup Co. – but with only 14.2% of senior positions in the S&P 500 held by women, the pipeline simply doesn’t exist to significantly boost these numbers. A study performed in 2008 found that American culture is deeply ambivalent about elevating women in management. And one of the main issues may be that women are still expected to manage with the same rules of the game as men. Without embracing more feminine assumptions, the pace of change will continue to be glacial.

The US is ranked 28th out of 145 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2015 gender gap study, behind Scandinavian countries, other European countries, and some African countries. In a competitive global environment, we cannot wait while more countries pass us by. Trends point to a growing need for women and feminine values. Change is never easy, but it is time to move Beyond Pink. //// Terry Grim is a partner at Foresight Alliance and an adjunct professor at University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Foresight.

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Gender as the Machine

By Shane Saunderson and V i c t o r i a Sc r u b b

We’re playing God again. Every day it seems that videos, articles, or images emerge of humanity’s latest triumph in the robotics world and, with each subsequent release, we inch closer and closer to looking at ourselves through a digital mirror. Our ability to push beyond the boundaries of what was thought possible has always been our greatest capacity as humans, however, robotic and AI advancements have a unique place within this capacity for the eerie implications they afford. The future of humanoids in particular is a strange space, where we see the best and worst of humanity quite literally reflected back at us as fabricated versions of ourselves. We see some of society’s most poignant topics and issues exaggerated or toyed with in an artificial sphere, and perhaps no topic more widely leveraged or relevant than that of gender.

Like technology, gender permeates and penetrates

the intangible and tangible spaces of our everyday lives from the moment we are born. Yet, this omnipresent aspect of our being is constructed – a fallacy and a fiction of social expectations, norms, and beliefs. Constructed, but made very real through its intertwining with the biological categories of male and female. Unlike the social aspect of gender, which focuses on personality or behavioral traits, the physiological aspect of gender, or sex, is rooted in physical traits – chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs. In the human world, sex is the starting point from which we are socialized into a gender; but in the world of technology, the starting point is gender, from which a representation of a man or woman is built.

Thus, as we find technology appropriating gender, we must first ask what we mean by gender within the realm of technology. Second, we must carefully explore how gendered roles are being used in the design and intentionality of the technologies we create.

And last, we must deeply ponder the role of gender in AI and the world to come.

photo: Caroline Davis2010

Exploring Gender in AI: Sexbots and Terminators

Our DNA sets us apart from all other species, and our flesh and blood will distinguish us from our humanoid counterparts. Thus, our humanness is deeply connected to our biology, and it is within this biology that we begin to unravel and deconstruct gender.

Through chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs, we are able to perpetuate the human species. It is a trait that we share with all living things – the capacity to reproduce. In this sense, our gender becomes a defining characteristic, as, in the barest forms of reproduction, it is the mechanism through which we as a species can procreate.

However, the role we play in this perpetual game also has broader implications through our gender. The obvious and non-obvious physiological differences between men and women – reproductive organs, body shapes and sizes, chemical and endocrine levels – both force and implicate differences in our minds, personalities, and behaviors. This divide is where culture starts to curate expectations around appropriate behaviors of men and women, or the creation of masculinity and femininity. It is in this divide where we also see the distinction between gender as it relates to our physiological differences (sex) versus gender as the socially indoctrinated (culture). Onto sex, each society normalizes its own beliefs, rules, and assertions about how men and women should behave, blurring the line between nature and nurture. Over time, what it means to be male or female becomes synonymous with what it means to be masculine and feminine, and is encompassed as a singularity under the term “gender.”

Throughout human history, sex, sexuality, and sexual expression have been the driving force behind the creation of gendered roles and the boxes we draw around them.

But as we understand more clearly the distinction between sex and our reproductive role, and gender and our prescriptive role, we start to see how what is biological and what is social have become deeply intertwined. We see that while some characteristics and personality traits have a foundation in biological differences, most of what we deem masculine or feminine is culturally determined.

// We are currently hard-coding our limited, 21st century views of gender into the long-term fabric of robotics and, by extension, society. //

The Machine as Gender Anthropomorphizing technology is fantastical, but gendering them is an experiment fraught with complication and countless pitfalls. The humanoid form is designed to be human, but whether it looks like it is or isn’t human is a very different question from whether it acts and behaves like one. So far, we have solved this by programming humanoids with the prescriptive performative behaviors associated with masculinity and femininity.

Since there is no biological foundation with robotics, we can only ever assign gender as it is socially defined – with all the nurture and none of the nature. As a result, we are forced to think about humanoids as a set of characteristics, abilities, and personality traits around an intention. We have to ask how we want it to look and how we want to it to function, and then decide if that profile leans towards our idea of masculinity or femininity. This ability for non-humans to be programmed with a gendered identity even without having a biological sex reveals that the two sides of gender, though related, are not the same. In fact, we are not making male and female humanoids at all, but rather machines that resemble the male and female form and are programmed to express desired characteristics of masculinity or femininity.

We could therefore have a female-looking humanoid with very masculine traits, or vice versa, or a humanoid with any combination of masculine and feminine traits.

And if we hypothesize that we can create, for example, “femininity” without the biological traits of a female, then we must also push ourselves to reconcile the potential for the biology of the female to exist without the rigid social expectations of “femininity.” Furthermore, when we break the limitations of the biological determinism of gender, we see that sociologically, it can be a very complex and ambiguous topic – one that forces our definitions to push beyond even the binary bounds of masculinity and femininity. In doing so, we draw a crucial distinction between female versus femininity and male versus masculinity.

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BRITISH ICONS GLOBAL LEGENDS REBORN

Thought Experiment: Putting the Androgyny Back in Androids

So What?

Regardless of whether or not we crack the gender riddle and how extremely and incorrectly we assign gender traits to our artificial beings, one thing we need to realize is that we are at a pivotal moment in time. While algorithms will undoubtedly be created to allow AI to evolve and adapt along with human beings, it is in the recent past and near future that some of the foundational components of artificial intelligence will be written into code. And while the window dressings may change with time, we are currently hard-coding our limited, 21st century views of gender into the long-term fabric of robotics and, by extension, society.

Today, even in our own society, it is possible within the timeframe of pregnancy to experience true gender neutrality. For a brief moment, we are neither male nor female, masculine nor feminine: we are simply human. Perhaps one day it will be possible through humanoids to expand the understanding what it means to be genderless; to create a humanoid without the physical characteristics or social constructs of a gender. What would the implications of genderless bodies be on our society and on our understanding of gender? Moreover, is it even possible to think of humanoids outside of our own constructs of form and function – or will they be too “human-like” to escape?

The physiological differences of males and females is often the starting point from which social and cultural expectations are mapped, but as we’ve explored here, certain understandings of the definition of gender can be hugely simplistic and limiting, to the point of being dangerous. Gender traits written into seemingly innocuous lines of code to create a sexbot here or a terminator there could have ripple effects that echo and expand into the future, resulting in us ultimately looking in a mirror, hundreds of years from now, and seeing a reflection that looks a lot like today. Perhaps being gendered is an inescapable part of the human experience, but perhaps it need not be the same for humanoids; in the AI world, gender could be obsolete, so long as we program it that way. //// Shane Saunderson is co-head of IC/Things at Idea Couture.

Victoria Scrubb is a research analyst at Idea Couture.

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A fun game to play at home is to work through the mental exercise of trying to design a truly genderless robot. If, as we describe above, social gender can be an open and complex topic, and if we’re playing God anyway, why don’t we simply remove gender altogether? While we’re at it, why not just create additional genders? Like any good mind-bender, this experiment has at least three outcomes.

In a Puritan’s world and working directly, the answer is simply put: no, we cannot design something truly genderless, because we cannot remove our minds from the social constructs of gender.

We build masculinized or feminized versions of robots not simply to satisfy our own vanity or sexual desires, but because we have no other frame of reference for human intelligence. We can speculate on what these may look like, however, even our speculations will likely be rooted in the known and we do not have a model to work from for the absence of gender.

This isn’t for a lack of trying to explore these questions, but the nature-nurture conundrum always gets in the way. It is at this point that we meet face to face with the reality that the intertwining between nature and nurture is so complex that we don’t really know where one begins and the other ends. We don’t actually know what aspects of our minds are “male,” “female,” “masculine,” “feminine,” or simply “human.” Short of massively violating the rights of countless individuals for years – from birth until the time that their minds have fully grown to help isolate learned roles from natural differences between men and women – it is exceptionally difficult to filter out thousands of years of social indoctrination.

And what of those other cat-skinning methods alluded to earlier?

Indirectly, there are two obvious possibilities to explore. We could create a sentient being that is additive, an equal combination of both male and female design. However, in doing this, have we not simply stuffed two minds into one box? A combination of genders is not a lack thereof, but an excess of genderization. Playing on our title – which highlights the extremes of gender misinterpretation – all we have accomplished in this scenario is creating a hypersexualized, overly aggressive and violent robot with a gender identity crisis.

On the flip side, we could go the subtractive route, creating an entity that exists at the overlap between female and male and keeping only those parts that are common. However, in doing so, do we remove so much that what’s remaining cannot even qualify as human? Here, the challenge becomes finding the difference between female and femininity. Even if we can, it begs the question whether our gender, male or female, is integral to our intelligence and humanity.

The reality of a perfect, genderless design likely exists somewhere between the additive and subtractive cases. The right answer probably lies along a spectrum between the two – combining some parts and taking out others – somewhere along that female-femininity line. However, this realization leads us back to the same issue originally established in this thought exercise. It is our lack of understanding of our own minds and gender – be it native or learned – that limits our ability to truly understand, and therefore replicate, human intelligence.

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B y J o n at h a n C o h e n

With increasing access to medical and recreational cannabis across the United States, the face of cannabis users is undergoing a rapid transformation. The notion of the traditional stoner is shrinking; Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Brad Pitt's couch-bound character in True Romance are now only a microcosm of the current demographic. So who are the new users? More importantly, who are the next ones? And what will drive the proliferation of this product? The answers to these questions are complex and varied, but they are also the key to growing this rapidly emerging industry from a multi-billion dollar business to a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem of products that center around a new lifestyle and way of being.

Let's focus on recreational use, though the line between medical and recreational marijuana can often overlap – and, admittedly, the overlap is a key point to its potential growth. But for now, we’ll focus on what can drive the mainstream and self-directed use of a variety of cannabis-related products. While the industry is seeing rapid growth in its current form, to expand beyond the initial excitement requires a deeper understanding of who is consuming, why they’re consuming, and how a system of products can fit into their lives. It’s also about harnessing this understanding to help shape the benefits of cannabis use.

We can all agree that the pace of the world is rapidly accelerating. We are all constantly exposed to a vast amount of information, and are expected to do more all the time. This extends to our work as well as our social lives. The increased level of digital interconnectivity has brought with it a constant and continuous underlying stress, causing people to feel torn or fragmented and overwhelmed.

The popularization of yoga, meditation, and a variety of Eastern healing modalities are a clear indication that we, as a society, are searching for alternatives. Yet, many of us are living with an increasing level of stress that builds and grows, demanding that our tolerance to carry this load continually increases until the bottom drops out and we’re forced to slow down. As the data shows, women are suffering from this even more than men.

The US Office on Women’s Health explains how “anxiety is a normal response to stress. But when it becomes hard to control and affects your day-to-day life, it can be disabling. Anxiety affects nearly one in five adults in the United States. [And] women are more than twice as likely as men to get an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.” So how are people coping? What steps are they taking to keep a rudimentary experience of anxiety from becoming a disorder, and why are women experiencing this more than men?

The full answer to why women experience more stress is beyond the scope of this conversation, but Daniel and Jason Freeman,

photo: Christopher Lynn

Know Your Audience How Female Consumership is Changing the Future of Cannabis

authors of The Stressed Sex, wrote an op-ed explaining the heart of it: “Considering that, on the whole, women are paid less, find it harder to advance in a career, have to juggle multiple roles, and are bombarded with images of apparent female ‘perfection,’ it would be amazing if there wasn’t some emotional cost.”

The Telegraph published an article titled “Anxiety: the epidemic sweeping through Generation Y,” and the National Center for Biotechnology Information explained how “autoimmune diseases affect 8% of the population, 78% of whom are women.” While there is often no known cause for autoimmune diseases, many approaches to these conditions focus on stress reduction, stress management, and increased body awareness. But many who attempt to preemptively manage their stress, or those who are forced to do so because their body begins to break down, often find the attempt to achieve balance a struggle that requires a great deal of time and financial resources.

Enter cannabis.

With the effects of use described as relaxing, calming, mentally stimulating, creatively enhancing, and pain reducing, cannabis can be positioned as a strategic offering for stress reduction. For a period of time, cannabis use can reset a user's stress baseline.

It can also help users gain perspective on their stress, something that is often difficult to do while in the frays.

But selling stress relief isn’t sexy. It’s also vague and passive.

The greater opportunity will come from the advancement of cannabis as a tool for self-awareness and reflection. A tool for living “Better” – the notion of Better with a capital B as a state of being, to be defined and customized and sold as an antidote to the stress of modern life.

The company that can understand how to define Better, and build an ecosystem of products around this, will not only capture the female demographic, but they will transition cannabis use into a lifestyle where excessive stress is no longer seen as an inevitability, but an antiquated way of being that is no longer accepted in chronic doses.

And, as the new face of use continues to be defined, the old social stigma around cannabis – the image of the stoner, the notion of being lazy, the association with the underachiever – is being replaced by the caring mother, the taxpayer, the responsible employee, the creative professional, and the entrepreneur.

Currently, women are leading the charge toward full legalization.

As The Atlantic wrote, “Activist women in organizations like the NORML Women’s Alliance, Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse (MAMA), and Moms for Marijuana International not only support women’s marijuana use, but they’re also working to challenge drug laws that they feel unduly harm pot users while leaving violent criminals out on the streets.”

Women Grow, Women of Weed, Stiletto Stoners, and Cheryl Shuman (founder of the Beverly Hills Cannabis Club), among many others, are redefining the category. Women consume cannabis differently, for different reasons, and have a unique consumption aesthetic. With this in mind, many entrepreneurial organizations are putting women on the front lines of developing cannabis products and businesses.

The old stoner culture that celebrated the psychoactive properties of the plant and embraced a level of escapism and heavy sedation is not congruent with this new demographic.

The outlaw mentality is outdated. As Bloomberg explains, “Winning over women will require more than just churning out pink bongs.

Women use marijuana differently, often preferring alternatives to lighting up joints.”

As cannabis culture continues to grow, an entire generation of users will have a relationship with cannabis products who may have never even smoked the plant. Delivery mechanisms will be reimagined, and the opportunity to develop entire ecosystems of CPG-type offerings will explode.

Likewise, companies will develop products with a variety of different value propositions – from budget conscious consumers, to celebrity-inspired goods, to brands that look to Gucci and Tiffany & Co. for inspiration. For many, living Better will change consumption from a utilitarian process to a luxury activity. They’ll embrace stress relief and relaxation as a reward for working hard.

It will become a modern privilege through unique strain engineering and specialty products – while mainstream cannabis coffees, teas, butters, spreads, lotions, and more will democratize relaxation to the masses.

Beyond products, a lifestyle will develop. As people come out of the cannabis closet, they feel a sense of connection to others that they have long missed by having to keep their use a secret.

The Atlantic stated how “there’s an air of cognitive dissonance about it, that a woman, especially a nurturing, professional woman, could both smoke pot and not be Jim Breuer in Half Baked was, to many, a revelation.” Companies have to seize the opportunity to foster this connection and newfound freedom.

It's not about developing the Starbucks of weed – the goal of every cannabis entrepreneur these days. It's about building a relationship with consumers that relates to their overall health, and how everything they want to achieve in their life can be tied back to their ability to withstand stress.

Chronic stress not only taxes the body; it taxes the mind. When companies can refuel a consumer's drive to keep going, they begin to offer real value.

The caveat here is that cannabis isn’t the cure to solve all of the world’s problems. There are downsides and drawbacks. But the current model of generations of chronically stressed people is also not sustainable, and cannabis could very well be the release valve.

The company that can start with cannabis and evolve into a holistic approach into providing solutions to simplify and de-stress life – from food, to clothing, to life management and beyond – will truly differentiate themselves from competitors.

And we'll all be Better for it. //// Jonathan Cohen is an executive producer and resident filmmaker at Idea Couture.

// The image of the stoner, the notion of being lazy, the association with the underachiever, is being replaced by the caring mother, the taxpayer, the responsible employee, the creative professional, and the entrepreneur. //

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We need to reexamine the origins of all our assumptions and test them across a wide range of possible futures. Honest thought will be uncomfortable. Rigorous reflection may expose our fragilities. Straight dialogue can be difficult. Plunging in and taking stock of uncertainty may make us feel vulnerable. But, ultimately, we emerge more resilient. If you're thoughtful, ambitious, and intellectually curious... you might like it here. ideacouture.com/join-us

re/think

Axor Citterio E

Kirstin Hammerberg, Head of Strategy, Brand Creating meaningful brands for the uncertainties of tomorrow

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// It doesn’t matter if your future has jetpacks or postgenderism if both are nothing more than artistic wish fulfillment. //

How to Rescue Strategic Foresight

By

J aya r

L a F o n ta i n e

Over the past several years, two independent research efforts have been making substantial contributions to our understanding of how and why humans think about the future, and how we might become better at identifying and training people to more accurately forecast it.

A small cottage industry of researchers from the biological and psychological sciences are trying to solve the puzzle of where the human ability to think about the future came from, and how much that ability impacts the future itself. Among the intriguing ideas coming out of this community is the Janus hypothesis, which states that human memory evolved for the purposes of planning for the future rather than cataloguing the past for its own sake. In other words, humans have longterm memory so that we can remember the past and draw on its lessons to guide our future actions. “The past is totally irrelevant unless it impacts survival and fitness, and from a fitness perspective what matters

is foresight.” says psychologist Thomas Suddendorf, a key researcher in the areas of human and animal foresight. This is a provocative notion, since in the history of psychology it’s been memory – rather than future thinking – that has long fascinated researchers.

The field also contains disputes that directly challenge the use and limits of future thinking. Some researchers, like Suddendorf, believe that future thinking was a key factor in driving the evolution of human culture from small hunter-gatherer bands to the vast and interconnected nation states that exist today. Others, like psychologist Alex Mesoudi, argue that culture evolves apart from the intentions that humans might have for the future.

Quite a lot hangs on this, like whether the future of culture can be created through human intention, or lies outside the realm of our meddling, like an itch in our collective experience that we can’t scratch. Anyone interested in how we think about the future and why foresight matters should be watching this developing field closely.

We’ve also been learning a lot about the skills that make up a good future thinker.

The publication of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction is a milestone in social scientist Philip Tetlock’s decadeslong project to understand why some people are better than others at making accurate predictions. In some ways, his findings are prosaic: great forecasters – or “superforecasters” as he dubs them – ensure they get a balanced media diet from sources that represent all points on the ideological spectrum, tend to be concerned with accuracy and fine-tuning rather than making grand proclamations, willingly adjust their confidence about their future claims when new information comes along, collaborate well with others, and are attuned to their own biases and knowledge blind spots.

What’s surprising, however, is how much better superforecasters are at predicting the future. During a CIA-sponsored forecasting tournament focused on geopolitics, Tetlock’s team of identified superforecasters performed 50-70% better than an average,

photo: Kristen Curette

His Future Her Future Their Future Our Future

unweighted crowd of participants. They also substantially outperformed prediction markets staffed by professionals from the intelligence community itself, many of whom, no doubt, had very particular geopolitical domain knowledge and experience that the superforecasters lacked entirely.

In other words, a keen, open-minded, nonpartisan citizen doing Google searches may well be better at predicting the future of the Kim regime in North Korea or impending massacres in warlord-controlled African states than even a seasoned intelligence sector veteran.

Together, these lines of research represent real progress in understanding the limits and possibilities of human future thinking.

It’s an exciting time to be interested in human foresight.

You’d assume that the futurist community would be alive with buzz about the work of researchers like Suddendorf, Mesoudi, and Tetlock. And, if futurists were genuinely interested in improving their ability to think clearly about the future and help others to do the same, I suspect you’d be right. But

here’s how this research has really been received: Other than a few voices in the wilderness, Tetlock’s work has been roundly criticized, ridiculed, and ignored by professional futurists. Some painted his findings as representing a return to the notion of forecasting as a form of prophesying that doesn’t take seriously the sheer complexity of the modern world. Others – especially those whose forecasts tend to stretch a decade or further into the future – blanched at Tetlock’s claim that even the abilities of highly skilled superforecasters were ineffective for timelines longer than eighteen months, and insisted that his methods drastically restricted the human imagination.

Things get even more puzzling in the case of Thomas Suddendorf’s work on the evolution of human foresight. During our conversation, Suddendorf was surprised to find out that the discipline of strategic foresight – a term that, in many ways, is a rebrand of futurism – existed at all. It was alarming to me that I could be the first member of my profession to reach out to

one of the leading researchers who was scientifically investigating the very skill in which we claimed superior ability and expertise.

You might find these receptions puzzling, but as someone familiar with the professional milieu of futurists, I can tell you that none of this is surprising. The mantra of the modern futurist is that the future is simply unpredictable – moreover, that it is somehow more unpredictable today than it was yesterday – and therefore the only reasonable course of action is to tell stories of multiple futures and develop strategies that somehow function well in each, which is just what they claim to do.

The main controversy within the world of futurists over the past several years has not been over whether their methodology is actually effective for making consistently good predictions about the future, but rather over what types of stories get told and who gets to tell them. This battle is being waged between two broad groups of futurists: what I’ll call “classical futurists,” who tend to be older, whiter, and more male, and whose view of the future tends to turn on suprapersonal domains like technology, economics, and geopolitics, and “critical futurists,” who tend to be younger, hipper, artier, and more diverse, and whose view of the future tends to turn on human-centric domains like culture, values, and social movements.

Allow me to issue a status report on this tempestuous teapot: the critical futurists are either gaining ground or supplanting classical futurists, depending on where you look or who you ask. The classical futurist’s preoccupation with technological innovation, the fruits of entrepreneurship, and continued economic growth are increasingly seen as stodgy, myopic, and politically conservative in outlook; they are in stark contrast with the critical futurist’s focus on understanding and articulating futures that have, at their heart, a vision of social justice, environmental and economic sustainability, and widespread cultural change in keeping with a generally progressive worldview.

I recently had a conversation with a wellknown futurist about why it seemed that critical futures thinking was becoming an essential tool in the business world. Her perspective was that, as the gender balance among managers and directors tilts for the first time toward women, management styles are moving away from the tech-driven, trend-focused futures preferred by men in leadership positions, and toward futures built around broadened cultural awareness,

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There are professionals that are serious about future thinking. They’re just not futurists, mostly. Those bores who make a living exploring how the future might plausibly turn out – actuaries, forecasters, statisticians, and so on who, let’s not forget, count both men and women in their ranks – are keenly professionally interested in how their forecasts map to the eventual reality, and are obliged to discard their models of the future should they fall short.

That’s how the predictive power of forecasting models improves: error by error.

Futurists, on the other hand, exhibit the opposite tendency; they are keen to think about the future in its unarrived state, but care less about how things turn out in fact because the reality is often far less interesting and frustrates their expectations. “Futurists as a subculture seem to organize their lives as futureexperience theaters,” consultant Venkatesh Rao observed on his blog Ribbonfarm.

“These theaters are perhaps entertaining and interesting in their own right, as a sort of performance art, but are not of much interest or value to people who are interested in the future in the form it might arrive in, for all.”

When unmoored from quantitative methods, investigations of the future come to reflect the personal sensibilities and political sympathies of futurists, rather than the comparatively drab facts of the matters that actually shape the future. A futurist’s secret wish is that the world comes to resemble the one in their imaginations rather than, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee characterized everyday life, the march of “just one damned thing after another.”

Unfortunately for them, the future doesn’t really care what you think or want.

For classical and critical futurists alike, much of the furniture of the universe – from brute probabilistic facts and statistical realities through to our evolved human nature – is reduced to kindling. Strategic foresight as it’s practiced today represents a drift away from the centuries-long project to improve our ability to ascertain the nature of risk in an honest and rigorous way. The disciplines of quantitative forecasting and risk analysis ought to keep futurists in check; without their guidance, the project of imagining the future in good faith is replaced with “art piece” futures, hamstrung by ideology and marred by blind spots.

This form of “future art” has nothing to do with sound future thinking. Art is often a means of expressing a yearning or dread for a world to come, but it can tell us little about the way the world will be in fact. An artist’s statement of intent at least labels his or her art as an expression of their personal perspective; the scenarios and artifacts of both classical and critical futurists carry no such disclaimer. It doesn’t matter if your future has jetpacks or postgenderism if both are nothing more than artistic wish fulfillment. //// Jayar La Fontaine is a senior foresight strategist at Idea Couture.

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empathetic listening methods, and collaborative, creative visioning preferred by women.

If my colleague is right, then something like critical futures will likely be an essential tool of industry leaders for years to come.

To which I say: great, but so what? It doesn’t much matter what domains you explore, whose voices you include, or which political vision you articulate if – as is the case with classical and critical futurists alike – you’re not really serious about doing good future thinking in the first place.

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B y Ja m e s A i ta, S t ep h a nie K a p t ein, a n d Melanie Levitin

Menstruation.

Uncomfortable? That’s a common response. This widespread taboo has allowed the “feminine hygiene” industry to operate without governance or pressure to innovate for the last 85 years. The conversation, however, is opening up, and a revolution is beginning in an industry that has been stagnant for too long.

Menstruating women were ostracized in biblical times. Like many unexplained phenomena, periods were associated with black magic, sinfulness, and disability. In several religions and societies, women were physically separated from men, often requiring a separate living space during their menstrual cycles.

As modern science connected menstruation with ovulation, and as women better established themselves in society, there were shifts in the perceptions of menstruation. However, many of the reactions to periods, such as the separation from men in places of worship, or the downplaying of the pain related to menstruation, are still abundant today.

This sidestep approach to menstruation has left innovation and opportunity on the table. The tampon was invented in 1931, but there has been little to no innovation in the 85 years since. Game changers driven by the intuition of an untapped industry and intrinsic motivation to change the experience for women have recently emerged to push the comfortably idle industry. While innovators in the Western world are developing technology-enabled DivaCups that send feedback through smartphones, groundbreakers in

Menstrual Designer: Jen Lewis; photo: Rob Lewis

Disrupting the 15 Billion Dollar Menstruation Industry third-world countries are bringing pads and tampons to the masses for the first time. The playing field is unequal, and the menstruating experience for women is disparate. Nevertheless, the level of change is the same: huge.

The taboo around periods is woven deep into our language and imagery, or lack thereof, both in day-to-day conversations and at a societal level.

We have euphemisms galore for periods (“Aunt Flo,” “Mother Nature’s Gift,” “Monthly Visitor,” “On the Rag,” “Surfing the Crimson Tide,” “Shark Week,” “Exclamation Point”) and, as a society, we shy away from the topic. Even feminine hygiene manufacturers exacerbate the problem – the first and only time an advertisement depicted menstrual blood in red versus the non-threatening blue liquid was in 2011.

For the majority of the population, the signals of change are still unseen and unheard. Most women continue to buy the same products from brands that have dominated the industry for hundreds of years, unaware of the budding revolution. Without conversation, consumer awareness, and pressure for change, household name brands of the pad and tampon industry succeed despite being laggard. The downfalls of current popular products range from eco-unfriendliness, to toxicity risks, to promotion of period shame, to products being priced at extraordinarily high costs.

The National Women’s Health Network reports that 12 billion pads and 7 million tampons are dumped into US landfills annually, and that’s just the disposal side. When you factor in the production, especially of plastic applicators, the ecological footprint grows even larger. Perhaps even more unsettling are tampons’ possible effects on the body. Over the past 50 years, the composition of tampons has shifted from natural ingredients like cotton, to synthetic ingredients such as rayon and plastic, especially among the big tampon manufacturers. These synthetic materials, along with absorbency, can create an ideal environment for bacteria, resulting in toxic shock syndrome, a potentially fatal illness.

Most recent innovations in the pad and tampon industry have focused on comfort and absorbency, and have done little to change the social stigma around periods. Alternately, they have promoted period shame by creating “silent” or “camouflaged” packaging. It’s not that the pad and tampon manufacturers are hoping to exploit women’s insecurities about bleeding; they are simply answering consumer wishes. Perhaps, however, they should be leading the conversation instead of following it. Now, they’ve left a gap for today’s “period revolutionaries,” with strong voices and beliefs about not only shifting the conversation, but changing the industry altogether.

The global feminine hygiene industry is projected to reach $15.2 billion by 2017, based on market research from Global Industry Analysts, Inc. But today, radical shifts are already taking place with startups emerging across the globe. Lunapads is a Canadianbased startup that was founded on the idea that there is a better way to make menstrual pads from both a health and ecological perspective. They manufacture reusable pads and pantyliners which are used by thousands and help divert over 2 million pads and tampons from landfills every month. They also donate their products to low-income families domestically and in underserved populations of East Africa.

While Lunapads, among others, are helping support low-income populations, the cost of menstrual products is still an enormous problem. The United Nations reports that just 43% of girls in developing nations attend secondary school, largely due to poor access to feminine hygiene products. In 2010, an AC Nielsen and Plan India report found that in India, the situation is so atrocious that less than 12% of women use pads due to their cost, and that the majority of Indian women rely on old fabric, husks, dried leaves, grass, ash, sand, or newspapers for menstruation needs – leading to a whole host of health issues.

Arunachalam Muruganantham’s wife was one of these many women. When he discovered the women in his family were resorting to dirty rags instead of sanitary napkins during their menstruation to aid the

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family budget, Muruganantham was motivated to help.

He spent five years building and testing a machine that could manufacture sanitary pads at a fraction of the price using local materials. This ingenious machine went on to win an innovation award from the Indian Institute of Technology in Chennai in 2006, and is now installed in 2,400 locations across India and 17 other countries, making his aim – for every Indian woman to have access to sanitary napkins and the chance of a livelihood – a reality.

Muruganantham was able to create a solution for a problem facing a specific demographic of female.

With half the world population being women, the innovation doesn’t stop there. While local materials and manufacturing can achieve affordable menstrual products, so can reusability. Perhaps one of the most popular options comes from the slew of new companies producing so-called “period panties.” These reinvented underwear are absorbent, washable, and designed to be used in the place of, or in addition to, tampons or menstrual cups.

New York City-based Thinx – launched in January 2014 – is one startup making such underwear. Their anti-microbial and leak-resistant panties come in six different designs and claim to hold up to two tampon’s worth of “flow” without the wearer feeling it. Thinx, like its rivals Knix Wear, PantyProp, and Dear Kate, claims to have patented fabrics that are moisture wicking and leak resistant, cost a fraction of what the average woman spends on tampons per year, come in a variety of designs, and last roughly two years. With a value proposition like that, it’s no wonder they are all experiencing an increase in popularity. Thinx alone has sold 200,000 pairs of thongs, boy shorts, and panties as of December 2015.

Tampons are getting a makeover as well. Cora and

Conscious Period have both reimagined the tampon using non-toxic, organic, hypoallergenic, chemical-free, and biodegradable materials to combat the current health-, ecological-, and design-related issues. Similarly, the menstrual cup has recently gained significant traction due to the lack of harmful chemicals used in production, low cost, durability, and minimal ecological footprint. Cup vendors such as DivaCup, Lunette, Anigan, Intimina, and Mooncup claim that these reasons, as well as decreased menstrual pain, make the menstrual cup the most compelling option for women.

Technavio predicts that this segment will have the largest growth through to 2020. DivaCup sales are reported to be growing at double digits in the US and Canada, and Intimina’s Lily Cup was crowdfunded on Kickstarter at 4000% of its goal.

And it doesn’t stop there. With the advancement of new technology, menstrual cups are being upgraded.

The “smart” menstrual cup – developed by Loon Labs – measures, analyzes, and tracks period flow. This interest in tracking and understanding the body has sparked the development of over 200 period tracking apps for smartphones. These apps allow women to track everything from the dates of their cycles, to the amount of flow, sex patterns, pain levels, shifts in mood, cervical fluid, fertility, and birth control consumption. Clue, one of the fastest growing period tracking apps, claims to have over 2 million active users in 180 countries. Period Tracker by GP International has been downloaded more than 10 million times from the Android Store alone, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. One app product designer and user Shuangyi Hou explains, “If we as a society say women should be checking in on their periods, and we give them permission to talk about it, I’m convinced it will be beneficial for women’s health.”

Periods are more than just a minor inconvenience once a month. They are an integral part of a woman, and often by extension, a man. In parts of the world, they are an economic burden causing families to choose between the health of the women in their families and their ability to work and learn with everyday essentials.

They are a reflection of how women are perceived, not only by our varying world cultures, but by themselves.

Periods are an intertwined factor in the overall health of half the world’s population. A job like that deserves more recognition and innovation than it’s been given over the last 85 years. Some game changers can see that manufacturers who enjoyed a monopoly for the last century will soon be faced with the daunting reality that they better innovate to survive. Because the conversation is starting. The industry is changing.

Period. //// James Aita is head of healthcare solutions at Idea Couture.

Stephanie Kaptein is a design strategist at Idea Couture.

Melanie Levitin is a healthcare innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

THE NEW INDUSTRIAL LEADER Menstrual Designer: Jen Lewis; photo: Rob Lewis

// The first and only time an advertisement depicted menstrual blood in red versus the nonthreatening blue liquid was in 2011. //

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Photo by Martin Seck / Equal Opportunity Institution

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The Future According to Women BY

MIRA BLUMENTHAL EMILY EMPEL ASHLEY PEREZ KARP ESTHER ROGERS FEATURE DESIGNER

RACHEL MIN

Think about the women who influence your thinking. You know the ones. They are the women you retweet, the ones whose podcasts you can’t wait to stream, and the writers whose blog posts and books you diligently consume.

They’re the ones who have the ideas that you can’t wait to share with your friends. Now think about who influences your thinking on the future. Are any of those women still on the list?

As a society, we tend to repeatedly hand over power to the same few people to envision the future for us. The Ray Kurzweils, Elon Musks, and Sergey Brins of the world are cited in countless thought pieces. The future we read about is made up of recycled bits of interviews curated from the minds of a few great men innovating in Silicon Valley. As it stands today, the prerequisites for being an expert on the future are running a tech startup that’s gone public, or directing sci-fi blockbusters.

In this feature, we set out to challenge this model. For us, there’s a gap between our everyday influencers and those who influence our thinking about the future. We wondered: What would happen if we purposefully built a view of the future curated entirely from the perspectives of women? Would talking to a large group of women (instead of a token female) yield a different view of the future? And so, we started this experiment.

We spoke to over 40 different women about their respective areas of expertise. We didn't

ask them about how women might change the future; instead, we invited them to imagine how the future might be different than today.

We were surprised to find that, in many of our conversations, the most insightful takeaways were not directly linked to the interviewee’s industry or profession, but rather to their personal experiences.

Then we had to make sense of it all. We began to link their perspectives together in unexpected ways, and new future possibilities emerged. What if, in the future, the everyday person was able to make legislative decisions?

What if, in the future, parents were treated as a political collective? What if, in the future, VR could be used as a sexual education tool for teens?

In the pages ahead, you’ll be introduced to five themes. For three of them, we highlighted a set of abbreviated interviews and key takeaways from our conversations. We then developed a thesis (“Our Thinking”) and a scenario to challenge how we think about the future today.

These sections aren’t aspirations, visions, or solutions to any single conversation we had, but rather, they are designed to be starting points for deeper conversations. We tried to cover the “What would happen if…?” and now it’s up to you to decide: “Would we even want that to happen?” or, “How might that happen differently?” So, without further ado, we are excited to present to you The Future According to Women.

#femalefutures

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01 The Future of Security We often take security for granted – until, that is, airplanes crash into our skyscrapers or anthrax arrives in the mail. A period of high alert follows, after which our sense of danger diminishes and we’re back to our usual state. But for Sharon Burke, the former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy in the Obama Administration, security is a constant consideration – and it’s not only biowarfare, tainted food sources, or radicalized governments that are top of mind for her, but the access that we all have at our fingertips, the implications of energy use on conflict, and how we can carve out a better future when the outlook looks grim.

Everyone's an Army

Q How will technology change our

notions of national security, the military, or warfare in the future?

As advanced technology is democratized and increased access is given to the individual, new opportunities will arise to both reduce and create conflict. What happens when the ability to wage war – and enforce laws or ideological beliefs – is taken up by the masses?

SHARON BURKE Sharon Burke is a Senior Advisor to New America, where she focuses on international security.

Previously, Sharon served in the Obama Administration as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy, a new office that worked to im-

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prove the energy security of US military operations.

The most advanced warfare technologies used to be in the hands of soldiers and now they're in everyone’s. You're seeing this democratization and globalization of weapons. You're seeing cellphones, the internet, additive manufacturing, drones, and all this equipment of war becoming far more widespread.

For national security, we're seeing technologies entering the military sphere globally – robotics, AI, bioengineering, missile technology, electronic warfare.

Then you have nations still looking at each other as friend or foe, and nonnation threats, such as the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. These are individuals that aren't particularly well resourced, but can access pretty lethal technologies, and that trend is going up. It's still

unclear what all that means for future security. What is the democratization and globalization of all these technologies going to look like in 50 to 100 years?

Q What does it mean to attack each

other in cyberspace rather than in a physical space with tanks and combat aircrafts?

The definitions of battle and war and weapon are shifting. We think of a war like World War II, which was big mechanized armies clashing on a field of battle, but now, to some degree, we're in a low intensity war in cyberspace.

Q How does energy fit within this

broader ecosystem?

Energy is such an interesting element when it comes to security, war, and peace because it shapes the global security environment, geopolitics, and the relationships between nations. Who has

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it, who wants it, where it comes from, how freely it flows, and the effect it has on national governments. Energy is also an input to war, as militaries can't fight without a steady source of energy.

Q How do you imagine our definitions

and uses of energy might be different in the future?

What's so fascinating right now is that the global energy mix – who is producing and who is consuming energy – is changing so dramatically. Right now, the US is once again becoming one of the top oil and gas producing countries, but no one’s sure how long it’s going to last. It could last a decade, it could last 50 years. So that's changing global energy relationships, but when you talk about 50 to 100 years out, we have a small number of producers and a lot of people competing for fuel.

Then you add in climate change, which is threatening the entire landscape of how we live, and the fuels that we consume are creating that problem. We have this conundrum where the energy that animates our entire global economy and keeps us all comfortable is also the energy that's ruining our future. Right now, a lot of global relationships and power are mirrored in who has the resources and who has the wealth, and the way we consume energy changes those patterns.

Q What kind of power-generating

technologies do you hope will become a reality in the future?

It’s human nature to hope that there's going to be some sort of amazing technology that's going to come along and change everything, and we've gotten used to that in some sectors. But that's not the history of energy in the world; energy and technology change very slowly, and I don't think it's reasonable to expect some sort of magical technology is going to come along and change everything overnight.

It's going to have to start with energy efficiency. We're going to be looking for

a number of different changes: natural gas in the near term, solar because it's a plentiful resource, geothermal, nuclear – these are all technologies we are going to have to put to various uses. I'm also a big fan of looking at energy services or end users. How do people actually use energy? Rather than just looking at the supplies, look at what people really need in order to change. We’re going to need to change transportation, for example.

It's a major consumer of petroleum fuels and there are a number of hopeful technologies in that space.

Q How important is the role of

women in the future of security?

Women's voices are varied. I've heard people say, “Oh we need more women in national security because women see security differently.” But I don't really

tal to those things, so the more women are part of the conversation, the safer we'll be. Women are absolutely necessary for building security in all parts of the world.

Q Are you personally hopeful about

the future?

I choose to be hopeful because there are so many developments that concern, scare, and worry me. I'll tell you a story.

One night, one of my sons was having trouble sleeping and was crying. When I asked him what was wrong, he said “I'm never going to get a chance to grow up because the world is going to end because of climate change and war.” So I hugged him and told him that I think he needs to see it as a challenge. Throughout human history, people have lived with war and disease and death and

The Future of Gaming

MARY FLANAGAN Mary Flanagan is a leading innovator, artist, educator, and designer whose works include game-inspired art and commercial games that shift people’s thinking about biases and stereotypes. She is also the author of the acclaimed books, Critical Play and Values at Play in Digital Games.

We have this conundrum where the energy that animates our entire global economy and keeps us all comfortable is also the energy that's ruining our future.

see security all that differently from my male colleagues. But if you bring in varied voices, you're going to have a stronger foundation for building and looking at the future. It's not a uniform progression everywhere, even in my own country, but women are increasingly a part of every industry and the conversation is very important and worth fighting for. In my own lifetime, advances for women have gone in fits and starts, where women have very quickly become part of the conversation and then lost ground. Security, in the broadest sense, means having food on the table, your children safe, and a job to support yourself and/or your family.

Women are often charged or instrumen-

danger, and always felt like there was nothing but dark clouds on the horizon for each generation.

I told him to look at the white space, not at all the threats and dangers, but at the doctors that create cures, the artists that create beauty, and the military that creates security. The response that humans have always had to threats and dangers is to create and explore and advance. You can either choose to look at everything that’s wrong and be consumed by it, or you can choose to be constructive in the face of it. I really do have faith in our ability to innovate, construct, change, and adapt.

“We’re at the beginning of a ludic explosion, if you will, where games can begin to frame lots of different parts of our lives,” says Mary Flanagan, an innovator and artist known for her work in gaming. It is, in fact, gaming that Mary believes will help foster a different way for us to look at the world – at how we behave culturally, how we take care of the environment, and how we can manage conflict.

When we think of games and conflict, the two go together quite seamlessly. After all, what is a game without someone or something to prevail against? With this comes images of swords and guns, perhaps some fiery magic spells, and an ultimate hero that emerges amidst the carnage. But Mary sees an alternative future for the medium as well.

“What I’m looking forward to is fostering a lot of diverse game makers and games that take on social issues and take on social responsibilities and nuance in interesting ways,” she says. “I’m really interested in the ways in which we can use popular media forms to actually improve the way we get along with each other, and make the world a better place. We can do that with games because they’re so dynamic, because they allow the player choice and agency.

Games reflect the complexities of the world, because they are themselves a complex art form. I’m looking at how games and new models of game playing could actually help

us solve some of the world’s pressing problems, not only by changing attitudes and beliefs, but also by modeling a problem in new ways.”

Mary acknowledges how problem solving in gaming by shooting everyone is a “binary solution to possibly solving a more complex problem.” She is looking for ways to use gaming to reimagine the entire system. “I really don’t want my world to just be what’s on a screen,” she explains. “I’m actually trying to affect larger cultural systems, like crime, poverty, and all those other big picture questions.”

She critiques our individualistic culture as a particularly significant obstacle, stating that we “need to be able to get out of our superhero mode, and not solve problems like a lone individual in a cape. We need different models of heroic problem solving, and we need to make them participatory, because the future of problem solving is going to involve a lot of people. We need to look at crowdsourcing in informed ways, not in mob mentality ways. We, the designers, of this kind of future have to really engage with these large questions and see games not as a play thing, but as powerful instruments used to understand the world.”

And these instruments don’t only have to come in the guise of blockbuster AAA games or popular apps. It can be a reimagining of some of our oldest games, like chess. “Maybe us against them was a bad model,” Mary argues. “What if chess had more players? What does that game look like?”

It’s clear that, as we stand on the precipice of rising conflicts, we have to look for the best educational tools for working towards solutions – and working with each other.

“I do think we’re going to have more war-like, game-like problems,” she says. “This is one of the reasons why we need better games. Because if we just say, ‘Oh, how we solve problems is we just kill all these people,’ or ‘how we solve problems is in these very binary ways,’ it’s not good for anyone. We have to step up the way we solve problems. We have to step up our thinking as a collective system.”

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The Future of Humanity

MADELINE ASHBY Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer, futurist, and speaker. She writes a column for the Ottawa Citizen.

She has written narrative scenarios and science fiction prototypes for organizations like Intel Labs, Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, and The Atlantic Council.

Humanity has evolved from developing our most basic survival instincts to creating nearly unimaginable accomplishments – and horrors. Today, it can feel like a utopic or dystopic future are equally plausible. We send probes to the farthest reaches of space, and then we unleash bombs on innocent people. We create inspiring medical breakthroughs, then poison the planet with irresponsible mass production.

So what does this mean for the future of us – the human race? Futurist Madeline Ashby weighs in on our challenges, tendencies, and how we may need to evolve in order to have a future at all.

Q What unexpected challenges will

the human race face in the next 50 to 100 years?

We already have a lot of challenges that we expect, but that we won't acknowledge. Take Zika, for example.

Zika is spread by mosquitoes that live longer thanks to global warming. It can also be spread from mother to child, and it's most likely to spread in countries and regions where access to abortion is criminalized. In that regard, it's the natural consequence of two trends: the trend of refusing

to deal with global warming, and the trend of institutionalized misogyny.

So we'll see more problems like that – problems that exist on two axes at once.

Q Which tools will redefine what it

means to be human?

To be human is to be flawed, and our species is hard at work at preventing, fixing, or eliminating those flaws.

If we want to preserve the potential development of humanity, we have to make multiple types of healthcare available to all types of humans. I'm hoping that the results of experiments in synthetic biology will help us with things like antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, or custom cancer care.

Q How will local and global gover nance and other systems of social organization evolve?

You’ll see a lot more distributed participation. The next big fight is voting rights, and expanding the franchise.

That's not just in the US or Canada, that's everywhere. I'm looking forward to watching the on-demand trend expand to include democracy itself. Major parties everywhere are

leaving votes on the table by not changing their policies. When they look at the margins, they'll expand the franchise.

Q How do you imagine society might

address our human tendency toward behaviors like war or violence in the future?

Violence is a behavior, but war isn't.

War is a choice. Or rather, it is the failure of all other choices. It's also a lack of imagination at work. And it's profitable – it looks good for the procurement budget – so it's easy to reach for as a strategy. It's really easy to throw money and bullets at a problem. It's much more complicated to engage in human-centered development that empowers people on the ground and gives them real agency on the path towards change.

We have to stop thinking about war as rescue. War isn't rescue. It's complication. People want power so they can have autonomy and freedom. So the real task is to give them autonomy and freedom. Which is to say, the best way to prevent war is to end poverty. And if we ever develop real universal basic incomes, possibly even with blockchains and alternative currencies, we can do that.

Q Do you believe humans have a

future? If yes, is it a future on Earth?

Some humans have a future. And some humans have a future on Earth.

And other humans have a future in space, with a long list of caveats regarding augmentation of the human body itself.

War is a choice. Or rather, it is the failure of all other choices.

It's also a lack of imagination at work.

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Julia Hemphill Research Consultant, nonprofit sector

The Future of Labor In terms of digital spaces, if you are a woman, and you exist on the internet, you are subject to abuse. There are about a million examples of this. At the moment I’m thinking about Anita Sarkeesian and that time she wanted to discuss misogyny in video games. Her efforts were famously met with a barrage threats of rape and abuse. Women in science are likewise subject to discrimination, misogyny, and sadly, sexual harassment.

There is no doubt that the internet can be a space where misogyny, racism, homophobia, and all of those other awful phobias and -isms can fester.

Catherine Cosgrove Chief of Staff to the Executive of RES PUBLICA Consulting Group

The Future of Governance Decision makers have never had so much information and so many analytical tools available to them in history, and the speed at which such tools are being developed is impressive.

Rita J. King Co-Director of Science House, a cathedral of the imagination where teams create the future they imagine

The Future of Science Most of the technology we create is used for war and entertainment. As humans, have we ever captured the upside of tech without the downside? It’s just the reality. We have weapons to hunt – well, we can kill people with them.

Alexandra Chong President at Badoo, a dating-focused social networking platform

The Future of Dating There is a very thin line between being super open and connected [online] and having access to everything while maintaining your privacy. From a legal perspective, legislation and case law have not been able to catch up with the speed and rate of technology.

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EVERYONE'S AN ARMY

Hacking Persuasion

Our Thinking What if the power to enforce laws or ideological beliefs fell into the hands of the everyday citizen?

Today, the rules of war are known; a soldier’s behavior is meant to be kept in check through clearly defined rules of engagement. But now, we are inventing new ways of waging war through methods that will be accessible to anyone, not only centralized governments or organized militia groups. As we move toward this future, the world might get worse before it gets better. If war is less prescribed and more experimental, it will be harder to take a proactive approach to national security, let alone personal security.

Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Nobody could fully fathom the repercussions of nuclear warfare until the first atomic bomb was deployed. In the future, what new forms will democratized warfare take? Will these intensify acts like cyberbullying or simply offer new platforms for radical extremists?

Already there is a new type of fear being created: everyone’s an army, and everyone’s a threat. Today, we see this manifesting in newspaper headline blips, like the interrogation of a 13-year-old schoolboy by the Secret Service over a Facebook post they misinterpreted as a threat to President Obama. Or “swatting,” where an emergency response team is called to investigate a faked emergency, such as a bogus bomb threat. The power to turn us against one another has become as easy as making one phone call. The next iteration could be much worse than calling in a SWAT team on your neighbor because you don’t like their choice of music at 2 a.m.

Technology is creating a space for people to join together, regardless of their backgrounds and credentials,

and create their own armies. Groups like Anonymous or ISIS are large-scale, modern-day examples. But what if more cohesive micro-armies emerged, centered around causes that aren’t always as extreme? What would your neighbor or roommate be fighting for? And what if you weren’t always on the same side?

The digital space provides positive connections for billions of individuals around the world – but the way we share data can also provide access into our everyday, in-the-flesh lives. In the future, selective targeting or bullying could be as easy offline as it is online today.

Imagine if groups were able to use your geolocation and IoT footprint to control the appliances in your house, increasing radiation levels to slowly poison you. Or, more subtly, they tampered with your sleep cycle by increasing the blue light emitted by devices, which has been shown to lower melatonin production.

It’s not all grim though; the women we interviewed – and in particular Sharon Burke, Madeline Ashby, and Mary Flanagan – continue to be hopeful for the future.

Sharon, for example, tells the story of her young son being unable to sleep because of his fears of the future, of climate change and war. But she goes on to explain how every generation has felt this hopelessness, and it’s within this feeling of despair that humankind takes problem solving to new heights and finds a way to persevere.

To better illustrate this, we have created a future scenario where we explore the possibilities in using democratized technology to create an army and fight flawed ideologies. As Madeline stated, war is a choice.

By acknowledging this, we are giving ourselves permission to choose unique ways of engaging with conflict.

Avery coded a few finishing touches into her ad hack. A pop of color here, a video tweak there. Perfect. It was relatively simple and to the point – almost indiscernible, yet strong enough to catch the eye and deliver its hidden message – but you’d never think it wasn’t designed by Walmart’s digital team.

She’d seen her mother, Kim, hack targeted ads thousands of times – not that she had any idea what was going on in the beginning. But, as Avery began to learn more, it didn’t take a coding genius to understand that her mother was a member of Shhhe, a hacking group dedicated to the protection of human rights from the Free Militia. Sometimes Avery even imagined that her mother was their leader – but if that were true, they’d probably live in a bigger apartment. Maybe even a house.

Not one to waste her skills, Avery put her budding coding genius to use by rewriting her grades every semester up until now. It was easy. But today, instead of simply changing her grades, she wondered if she could “encourage” her teachers to edit them on their own. It was her first attempt at this level of shadow hacking.

Avery logged into her mother’s account to upload the first ad. She set the target audience. Teachers, 27-55, located within 10-25 miles of Charlottesville, frequently searches for the following keywords: “lesson plans,” “TED-ED,” “difficult students.”

“Avery! What are you up to?” she heard in the background. Rolling her eyes, she quickly pressed the submit button.

Kim had just gotten out of the shower. She barely caught a glimpse of the ad upload confirmation page before it was exited, and she felt a sinking feeling. It was time to have a talk.

Since Avery was three, Kim recognized that her daughter was gifted in the art of persuasive technology. Kim had tried to hide her participation in

Shhhe for years. But, when Avery was nine, Kim and a group of women trolled a growing hate speechfueled Free Militia site. One of the women made a critical error by leaving her IP address open. The group tracked her social history and geolocated each of the women, hacking their smart devices to emit a dangerous amount of radiation. A conversation that had started on a message board had now escalated into a war outside the digital space. Kim was lucky – she realized what was happening fast enough. Unlike some of the other women, her reproductive organs were left intact.

After this, Kim moved away from the city and formed Shhhe. She wondered if subtle priming on the web could ever create a new normal for society – a safer normal. Social media sites had successfully tried it years ago by altering social feeds for mood.

Kim took it to the next level by embedding persuasion into hacked ads, and soon realized that not only did it work, it was mercilessly effective. Corporations had been doing this for years; now anyone with a device and an IP scrambler could quite literally change and influence the world.

Kim made her primary income through hired mercenary jobs via Shhhe. As Shhhe grew in size, so did Avery’s interest in her mother’s job. And, as Kim had worried, Avery picked up on a lot of her skills.

But instead of using it for social justice, she was more concerned about hacking her grades, or using persuasive technology on her classmates so that she could be popular.

Kim knew it was time for them to sit down and have the talk. Even if she came off sounding like a hypocrite, she was too worried that Avery could go down a dangerous road beyond hacked grades – into the physical space – like the Free Militia. The road there was easier than it looked; that’s what scared her. A synthetic biohack here, targeted radiation poisoning there. Kim always had a personal code of ethics. Now she had to figure out the best way to encourage her daughter to create her own, and stay out of jail.

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02 The Future of Entrepreneurship Parents today are master multitaskers, and Randi Zuckerberg could very well be a poster girl for it. She is not only Founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, but also the author of two books, the host of a weekly radio show, a TV host and producer, a Broadway star, and a mother of two. We spoke to Randi to discuss motherhood and entrepreneurship, the role models of the future, and how to keep up when your kids are digital natives.

Parent Relations Q What kinds of role models do you

think girls need today, and how might these change by 2040?

A growing contingent of unfulfilled parents is expanding worldwide. As their work is increasingly expected to blur with home life, the ability of parents to balance both realities is wholly dependent on the policies of their employers. What if parents exercised their power to collectively bargain for new workplace benefits?

RANDI ZUCKERBERG Randi Zuckerberg is an author, the founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, host of Dot Complicated on SiriusXM, editor-in-chief of DotComplicated.co, and a mentor on Oxygen’s show Quit Your Day Job. As an early executive at Facebook, Randi created and ran the social media pioneer's marketing programs. Since starting Zucker-

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berg Media, Randi has produced shows and digital content for PayPal, Clinton Global Initiative, and Condé Nast.

Today, there are multiple generations of women that each have differing degrees of digital savviness, so the role model we need is more of an educator; it’s more a kind of friend, one that says “alright, this is the world – it’s scary, give it a try.”

But girls that are born today, they’re digital natives. They don’t know a world where girls and boys have different access online. They don’t know a world where women aren’t tech savvy. So I think, in the future, the role models that we’re going to need are more pop culture icons that are techy, that are digital, and that are women.

I’d love to see female movie stars and pop stars represented in a way where

they’re the tech savvy ones, they’re the coders. When HBO does the next version of Silicon Valley, I’d love to see a woman represented on screen. I’d love to see more TV shows like the children’s show I’m working on now: Dot. I think, right now, getting women into tech is about basic education – giving them coding classes, encouraging them to set the tone for their daughters – but there needs to be a next step. In the future, girls need to see that it’s cool, that it’s normal, that women in pop culture are very tech savvy and they’re leaders.

Q What sort of considerations might

be built into “The Valley” moving forward, especially when designing for girls?

Girls should not know that there are “girl colors” or “girl themes.” We talk about this a lot when working on Dot.

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The Future of Fantasy Imagining what’s to come is no easy feat. With techno- and male-centric perspectives often at the core of popular cultural depictions of “The Future,” many marginalized groups remain just that – on the fringes and unaccounted for. Enter Adrienne Maree Brown: visionary fiction writer, doula, and pleasure activist. Adrienne is committed to popularizing ideas of the future that are, in some ways, antithetical to the mainstream; futures that challenge, bring into question, and force us to reevaluate our systems of education, government, and self-expression.

Being a parent is almost like being the CEO of a small company.

We were thinking: “Should we do an episode where Dot has overcome stereotypes, where people think she can’t do something because she’s a girl?” And then we thought, “Wait a minute – young girls today don’t know that they can’t do anything.

Why would we put that into their heads?” It’s going to be really important that toys, games, pop culture, and other media in the future don’t create a gap or a wedge between what girls and boys can do, what they should think, or what colors they should use.

I’d love to see all STEM learning toys be gender neutral.

preneurs, as investors, as CEOs – not as female entrepreneurs, or female investors, or female CEOs. I hope that we start to see enough gender parity in these industries so that it’s not even a word that you’ll need in front of your title a few decades from now.

Q

In your opinion, is there a correlation between parenting and entrepreneurship?

Q

Being a parent is almost like being the CEO of a small company. You have to really think: “OK, what kind of company culture am I creating? What’s our mission? What is the end vision and the outcome?”

If you’re a female entrepreneur today, you are very aware that you are a woman. Whenever I set foot anywhere tech related, I am very aware of being female – every single day of my career. I hope that, in the future, we’ll just think of ourselves as entre-

Another similarity that I see – and I think this is marvelous – is that, as an entrepreneur, you have to be really flexible. If the macroeconomic trends change, you need to be open to changing your company. If something happens in the marketplace, and you need to change your idea completely,

What might it mean to be a woman entrepreneur in the future?

you need to be adaptable. Similarly, as a parent, you go into it with ideas – but you can’t know how it’s really going to be.

Q What is visionary fiction?

Q

What trends or changes do you see disrupting parenting in the next 10 to 15 years?

It’s going to be harder and harder for parents to keep up with the digital savviness of their children. There are new apps and websites that are coming out on a daily basis. Even the most tech-savvy of us parents are going to be lapped by our children. And so, instead of what a lot of parents do today – which often involves hovering over children on their computers and having access to their accounts and passwords – that relationship is going to have to change, simply because parents won’t be able to keep up with everything their children are doing.

And that is a little bit scary, but also a little bit exciting.

ADRIENNE MAREE BROWN Adrienne Maree Brown is the Co-Editor of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, as well as a pleasure activist, doula, healer, facilitator, and writer.

Visionary fiction, at its root, is the place where thinking about the future and being cognizant of present day circumstances come together. Right now, we are living inside the imagination of white supremacists and patriarchal men who see the future as a place to dominate. They seek to dominate the resources and the planet itself. Right now, a police officer can imagine that a young, unarmed black person is dangerous and can shoot them with impunity. That's actually an act of imagination. Visionary fiction is a way of responding to and reclaiming the territory of imagination, saying: Anything that we create, we first have to be able to see in our minds and create a shared vision. We want that vision to be bottom-up and oriented to the collective. The more people who collaborate on creating a vision for the future, the more people will find a home in that future.

Q How do you see the work that

you're doing figuring into your vision for the future?

A lot of my work is around reclaiming our right to imagine. If I'm successful, there will be a lot of people who get marginalized in our current system – people of color, poor people, women, trans people, people with disabilities, queer people – who will be at the frontline of envisioning what's next, and I think that's really important.

When I tell people that marginalized groups will be coming up with visionary solutions so that we're not just surviving but actually improving the quality of our lives, they say: “You're insane, it's not possible that quality of life is going to get worse.” But that's because we have a very capitalist view of quality of life and it's all about size, growth, luxury, and comfort, instead of the quality of life that comes from deep connection,

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I want more female leadership in the world. I want to see futures emerge from a feminine and feminist perspective, but I don't think that ultimately has to be gendered.

The Future of Branding

MARISA THALBERG Marisa Thalberg is the Chief Marketing Officer at Taco

from taking good care of your family, from knowing that you have total support and other people are looking out for your personal abundance. I hope that the work I'm doing with marginalized communities helps to make value shifts feel more possible, more viable, and more exciting.

Q Is there something uniquely specific to women that fuels

your visionary thinking?

Gender is a kind of socialized space; we get created and then we buy into it. At some point I get turned into a girl or turned into a boy based on my family and my belief systems, and that has an impact. The impact of “boy” is very much about a penetrative experience in the world. “I'm going go out and dominate in order to get where I want.” The space that women are given is “I'm going to create, I'm going to open, hold, protect, care for,” and over time that does produce a certain capacity or set of capacities. I want more female leadership in the world. I want to see futures emerge from a feminine and feminist perspective, but I don't think that ultimately has to be gendered.

When I meet feminist men, I get really excited by that. Every human being has the full gender perspective within them.

I long for a return to witches and women who are powerful in their magic and who are seen in their connection to each other and to creating and bearing life, to that space in your body. I do a lot of work as a doula, and it's been incredible to support people through that journey. There's something about having that journey, having that capacity, that creates a different relationship to all living things. I'm not a mother myself, but I wonder what the future would look like if the only people who could determine it were those who had spent nine months carrying a child within them. I think you'd be less likely to destroy everything if you'd gone through that process.

When you've created everything and everyone around you, there is a sense of shared resources, shared abundance, that the ultimate abundance is family, and everyone in your society is part of your family because they're all part of raising and

shaping your children. The most valuable resource in that society is the future generation. Right now, there are many indigenous cultures that are oriented this way, where there are matriarchal lines and the future is held in the hands of the mothers and grandmothers. So this is not just a far off, sci-fi idea. The trouble we run up against is whether or not that society could coexist with societies that are run by men or that are dominated by the views of men.

Q What contribution do you see your work in visionary thinking making to the world of marketing and branding both currently and in the future?

I think most products are marketing a vision of the world.

As you're trying to sell something, you're fundamentally also selling a future – a future in which people need whatever it is that you have to offer. It always blows my mind that there are corporate structures that use the corporate space to advance technologies or practices that harm the planet, because it just seems so shortsighted as a corporate strategy. These are your consumers. Even if you can't love all of humanity, if you get rid of them, if we're all dead, no one is going to buy your products.

Q What will feminism look like in 40 years?

Figuring out our relationship to our womanness is going to be a new horizon. A lot of people in my community are using “they” and “them” pronouns instead of saying “she,” “her,” or “he,” “him.” I grew up in an environment where it was all about being a strong black woman – but I can now feel that slipping away from me. The woman part feels less and less important; the feminism part, and the humanism part, feels more and more important. I'm in a community with people who don't uphold gender as a way to tie our power. So I'm curious: would this issue even exist in 40 years? What is a feminist future, a feminist view of the world in 40 years, decoupled from gender? Things are shifting so fast in my lifetime that I feel that is definitely possible.

Bell, where she leads all product and brand marketing along with brand engagement functions. Marisa previously spent eight years at The Estée Lauder Companies, Inc., where she pioneered the company’s global digital and social marketing.

As a parent, the idea of balancing your professional and your personal life can feel perpetually out of reach.

But for Marisa Thalberg, CMO of Taco Bell, work-life balance doesn’t need to feel that way – and it starts with making a systemic change at the pop culture level and reevaluating the portrayal of working mothers in the media.

That, in part, is why Marisa started her Executive Moms online community in 2002. The blog was an early step in Marisa’s efforts to change the mainstream narrative that surrounds the working mom: a woman who is all too often depicted as someone who tries to achieve balance but never seems to succeed. For her, it's clear that the ways in which executive mothers are “branded” is not only inaccurate, it’s also unmerited.

Q How has popular media influenced

the perception of the working mom?

The media has been terribly unfair to executive moms. Think about any movie or TV show that you watch, the

“working mom” is still, in 2016, code for a harried, frazzled mother who is neglecting her kids and doesn’t have it all together. It’s incredibly insulting, especially because we’re now in an era where women are actually taking a majority role in breadwinning responsibilities. I’d love to see more positive portrayals of real working mothers, real executive moms in the media, in culture. There is so much data now that suggests that it’s actually healthy and wonderful, emotionally as well as financially, for children to grow up in a household with women and mothers who have careers.

Q How can marketers reconcile the

demand to meet customers’ needs with the ever-changing loyalties of the modern purchaser?

As much as technology is changing things at a rapid pace, our values, wants, and needs as people actually aren’t that different. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is still the best guidepost. There are just many more options. We’re in a very paradoxical time; but if you first acknowledge the

As much as technology is changing things at a rapid pace, our values, wants, and needs as people actually aren’t that different.

paradoxes, you can navigate your way through them. For example, people feel bombarded with advertising and content, yet there’s a huge impetus in marketing right now to satisfy the insatiable demand for more content.

So how do you navigate your way through that? Or, how do you, as a global brand, be more global and local simultaneously?

Q How can brands integrate a sense of

humanity into their digital campaigns?

Brand voice and how we tell our stories is going to be more important than ever. Fundamentally, people want to feel connections and technology is not negating our desire to connect, it’s changing it and, in some ways, facilitating it. So, the more a brand feels like an understandable personality that consumers can identify with and relate to, the more successful it will be.

A lot of this has to do with where to have a human touch and where to intervene with technology, and how those two things interweave.

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Alisha Bhagat Futurist and Advisor at Forum for the Future

The Future of Childcare In our current culture, a word often associated with motherhood is “sacrifice.”

This was not always the case. I hope that, by changing the ideas around things like work and gender, we can move away from this model of sacrifice and see parenthood as a part (although an optional one) of a rich, full life. Parenting is necessary – but it should also be pleasurable.

Belinda Johnson Chief Business Affairs and Legal Officer, Airbnb

Jamie Zahlaway Belsito

The Future of Regulation As a parent of two daughters, I think about their futures and the opportunities and the challenges that their generation is going to face. I’d love to see them enter their careers with all kinds of opportunities I might not have had. I have been incredibly fortunate to have a husband who has stayed home to care for our kids, which has given me all sorts of flexibility. More and more couples are having these conversations and these so-called “role reversals.” I’d love to see, if my daughters were to start families of their own, that this kind of thing will be not be thought of as a role reversal but just roles.

Arianna Huffington Co-Founder, President, and Editor-in-Chief of The Huffington Post

The Future of Media We are witnessing a global shift toward leadership values and abilities that are traditionally considered feminine: empathy, compassion, and collaboration. The more these qualities gain traction, the better off we’ll all be, women and men alike.

Advocacy Chair for the National Coalition for Maternal Mental Health

The Future of Mental Health We, as a nation, put emphasis on future generations and family, but – unless we give employees adequate time off to take care of their families, and provide workers with livable wages to allow for the health and wellness of their families – we need to stop talking about how much value we put on our families and children because, right now, we’re unable to support them as a society.

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02

PARENT RELATIONS

Mediating Parenthood

Our Thinking As the expectations for work performance grow more intense, how will the changing needs of parents impact human capital strategies?

We’re living in a world where work is designed to feel more like home, and home feels more like work. Firms like Google or Facebook aren’t just building complexes or work environments for their employees’ own self interests. While they offer dry cleaning services, “baby bonding bucks,” free meals, on-site oil changes, haircuts, and more, there is an unspoken sense of needing to give more in return. In short, the employee experience is acutely designed to make everyone stay later, work harder, and deliver more.

On the opposite end, employers are more aware and willing to allow employees to work remotely on their “own time.” And while there are clear benefits to flexible work arrangements, there’s also this undeniable fact: work-life balance is a myth. The workday has no definite end, and neither does our insecurity from the pressures that come with it.

This environment is ready for reform. But, unlike previous examples of labor unions as drivers of change, the catalyst for more flexible and balanced work environments may come from the group with the most urgent need for change: parents.

Parents matter to fostering a viable future; they are an overwhelming part of the US population – 34.4 million families have children under the age of 18, which equates to about two-fifths of all American families, and the labor force participation rate for all mothers with children under age 18 was 69.9% in 2015. They also drive significant economic output for the global economy. And now, as millennials start becoming parents, this subgroup is beginning to demand new work benefits from employers and, as they move into childrearing roles, will be a growing force of contention.

Today, collective bargaining and labor union participation is swiftly declining, but in lieu of a national agenda

on childcare, what if the next labor movement was sparked by parents as a driving force for social change?

As Jamie Zahlaway Belsito mentioned in our conversation, the current rhetoric around the importance of family rings shallow compared to the actual legislation we have in place. Both in the public and private sector, there is an emphasis on supporting and maintaining the rights or benefits of the individual citizen or employee.

In the near future, labor organizations could shift from advocating on behalf of the individual to representing the unmet interests of families or other extended social units like long-term roommates. Employers would be required to negotiate and design remuneration and benefit packages for a social unit – however that network is redefined – instead of an individual employee.

Just like health insurance today, employees would be able to choose a lifestyle “plan” to meet the needs of their social unit beyond just pay and vacation time. As evidenced by current corporate wellness initiatives, this could lead to increased workforce happiness and participation, and drive down costs. Beyond benefits, labor unions might also emphasize the need to create workplace policies that put the emphasis on care rather than productivity.

The women we spoke to all touched on the importance of parenting, and the driving force it can become. They put forward the notion that maintaining one’s identity as a parent drives both workforce performance and political participation. Using parenting as a platform for labor reform has the potential to make the workplace better, not just for moms and dads, but also for people who are aging, single, or part of other demographics. In the following scenario, we explore the concept of social unit benefits and the risks that go along with them. In this future, companies will need to have systems to actively anticipate and respond to network changes – and, if done right, we stand to collectively benefit from this greater emphasis on care.

It was going to be very awkward, that was a given. Januka had already rescheduled the meeting three times and knew that if she did it again, her plan would be penalized. She was still tempted though. It was impossible to leave all of the relationship baggage at home, and she wasn’t sure if she could stomach sitting through this. She dabbed on an extra bit of mood oil as emotional armor – it was better than nothing.

For the past few months, Januka had been meticulous about sharing her lifestyle data with the National Federation of Families (NFF). Not knowing how they would analyze her needs from this data, she also kept her own notes on what she wanted. She had multiple lists of all her dream benefits on her Thotz app – and the lists were getting long. “Welcome to the life of a mom who’s raising a kid with autism,” she thought wryly. No amount of help was ever enough.

She had to admit though, the past few months have been easier thanks to the benefits she was already getting. Yes, the blow up with her partner was extremely painful and they were no longer speaking any more than they had to, but at least they reached a decision quickly: Necie would be the one to move out of their apartment, and Januka and Kaya would be left living on their own. Necie was still a great mom, but she was also now a part-time parent. It was definitely different. But luckily, right before they separated, Necie had the foresight to join the Family Union at her company. Membership included some additional costs like health insurance, and they each had to pay into a benefits program on top of it, but the impact on their lives was profound.

Given that Januka’s company, Adventia, was a top employer, they were getting so much more than just childcare support. For instance, on days that she was working in the physical lab, she was provided with a meal prep service. She’d come home to a box

filled with fresh ingredients that had already been cut and perfectly portioned. She and Kaya would cook together. It made her feel a little better on days when she wasn’t able to pick her daughter up after playschool. To qualify for these benefits, she was required to spend a minimum of 40 hours of care time with Kaya. It was strange having to meet care quotas instead of work outputs.

She looked at her dream benefits list again: “Autonomous Bus Service (for my commute and to drop Kaya off at her early childhood learning program – must have smart car seats and an on-bus community care coordinator), Puppy Rental on Tuesdays (only day we have time for a routine activity), Activity Matching (for Kaya’s play needs), Child Travel Plan (ability to travel with Kaya on the rare business trip to a hotel with caregivers who are trusted in supporting kids with severe autism).” Her notes went on and on.

But all of these things would be icing on the cake.

The cherry on top. At the end of the conversation, she knew she wanted to keep one primary benefit: unlimited Family Care days. This was critical.

So here she was now, ready to sit across from Necie and negotiate. Who got which benefit, and who paid for it. In most cases, you could just work this out online, but NFF assigned them a Support Champion because of the contentious breakup. She knew they’d both make out ok, but couldn’t help but feel like someone would leave as the victor. She really hoped it would be her.

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03 The Future of Sex

CINDY GALLOP Cindy Gallop is the founder of Make Love Not Porn, and the founder and former chair of the US branch of advertising firm Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Her TEDTalk, "Make Love Not Porn," was one of the "most talked about presentations" at the 2009 TED conference.

Virtual Firsts

Digital etiquette – or a lack thereof – is influencing the way kids grow up, including how they think about their first sexual experiences.

Rethinking traditional notions of technology, education, and parenting offers the possibility to reset expectations for girls and boys. What if digital innovation was used as a way to create more positive realities?

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According to her Twitter bio, Cindy Gallop likes to “blow shit up,” and right now, she’s blowing up what it means to have “good sex.” Today, our definitions are often influenced by what’s represented in pornography, and only portrays and benefits a specific subset of people. “Good” isn’t the same for everyone; and, according to Cindy, the definition needs to be expanded to better reflect real life circumstances. It’s not about being anti-porn, it’s about reevaluating expectations by portraying the many different ways sex can be good.

Q What is the mission of Make Love

Not Porn?

We are building a whole new category on the internet that does not exist – social sex. I conceived of this entirely deliberately because our mission is one thing and one thing only: To help make it easier for people to talk about sex, openly and honestly, in the real world. The issue isn’t porn, the issue is the fact that we don’t talk about sex.

Our tagline is “Pro-sex, pro-porn, proknowing the difference.”

Jon Evans wrote a great post about this on TechCrunch last year, which was one of the best summations of what we’re doing. He said that the tech world has divided itself into two

separate groups: porn and non sexual content. He explained that there’s a huge gap in between, and that’s where Make Love Not Porn is; we are sexual content that isn’t porn. But because we’re so fucked about sex, people think, “Oh it’s sex, then it must be porn.” The huge mistake that the tech and business world make is that anything to do with sex is porn.

Q How would you say your future

of sex might be different from other people who are trying to reinvent the future of sex?

When media and tech blogs and publications bring themselves to write about sextech, they default to the hardware. It’s easier to write about

VR, virtual porn, and sex toys. It is way more difficult to engage with what my team is doing on the software side. We are using technology to bring people closer together in the real world. I want to help every sextech entrepreneur out there because the solution is not to shut it down or repress it. It's to open up.

The explosive growth in extreme violent porn is not driven by evil, twisted, vicious people working in the porn industry, it’s not driven by humans becoming more depraved and corrupt. It’s driven by a bunch of guys scared shitless that they’re not making any money. It’s the same as reality TV. This is why what I’m doing is important. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a business is a good guy with a better business.

Q How is the culture of Silicon Valley

shaping our notions of sex, relationships, and dating?

At the top of the tech world, like at the top of every other industry, are white guys talking to white guys.

When you have a world with all-male founding teams, with all-male tech teams, getting funded by all-male VC teams, you get all-male advisory boards. The dominant unicorns, the successful tech ventures, all have an entirely male-centric world view.

And, when you have a male-centric world view at a huge scale, that fundamentally changes human attitudes and behavior.

I normally say to men: we live in a world where the default setting is always male. Men, you have no idea

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Because we don’t talk about sex in the real world, we have no socially acceptable vocabulary with which to do so.

how much happier you would be living and working in a world that was equally designed by women as much as men. This is one of the reasons I have an issue with the term “feminist porn” or “porn for women” – it implies that men will not enjoy it. But they will. Women challenge the status quo because we are never it. The most innovative, disruptive things will come for women, and men will bloody love them.

Q How is the conversation around sex

and porn changing?

We are observing social issues and addressing social agendas that nobody else is. Our entire mission is to make it easier to talk about sex. Because we don’t talk about sex in the real world, we have no socially acceptable vocabulary with which to do so. The language of porn has rushed in to fill that gap. And that is not good on a number of levels, but as you would expect in a male-dominated industry, the language of porn is predominantly male generated. Pounding, banging, slamming, wrecking – all terms thought up by someone who does not have the soft internal tissue to which those things are being done. At Make Love Not Porn, we are building a new language for real-world sex. We tag

our videos completely differently.

We’re doing that because we want you to take this language and use it beyond our platform in the real world. It’s language you can use to talk about what you want to do in bed in a celebratory, positive, and gender equal way.

Q We’re talking a lot about sex. Sex

goes hand in hand with the notion of relationships. How do you see the future of human relationships evolving?

One of our members, a young man, summed up what Make Love Not Porn is about beautifully: “Watching porn makes me want to jerk off, while watching your videos makes me want to have sex.” We, like any other social platform, are about connecting people.

We’re opening up the dialogue around sex to get to better sex, to get to better relationships, to get to better lives. We are using technology to bring people closer together in the real world.

That’s the part of sex that, ironically, nobody wants to talk about.

Q What is the role of parenting in this

type of future?

My startups are real-life manifestations of my own philosophies. One of my philosophies is that everything in life starts with you and your values. So

The Future of Girlhood Nancy Jo Sales wants to “live in a world where girls feel respected, where they don’t feel pressured to have sex with someone that they don’t want to, or reveal their naked bodies on the internet in order to be popular.” A future where young women “are free to have the time and space to think and daydream… without the constant tether of social media.” In her latest book, American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, and during our conversation with her, Nancy Jo presents a bleak view on the current state of girlhood – one in which the “prevalence of social media conflated with the sexualization of girls in our culture has created a public health issue.”

one question I already ask people is: what are your sexual values? Nobody can ever tell me, because we are not brought up to think that way.

Many of us, if we’re fortunate, are born into families and environments where our parents bring us up to have good manners, a work ethic, a sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed, but they should. What I say to parents all the time is that it starts in the home and it cannot start too early.

This is why I want to raise funding for Make Love Not Porn – we want to build out a Kahn Academy of sex education, because right now, nobody goes into the field to make money, and I would like to change that.

Q If you had access to the funding you

need, what is the future you would be looking to create?

We would achieve world peace. I’m not kidding. When we are more open and honest about sex, when we are able to freely be sexual beings and use own our sexuality to engage with each other, we will be one step closer to world peace. The world will be a happier place accordingly.

NANCY JO SALES Nancy Jo Sales is an awardwinning journalist and New York Times best-selling author who has written for Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, and many other publications. Her latest book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers is an investigation into how social media has changed the lives of girls and presented them with unprecedented challenges.

Today, you can’t truly understand the experience of being a girl without also unpacking what it means to grow up on social media. According to Pew Research Center, in 2015, 88% of American teens aged 13-17 had access to a mobile phone, 92% went online from a mobile device daily, and teenage girls used social media sites more often than boys. The rise of personalization and technology typically negates the idea of a universal experience, however, social media is creating a “similarity of girls’ experiences regardless of their race or background” and a series of conditions that pervade across this demographic, such as new expectations for sex and a lack of social etiquette in the digital sphere.

impact on girls versus boys. Nancy Jo believes that “social media encourages a toxic environment of comparison,” especially for young women.

Michael Harris, quoted in American Girls, has found that “girls are asked to compare themselves in ways that boys just aren’t.” As social media continues to thrive on a visual-based selfie culture, it’s giving rise to the over-quantification of looks, and girls are judged on their appearance by tangible feedback – likes, retweets, follows, and shares. One girl Nancy Jo spoke to, eighteen-year-old Rachel, believes that women are rewarded for “Photoshopping [their] actual self ” into girls who are more beautiful, likable, or “hotter” than their real selves.

And, while social media might be the great equalizer for young women, it’s far from equitable if you look at its

Social media has created a system where it’s considered normal and common for boys to rate girls. This

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creates a feedback loop, where girls are engaging in more extreme behavior because they want to be differentiated from their peers by being rated higher and earning more likes.

The power dynamics in this system are clear. Social media is becoming a space where “sexual interaction between girls and boys on screens is largely controlled by boys,” Nancy Jo points out, though she feels this shouldn’t come as a surprise considering Silicon Valley is “a male dominated culture” and “the most popular sites that girls are using have been created not only by men, but actual frat boys.”

Beyond setting unrealistic social expectations for young women, Nancy Jo believes that “[social media],

interact with socially as real-life versions of porn stars. Another one of Nancy Jo’s interviewees, 16-yearold Zoe, says that “guys look at [nude photos] like a different kind of porn, almost. It’s self-generated porn.” But to Zoe and other young women, sharing sexual content is talked about by their peers as being “NBD” (“no big deal”), thus increasing the pressure to participate.

These pressures come under the guise of “hookup culture,” and some may liken this trend to the heightened sexual experimentation that simply comes along with youth. But sex educator Beth Kaper, who was also interviewed in American Girls, thinks otherwise: “Social media as it’s used is encouraging very sexual behavior

grow into women, at which point their pleasure has long since stopped being a priority. To delve deeper into this issue, Nancy Jo draws on a 2013 study by researchers at the Kinsey Institute and Binghamton University: “The double standard in hookup culture is really apparent when it comes to orgasms… women were twice as likely to have orgasms in the context of serious relationships than in casual encounters.” Perhaps sex is more accessible to young men and women than ever before, but Nancy Jo begs the question: Does simply offering access to sex make for better, healthier notions of sex and self, especially for girls?

At the end of our conversation, when we asked Nancy Jo what she finds to

Why is the loss of childhood inevitable?

Social media encourages a toxic environment of comparison.

combined with a pervasive sexualization of girls in the wider culture, is an overarching trend which is already having serious consequences.” Social platforms are impacting girls’ and boys’ views of sex and, combined with porn culture, act as a new and problematic version of sexual education.

Some studies cite that kids, on average, see their first pornographic content at a young age, often earlier than middle school. It’s not uncommon for porn to function as an alternative form of sexual education for youth culture – a medium to learn how to talk about sex, what to expect during sex, and how to define sexual preferences. But Nancy Jo is quick to differentiate: “Being sex positive and porn positive aren’t the same thing.”

This emphasis on porn culture is driving boys to equate the girls they

at a very young age. And they’re not learning to be intimate in any other way than a sexual way. They think intimacy is sex.”

Girls are led to believe that it’s “uncool” or too much to ask for a real relationship beyond just physical interactions. During Nancy Jo’s conversations with girls, they often “asked [her] about what’s happening to intimacy, what’s happening to love, what’s happening to romance.” One girl even asked what it was like to go on a date and to have somebody want to get to know you. Social media and the expectations of youth culture have accelerated everything and changed sexual experience to be less intimate and less incremental.

This notion of hookup culture isn’t just impacting adolescents during girlhood – it’s affecting them as they

be the most troubling aspect of her research, she said it was “the amount of resignation that girls express and feel about the way things are.” But how can this disheartening conversation be changed? Nancy Jo believes that we need to move beyond technological notions of progress to redefine the human experience, especially for underserved groups like young women.

“Why is misogyny and sexism inevitable?” she asks. “Why is the loss of childhood inevitable? The wonderful thing about human beings is that we can create our reality. We create our culture. We can create whatever we want it to be. One of the problems here is that we’re not being responsible about what is happening to girls.

We’re not listening to them… We can do whatever we want with social media.

What I would hope is that we change culture for the better.”

The wonderful thing about human beings is that we can create our reality.

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popular sitcom that will have a major character who’s trans, and it will be a light, accessible, funny sitcom that will bring trans people into the living rooms of millions who would otherwise never really think about it. It is really hard to overstate what kind of impact that could have.

The Future of Gender

Q What do you see for the future of

the gender binary?

The ways in which a person experiences and expresses their own identity are always shifting. With maturity, experience, and time, each person journeys to discover who they are and how they present themselves to the world. Jen Richards, an advocate focusing on racial and gender justice, looks at what happens when the person who is taking that journey does not fit into the traditional definitions of gender. How is that person’s experience of self expression different, and how will it change in the future as technologies, both social and medical, continue to develop?

Q How might the experience of a

10-year-old trans youth be different by 2030 than it is today?

JEN RICHARDS Jen Richards is a writer and actress, as well as a consultant and advocate focusing on nonprofit management and gender and racial justice. She works with both national organizations and media outlets, and is the co-writer/star/producer of Her Story, a frequent guest on BuzzFeed Videos, and was a series regular on season one of I Am Cait.

It’s fun to think about what it will be like for trans youth. It’s amazing how often I can go into bookstores now and see trans people in books and magazines, as well as on TV. The visibility came so quickly – more quickly and so much bigger than any of us anticipated. There is a whole generation of trans kids today who will grow up with that just being normal.

But at the same time, there are kids growing up in places like North Carolina where there’s a state legislation entirely based on a fear around what trans youth are, and that must be horrifying for them. I think a lot of that will settle out in the next 15 years. Of course, hatred won’t be entirely gone, but, given the pace at which gay and lesbian acceptance has been in focus

for the past few years, I think trans people will experience the same thing.

Hopefully, trans acceptance in 15 years will look a lot like gay and lesbian acceptance today. We’ll be accustomed to being represented in the media, having pride parades, and just being acknowledged as a part of society.

Q How do you envision the experi ence of a transgender individual in the media might be different by 2030?

It is going to be massively different, particularly as more and more trans people are speaking in their own voices. There’s an interesting shift happening right now in Hollywood, where it’s becoming less acceptable to have cisgender actors playing trans roles.

There’s a sense now that those parts really should be going to trans people.

We’ll inevitably have our first “Will and Grace moment” – there will be a

My friends and I are the last of the dinosaurs – our gender still adheres to the binary of male or female. Most of my friends transitioned from one gender to a very traditional place on the other side of the spectrum, so they’re still binary identified. They’re men or women, and most of them are heterosexual, too. So something that seems so revolutionary and subversive isn’t always so. Someone can move from one box to the other box, but it doesn’t challenge the fact that there are still only two boxes.

A lot of work in trans activism is allowing the transition to happen more easily, and accepting that a person can move from one box to the other. But younger trans individuals, especially those under 25, are just destroying the boxes altogether. The traditional binary of gender is being completely disrupted and they have so much new terminology. It’s an incredible space for self-expression. What is often considered the future of gender seems to already be happening with the younger generations.

Q Can you see a world where humans

work towards creating new types of sex organs?

Although this isn’t something I’ve thought much about, I can absolutely see that happening. Gender is becoming art. It’s becoming play. And once that happens, it becomes open to all kinds of interruptions and innovations, whether it’s artistic, or ethical, or technological. As gender becomes something that is almost akin to fashion – which is grounded in a physical

Gender is becoming art. It’s becoming play. And once that happens, it becomes open to all kinds of interruptions and innovations, whether it’s artistic, or ethical, or technological.

reality but is also a place of art and commerce – all kinds of opportunities open up.

Q What types of technologies do you

see emerging that might help individuals determine gender for themselves?

The two big technologies that have already completely reshaped the trans experience are medical technologies and social media. Medical technologies, such as advancements in endocrinology and hormonal therapy as well as surgical interventions and reshaping the body, have allowed a lot of people to attain the body that they desire, the body that matches their sense of self. And that’s tremendous.

When I was younger, what I knew about the trans experience was very specific and based on a distinct, single narrative. In the past few years, social media has completely transformed the trans community and, through that, it has given us access to so many different kinds of narratives around what it means to be trans – so it opens up the experience. It allows people to say, “Hey, my experience is just as valid.”

It allows more people to come into the community and reduces feelings of shame.

Q Besides social media, what kinds of

online spaces might impact notions of gender?

I am not involved in any kind of gaming, but a lot of people are and I've heard a lot of trans people talk about

the first space that they felt comfortable playing with gender was in online worlds, where they could adopt a character of the opposite gender. It gave them a way to imagine themselves as something else. That is a really common story. I can see that becoming an increasing avenue for people to discover their own sense of gender.

Q What sort of beliefs around gender

today support or conflict with your aspirational view for the future of humanity?

The most obvious one that greatly conflicts is the belief that women are inherently worth less than men. And that, for me, is a far bigger, more pervasive, and more damaging concern than the specific place of trans people within the larger gender spectrum. Violence against women is a huge, global issue and it manifests in a variety of ways – interpersonal, governmental, medical, or with unequal pay. And this needs to be addressed before all else.

I’m always going to be working toward improving trans rights, but when I’m moving through the world, the issues I confront on a daily basis have less to do with being trans and more to do with being female. Until we address this, there’s no room for gender exploration and play and all the other things we talk about. My concern is that, as of right now, half the globe’s population is still brutally penalized because of their gender and the way that gender is based in our physical reality.

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Jess Weiner CEO of Talk to Jess, a consulting and strategy firm that seeks to change brands' messaging toward women and girls

The Future of Influence Not every brand, not every business, is designed to take on a direct conversation with women and girls. You have to come from a place where you’re really ready to do the work and make the change, or I say: just don’t do it. There’s nothing worse than an empty, zero calorie message for women. We smell it, we’re very savvy.

Natalie Ebel Director of Marketing at Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit providing quality education in the developing world

The Future of Education Technology is perhaps the most critical factor in maintaining a true feeling of compassion and really wanting to make a difference, as it can establish an even greater connection between a person and a cause.

Virtual reality and other technologies can have an incredibly deep impact that not only compels people to feel, but also to act. At the moment, VR is the only medium where you can fully immerse yourself in another world, which forces us to become connected, more human, and more empathetic.

Dalal Khajah, Annie Pariseau, Josephine Wai Lin Co-Founder and CCO, Director of Hustle, Co-Founder and CEO of ManServants

The Future of Dating

Debbie Sterling Founder and CEO of GoldieBlox, construction toys that get girls building

The Future of Play What I’m trying to do is redefine what girlhood means in terms of play. Today in 2016, if you go into a toy store, it looks like girlhood is all about beauty, fashion, and being a princess. By 2040, I think the pop cultured definition of girlhood will encapsulate all of the multifaceted interests that girls actually have, such as athletics, building, and STEM.

When industries are redesigned for women, we’ll find more initiatives “for good.” As a trend, we’re seeing the rise of the single, independent woman. Marrying later in life means she has more time to figure out what she wants – and we will be demanding a higher standard of men before commitment. Men being caring, supportive, and putting a woman’s happiness above his own once in a while shouldn’t be unrealistic, it should be the norm.

Elizabeth Merritt Vice President, Strategic Foresight and Founding Director of the Center for the Future of Museums at the American Alliance of Museums

The Future of Museums As more and more people augment their senses — vision, hearing, touch — how will that change how humanity experiences traditional visual and performance art? How will artists, and museums, adapt to audiences that experience the world in ways formerly outside the spectrum of human ability? As with any world-changing trend, one of the roles for museums today is to introduce new concepts to people, help them explore new technologies in a safe, trusted environment, and foster hard discussions about how societal norms should change over time.

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Simulated Expectations

Our Thinking

How can we use technology to create a safe environment for children to experiment with different aspects of adulthood, even topics like relationships and sexuality?

Part of being a kid is practicing for your future as an adult. It’s about figuring out who you want to be when you “grow up,” defining your dream job, or sussing out what it means to be a woman.

For the generations who grew up without social media, their experimentation with womanhood consisted of make-believe and dress up. They had time to invent and live in their own worlds.

Today, girls (and boys) still spend time in a make-believe adulthood, but the worlds they live in are predefined. And, because the technology they use is designed by and for adults, their access to modern spaces for self-discovery is severely limited.

The content that girls and boys rely on for self-reflection, education, and experimentation set unrealistic examples of expectations for adulthood. For instance, basing your sexual expectations on porn culture leaves out a significant narrative around what it means to have sex. Selfhood is being defined by the feedback mechanisms embedded in digital culture. Girls have gone from playing house to crowdsourcing their sexuality.

“Am I pretty?” videos are just one example of the ways in which young women are leveraging platforms like YouTube, asking strangers to validate their appearance and help them understand themselves. These platforms and devices, as well as the structures that support them, don't take into account the inquisitive nature and needs of pre-teens and teenagers. By providing more realistic notions of how ideas like sexual exploration might feel for both girls and boys, and expanding the spectrum of what qualifies as “normal” behavior, we

have the potential to not just reframe expectations for sex, but also revalue the idea of intimacy and build a culture of empathy.

In our interviews, we repeatedly heard that the vast majority of technology – especially social media and porn platforms – has been designed by men, for men.

We wondered, what if new technologies and content distribution platforms were designed to celebrate girlhood and boyhood and address the very real questions that teens have? Imagine virtual reality technology being leveraged as a tool for informal, self-guided sexual education for young people of all genders. Instead of offering teens predetermined, limited notions of adulthood that are hinged on models of comparison, girls and boys would be offered blank slates to experiment and create their own preferred futures. What if they were challenged to define a set of personal values, and experience how their intended actions might impact others?

By changing the ways in which teens can access experiences of maturity and adulthood, the better prepared they can be for real life experiences. For the following scenario, we explore the ways in which a young girl might tackle matters of body insecurities and sexuality in a safe environment that she can traverse at her own pace. As Nancy Jo Sales says, “the wonderful thing about human beings is that we can create our reality” – and this includes a virtual world that allows for the type of experimentation and self-education that bridges the gap between pretty princesses and fully-fledged adults.

Manuela felt so nervous, she thought she might be sick. Her greatest fear was just confirmed: she was assigned to yoga for the entire semester.

This was going to be her first real seventh grade gym class. She always managed to replace the “Get Fit!” requirement with other electives that gave her skills that were actually useful. Most of her classes were virtual, but this one was in-person.

Yoga meant changing in the girl’s locker room into tight pants and a sports bra. She Googled the people in her class and her heart sank. Even though she had never met them, she imagined that half of them were already wearing thongs to school. Manuela didn’t even own a thong. The idea of having to change into a sports bra in front of the other girls made her feel so exposed. Her breasts were larger.

Would they notice the stretch marks on them? Or the size of her nipples? Or their color? She looked in the mirror. Her legs were shaved, but a line of hair was visible from her belly button down. She worried about her lower back too – would they notice?

As one of the only Latinas in the area, she figured something on her body would stand out.

Doing the only thing she could think of to feel better, Manuela added a question to her school district’s Ask.us page as an anonymous user: “How can I feel more comfortable being naked around other people before gym class?” Within a few hours, she got an alert: “New Upload: Dare to Bare.”

As she tightened her Oculus headset and changed worlds, Manuela knew what to expect. These life preps were all kind of the same. They started with a situation teens would find themselves in, and she would be guided through the participation. She wondered who put these programs together. They must be really smart.

Manuela walked into a virtual locker room, and stood with a group of girls her age. She knew they weren’t actually there, but it felt so real, she couldn’t keep her heart from racing. “Hi!” a pretty brunette girl said. “I’m Savannah. Are you excited for class?”

Manuela nodded, but hesitated as she watched the others start to change. The brunette girl took her t-shirt off, and Manuela couldn’t help but stare at her back, her shoulders just a little bit visible through her hair. It was covered in small red dots, but Manuela still thought she looked quite pretty.

Looking around the room, she noticed that no one else looked totally airbrushed either – there was a scar here, some cellulite there, maybe some extra hair – and it made her feel comfortable enough to start undressing too.

But Manuela hesitated as she bent down to untie her shoes, suddenly very aware of the rolls her stomach would make. No one else seemed bothered with theirs though – everyone, even the skinniest people, had some. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all. She wasn’t completely happy with how she felt yet, so she repeated the simulation over and over again for the rest of the afternoon.

On the first day of yoga class, in the locker room, Manuela didn’t hesitate to start changing. It really felt like she had done this before. Feeling pretty comfortable, she looked over at the girl next to her and said, “Your bra is so cute. Where did you get it?”

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To create this feature, we interviewed over 40 women. Due to the overwhelming response that we received, we were unable to include all of our themes and conversations in the magazine. Here is a peek into two more themes which we are excited to share online at miscmagazine.com.

Dr. Gillian Einstein Associate Professor at Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

The Future of Women's Health We need new measures for gender, and we need new algorithms that really take complexities and intersectionalities into account.

I think the models are going to change. It's going to give birth to innovation.

Words for the Unknown

Innovation practices often focus on making “things” that are bigger, better, and brighter to drive growth. But as technology fundamentally changes what it means to be human, we will increasingly need to invent new ways of talking about our everyday realities as they relate to concepts like health, technology, and food.

What if we more proactively shaped not just the new thing, concept, or technology, but the language and social norms around it as well?

Sara Menker Dr. Anne Beal Chief Patient Officer at Sanofi, a global leader in healthcare

The Future of Healthcare I think that the biggest challenge we have right now is that we are not customer-focused, we are not patient-centric, and so every solution we come up with makes it easier for the doctor, the payer, the pharmacist – everybody except for the patient. I actually think that if we had no new technology, there would still be lots of room for innovation.

Founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, a platform that provides users with actionable agricultural data to drive higher productivity and greater access to capital

The Future of Agriculture In order to help people be better prepared for climate change, the first thing we need to do is help people understand it. It’s still a largely abstract concept because it’s been sitting in the science or policy domains. But the policy domains don’t act on it, because they don’t understand the science. There needs to be a bridge to close the gap between those two worlds.

Sally Grimes Chief Global Growth Officer and President, International at Tyson Foods

The Future of Food There are some known conventions in food that our industry has held sacrosanct. You’re either a commodity company, or a branded food company. You are either focused on cost, or you’re focused on growth. You’re either business-to-business, or business-toconsumer. These simple conventions have shaped our industry and defined food companies for decades. I believe these conventions no longer apply.

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R E V E R S E T R AC E D E S I G N

T H E F U T U R E ACCO R D I N G TO WO M E N

Aubrey Yee Futurist, systems thinking practitioner, writer, and photographer

The Future of Oceans We can’t simply innovate our way to a better future through technology.

So, while technology plays a critical role in the evolution of our collective futures, we need to pay much closer attention to social and environmental justice if we want to leave our kids a world worth living in.

Reverse Trace Design

We are inhabiting the Anthropocene, a geological period where humans drive environmental impact. After years of new and better technology designed

Natalie Panek Engineer at MDA's Robotics and Automation division, working on Canadian space robotics and other space exploration programs

Dr. Amina Wadud Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies, Visiting Scholar at the Starr King School for the Ministry, as well as an international consultant on Islam and gender

to conquer nature and manifest man’s greatness, resource scarcity and extreme weather patterns are creating a need for new design paradigms on all scales. What if good design, experience, or technology was measured by how much it reversed human impact or the status quo?

The Future of Space The orbits around earth are getting so cluttered because we keep launching new satellites to meet our growing demand without doing anything about the ones that are still up there, broken down. It’s going to be like our oceans – just polluted and full of garbage. But what if satellite manufacturers had to pay a deposit to even launch their satellite into orbit, and then they would only get the deposit back if they deorbited their satellite or cleaned up a certain amount of space debris?

The Future of Identity

Madeline Stuart 18 year-old aspiring model from Brisbane, Australia with Down Syndrome

The Future of Role Models I hope we start focusing on our inner beauty, on our environment, on our health, and our wellbeing. I hope, with time, we all learn to love ourselves.

Critical mass is important because when you have more people pushing at the boundaries, you start looking at alternatives. And when you start looking at alternatives, you start creating those alternatives and you start building steps toward the utopic goal. But the utopic goal is not just to be utopia, it’s to be achieved. You have to keep your vision forward-looking and then you have to say, “Ok, that’s where I’m going. How do I get there?” Because it starts with only a single step from your own location.

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T H E F U T U R E ACCO R D I N G TO WO M E N

We commonly hear the feedback that more people need to be thinking about the future. And while that statement may ring true, we noticed a recurring theme during our experience of creating this feature. There was a universal truism throughout all of our conversations – many of the women said to us: “I have so many ideas about the future, but I’ve never been asked to share them.” The onus is on all of us; we have to ask the people we find most influential about their views on the future.

We have the ability to democratize the future that we see, hear, and read about. Conversations can, and should, include more women as well as other untapped perspectives that exist outside of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or the field of professional foresight.

We invite you to do the asking. To read the interviews and start drawing your own connections. To reach out to us and tell us who we missed. Or, if you have a platform of your own, to start asking others: How do you imagine the future will be different than today? We need new conversations that inspire and challenge. The future is ripe to be rewritten, re-explored, and reimagined. And not just by men or by women, but by all of us.

To continue the conversation and see more content from our interviews, visit miscmagazine.com and follow #femalefutures on Twitter and Instagram.

SPECIAL THANKS / Robert Bolton / Laura Dempsey / Julie Do / Ryan Doyle / Fiona Hughes / Stephanie Kaptein / Elinor Keshet / Melanie Levitin / Khairunnisa Mohamedali / Maryam Nabavi / Will Novosedlik / David Oliver / Lindsay Roxon / Valdis Silins / Michelle Switzer / Allen Tsai / John Wither / And all of the women who took the time to speak with us

TRANSFORMATION IS HARD.

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B y D r. M ic h e l l e S w i t z e r

The Rising Star of Food Over the past two decades, food, and its preparation, have experienced a meteoric rise as a source of entertainment. The birth of specialty channels dedicated to it, the cult of celebrity chefs, and the number of televised cooking competitions are all testaments to our ever-growing obsession with food and the culture surrounding it. Like many, I have voraciously devoured this content, drawn in particularly by those shows that examine food as cultural practice and feature the kitchen as a space for art, innovation, and haute cuisine. For years, I consumed this content happily and uncritically – until I watched a particular episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations. Entitled “Japan: Cook it Raw,” this program took 15 of the world’s best chefs and threw them “into an unfamiliar environment with unfamiliar ingredients.” Viewers were invited to follow these innovators as they ruggedly foraged the forest floor for ingredients, waded through mud to hunt for duck, pontificated over what makes great cooking, and finally presented their experimental dishes to some of the world’s most esteemed food critics. Yet, as entertaining as it all was, I found myself distracted by what wasn’t on the screen: women. Or, to be more specific, women chefs. This omission was all the more glaring because it seemed to go unnoticed by the

Historically, the private (or domestic sphere) was seen as pertaining to women who, due to their perceived fragile nature, needed to be kept away from the vulgarities and complexities of public life. The public sphere, meanwhile, was seen as the domain of men, where they could engage in and discuss pressing and complex topics such as politics and business.

This strict dichotomy has been largely broken down in many parts of the world, yet is clearly still being replicated in new ways in the world of haute cuisine.

Cooking, when elevated to the level of art and portrayed as a creative and innovative pursuit worthy of feature films, biographies, and specialty programs, almost always features men as the protagonists. Women sometimes appear in the kitchen in these contexts, of course, but predominantly as assistants or pastry chefs, with only few exceptions. Otherwise, when it comes to cooking, women are expected to cook primarily in order to nourish others (home cooking).

Unsurprisingly, then, virtually all of the women chefs featured on television programs are filmed in their homes, creating meals for family and friends. Cooking for creative expression or personal passion has become secondary.

However, more often than not, when women are featured in the kitchen, it is in limited, essentialized, and nostalgic ways, as, for example, the Italian mother or “nonna” (seen in recent ads for Casa di Mama’s frozen pizza or Ikea kitchens). Almost never is she presented as an innovator worthy of a Michelin star. This characterization, ironically, works to make the labor of women – who still carry most of the burden of housework, despite the fact that women make up almost 50% of the workforce in North America and Europe – conveniently invisible, suggesting that the mother/wife/partner who cares for her loved ones through the provision of home cooking is a thing of the past or an idealized notion. This image does further harm to women in the context of growing concerns over children’s health and the obesity epidemic by simultaneously laying the blame at their feet, even if indirectly: As women have become so caught up in their pursuit of a career outside of the home, they have led the younger generation to rely on a diet of processed fast foods. Modern women are thus charged with two counts of being unworthy of the title of chef.

A Man’s Domain participant chefs, producers of the program, and organizers of the event.

And like spotting the hidden image in an optical illusion, once I saw this glaring absence, I couldn’t unsee it. Over the past couple of years, in fact, I’ve continued to watch countless hours of food-focused programming and have come to realize that this absence of women isn’t an anomaly; it is the norm. Out of six episodes of Netflix’s Chef’s Table, only one episode features a woman, chef Niki Nakayama. Likewise for David Chang’s The Mind of a Chef. And as for Anthony Bourdain, I can only recall one episode of Parts Unknown (“Miami”) where he has been accompanied by a female chef colleague.

Food critics are no better. Check any list of the best 20, 50, or even 100 chefs in the world, and you can easily count the number of women included on one hand, and in many instances they are partnered with a male chef. Worse, not a single woman appears in the top 10.

Even in the world of mixology, the creative, haute version of drinking, women are conspicuously absent when it comes to recognition, even though bartending has a large female workforce. And I’m just scratching the surface. It would be inaccurate to deny that this discrepancy in the number of male and female chefs isn’t in part the result of there simply being less women heading kitchens in the world of haute cuisine.

But, this fact alone is not enough to explain this imbalance.

photo: D Hancock

A Woman’s Space

Home Cook versus Haute Cuisine

// The absence of top women chefs needs to be understood as a systemic problem. //

Stirring the Pot How can the industry begin to correct this imbalance?

First, there needs to be acknowledgement that, while there may be a dearth of women chefs in the world of haute cuisine, it is a result of a larger problem that isn’t simply due to their lack of interest in pursuing this career path. The absence of top women chefs needs to be understood as a systemic problem. Just like how the #OscarsSoWhite campaign has pointed out a fatal flaw in the film industry that not only is the work of black actors and filmmakers overlooked, but Hollywood is not creating enough opportunities that could even garner them a nomination. There needs to be an honest dialogue among those working in the world of haute cuisine (and its admirers) about the lack of women within it. Sexist attitudes about women not being able to hack it in the high-stress world of running a top-class kitchen need to broken down, and a more open attitude to women in the kitchen needs to prevail.

This is good advice for the business world, as well. As Shane Ferro recently wrote in a piece for Business Insider, “the problem with women in the workplace is men.” Male leadership needs to become more conscious of the exclusion of women and be willing to work to remedy the imbalance. That means that women don’t just need to “lean in;” men have to first make some room at the table by “leaning out.” After all, great leaders take many forms: The aggressive alpha male, as embodied by top chefs like Gordon Ramsay, is not the only kind of person who can successfully lead a team.

Secondly, the male-dominated world of haute cuisine needs to acknowledge the work of women who are already doing innovative and interesting things with food, and not just as a novelty. As more women become recognized for their work, it is very possible that it will inspire many more women to pursue a similar path.

This can only be a good thing. As is the case in business, the more perspectives brought into the great kitchens of the world, the more possibilities for original and inspiring creations. In the end, actively welcoming women into the fold might be the most innovative thing haute cuisine could ever do. //// Dr. Michelle Switzer is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

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By Nadine Hare a n d DR . M a r c L a f l e u r

Just over a year ago, reports started to emerge out of Brazil of a spike in cases of fever and rashes. Doctors and researchers in the area identified the culprit as the Zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease that is mostly asymptomatic, presenting the above-mentioned symptoms only about 20% of the time.

However, it was not until a surge of cases of microcephaly – a serious condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads – that Zika really captured the world’s attention.

photo: Camila Cordeiro

Zika Redux Resurfacing Old Tropes in a New Virus

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All of a sudden, pregnant women and women who were thinking of becoming pregnant throughout Brazil became the face and the “problem” of Zika – and mostly poor women, at that. Through the trope of the pregnant woman’s body, Zika implanted itself in the dark imagination of the West. In this brief review, we want to call attention to the ways in which the Zika virus lives as a cultural concept, both drawing on long held tropes of women’s bodies, and how it is used to deploy specific and culturally constructed understandings of risk and threat.

It goes without saying that Zika is a threat to pregnant women, and helping women protect themselves from the virus in danger zones is important. As medical anthropologists, though, we are interested in the intersection of the biological and the cultural, of the physiological and the social. As the Zika “epidemic” played throughout the media in the last several months, we have become increasingly attuned to the ways in which the discourse around Zika jumped the boundaries of the purely biological and played into larger social discourses around controlling women’s bodies.

Women’s bodies have long been constructed as sources of risk, threat, and danger. Right from the depictions of Eve in the Garden of Eden to the Salem witch trials, or the fears around miscegenation centered on the hyper-sexualization of African American women, female bodies have been characterized as mysterious and unstable. This is particularly true of women’s fertility, often deemed as something powerful and unknown (to men) that needs to be controlled. Consequently, in Brazil, where the most poignant and tragic effects of Zika have rested with pregnant women and their babies, the old and familiar narratives of women’s bodies have re-emerged as this “new” virus has its day in the media spotlight, taking the place of SARS, Ebola, and bird flu as the new viral contamination of threat.

What happens, then, when we resituate the response to Zika in a larger history of women’s bodies as a site of control and intervention? In Brazil, women’s bodies and women’s fertility have emerged on the frontline of the response to this epidemic.

Pregnant women have been told to stay indoors, and it has been recommended that women not get pregnant. Women who do get pregnant are implicitly shamed for their irresponsibility in doing so – as if they alone are responsible for their condition and the state of their child. Here, women’s bodies are both fetishized and infantilized at the same time. Moreover, women – as the bearers of microcephalic babies – become the face of its blame.

Women’s fertility and reproductive capabilities have, of course, long been at the center of paternalistic and state interventions.

Discourses of “family planning,” particularly in the developing world, have a long history of conceptualizing women (and poor women, more generally) as being producers of too many babies: people whose fertility is too high, who are not civilized enough to control their own bodies and sexuality. The histories of this behavior are long.

In the past, zealousness of family planning has led to many abuses: eugenic policies such as the forced sterilization of (poor and/or non-white) women. In the US, family planning initially targeted African Americans living in inner cities. In the 1960s, as countries in the Global South decolonized and were the subjects of development efforts from the West, controlling women’s fertility was justified through a discourse of economic development; less babies meant, to the Western eye (a patriarchal gaze if there ever was one), fewer mouths to feed and less poverty. This emphasis on women’s bodies as the source of national economic prosperity would find its apogee of expression in the Chinese one-child policy.

This logic and discourse began to shift towards the late part of the twentieth century, when greater emphasis began to be placed on the health advantages for women and children instead of economic benefits for nations. Fertility became reframed as a health “problem” instead of an economic one.

With Zika, narratives of control and intervention on women’s bodies and fertility have re-emerged. The panic that this virus, and others like it, inspires always seeks someone to blame. In HIV, it was gay (and often non-white) men; in SARS, it was the tubercular immigrant who infiltrated the sanitized West; with Zika, women, and poor women at that, have become the frame of reference. Their bodies and their fertility must be controlled – for their own good and for the good of the nation.

These narratives end up putting the blame on women, while disregarding the conditions in which they live. When the Brazilian government asks women, especially those in their first trimester, to stay inside their homes, preferably in air-conditioned spaces, the conditions of daily precarity in which they live – which makes taking time off work financially impossible and air-conditioned houses a luxury – are forgotten. Women’s bodies are blamed for the continued expansion of the Zika virus, while pervasive inequality and long-standing paternalistic interventions into women’s fertility are ignored.

As researchers and designers in health, what Zika forces us to do is pay attention to the hidden lives of disease and illness as biological entities, as viruses get transmutated into social concepts, narratives, and relationships between the have’s and have not’s. Zika’s ability to dig up old tropes of women’s bodies as risky and threatening, as sites in need of control and intervention by others, reminds us that diseases live far beyond the boundaries of the biological; that they form not just a physiological entity that must be vaccinated against in the body, but that they also form a social phantom image that is entirely harder to vaccinate against – and whose effects live long after the virus itself has gone. //// Dr. Marc Lafleur is head of medical anthropology at Idea Couture.

Nadine Hare is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

// Women’s bodies are blamed for the continued expansion of the Zika virus, while pervasive inequality and long-standing paternalistic interventions into women’s fertility are ignored. //

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The Case for a More Evenly Distributed Future

The Business Case

The Cultural Case

There is a growing body of data that makes a business case for gender parity. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the presence of women in leadership roles produces better results. What would it mean if gender parity were to be fully achieved? How would that affect productivity, profitability, and ROI? Three recent data points (two from McKinsey and one from the Catalyst Group) are of particular interest in this regard:

As data continues to expose the stereotypical fallacies that have dominated the workplace for so long, one wonders what it will take for parity to finally be achieved. The answer may lie in the inevitability of generational change.

For this we may look to the idea of Cultural Transmission, a biological and evolutionary theory based on the way a group of people or animals within a culture tend to learn and pass on information. Learning styles are greatly influenced by how a culture socializes with its children and young people.

In a paper entitled Mothers and Sons: Preference Formation and Female Labor Force Dynamics, the argument is made that the growing presence of a new type of man – one brought up in a family in which the mother worked (which at this time, would have been historic by decades where, in the US, we’ve seen participation in the workforce for women rise from 35% to 75% between 1948 and 2014, where participation by men fell from 93% to 88%) – has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time. What’s important about this study isn’t the result, but the mechanism – that the transmission of an accepted way of life occurs through proximity and example.

If we translate this into a future context, we can map a kind of Cultural Transmission 2.0.

/ Complete gender parity could increase global output by more than 25% / Going from having no women in corporate leadership to a 30% female share can translate to a 15% increase in profitability for a typical firm / Companies with higher female representation in top management outperform those without by delivering 34% greater returns to shareholders More and more data is emerging in support of gender parity, specifically in leadership roles. Since the early 2000’s, for example, Business Insider has been collecting 360° feedback data from leading organizations worldwide and now has 450,000 feedback instruments providing data on 45,000 leaders across a wide variety of industries. From data collected in 2011 and 2012 in a survey of 16 leadership competencies, women outperformed men on 12 of the 16 and overall by a margin of about 6%. It’s important to point out that two-thirds of the survey respondents were men, and that, because of the large sample size, the 6% gap is statistically significant.

The Performance Case

It’s prime time for equality and diversity, seemingly more so now than ever before. From The New York Times article on average pay over time as women thrive in traditionally male-dominated fields, to Cindy Gallop’s scathing response, to Publicis CEO Maurice Levy on the bad behavior of JWT’s ex-CEO Gustavo Martinez, there are strong signals highlighting the need for equality.

Women have a long history of fighting for equality, on principles of justice and human rights, on the right to work outside the home, and now for the right to pay equality and ultimately, the right to lead teams, companies, and nations. This is both an old frontier and a new frontier. An old frontier in that diversity and equality have been studied and discussed over decades. A new frontier in that we are seeing proof and leading indicators that push us in the direction of equality.

photo: Alita Ong

BY Cheesan Chew

Numbers like those above put paid to the shibboleth that women are not as equipped as men to lead. The Business Insider article cited above goes one step further by claiming that women aren’t just as good as men in leadership roles – they’re better, and they get better the higher up the ladder they go. The only thing standing in the way of diversity at the top is unconscious male bias, pure and simple.

If a woman manages to continue climbing the corporate ladder beyond the age of 40, she is likely to be perceived as more effective and competent than her male peers. There are several factors contributing to this: One is a common belief that they must perform twice as well to be thought half as good. For women who push hard in their careers, fighting odds and pushing, despite the unfairness, results in a greater performance. Another is that, after the age of 40, women continue to ask for feedback as they ascend the ladder, whereas men don’t. Conditioned as they are to exude self-confidence, men take it for granted that they are doing “just fine” and, therefore, don’t need to seek feedback.

Stereotypes regarding the traditional male bastions of IT, R&D and engineering were also challenged by the BI study, which demonstrated that women in these functions actually received higher ratings than men.

The Future Case While we have seen gains in the number of women in positions of leadership in both private and public sectors, these numbers remain small and are nowhere near a proportional representation of the male/female split that exists in the population. That said, we are at a time in history in which cultural transmission could be accelerated by a combination of powerful forces: / Technology – the free transfer of information across the globe allows for influence outside immediate communities / Media – the increasing number of news citations concerning women in positions of power builds awareness and acceptance / Movements – the growth of groups and movements that support the education of girls builds a larger base of potential leaders / Politics – legislation to promote women to positions of leadership accelerates parity In my work with innovation leaders, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with some of the best and most creative minds in their industries – many of whom are women. I have a foundational belief that it takes diversity to create new ideas that will drive the future of business and economies.

My hope is that organizations and leaders will leverage that belief to the fullest in anticipation of the uncertainties of ongoing social and economic disruption. As William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” No quote on this topic could be truer. //// Cheesan Chew is chief CX officer, SVP at Idea Couture.

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Your Breasts Are No Good Here

The Bible and Western Civilization. “Okay, that’ll do.” It was the summer of the last year of university and I needed one more course to graduate. I had taken, what I like to refer to as, a personal sabbatical halfway through my bachelor’s degree.

I came back to school focused, passionate, and ready to work hard, but I let one itty-bitty ball drop. The good folks at student services informed me that my application to graduate had been rejected – I was one credit short. I scrolled through the course calendar and chose the most rudimentary, most no-brainer course I could find to wrap up the degree that would never end. My memory of things learned in university feels like a big house after a hurricane, papers everywhere, nothing where I left it. But, The Bible and Western Civilization? Crystal. Clear. I’m convinced it was divine punishment for treating my education with such carelessness, but none the matter, it was my cross to bear.

One biblical character that stands out for

me is Job. God basically ruins Job’s life on a dare from the devil. Kind of makes God a bit of a lame bully, right? But religious studies geeks will tell you that’s not the point of the story. The point of Job’s story has to do with his tenacity. No matter what God, life, whatever, threw at Job, he was still grateful for everything he had. He was tenacious. Even when things weren’t going so well, there was nothing he could do about it so he just accepted it and said, “them’s the breaks; that’s life.”

My mother was a similar force, a unique mixture of wiles, determination, and chutzpah. She was 28 years old when she left the warm bosom of her life in Israel to move across an entire ocean all because she wanted to do something big, bigger than her. My mother got my dad and then three-year-old brother on a one-way flight to Toronto. The three (and soon to be four) of them cozied up in a one-bedroom student apartment in downtown Toronto as she worked her way through a doctorate in clinical psychology. At 33, everything – the swelling family, the new career, and the

semi-detached home – was coming together. Being alive was something she never took for granted.

To describe her as healthy doesn’t do it justice. She was beyond healthy; she was downright disciplined – the kind of woman who bought into all things detox and macrobiotic. My mother had effectively rid herself of every contaminant. Except for one. Diagnosed with breast cancer at 35, her story begins with the classic “survivor” trope: she finds a lump, treatment follows suit, and against all odds, remission occurs. But before the lottery tickets were bought and the vacations booked, she started to get these excruciating headaches.

Then her headaches became migraines, the migraines became dizziness, and the dizziness became trouble walking. In some sort of devilish synchronicity, as if to teach her a bit of Job-like humility, the cancer had metastasized in her brain. The woman who loved being alive, with all her bombastic flare and utter charm, passed away at 37.

In Genes We Trust

photo: courtesy of elinor keshet

By Elinor Keshet

Grieving someone’s death is like getting airdropped into the middle of the Mojave with a hand drawn map that only says “take a left at sand dune.” You can either stand in the middle of it all, head in hands, or you can try to figure your way out. People said things to me like, “I don’t know how you manage” or, “if it was me, I’d still be in bed.”

But I wasn’t strong, I wasn’t managing, I just didn’t know what else to do except to carry on. In my grief, I became obsessed with cancer, realizing I knew very little about this thing that had taken such an important person away from me. Cancer was not just a disease, but also a character; the development, discovery, and spread of which had a profound effect on my life.

Breast cancer is one of a handful of diseases at the center of the North American consciousness. Screening for it has changed considerably in the past 15 years with the discovery of two breast cancer susceptibility genes in the mid-1990s: BRCA1 and BRCA2. The genetic test for breast cancer,

called the BRCA test, is now a clinical reality and routinely performed all over the world. With it, clinicians can assess the risk a person has of developing breast cancer, and the risk of their blood relatives.

BRCA testing has become part of today’s oncological zeitgeist, thanks in large part to Angelina Jolie. In 2013, the actress publicly shared her decision to have a double prophylactic mastectomy after learning that she had the BRCA1 mutation. For Jolie, knowing her genetic risk and being able to plan and prepare was the key to winning the persnickety game of cancer hide and seek. Because how could you lose when you’ve already surveyed every closet, cupboard, and cancer-filled crevice in the entire house?

In 2012, a year before Angie was singing the praises of BRCA, I was an 18-year-old looking for a resolution. I wanted to crack the paradoxical case of my mother’s death: healthy woman, mid-30s, breast cancer. It challenged everything I knew about being healthy. I was told that if you get your flu shot, don’t eat red meat, drink wine, eat goji

berries, wait, never mind, drink less wine, now replace everything with kale, take your vitamins, but not too many, do this, and do that, you’ll be guaranteed a long, healthy life. My mother did all that, so what went wrong? I was old enough to know that breast cancer wasn’t an affliction of the young and fit; her age made her an outlier. There was something murky underlying her pathology, something deep in her nature.

If her genes couldn’t be tested, then I would just have to volunteer myself to be the proxy.

// Current research suggests that only 5-10% of breast cancer cases are the result of an inherited predisposition. //

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Before actually having blood drawn and tested, a woman’s risk must be assessed during pre-test counseling. A genetic counselor will work with the woman to create a pedigree map, making visible the pathological distribution of cancer throughout her family. This helps the counselor decide if there is enough of a risk to even proceed with the test. Identifying all relatives who have been affected by cancer is one of the strongest known individual risk factors for hereditary breast cancer. Here, patienthood takes on a new meaning. The prototypical patient was once a singular person experiencing the disease or the focus of a clinical exam, but the BRCA patient is a composite of many people at-risk of experiencing a disease. Their patienthood is defined in relation to others, and so the “patient” becomes a synecdochic term for any relative who shares the mutation.

Sitting in the waiting room of North York General Hospital’s Genetics center, I felt staunchly affirmed in my decision to get this test. I wanted to know if I had the mutation, not just for myself, but also for my whole family and any future kin. In the “Whodunnit?” of my mother’s cancer mystery, I was finally getting closer to figuring out the culprit.

Although the mutated gene would be a part of my own anatomical body, I felt like I had an altruistic duty to warn the rest of my relatives of their fate.

The Confusing Space Between Disease and Mutation The results of a BRCA test – whether positive, having the mutation, or negative, having no mutation – are highly ambiguous.

To be a carrier does not mean future occurrence of cancer, but instead a greater susceptibility to it. Say you have the inherited mutation, your genetic counselor will inform you that you have a 40-85% risk of getting breast cancer by 70 years of age. It’s quite the margin. The alternative, a negative result, is no less ambiguous.

Prognostic testing is still in its early days – it’s not fully known what the connection between a mutation and the development of a cancer is. A negative result implies that there is no known genetic risk, but it could be the case that the mutation either escaped detection or that it exists in another gene that has yet to be discovered.

There was something inherently problematic with the evidence I was working with.

Both outcomes don’t exactly offer peace of mind, but the perception of this biological omen is that it is a veracious advancement towards a life that is breast cancer free.

Prognostic testing is intended to help our genes be heard, to yield their secret inner workings, functions, and – with any luck – their dysfunctions. However, this unstable prognosis has transformed breast cancer from a yes or no condition into a continuum of risk. The ambiguity between diagnosis

and prognosis, between mutation and disease, is what defines the at-risk patient.

I won’t say that this liminality is all bad.

We’ve seen improved and mandated prevention and screening practices, and widespread legitimization of the presymptomatic breast cancer patient. However, an unintended trickle-down effect is the additional burden of responsibility that comes with knowing your risk.

By all intents and purposes, the at-risk patient is still “healthy.” Yet, in a particularly ingenious biomedicalizing fiat, the at-risk patient is no longer just responsible for the health of their body, but the health of their unwavering genome too. If it turned out that I was a carrier of the mutation, I would be thrust into a long-term regulatory relationship with my “breast health.” I would have to become so perceptibly aware of a part of my body that, at any point, could fail me.

Since there are no cures (yet) for a genetic mutation, the only way to avoid engaging in these stringent screening practices, to take back control, and to eliminate any and all risk, would be to get a prophylactic mastectomy.

// The BRCA patient is a composite of many people at-risk of experiencing a disease.

Their patienthood is defined in relation to others, and so the “patient” becomes a synecdochic term for any relative who shares the mutation. //

photos: courtesy of elinor keshet

The Composite Patient

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Your Breasts Are No Good Here Prophylactic mastectomies have become a go-to medical intervention for women who are at-risk. My brother, who was in medical school at the time, told me in all seriousness that if I had the mutation, I could just lop my breasts off and put new ones on; a single procedure – no fuss, no muss. He made it seem like the decision to surgically remove my breasts from my body was like deciding whether or not to get bangs, “Oh yeah, bangs. Definitely.”

At 18, I wasn’t prepared to acknowledge this as a possible option.

The more I learned about the test, the more unprepared I felt about solving the mystery before me. Everything had a caveat attached to it. It felt like I was free-falling through an infinite waterfall of possible risk. Testing positive would mean having to choose between hyper-surveillance and surgery, neither of which was helpful or even realistic for me. It’s absurd, really, that this whole ordeal would be based on 1) a vague quantification of risk for 2) a disease that could literally manifest at any point in my life. The presence of BRCA1 and BRCA2 may mean a higher risk of developing the disease, but hereditary breast cancers are very rare compared to the risk from environmental and lifestyle factors. In fact, current research suggests that only 5-10% of breast cancer cases are the result of an inherited predisposition.

Into the Unknown Being alive means accepting that everything in life arises and passes. This is an understanding that wanes some days and is crystal clear on others. There are times when I feel so incredibly aware of each moment – its brevity, its pain, its beauty, and its end. Throwing flowers at God’s feet, Job accepts his punishment and secedes to God’s divine wisdom. Throughout his trial, Job remains completely humble and grateful for what God has given him, for he does not have any knowledge “of things beyond [himself] which [he] did not know.”

Well neither do I, but I can accept that each moment will inform the next in order to keep myself sane.

Marcel Proust, writing to a bereaved friend, said, “You will always keep something broken about you.” Although it would be nearly a century before the discovery of the BRCA mutation, he was not wrong.

Even though my mother’s genes, broken or not, are woven into mine, I’ve learned to let go – to deal with the sadness, the uncertainty, and to forge ahead. //// Elinor Keshet is a senior innovation analyst at Idea Couture.

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By Michelle Jacobs

During my first year as a US employee of a Canadian company, I learned that one of my new Canadian colleagues was not only expecting her first child, but also preparing for a yearlong maternity leave. Yes, you read that correctly. A year. Twelve whole months of government-sponsored job protection and subsidized family leave, to be divvied up between parents at their own choosing.

As a point of comparison, I – an employee of a company with less than 50 American employees – am eligible for absolutely zero days of family leave, paid

or not. Zero. In real terms: if I had a baby tomorrow, my employer would be legally entitled to demand I squeeze the labor into my lunch break and be back at my desk for my 1 o’clock client call.

None of this is news. For decades, international studies and publications have reported on America’s lack of mandated paid leave with disbelief and dismay. Unfortunately, the financial, operational, and political considerations surrounding this issue are complex, to say the least. Alas, I’ll leave the debate on how – and if – the government should solve this crisis to those running for office.

photo: Treasures & Travels

Counting the Days: Rethinking leave and the new parent experience

Instead, I’ll ask how we, in the design thinking world, might tackle this challenge. What if instead of a policy issue, we think of this as a CX issue (or in this case, an EX – employee experience – issue). How can private corporations rethink the experience of their employees – in particular, the overwhelmed, under-rested, and mentally drained variety of employee otherwise known as “the new parent” – to deliver greater value and yield better returns? Is it really just a matter of providing more weeks off?

To find out, I turned to those best equipped to empathize with the plight of the new parent: new parents themselves.

I reached out to a handful of freshly minted and soon-to-be moms and dads across industries and geographies, and asked them what their employers did or offered to make their lives easier, more manageable, more productive, and more enjoyable while they were expecting and welcoming their new babies. Perhaps more importantly, I asked what they wished their employers had offered but didn’t. “In an ideal world where you run the company and you call the shots,” I inquired, “what policies, practices, or programs would you implement?” I told them to dream big.

Respondents – especially expecting parents – did detail how many fully-, partially-, and un-paid weeks their companies offered.

But here’s where it got really interesting: for new parents, paid leave was just the beginning. It was considered table stakes, sure; but after a certain point, no one dreamed of more time off.

Perhaps because the national standard is set so low, most of these parents were grateful for any paid time and acknowledged the burden their absence placed on their employer, both financially and operationally (especially in small businesses or teams without built-in redundancy).

For new parents, the conversation focused more on what happens after maternity or paternity leave ends and the rest of their parental lives begin. The few weeks of family leave – much or all of which passed by in a hazy, sleep-deprived blur – is a blip in the big scheme of their new child’s life. Instead, their “dream big” policies, practices, and programs focused on a crucial and difficult period where employee experience (re)design has massive potential – a period I’ll call “The New Parent Transition.”

The New Parent Transition is all about providing an “on ramp” back into the workforce, a way to ease the transition from being home all day to being at work all day. New parents wanted their employers to acknowledge that going back to “life as usual” after a baby is born isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. To start, there are new biological needs; sure, that new mom can be back in the office from 9 to 6, but she’s going to need time and space to pump breast milk. There are new logistical challenges too, like when the new dad needs to be on call to retrieve his sick child from daycare in the middle of the day or to work from home when the nanny has her own family emergency. And then there’s the unseen but powerful emotional drain – the parents who may be physically at the table but are mentally wondering what milestones they’re missing at home.

When envisioning these Transition period solutions, some parents mentioned the things we might expect from companies with more “innovative” cultures – pumping rooms at the office with high-speed WiFi and Netflix, courier-service milk delivery to their home, company-paid sleep trainers to get babies (and their parents) sleeping through the night sooner. But the vast majority of new parents I spoke with kept things pretty simple, focusing on just three wish list provisions.

01 The ability to be home when I want to be.

“Going from full-time home to full-time office is hard on the whole family.”

– New Mom “I've seen several businesses – both small and large – provide new parents with the option to transition to contract positions, allowing them the flexibility to work on their time and not sacrifice their salaries.

Vodaphone even offers full-time pay for 30-hour work weeks for the first six months after you come back from paid leave.”

– New Mom Many new parents aren’t ready to simply flip the switch back to full-time employee.

They want to be home – at least some of the time – spending important bonding moments with their new child, but they’re also ready to reengage with work, interact with grown-ups again, and keep those much-needed paychecks coming. They want, and need, to come back, but not necessarily in a full-time or always physically present capacity.

// For new parents, the conversation focused more on what happens after maternity or paternity leave ends and the rest of their parental lives begin. //

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02 The ability to be home when I need to be.

“Babies get sick ALL THE TIME, especially in the winter and in daycare. New parents need the flexibility to be able to leave work and handle that.”

– New Mom “My boss lets me work from home on Fridays, when my wife goes into the office and we have no other childcare coverage.

The ability to work remotely is HUGE.” – New Dad Stuff happens. Kids get sick. Nannies get sick. Your wife suddenly needs to take a three-day business trip. Not to mention the break-the-bank costs of full-time childcare.

Sometimes, mom or dad simply need to be on-call to be home for part or all of the day.

// If we reframe the problem to one of maximizing benefit, not maximizing weeks, we may find that the economics of new parent policies aren’t a zero-sum game, after all. //

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03 Affordable and reliable childcare when I’m not around to provide it myself.

“Childcare that’s either subsidized or paid with pre-tax dollars – especially if on-site, so parents can see their kids on breaks – would make this difficult transition a little more manageable and seamless.”

– New Mom New parents recognize that, at least some of the time, someone else is likely going to be responsible for keeping their child happy and alive. Many are lucky to have family and friends around to provide extra support, but for those reliant on paid childcare, the costs – both financial and emotional – can be overwhelming. Easing this burden with subsidized childcare or by allowing parents to see their children midday can go a long way.

One can envision many different ways to provide these three high-level benefits, because what’s right for one company’s employees, financial and operational structures, or culture may not be right for another’s. But at the end of the day, these new parents require flexibility, however their employer chooses to deliver it.

As we approach this challenge from the lens of EX design, we must dig deep to understand both the costs of these new benefits and their true, experienced value to employees; only then can we begin to really explore the optimal distribution of resources. We may find, for example, that employees would happily take shorter paid leave in exchange for the ability to work from home when they return, or that employee productivity skyrockets when provided the peace-of-mind of reliable and affordable childcare. If we reframe the problem to one of maximizing benefit, not maximizing weeks, we may find that the economics of new parent policies aren’t a zero-sum game, after all.

Regardless of if or how our government intervenes to solve for paid leave, employers have the ability to decide if and how they help their employees navigate the scary and stressful experience of the new working parent – and, ultimately, to determine if and how they retain not only these new parent employees but also their experience, knowledge, and loyalty. //// Michelle Jacobs is co-head of IC New York and a senior innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

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experiments with innovative technologies in collaboration with a local glass blowing studio.

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Q&A Catherine D’Ignazio

by Jamie Ferguson

MISC spoke with Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor of Data Visualization and Civic Media at Emerson College, about the possibilities for feminist data visualization; the power, pleasure, and limitations of visual data; data literacy; industries of accountability; and the future of inclusivity.

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Last year, you wrote an article called “What would feminist data visualization look like?” Let’s talk about that piece and why you wrote it. The article begins with a strong quote from Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” that critiques visual representation and the privileging of the eyes over the body.

Seeing the emerging discourse over the past ten years and all the hype around data, its visualization and tracking, and doing it in my everyday life, it has always struck me as a form that is particularly disembodied. This was the original impetus for writing the piece. What Haraway is calling feminist objectivity has to do with situated knowledge, which is produced by bodies, and these bodies see the world in very different ways based on their situated historical, cultural, and racial circumstances. When we see a visualization or a map (which I consider a type of visualization), it’s a view from nowhere. It’s the “god trick,” as Haraway says. From a communication standpoint, that’s part of its power and its pleasure.

This sense of visual mastery over the landscape is not something to ignore, and perhaps there are ways to take a different or more ethical stance. The question that I’m really asking in the article is: How do we put bodies back into data visualization? Is that even possible? How can we think about what’s missing and, in some way, represent existence that is predicated on power? Is this asking too much of data visualization? I don’t know.

I think it’s a powerful challenge. Thinking about the history of maps and the embedded models of power that these representations produce, where does this lineage leave us?

Given the provocation of the article, let’s talk about some of the opportunities to situate data, like including more robust metadata, referencing the material world behind it, questions of representation, etc. Are there tactics or areas of study, like gender studies and design research or feminist materialism, that address these issues?

The mention of the history of the map is interesting because, on the one hand, the age of the map precedes us, but using it as a tool of power wielded by elites to administrate and maintain control over space parallels, in many ways, what we are seeing today with data. For those not represented, their voices simply do not exist.

Where the data lives, who administers, owns, has access, and can leverage the data, are all things that are not distributed equally.

It is very asymmetrical, and it comes back to bodies.

Indigenous mapping and the data collection process itself being more participatory and community-driven is, therefore, very relevant. Typically driven by community needs, many participatory and indigenous mapping projects retain control over their data.

And this is something we don’t often talk about.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is a field where technologists have been asking important questions to implement and operationalize feminist design principles such as making design more participatory and pluralist, looking at marginalized users, and looking at ecology and systems.

We can learn a lot from those spaces that are typically neglected.

I’m glad you mention HCI. I want to ask you about technology and tools for addressing data literacy, specifically as it relates to your work with journalists and what is emerging in the field.

When I went back to MIT, I joined the the Center for Civic Media research group, which has a strong relationship to journalism media innovation. I did a lot of projects related to mapping the news,

which topics are being covered, and which areas they were covering.

I developed a relationship with journalists and journalism – an industry that was undergoing a lot of turmoil; one that undertakes such an amazing public mission for social justice in the world.

In this context, they’ve started experimenting with different ways of capturing data and telling a story.

Journalism – like law, education, culture, and art – is an area that I’d call an “accountability industry.” These are fields that have a public mission and desire to hold power to account. These are critical public voices in conversations about politics and power, and so, I think we need to focus building data literacy in these fields specifically so that we can amplify the voices that need be part of the conversations at a larger scale.

I really like the term “accountability industry,” especially if we want education, art, design, or any of the fields you mentioned to be maintained and strengthened as such. Can we talk about a specific project that addresses these questions around data literacy and the “accountability industry?”

I’ve been working on a project for the past year called databasic.io.

It’s a suite of three tools that were co-developed in collaboration with my colleague and friend Rahul Bhargava at MIT. There are a lot of great tools out there, but we noticed there were not many tools designed for learners, for introducing terminology, or the more process-oriented nature of data visualization – like cleaning or analysis, for example. So we thought we could build a suite of tools

that were very specifically and narrowly defined. We included design principles, like it should be focused, it should be fun, etc. It’s very simple – and that’s the point. We want to introduce people to the basics of data. We’ve been doing a lot of workshops to provide an on-ramp for journalists, non-profits, community organizations, and some policy folks.

As you were speaking, I was thinking about Eyal Weizman’s work and the Forensic Architecture research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London. He literally takes media stories and pieces them together, not from one perspective, but dimensional, crowdsourced inputs. A multi-authored telling of truth that, for example, can stand up in court. I’m thinking about the open-source movement and also other tools for community, like art, that can be used to build one’s own tools for accountability from a dominant regime.

I participate in a number of open-source communities. I’m a member of the Public Lab for Open Technology and Science. I run an ad hoc collective, the Institute for Infinitely Small Things. It’s almost 10 years old now, but a particular project that represents the type of work we tend to do, and that speaks to this idea of a multi-authored telling, began with a group of people who started doing experimental walks around the city. One of our members from Montenegro observed how Anglo-Saxon the names of the streets and public spaces were. So we looked at the history, who had been commemorated, and who had not. There are large

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Ethiopian and Brazilian communities, certain neighborhoods that are at least 35% Afro-American, and many other groups – all of which were not represented. So we invited members of the public to rename public spaces, and we set up a small library to do so.

We collected over 300 renamings, individual conversations, very interesting back-stories, and we published a map with the names and stories that were submitted. We called it the City Formerly Known as Cambridge. For us, this was a model for the participatory process.

Yes, art and design that engages and experiments with critical in-world action is both aspirational and also very topical and practical.

I agree that art and design are aligning so much more – with design becoming more speculative, and art becoming more practical.

There are still things that are permissible in art that simply don’t happen anywhere else. If I do events, they look like the “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” hackathon, or a walk in a public space with lectures along the way. These may look like hackathons or tours of public spaces, but they have been deeply inflected by my background as an artist.

Yes, these are the types of projects to look to that are expanding our definitions. What are some promising trends, shifts in perspective, or future projections you want to acknowledge or explore?

There are so many fields structuring large-scale conversations: citizen science, design solutioning, folks in crowdpowered journalism. I’m looking at these large-scale communities as models, as ways to work with data and do visualization. I think we are going to get better at leveraging crowdsourced methodologies and connecting them back to data and visualization.

ProPublica is working on a project, that’s still in progress, about the effects of Agent Orange after the war. They source impact stories from individuals and use this material for articles, but they also return to the communities with these stories. This is a really interesting back and forth that considers the community’s relationship with data. Another interesting initiative is Sarah Williams’ Local Lotto project. By analyzing the lottery in a New York neighborhood, the project studies data methods and probability in urban areas. It’s a holistic look that combines education, visualization, community participation, and intergenerational dialogue.

Then, hopefully, we bridge the gender gap to include more women and minorities within the technical fields. These are things that need to happen so that these tools are not tools of oppression, but tools that make authoring more accessible to everyone. //// Jamie Ferguson is a design and foresight strategist at Idea Couture.

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What if unions were software?

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MiscFutureAd_printready.pdf

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OCAD University's graduate program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation is creating a new kind of designer: a strategist who sees the world from a human perspective and re-thinks what is possible; an innovator who can imagine, plan and develop a better world.

B y S t u a r t C a n d y, C h r i s t i n e M c G l a d e, a n d R ya n Tay l o r

In light of the trends currently unfolding in the fields of artificial intelligence, workplace culture, and social values, we hypothesize a version of the year 2035 in which gender equality in compensation, distribution of power, and recognition are realized – finally – by taking flawed human decision-making out of the equation. On this basis, we generated an office artifact from the year 2035: an advertisement for the Union of the Future.

In this version of 2035, education, placement, recruitment, hiring, and team formation are all controlled by an algorithm. The “Younion” perfectly matches tasks that need doing with individuals who have demonstrated the

competencies suited to doing them. Blockchaincertified, the Younion guarantees team diversity, optimum innovation, and absolute wage parity based on value and not gender. The Younion takes the bias of the bottom line.

This is one simple example of how experiential futures practices – part of our work in the Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University – can synthesize and dramatize possibilities by creating images, artifacts, and immersions from those futures, today. //// Stuart Candy is a professor of foresight and design, and director of Situation Lab at OCAD University.

Christine McGlade is an MDes candidate in OCADU’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation Program, and founder and creative director at Analytical Engine Interactive.

Ryan Taylor is an MDes candidate in OCADU’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation Program, and a practising impact designer.

Are you ready to embrace a creative future?

Our graduate programs span the fields of art and design histories, criticism and curatorial practice, inclusive design, health, business innovation and foresight, digital media, and the studio art and design we’ve been teaching for 139 years.

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Is online dating affecting human-centricity in the workplace?

By Courtney Lawrence

As dating continues to move into the digital realm and becomes increasingly commoditized, it brings up many age-old issues for both men and women – trust, betrayal, desire, and deceit. With the onset of online personalities, it’s easier than ever to create personas that are, at best, partial suggestions of who an individual is. It is also easier, and arguably necessary, to make dating decisions based on assumptions and prejudices, rather than curiosity or empathy.

In this same vein, it is possible that such reactive and judgmental behavior is trickling into organizations, as employee turnover occurs at unprecedented rates. “Swipe sites” and the online dating mentality could transform the way we interact and engage with others, not only in our love lives, but also at work.

In an effort to be efficient in meeting new people, are we becoming less interested, thoughtful, and curious?

Dating Dehumanized

Relationships in the Workplace

Informal Relationships and Employee Engagement

In the quest to make dating more accessible, sites like Tinder, Bumble, and Happn are offering singles the opportunity to meet a diversity of potential romantic matches in a condensed time period. The relatively quick evolution from platforms like Match.com and eHarmony (which required extensive personal profiles) to apps like Tinder (which require little more than a single photograph) means users can evaluate dozens of potentials in a matter of minutes – and just as quickly dispose of them, based on the lack of instant attraction.

The breadth of options are designed to eliminate the accountability of committing to a particular person, but along with this variety comes tensions for those seeking a lasting partnership. In this virtual world of dating, the ability to create a connection, trust, and deeper emotional bonds is jeopardized.

While there are many success stories from online dating, one of the most significant issues with online profiles is that they become reified versions of the self. Given the lack of substantial data and insight into a person, it’s easy to become fixated on a glorified interpretation of what or who is presented, believing it to be true. Often, these interpretations are dictated by the patterns of our past or expectations for our future, rather than the reality of the present. It is easy to construe a story about another person without having a single conversation, let alone a face-to-face interaction.

With this online dating mentality, our mental model for making decisions about whom, when, and how to trust someone, be vulnerable, or open up is determined largely by a simplified depiction of another.

More importantly, it becomes easier to rely on assumptions or judgmental behavior rather than allowing genuine interest, a commitment to explore, and a sense of openness. Instead, we see confusion between intuition and judgment, where people say, “he/she just wasn’t right” without further exploration.

Unlike current trends in online profile-based dating, various formalized business practices take an empathetic, humancentered approach. Many standard relationship-building practices – marketing, workforce attraction, and client engagements – can be likened to “traditional dating,” where decisions are made based on insightful understandings of a consumer, a candidate, or a client.

For example, in hiring practices, it is no longer enough to just look at what’s presented on a resume or cover letter. HR methods are much more robust, in which someone’s professional profile is only one piece of the puzzle, and culture fit, extracurricular interests, and other life experiences are all valued and accounted for.

Likewise, in marketing, the movement is to go beyond traditional personas and gather thoughtful insights into the consumer and the contexts that impact the way they engage with a company’s products or services. Designing for these deeper and more dynamic representations of a target market requires going beyond assumptions or judgments. And in client relationships, it is crucial to immerse oneself in fully understanding the individual, team, or organizational stakeholder’s needs by assessing their cultural and operational realities.

In many ways, formal business practices prioritize and operationalize deeper forms of relationship building, knowing the importance that empathetic understandings play in affecting outcomes downstream.

Such processes are purposefully designed to question assumptions and gather insights about a group or individual. Interestingly, these human-centered approaches exist because of a predetermined framework of practice.

One realm where the impact of the “online dating mentality” is becoming more prevalent in business is in informal interpersonal workplace relationships.

Ironically, while businesses focus on practicing human-centric design and empathy, we may be diminishing these skills in our own sphere, especially as employee turnover happens more frequently. How often do we resort to assumptions, prejudices, or quick judgments about current or new colleagues, teammates, or leaders?

Not long ago, employees would stay with a company for 10, 20, 30, or even 40 years.

In that context, they grew up with their colleagues, saw the business change, and shared multiple milestones throughout the course of their careers. Today, as individuals are looking for the “perfect match” in an employer – the right mix of culture, role, reputation, compensation, and so forth – employee turnover is at an all time high. It’s common for an employee to stay within a company for five years or less. As a result, teams are in constant flux in a similar way that dating profiles come and go.

As a result of an environment that is always in flux, where new employees can be seen as competition or temporary fixtures within a company, it’s easier to rely on an insubstantial amount of information – their resume, a passing comment, their past experiences, or their current title – to assess them. Both in online dating and in these types of ever-evolving workplaces, you become your “biodata,” a two-dimensional characterization of who you are.

Part of the issue is engagement, which can stem from the quality of connection between employees and their peers and/or leadership. Without solid workplace communities and relationships, employees may choose to go elsewhere. According to Gallup’s 2016 State of the American Workplace study, 70% of employees worldwide report that their work is not engaging.

One quarter of that subset is “actively disengaged.” This translates to nearly 900 million people globally not feeling engaged by their work, and 340 million feeling actively disengaged.

photo: Studio Firma

Snap Judgment

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Given the “disposable” nature of workplaces, what is the reward in truly understanding those you work with or who work for you? More importantly, how do managers or leaders who see such turnover in their company get to know every new hire in a more substantial way than assessing them like they would a dating profile? How are leaders fostering an environment of curiosity about each other so that employees are not just commodities, and long-term relationships are valued as the key ingredient to company success and performance?

Beyond Assumptions The habits we form from our online dating, swipe-happy mentalities may impact the future of our workplace relationships more than we realize today. The result of not making a concerted effort to understand the full personalities, needs, or skills of employees reflects this connection, and is a risk factor for any leader or company looking to build a cohesive workforce. In any workplace, attention must be paid to moving beyond assumptions and truly getting to know one another. After all, there is so much more to each of us than a profile picture could ever say. //// Courtney Lawrence is a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

// In an effort to be efficient in meeting new people, are we becoming less interested, thoughtful, and curious? //

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Howard Gardner’s 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences is one of the more popular perspectives on the mind, and views intelligence as a set of differentiated modalities, rather than as a single, general trait or ability. Though often criticized for blurring the line between innate smarts and developed ability, Gardner’s theory breaks down intelligence into nine distinct, though somewhat interrelated, types: Naturalistic, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Spatial, Logical-Mathematical, Musical, Linguistic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Existential.

If we hold these nine types as an expanded definition of the word “intelligence,” we can compare the technology of today against these standards to see how smart our devices really are.

Naturalistic Our natural intelligence defines our ability to recognize and interact with the organic natural world around us – plants, animals, rocks, clouds, etc. Though not added until nearly a decade after publishing, Gardner described this intelligence as core to our evolutionary success as hunters, gatherers, and farmers.

Developmentally, this intelligence should be marked by little more than highresolution vision and olfactory systems, coupled with an extremely in-depth natural database to analyze against.

In theory, this seems like an ability that is less important for machines to possess. However, if we are to rely on them as tools for our needs, we’ll likely want our smartphone to not accidentally encourage us to make poison ivy tea in the woods. Moreover, even a robot will suffer from mistaking a jaguar for a house cat – so there could be some underlying survival aspects in play.

Artificial Intelligences

By Shane Saunderson

Smarthomes, IoT, AI, ubicomp, robotics, ambient media, pervasive computing – all are advancements that, in one form or another, describe our attempt to embed digital intelligence into the otherwise dumb, lifeless things around us. However, as we engineers are so often prone to, many of us have been all-consumed by the pursuit of a single focus at the expense of other equally, if not more, important factors. The fields of IoT and AI have been racing ahead,

trying to get some semblance of basic functionality in place. Yet in doing so, we’ve created another problem: We’ve been building stronger smarts and functionality, but, in the process, have created smart devices that are a bunch of assholes.

What we neglect in the pursuit of intelligence is that there is more than one type of “smart.” Our current efforts have understandably chased after the more obvious, functional definition of intelligence.

However, this narrow perspective of the word has created a bunch of basic gadgetry that no one wants to interact with. We’re actively building the electromechanical equivalent of genius savants – all IQ with no EQ. And, in fact, even that statement may be a massive overgeneralization. Human intelligence is comprised of countless aspects.

While there are many ways we can deconstruct these intelligences – all of which are incorrect or limiting in one way or another – for the sake of exploration in the digital sphere, let’s pick one and play.

Current AI Level: City Slicker Leading Example: Bosch BoniRob

photo: Xavier Caré

Just because you made a machine “smart” doesn’t mean you made it intelligent.

Implication: Device may be destroyed by nature or angry user.

BodilyKinesthetic Our body smarts describe our ability to leverage our body and manipulate objects around us effectively. This intelligence relies strongly on a good sense of timing, perception, and control, enabling the perfection of fine or gross motor skills.

Plainly put, machines typically suck at this. While a device can be programmed to perfectly optimize a single motion, like in manufacturing environments, the moment any variability is introduced, all hell breaks loose. Body intelligence is further complicated by the fact that devices are often built to be modular and adaptable; the equivalent of being caught in a permanent state of robotic puberty, where audio drivers drop a few octaves and new wires start growing where there weren’t any before.

// What we neglect in the pursuit of intelligence is that there is more than one type of “smart.” //

Spatial Spatial intelligence is a tricky one. At a glance, it is described as little more than the ability to think in three dimensions. However, the implications of this notion get a bit more interesting. Because of the human capacity to speculate, spatial intelligence effectively ties into our imagination and creativity, allowing us to perceive hypothetical versions of the world around us.

Can a computer think in three dimensions? Of course – it can likely think in four or five. However, very few machines have taken the next leap into projecting new thoughts and hypotheses into this three-dimensional world.

This means that, as it stands, our best machines are little more than environment rendering software.

Current AI Level: Drunken Toddler

Current AI Level: Following the Lego Instructions

Leading Example: Boston Dynamics Atlas

Leading Example: Autodesk Inventor

Implication: One wrong step and a half-million dollar piece of equipment becomes an impressive paperweight.

Implication: Cold War era, brutalist design and architecture.

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// We’re actively building the electromechanical equivalent of genius savants – all IQ with no EQ. //

This intelligence represents our ability to calculate, quantify, consider propositions, and carry out logical operations.

Beyond the simple manipulation of numbers, this intelligence has heavy implications for both pattern recognition and the ability to develop effective strategies.

This is the place where computers are currently wiping the floor with us. While some people may argue that machines still trail humans in pattern recognition and strategy development, anyone who has suffered the embarrassment of playing an RTS (real time strategy game) on “Insane” mode knows this to be a fallacy.

Current AI Level: Genius Savant Leading Example: Google AlphaGo Implication: Younger generations not bothering to learn math and an impending enslavement of the human race.

Musical

Linguistic

Interpersonal

Intrapersonal

Existential

Our musical intelligence, as the name suggests, pertains to aspects such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre. However, beyond the mere identification of music, this creative intelligence allows us the ability to recognize, reflect on, and even create our own melodic patterns.

While the audio processing half of this equation seems to be little to no problem, once again, the larger creative aspect is where the challenge emerges. That said, by analyzing historic data points of music, we have been able to create reasonably sophisticated music generation software. However, to date, the “hits” created by these programs fall into one of two categories: blatant rip-off or painfully unlistenable.

Our linguistic smarts represent our ability to understand and express ourselves through words and language. This intelligence allows us to understand broader use context and apply meta-linguistic skills to comprehend the deeper meaning of both language and communication. In short, reading between the lines.

In theory, the artificial version of this intelligence is an effective natural language processing unit. The problem is that no one has built a good one yet, since human communication is fraught with subtle nuances, sarcasm, context-sensitivity, and lies. Basic linguistic intelligence is simply understanding the words – a task nearly cracked by the world of computational linguistics; but understanding the words behind the words is a feat that requires an understanding of whom those words are coming from.

People’s smarts define our capacity to understand and interact with others without making things terribly awkward.

This is the empathy category that hinges on the ability for someone to interpret all types of verbal and nonverbal communication and use the acquired information to be considerate of the individuals around them.

We’re now getting into the territory where our technology sucks – I mean, really sucks.

Our current ability for technology to pick up on human context and emotion is only worsened by the ability for that technology to react to it.

We’ve devoted entire fields – UX, HCI, and others – to attempting to improve this form of artificial intelligence, but to date, no one has effectively made a device that, at some point, doesn’t deserve to become airborne due to human frustration.

Intrapersonal intelligence describes our ability to look within and deconstruct ourselves. It is crucial for identifing and understanding our own emotions, as well as to put these within the broader context of what it means for our lives and our futures.

This intelligence is practically nonexistent within the world of technology – though, not for a lack of success, but trying altogether. To date, few people have seen the value in a device that can be introspective. But in the coming years, this type of intelligence may be the key to unlocking broader interpersonal and existential smarts. How can we expect to understand others and the world around us unless we can understand ourselves first?

Current AI Level: Super-Intelligent Parrot

Current AI Level: Socially Awkward Teenagers

Leading Example: Bruce Wilcox’s “Rose” Chatbot

Leading Example: RoboThespian

Existential intelligence is likely the highest form, and deals with broader questions about the limits of life and, ultimately, our existence. It highlights the part of our brain that allows us to think beyond what’s literal, and contemplate broader concepts like the origins of life, spirituality, and how they get the caramel into the Caramilk bars.

Existential intelligence sits at the top of the hill as the most complex and elusive form of intelligence that, to our knowledge, few other species, let alone technologies, have ever cracked. While I can’t be certain that pigs don’t think about where bacon truly comes from, I do know that it will be a long time before robots start developing their own religion. That said, an interesting thought exercise emerges once an AI has met and potentially surpassed this ninth intelligence and begins to explore the realms beyond… but I digress; that’s another topic for another day.

Current AI Level: Starving Singer/Songwriter Leading Example: Melomix109 Implication: We will continue to listen to Top 40 songs produced by human pop-machines.

photo: DARPA

LogicalMathematical

Implication: Automated customer support lines will cause you to throw your phone across the room for at least another decade.

Implication: No robot girlfriends… yet.

Current AI Level: Dog Fighting its Reflection Leading Example: Nico robot Implication: The emergence of artificial psychiatrists for robots that live in denial and refuse to acknowledge their own emotions.

Current AI Level: Non-Existent Leading Example: Not Applicable Implication: Do robots dream of electric sheep? //// Shane Saunderson is the co-head of IC/Things at Idea Couture.

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Enter the Bachelor Machine

Market research is in need of a feminist critique. It has evolved for too long without benefiting from an examination that makes plain the implicit assumptions and power imbalances grounding its methodologies and claim of objectivity.

It needs this because, as more people align themselves with the core principles of design thinking and bravely set off to do a kind of human-centered research of their own, the need for methods and techniques that do not needlessly objectify human beings becomes more desperate.

photo: Kelly Knox

By Paul H artle y

Research is not a neutral activity. Even the most rigorous empirical science is still an interpretive art.

Just as victors write our histories, research reports are written with comparable biases – some of which are unspoken and unacknowledged. It is the job of capable, experienced researchers to ensure that the results, and the methods themselves, are scrutinized to avoid the worst, while making interpretive arguments that illuminate our understanding of our world and ourselves.

One of the critical frameworks that we use to accomplish this had its beginnings in feminist scholarship.

Feminist scholars have been very good at revealing the kind of implicit biases that color how we as a society build knowledge and view the world. One excellent example is Constance Penley’s work on filmmaking in her article, “Feminism, Film Theory, and the Bachelor Machine.” She coined the term “bachelor machine” to expose some of the effects of the cinematic process on how women are understood in popular culture. She demonstrated that films and filmmakers rely on the assumption that the viewer is male, and that everything in the film – women, the world, and the emotional and narrative content – are seen from the perspective of the male gaze. Her point is that even if the viewer is not a man, the cinematic experience forces the viewer to “see” from the male perspective. Her critique made it clear that the apparatus of the filmmaking process creates an audience of bachelors out of a diverse group of people. It also turns the women who were “being looked at” into objects and provides the audience with the permission to scrutinize them as such.

This is a vitally important critique, because it exposes an example of a problem lurking at the core of an entire system. And it is an important point to make because this can be found in other circumstances. Market research is also a bachelor machine of a kind. It is a conceptual apparatus that turns human beings into objects of study and creates a framework through which we are supposed to scrutinize them. It turns individuals with names, personal stories, and idiosyncrasies into segments, archetypes, personas, and statistics. It also provides the permission to reduce their wonderful complexity into easy-to-use simplicity. Contemporary retail’s preference to refer to its consumer as “her” demonstrates how this gaze can be gendered when necessary.

Without a critical reappraisal of this tendency, the research methods of market research will continue to uphold other unspoken, systemic assumptions. The preference for speed and simplicity makes it resistant to these kinds of critiques, because they do take time and require a willingness to deal with complexity.

Consequently, market research will continue to be unable to evaluate new forms of research, and new methodologies with the kind of critical lens that prevents the emergence of new, tacit biases. This means it is vulnerable to accepting research methodologies and perspectives that are burdened by problematic and unquestioned assumptions.

One example lies in the troubling introduction of “masculine studies” in market research. In the past few

years, many companies across many industries have experimented with this problematic research area as a way to understand younger men. On the face of it, masculine studies, and its proponents like Dr. Harry Brod, are trying to study men directly and come to terms with what it means to be a man in contemporary society. As a research area, it appears to be equivalent to women’s studies or gender studies. And if this were the case, it would be an acceptable addition to the host of inputs into market analysis. However, as its many critics have pointed out, it is a reactionary discipline that emerged as a counter balance to feminist critique.

As such, it is an attempt to rehabilitate the centrality of men, and the male perspective, in social and cultural research. It is implicitly trying to undo the critique that grounds the kind of arguments that scholars like Penley are making. Many kinds of research are already bachelor machines and need no help to reorganize the centrality of the male perspective. Without the very critique masculine studies is trying to appropriate, it would not be possible to identify the hidden structure and implications of its rise.

Without the critical lens that feminist critique provides, the market researchers who are looking for inspiration in work like those in the body of masculine studies will not be able to avoid its pitfalls. Beyond making important statements about the structural difficulties of women around the world, many feminist critiques offer an excellent mechanism to evaluate the usefulness of research methodologies. Far from being too impractical, these reflexive critiques are essential to good research. Market research needs to learn from the body of feminist critical theory to learn to correct itself and avoid making the kinds of errors that prevent businesses from learning about the world outside of their door. Ultimately it means that to avoid repeating the same mistakes, and recreating the bachelor machine, market research needs to find a better way to critique itself. //// Paul Hartley is head of human futures and technology, senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

// Market research needs to learn from the body of feminist critical theory to learn to correct itself and avoid making the kinds of errors that prevent businesses from learning about the world outside of their door. //

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B y Ta n i a S h e i k h a n a n d D r. T e d W i t e k

The gender-specific desires and needs of the female have formed the basis for some insightful patterns of behavior over the past centuries, both for the female as consumer and in the practices that persuaded certain consumer behaviors. Renaissance women applied poisonous plant extracts to their eyes for seductively dilated pupils. In the Victorian period, advertisements to women played on the era’s heightened fear of disease, promising escape from the “bitter penalties of disorders.” Cigarette advertising in the 1960s lured women into a lung cancer epidemic, while recent lobbying for pharmaceuticals for female sexual health brought about controversial marketing approvals that debated benefit-to-risk ratios. Such observations bring a stark reality to the idiom: be careful what you wish for.

photo: courtesy of the british library board, borax, lady’s pictorial 1885.

Women’s Health and Commerce: A Historical Perspective

Belladonna and the Renaissance Woman

Victorian Culture and Their Consuming Angels

One of the active substances in the ubiquitous plant referred as “deadly nightshade” is an intense biologically-active substance of the atropine family. Its toxic effects have been lyrically described as making one “red as a beet, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, hot as a hare, and mad as a hatter,” as atropine causes flushing, blurring or loss of vision, decreased salivation, fever, delirium, and even hallucinations and convulsions.

However, upon learning of the dilating effects on the pupil, it was not an uncommon practice for Renaissance women to apply the substance to the eye to mimic a state of arousal and achieve a seductive beauty from their magnified pupils. There are even some accounts where repeated use caused prolonged blurred vision and even blindness.

They likely required a skilled chemist to extract the berries, but apparently their “dispensing fee” did not come with the obligatory cautions.

While print advertising was not driving this behavior, the female depiction of desired beauty in Renaissance art was perhaps one venue of persuasion, as were historical accounts of similar practices as far back as Cleopatra performing similar rituals with atropine extracts of Egyptian henbane. One can't help but wonder at the lengths these women were willing to go for beauty perpetuated by their own versions of “popular culture.”

The Victorian era brought about some pivotal practices in women’s persuasion, both in personal care products as well as pharmaceuticals. In her book Consuming Angels, Professor Lori Loeb from the University of Toronto notes that by 1880, Great Britain had begun what can only be described as an advertising frenzy. Advertisements peppered the pages of newspapers and periodicals, its influence steadily increasing with the expansion of the press and a flourishing, competing Victorian market economy.

Loeb considered hundreds of Victorian advertisements for her research, from food and hygiene products to patent medicines, all of which she concluded belonged to the “hedonistic enjoyment” that nineteenth-century shoppers were now experiencing. Earlier notions of consumerism, which associated material goods with guilt, was banished: advertisements now proudly proclaimed their products’ deliverance of luxury, comfort, and good health, with a choice selection of beauty products, soaps, and patent medicines. Domesticity was crucial to the Victorian mindset, and the recurring themes of home, a mother’s love, and romance were all applied in selling a product.

Advertising companies also extolled things Victorians most feared, and subsequently could avoid by buying their products: disease, aging, and physical weakness. They also proclaimed important beliefs in nineteenth-century Britain, as Loeb considered one advertisement for Swan Soap. A white woman enjoys her bath with the aid of a content-looking African maid, who hands her the soap she needs to scrub herself clean. While the ad clearly promotes a soap, it holds an underlying meaning: the goodness and compatibility of British imperialism.

Loeb points out that although these ads were mostly targeted to the middle-class female consumer, they were dictated by a male voice of authority; women would not enter the realm of advertising or newspaper production until the 20th century. This does not mean, however, that the targeted readership were passive buyers. Instead, they were willing participants; women who carefully considered the means to beautify themselves and maintain good health in their homes, thus buying whatever products promised to fulfill that dream.

// Earlier notions of consumerism, which associated material goods with guilt, was banished: advertisements now proudly proclaimed their products’ deliverance of luxury, comfort, and good health. //

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You Have Regressed a Long Way, Baby

Be Careful What You Wish For

The feminist movement of the 1960s and the desires for equality unfortunately also came with the consequences of increased cigarette consumption. Virginia Slims illustrated that cigarettes no longer had to be hidden in one’s garter, proclaiming: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” the result was a sharp increase in female lung cancer death rates.The result was a sharp increase in female lung cancer death rates since the mid-1960s, which continued into the new millennium. Today, lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer deaths in women, surpassing breast cancer in the mid-1980s.

In a medical journal editorial in 1978, a prominent chest physician, Alfred Soffer, pointed out the unfortunate truth that some women equated smoking with social freedom and that “cigarette advertising that preys on a women’s desire for equity is either cynical or naïve.” This advertising campaign (costing $422,000,000 at the time), he believed, was promoting false hopes, false slogans, and false freedoms. As he concludes, women have “regressed a long way, baby – toward equaling the ‘appalling morbidity and mortality of male smokers.’”

Many forces have influenced women’s roles as consumers, and while the persuasion to take action can often be a good and important virtue, it may also serve unintended consequences when driven by commercial forces and the desire for an often ill-informed result of consumption.

As Professor Loeb points out, the chilling possibilities of life among Victorian women – such as disease, age, and marital discord – have indeed been grossly exaggerated in advertising in order to form a frightening catalyst to act through consuming. In more recent times, the “privilege” to smoke and the recently-available drug for women’s sexual health are proving to be a false victory of “equality.”

“Marketing drugs to women over the last 500 years has required inventiveness,” notes Professor Loeb. “It has sometimes involved manipulation.

But it has been most successful when mirroring back to women their genuine hopes and aspirations in each historical age.” Plato articulated that behavior is driven by a mix of emotions, desire, and knowledge; the latter component could have certainly received more exposure in the last few decades. Whether applied to the Renaissance society lady or a modern day working woman, the preoccupation with living up to the standards of an “ideal” woman, and the means to achieve it, is a historical constant. Understanding its repercussions, however, is only a recent phenomenon. ////

Flibanserin is Not the Female Viagra When Sprout Pharmaceuticals took over the unsuccessful challenge of drug registration of flibanserin from the German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim for treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in women, they did more than additional clinical research to evaluate the effects; they secured the advocacy of groups such as Even the Score, who felt that sexual health efforts in the pharmaceutical industry were too focused on men.

Several advisers to the FDA remained skeptical and not too impressed by finding only marginal improvements in sexual satisfaction over a placebo, especially in parallel to safety concerns about low blood pressure, fainting, and somnolence.

Nevertheless, the FDA approved the drug, denying any gender bias relative to the numerous drugs approved for men. Criticism of the FDA based on comparing the number of approvals for Viagra-like drugs to flibanserin were unfounded, given the distinct differences between desire and physical arousal and the biologic mechanisms behind them, as well as the ways in which clinical scientists can study these conditions to provide a sufficient weight of evidence.

Tania Sheikhan is a graduate student in Early Modern History at King’s College London.

Dr. Ted Witek is a professor and senior fellow at the Institute of Health Policy Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health, and serves as senior vice president of corporate partnerships and chief scientific officer at Innoviva in South San Francisco.

// Virginia Slims illustrated that cigarettes no longer had to be hidden in one’s garter, proclaiming: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” the result was a sharp increase in female lung cancer death rates //

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Making the New Feminist Revolution

By Lindy Wilkins

We are all cyborgs. We are made up of pieces that mingle and intertwine. These pieces do not stand alone: their sum is greater than their individual parts. Our gender, race, class, experiences, appearances, and abilities are some of the endlessly interconnected mechanisms that make up who we are, and influence how we perceive each component in turn. This is a term first coined by Donna Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto”, but has been realized in feminist theory before and after this formalization.

It is impossible to draw lines around each of these pieces. Where does one’s perception of gender stop being informed by their own experience? In Canada in the 21st century, we are constantly classified by these intangible elements in a process that creates broad assumptions about groups of people.

My perspective comes from the maker movement. Makers are community oriented DIY fabricators who aim to subvert the current access points to systems of production, fabrication, and STEM knowledge. One of the principal philosophies of the movement is “All kinds of people making all kinds of things.” Despite this principal, many of the most popular

websites, publications, and news sources depict over 85% male makers and a deeply concerning 0% people of color. Further, the topics covered by mainstream maker publications are limited: 53% of displayed projects are robotics and 33% are vehicles.

This narrow lens makes the call to action and rhetoric of the maker movement statistically false. A simple claim that a space is diverse does not actually make it so.

By claiming a movement is inclusive in the face of published evidence ignores the delineations society has placed on us.

Even if they are less prevalent in 2016, such lines promote intergenerational alienation. Without broadly inclusive media representation, youth are unable to project themselves into an assumption of senior roles within the field. Classifying people by single parts of our complex beings is an archaic practice, but we cannot ignore the structures that have been put in place based on these taxonomies.

The maker movement is tied to the broader narrative of STEM fields trying to utilize affinity for technology as a unifying interest. It is uncomfortable that the representation of the field is so overwhelmingly directed to white men, because image saturation and stereotype threat creates barriers beyond the personal. When a single group is responsible for the

distribution of information and education on a topic, the available learning quickly shifts to suit the existing knowledge base of the group in power. Learning becomes easier for this group – but much more difficult for people without the invisible asset of “belonging” or passively socialized knowledge. People who are not included in the implicit knowledge base begin to question why they are having trouble learning something the in-group perceives as “easy.” This assumed knowledge ranges from an assumption of tool competency to experience in “reading” or viewing similar projects. Some of us have not been socialized to be encouraged to disassemble, explore, repair, and look inside.

These learning methods are presented with the intent of sharing projects and knowledge, with a genuine desire to be inclusive. However, emphasizing the same paradigms of education presented from a particular perspective leads to more of the same kinds of people making the same kinds of things. I can promise you, it is not only white men who like robots.

One of the most perplexing things that was ever said to me in a makerspace is that the laser cutter was for girls. It was not said with a mean spirit or poor intentions.

I asked why, and the man who said this elaborated: “Well, mostly girls use it. And it’s clean.” I decided it was not productive to mention the multitude of times I’d been covered in soot, put out small fires, or was mildly electrocuted while rewiring a machine. Instead I was prompted to consider that yes, the laser is used primarily by female-bodied humans. The person who taught me was female, and so was the person who taught her. The man who observed this was a member of what we called the “illu-mill-nati,” a group of primarily male-bodied humans who controlled access to knowledge around the CNC mill.

They would never tell us we couldn’t learn, and always encouraged us to ask questions. Still, I have almost never seen a female-bodied person use one of the CNC mills.

I realized that I was witnessing a new gendering of tools and tasks. This was being done in a contemporary way of saying, “We said you could, so why don’t you learn?”

The reason I gravitated toward the laser was because I saw people like me using it, people with knowledge of how to learn and operate a tool within a primarily maledominated space. People like me, who could guide me. Learning to use the CNC mill before the laser cutter would have

photo: Julien L. Balmer

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entailed not only learning a complex new tool, but also dealing with people who fundamentally didn’t understand how they were socialized to treat me differently.

This is why we gravitate towards people who are like us – even if it’s sharing the pieces of our identity that have boxed us in.

It is difficult to be in a place where people don’t understand why socialization matters: tacit knowledge is hard to pass on, and it can be an impossible barrier to be the only person in a learning space who doesn’t know what a “size 4 Phillips head” is. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wanted to be around people where I felt it was safe to ask those questions, and knowing that there might have been a time where they too were feeling confused about things that were “obvious” or “easy” to others.

When we create knowledge from a singular perspective, we present only certain types of people with the ability to learn with ease.

Claims that things are “easy” create knowledge gaps that build an even bigger barrier to entry. It builds knowledge for the same people, and that is a problem that extends in many other directions than the ones highlighted here.

These paradigms of gendered tools have existed for a long time. One of the most curious instances of this is sewing.

It’s fair to say that you don’t have a need in your life for a CNC mill or a laser cutter, but we’ve all ripped our favorite pair of jeans.

It’s impossible to not engage with the deterioration of clothing, and yet I only know a handful of male-bodied people who are able to use a sewing machine. I’ve been asked to fix items of clothing at makerspaces (I can’t sew), but no one has ever asked me how to use the laser cutter machine.

This type of causal assumption of knowledge not only blocks people from learning, but it creates a problematic hierarchy of tools and the value of knowing how to use them. An instance of this was when a friend and I were hanging out at a makerspace we frequented. My friend had broken his arm and beautifully crafted a complex sling, complete with zippers, pockets, and adjustable straps. One of the zippers was broken and he was fixing it.

A nearby patron of the space remarked, “You’d better get one of these ladies to fix that” and motioned to me and another of our other genderqueer companions. My friend later confided in me: “That was actually the first time a dude said a misogynistic thing to me as if I was supposed to agree. Which, as a trans man, is when

I felt like I crossed over this weird gender line.”

The suggestion here was to have us do the task, which is against the DIY spirit of the space. In my experience, this is the norm with typically “female” fabrication methods; people tend to share fixes rather than knowledge. The value of knowing how to use the tools lessens, because the assumption is that there will always be people to fix your jeans. These dynamics exist in many forms, across many pieces of identity, but the perspective of gender speaks most to me.

This is one of the reasons we instituted a “hands off” teaching policy, which means when you are teaching someone a skill, you aren’t allowed to take it out of their hands.

They are the learner, and should be doing the task. These same people who are so “hands on” while teaching, are very “hands off” when it comes to tools they aren’t interested in. The broad assumption is that some people are interested in heavy machinery, and some are interested in sewing — and somehow we can guess who is who. The industrial sewing machine can sew through your hands though, and personally, I would call it a heavy machine.

This is why we need the Feminist Cyborg Revolution.

We want to break down these barriers, but first we need to acknowledge them.

These problems will not solve themselves through claims of openness, accessibility, and inclusivity. We must actively reach out and be aware of who is learning and teaching. We should be taught by someone unexpected, because if there is an expectation of a particular type of person holding a particular type of knowledge, we have not achieved our goal. In order to not fall into the same career and tool paradigms, we need to be aware who is and isn't present in our communities.

“Our best machines are made of sunshine,” says Haraway in “A Cyborg Manifesto.”

The best machines we use are run off of invisible waves and signals running through the air. These are the intangibles that we don’t have to think about daily. These systems are in place and for the most part, run consistently. This is not happenstance; we didn’t stumble upon WiFi by telling each other it existed. It is a system we put in place through active work, and this is what we need to do with our communities, workplaces, tools, and careers. //// Lindy Wilkins is director of education at STEAMLabs Community Space.

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Navigating Diversity

By Lotte Rystedt and C h r is t er W in d el ø v-L idzél iu s

Marianne Egelund Siig wants her kids to grow up in a world where they don’t have to battle gender stereotypes in their work life. That is a big part of her driving force as the Head of Diversity at Scandinavia’s largest bank, Nordea, a role she has held for the last two of her 11 years at the company. She started off her own career as a graduate from Kaospilot, a creative leadership and entrepreneurship school based in Denmark. Today, she has implemented diversity policies for 30,000 employees.

Egelund Siig’s motivation comes in part from her children, her teenage twins – a boy and a girl – and a younger daughter. As all mothers, she follows their development and challenges, but the gender stereotypes the children will face upsets her. “I can just look at them and say to my girls: Ok, you get this backpack and you will get ten more stones in yours.

Because of your gender, you are set behind from the beginning when you want to follow your ambitions in your working life,” says Egelund Siig.

The differences in opportunities and expectations are very obvious to Egelund Siig. Some of the stereotyping she sees for women is the contradiction between being a good mother and pursuing a career.

For men, on the other hand, the perception is often that they don’t want parental leave, nor do they want to play an essential role in their children’s lives. She sees the stereotypes as a hinder for both genders,

something she hopes to change: “A big part of my motivation for working with diversity in companies is that I hope I can do just a little bit to remove these stereotypes from my children’s adult life. Because they are just so unfair.”

In her professional life, she tries to leave the emotions out of the gender discussion and focus on the facts instead. “We need to look at what is actually going on and not just let it be a discussion based on feelings and assumptions,” says Egelund Siig, pointing to “A Nordic Mystery,” an article from The Economist.

This was a term that The Economist first used in 2014, based on the Global Gender Gap Index, compiled by the World Economic Forum (WEF). This survey showed that, although Scandinavian countries are in the top five when it comes to gender equality in general, the countries rank quite low for women in leadership positions. As an example, Denmark ranked as 81st in the world last year.

“We have the fundamental things in place such as equal access to education, healthcare systems, and good maternity leave,” says Egelund Siig, “but there are still not many women in leadership positions. That gap is quite frustrating, but also leaves a huge potential for changing the situation. We just need to crack the code.”

As a graduate from Kaospilot, Egelund Siig carries the skills to see possibilities within any challenge.

In her job as Head of Diversity, she has founded new viewpoints on gender diversity based on surveys and interviews with managers. For Nordea, the first step of the diversity strategy is to create more gender equality

photo: Lone Mørch

In the largest bank in Scandinavia, Kaospilot alumni Marianne Egelund Siig leads the initiative to get more women in top leadership positions.

among the leaders. Of all its employees, nearly 60% are women, but on the top leading levels only between 20% and 30% are female.

Egelund Siig has created and implemented a number of new policies for diversity at Nordea, one of which ensures that both genders are represented among the last three candidates for manager positions. “We have looked at and adjusted key people processes, because it is important to be as concrete as possible. One of these processes is the recruitment, and sometimes we must go an extra mile to invite women to go for the position,” she says.

Another recurring topic is maternity leave, a period that many women fear will leave them behind in the competition with their male colleagues. Egelund Siig herself took a parental leave of two years when she had her third child. She stayed connected to her career by reading, finding inspiration online, and going to conferences.

At Nordea, the guidelines for parental leave include that the managers keep in contact and share important information with the men or women who are at home.

“This is to ensure that they get notified of important developments and to prevent them from feeling isolated from what is going on at their workplace,” Egelund Siig explains. “That can especially happen to women, who have longer parental leave than men.”

In Scandinavia, quotas for how many women should be on boards, for example, has long been a hot topic.

To Egelund Siig, the continuous discussion around quotas is a symptom that companies – and society – are not being creative enough in finding new ways to establish gender equality.

“We need to install procedures that call for creativity to attract more women, as an example, in the recruitment process,” she says. “Also, we have to set concrete targets for the development of diversity in the organization. Setting clear goals is a natural way for businesses to work, and we shouldn’t see the work on diversity as something isolated and mysterious.”

To lead by example, Egelund Siig ensures she always looks for leadership potential among the women in her organization. “Research has shown that we are good at assessing men and women equally in regards to competences and performance, but when it comes to seeing men and women’s leadership potential, we are better at seeing that potential in men than in women.”

Egelund Siig tries to teach managers to be able to make more gender-neutral assessments. Her best advice to leaders who wish to become aware of the potential of women employees is to check their own assumptions: “Instead of thinking ‘she has two small kids, she would probably like to step down a bit,’ investigate if that is actually the case. Ask the woman herself.”

Encouragement can certainly play a key role too.

After conducting 17 interviews with executive women in Nordea who have come very far in their careers, all of them stated that they were encouraged to step into their first leadership position.

“So much research has shown that women are underestimating themselves and men are overestimating

// we have to set concrete targets for the development of diversity in the organization. //

themselves. Be aware of this, and know that women need to be encouraged more. The women in our survey all had their doubts at first,” says Egelund Siig.

Her crucial advice for young women is to “just do it,” and the sooner the better. “Fail faster and get back on the horse, or find out that you want to do something else.” Egelund Siig started her own career as a leader in her mid twenties when she founded a cultural magazine that she was also the editor of, and for eight years she headed the Nordic consultancy company that grew out of Kaospilot.

Now, as Head of Diversity, Egelund Siig thinks that the Scandinavian countries are good role models when it comes to having the fundamental structures in place for gender equality – but they aren’t finished moving forward either. “We can learn a lot from other countries,” she says. “The US, for example, doesn’t have structural things like maternity leave and free education the same way as we do in Scandinavia, but they have another respect for working women and I don’t see the same stereotyping and contradiction between being ambitious with your work and being good mothers.”

In addition to her job leading the strategic work for more diversity at Nordea, Egelund Siig also takes part in the public debate on diversity, gender equality, and leadership. “This issue is so important to society,” she explains. “We can see that companies with more women in leading positions do better economically. Most of the graduates from universities today are women and we cannot afford, as a society, to not make use of their potential.”

She believes that gender equality has to be helped with both political initiatives and new strategies in companies. “How patient can we afford to be when it comes to creating gender equality?” is her burning question.

One thing is for sure, Egelund Siig is not planning on sitting back and waiting for it to happen. //// Lotte Rystedt is a journalist and communications officer at Kaospilot.

Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius is the principal of Kaospilot.

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Motherhood in the Digital Age

It began for both of us with two blue lines.

After taking a few at-home pregnancy tests between us, we realized that it was true.

We really were pregnant. Once the initial shock and excitement had subsided, and we shared the news with a few close loved ones, both of us did what any normal millennial would do: we reached for our smartphones to let Google fill us in on what to expect when we’re expecting.

No surprise, right? Technology has forever changed the way we work, play, communicate, and interact with the world. As millennials, the generation that ushered in this new era of the device life, we are big believers that technology has not only enhanced our daily lives by making it simpler and, at times, more manageable, but that it has also given us opportunities to connect with others and strengthen our relationships.

As first time expectant mothers, we were both relieved to discover how much we could learn online. In recent years, we have seen an increase in the use of apps, websites, social media, and tech-enabled baby products to satisfy our desire to learn and navigate the complexities of pregnancy and parenting.

Here is the story of our journey to motherhood in the digital age.

photo: Matthew Jolly

By Jessica Konzelmann and Martha Twidale

The Baby Industry in the Digital Age Our quest for knowledge began with the standard pregnancy websites, most of which led us to the ever-growing world of pregnancy and parenting apps – apps that track your fertility, guide you through prenatal fitness, offer nutrition tips, let you know which exercises are safe, generate baby names, and help you stay abreast of every moment of pregnancy.

A quick search on the Android App Store, Google Play, and the iPhone App Store yields well over 1,000 results for pregnancy and parenting apps. This surplus of information, once solicited through formal prenatal care or via more experienced friends and family, is millennial desire for convenience. Accessible 24/7, it puts our minds at ease and provides a much desired sense of control – regardless of how unattainable that may be – over our pregnancy.

If you are curious to know how your baby is developing at 27 weeks and which vegetable they most resemble in terms of weight, BabyCenter will tell you that. (It’s a cauliflower, if you’re wondering!)

Need to know when you are most fertile and the best days to conceive? The Ovia Fertility app can help you out. Having contractions? No need to time them on your own, because the Contraction Timer (Android) and Contraction Monitor (iPhone) will do it for you. And if you are having trouble breastfeeding, consider latchME, a one-stop breastfeeding shop. It’s a treasure trove of tips and videos that will help you sort out the most personal breastfeeding issues, while a community of moms are also on hand to field questions or offer support.

Once we got the hang of the apps, we then turned to the bloggers, Facebook mom groups, and parent forums. We found ourselves acting on advice from other moms and moms-to-be about what to read, which products to buy, and strategies for getting through labor and the early days with a newborn. The idea of engaging complete strangers for advice and reassurance on some of life’s most personal topics seemed natural for us and, unsurprisingly, has become commonplace for our generation.

As a connected generation, millennials understand the value of the collective power of networks. We feel safe engaging with complete strangers, because we are doing so from the comforts of our living rooms. Those personal and, at times, embarrassing questions related to pregnancy (like “what is a normal amount of times to pee per day?”), we fearlessly put out there for the world to answer. We love hearing the opinions of others just as much as we love to give them. Certainly, we have both turned to friends and family for support and guidance, but there’s nothing faster and easier than embracing our online communities.

Feeling as secure and informed as any pregnant woman could be thanks to our online experts and new friends, we then began to explore the wild new world of baby products. Having blown up over the past ten years, the global baby industry continues to grow in countries where the birth rate is declining – in part, because of the growing affluence of middle class parents. Of these products, two old stalwarts – baby food and diapers – have become so huge that Nielsen estimates their global value at $35 billion and $27 billion respectively.

Then, there are the new products: gas reduction technology in bottles for gassy babies, odor-killing in diaper pails, complex video monitors and baby wearables that – again, thanks to technology and smartphones – allow parents to track movement, watch babies sleep, talk to them, and monitor more biological activity than most of us would know what to do with (including heart rate, blood

oxygen level, and skin temperature.) A great example of this is the Owlet Smart Sock, a device that fits on an infant's foot and allows you to monitor a host of vital signs as well as visual and auditory cues, sending the data directly to your smartphone. On a more extreme level, Pixie Scientific has developed a disposable that scans dirty diapers for signs of infection. All these products quantify our baby and give us access to helpful analytics which we can only hope will lead to us being more rested, relaxed parents with healthier kids.

But will they? With so much more available to us than previous generations, are we really better off as expecting parents? Or, is our obsession with information, data, technology, and gadgets actually fuelling parental fears and anxieties? Are we just trying to exert control over a situation that we cannot control? How millennial of us.

It can be reassuring and even empowering to learn how our bodies are changing and our babies are growing. But, with so much new data, it can also be overwhelming. The forums and review sites are full of extremes with people who have had the best or the worst experiences. The blogs and books contradict each other.

And your OB/GYN hates Dr. Google. Whether it’s online research, apps, or wearables, it can be easy to fall into a downward spiral that inevitably leads to imagining the worst case scenario stories and potential risks that will wreak havoc on pregnant women and their partners.

So does access to all this information really help us feel more prepared for the future, or will it create more anxiety than benefits?

Technology may provide us more avenues and opportunities to learn, but for moms and moms-to-be, maybe it is hurting our natural intuition as parents. Will we immediately turn to an app, blog, or online forum to answer emergency questions or solicit advice on the most mundane topics? Our reality is different than our parents’, and perhaps parenting in the digital age means embracing technology as just one more resource to help gain the confidence we seek. But do we really understand the impact this could have on our children, our families, and ourselves?

Only time will tell how millennial parents will fare. We may be quick to discover that, no matter how ready we can be, nothing will truly prepare us for the miracle of childbirth and parenting. //// Jessica Konzelmann is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

Martha Twidale is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

// With so much more available to us than previous generations, are we really better off as expecting parents? //

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Opening Up Business

BY K a t e M o r g a n

Traditionally, winning in business meant coming up with the big idea, keeping it secret at all costs, and being the first to market. In this world, everyone outside of your business is a threat to your success. You have to keep the competition out.

More and more businesses are realizing they can’t win with this model. The rate of change is accelerating, customers’ needs and expectations are growing in complexity, and nimble startups can quickly innovate to overtake market leaders. Companies need to open up and evolve their business models or be shut out.

Companies who have recognized this shift and responded are thriving. They prioritize collaboration over competition, share knowledge and data openly, and strike partnerships with others outside of their own four walls. They adopt an open business model, not a closed one.

Melanie Capewell, Head of Commercial Excellence at Daiichi Sankyo Europe, has been championing this way of working.

MISC talked to her at the Eye for Pharma conference in Barcelona about what it takes for organizations to behave and win in this new world, and how the role of women will be critical to their success.

How would you describe the difference between closed and open business models in the healthcare industry?

The traditional closed business model is about defending your product and safeguarding your data. Figuratively speaking, the doors are closed and you tactically decide which windows to open.

You need a lion at the top to protect your territory and outsmart competitors. It’s the classic, alpha model. Though we have always had disruption in healthcare, today, change is happening at an unprecedented rate. Market leaders are losing their positions faster than ever before, and, in order to be successful, we need to be responsive. Organizations need to embrace a new employee mindset, an altered company culture, and a fresher, more open business model.

An open business model enables us to leverage opportunities rather than being swept away by disruptions. You need to look for collaborators and think about your value proposition from the consumer perspective – which now includes patients more than ever before. You might co-create clinical trial data with a competitor, use wearable devices, listen in on social media, or do a variety of other tasks in addition to your fundamental business strategy.

We also need to become better at pilots, taking risks, and scaling up quickly when we are successful.

All of the above requires an organization that is comfortable with ambiguity, has resilience, values collaboration across teams and hierarchies, prioritizes creative thinking, networking, heterogeneity, and, importantly, listens. This open business model also requires a new leadership approach.

What is different about leadership in an open model?

In the classic closed business model, the leader sits at the top of the pyramid and views his or her teams as an extended arm to execute a clearly defined strategy. The leader controls the flow of information, drives decisions, and manages by authority.

In an open business model, the pyramid flips. In order to be agile and responsive to changes in the marketplace, the leader needs to leverage the heterogeneity of the team. The boss no longer sits at the top, but supports the pyramid from below, enabling the team.

To maximize potential, the leader must understand each team member’s intrinsic sources of motivation by listening and striving for a balance of trust and disruption, allowing the explicit strategy to be challenged by an emerging one. The soft skills often ignored in the closed business model become key to success in the open model.

What role do women play in the shift toward an open business model?

The marketplace is finally beginning to understand their different customer groups, recognizing that women drive many consumer decisions. This is particularly relevant in healthcare, where health is often family health, predominately a female-controlled topic.

Women utilize digitized media to inform themselves and often form strong networks. Think about breast cancer and how much (mostly) women have come together to create a strong community, and ultimately a strong lobby, versus that of prostate cancer.

Currently, pharma companies still have male-centric leadership, and I believe both female and male leadership is essential to developing a value proposition that is relevant to patients, and thereby women. The open business model, again, is better suited for this than the closed.

What barriers do you see getting in the way of women trying to lead this kind of change within organizations?

The list of barriers is endless. Even the fact that we can ask this kind of question shows how far our mindset still needs to shift.

Women are still categorized as being good with detail, conscientious, organized, and collaborative. It’s easy to be

pigeonholed as the assistant rather than the thought leader.

We, as a society, have also not yet solved how we can best combine parenthood with a career.

You have two kids and another on the way – for some women, becoming a mother means putting their career on hold. How have you navigated that challenge?

I think I have become a better leader in my organization because I am a mother. Children are not yet skilled at controlling their emotions, and they react immediately to your actions. If you don’t listen to your kids and allow their point to be heard, you create a power struggle. Similarly, the people I work with also need to feel valued and heard. When you listen rather than impose your opinion from the start, you learn a lot of important information about your team – motivations, circumstances, networks they belong to – which can both help you have your way and create opportunity for them. Kids are a really good coach in that regard. Being a parent also reminds you that you cannot choose when to act like a parent, and when not to. Your actions speak louder than words, and your kids observe you all the time. As a leader, it is no different.

Finally, what do you hope to be true in 15-20 years?

I hope the “women in leadership” conversation is dead. It’s tiring and bizarre that we even have to have the debate. Why, as a society, are we not more keen to leverage all of our assets to keep our economies strong and competitive? When I think about the future, I hope we have bridged the gap between gender and leadership, and found more flexible, holistic solutions for both men and women. //// Kate Morgan is a senior innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

B y L a u r a D e m p s e y a n d i lya p a r k i n s

Fashion is an extraordinary thinking tool.

Contrary to assumptions that it is trivial, cultural critics have long found that fashion can open up vexing questions in accessible, creative ways. It is particularly useful for thinking about time, as fashion has a unique tempo: it is resolutely of the moment, yet constantly refers to the past, suggesting there is more of the past in our present than we realize.

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Modern fashion is also a rich site for thinking about the meanings of gender. It often acts to enforce strict and limiting definitions of gender identity – hyper-femininity, in particular, has been a stock-in-trade of the industry for decades. In this sense, fashion has tended to reinforce the rigid categories that we have inherited as a byproduct of the modern will to differentiate. From about the year 1700, dominant understandings of reality have stressed difference rather than similarity, and fashion has provided an excellent stage for the reproduction of racial and gendered differences.

But fashion’s creativity and sensitivity to time means that it doesn’t have to be this way; fashion might actually enable us to imagine alternative gendered futures. Remember, fashion responds to the moment. This moment, in the Global North, is witnessing an unprecedented openness to trans and multi-gender realities. How might these influence fashion’s future?

The Menstruation Machine By Hiromi Ozaki (aka Sputniko!)

Photo: Rai Royal

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Thinking About The Past

Looking to The Future

Despite its familiar tendency to adhere to gendered norms, fashion has long been a site for experimentation with gender, and its history is rife with scenarios in which clothing trends emphasized gendered difference. The 1830s, for instance, has been called the era of the Great Masculine Renunciation. It featured a movement away from opulence and color in men’s garments and a narrowing of the acceptable range for masculinity – here we saw the rise of the sober, dark, unfussy suit. At the same time, fashionable silhouettes in women’s clothing accentuated women’s bodies through the ballooning of skirts and tight corseting of waists, which marked them out as ornamental and relatively immobile.

But there have been historical moments in which fashion offered a glimpse of something else. In the 1920s, the lifting of skirts, the introduction of what resembled an uncorseted silhouette, and a diffusion of sportswear, emphasized a vision of femininity that was less differentiated than it had been for decades: an active, strong, and publically engaged “modern woman” visibly materialized through clothing. In the same decade, newly coalescing communities of Sapphist women – whom we would now call lesbians – communicated to each other through the adoption of masculine styles, styles which were of a piece with the general trend toward masculinization in women’s dress and so were not necessarily legible to those not “in the know.” The historian Mary Louise Roberts has suggested that in the 1920s, fashion produced change rather than simply reflecting it, stressing the close connection of sartorial styles with qualitative transformations in the experience of gender.

Consider three distinct futures: One in which the dominant mode of expression is hyper-gendered, the second, an androgynous future, and finally, a world in which gender has become a fluid concept rather than a strict binary classification. We have already seen examples of each of these worlds play out in recent times. Kim Kardashian, the mother of selfies, has turned her hyper-feminized persona into a multi-million dollar empire, while Ukrainian model Valeria Lukyanova gained notoriety for modifying herself into a human embodiment of a Barbie doll.

At the other end of the spectrum, musician, actor, and model Grace Jones emblematized an iconic androgyny, simultaneously expressing both male and female characteristics through her imagery and work. The late David Bowie also flamboyantly expressed his masculine and feminine qualities, but morphed with such ease between them, he was nearly impossible to categorize. This defiance of the gender binary appears to live on in people like Hari Nef, the first transgender model signed to IMG, who chose to openly transition from her assigned gender under the gaze (and undoubted scrutiny) of the public eye.

These individuals are certainly exceptional, but they may also speak to the possible futures that lay before us.

In this not-so-unfamiliar future, perceived differences between genders continue to be magnified, with the development of advanced body modification technologies upping the ante in the pursuit of idealized forms of beauty. Where heels once raised us a few inches from the ground, fashionable new prosthetics might permanently extend our limbs or shape our silhouettes, and could themselves become new avenues for self-expression.

Though debates about the merits of natural versus “technical” beauty may be waged, as body modification technologies advance and become more democratized, they may also indenture us to the planned obsolescence and devotion to newness that now heavily impacts the speed of both fashion and consumer technologies. This future might therefore be characterized by a veritable arms race that not only amplifies competition between genders, but also within them.

Can the magnification of gender differences ever empower women? Current pop culture icons like Beyoncé may give hope that femininity – not to mention diversity – might eventually be imbued with associations of power, but as author Jill Filipovic has pointed out, feelings of empowerment and actual power are two different things. Hyper-femininity is often closely associated with sexualization – which, in turn, tends to reinforce strict gender stereotypes that limit rather than support self-expression, especially for those who fall outside the binary. Perhaps for femininity to become a source of power, it must be a choice, not an imperative.

The Gender Spectrum Future 1 Hyper-Gendered

Future 3 Genderfluid

Future 2 Androgynous

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What if, instead of seeking difference, we strove toward sameness? Unlike a hypergendered future where otherness is heightened, androgyny implies an element of unknowability, of mystery. An androgynous future would thus most likely be characterized by an unwillingness to be characterized or sorted.

Today’s gender-neutral fashion often defaults to the defeminization of women and girls’ clothing, but there are emerging examples of the reverse as well. The mostly-male icons of the Genderless Kei fashion trend in Japan, for example, have embraced feminine and childlike sartorial choices and rejected traditional gender rules by blending both male and female beauty techniques to achieve their androgynous looks. Given society’s tendency to discount the feminine, the overt choices of these men to adopt female fashion and beauty is a more subversive statement than it might first appear to be.

Some people are already speculating how we might do more than just mimic another gender, so that we may empathize with it as well. Designer, artist, and MIT Media Lab faculty member Sputniko! (Hiromi Ozaki) explored this concept through the speculative design of a “menstruation machine,” a wearable device equipped with a blooddispensing system and electrodes to stimulate cramping in the lower abdomen to allow anyone to experience the sensations of the average five-day period.

Similarly, advanced assistive reproductive technologies have the potential to externalize a traditionally feminine experience: pregnancy. While proponents of postgenderism and these forms of technological advancement believe they could free women from the biological responsibility to bear children (or pass it along to others), the emancipatory nature of such an advancement is more likely determined by who leads its development – and why.

Just as a hyper-gendered future might ostracize those who fall outside the traditional gender binary, an androgynous one might equally penalize those who desire to (or can’t help but) express their femininity or masculinity.

Whereas either pole of the gender spectrum – between hyper-gender and androgyny – suggest permanence, a future dominated by gender fluidity would be personified by ephemerality, but also the ability to fall somewhere in between (and indeed, beyond) the binary. This future might see us move from a view of gender as fact to one in which it is seen as a form of self-expression, or as actor and transgender activist Jen Richards has described, as something that can be played and experimented with, as we do with fashion today.

The planned obsolescence that currently typifies both fashion and technology might actually have the unintended benefit of allowing us to experiment and even play with gender. In this future, those who wish to might move along the spectrum and stop wherever feels most representative of who they are. Facilitated by expressive wearable devices and fashion tech, this fluidity might be slow and determined, or quick and modular – especially for those who prefer latitude over immutability. In the same way we have come to understand and respect the importance of biodiversity, we might also begin to accept and value human diversity.

Though not directly connected, gender fluidity and the desire to augment our bodies via technological means (often referred to as transhumanism), have interesting commonalities. Both strive to transcend what we begin our lives with – the physical “god given” traits we are born into. And yet, the idea of changing ourselves is not new.

We have always shape-shifted, be it through clothing, makeup, tattoos, or begrudgingly, the passage of time. Perhaps the acceptance of trans- and multi-gender realities will grow in parallel with our acceptance of technological enhancements to our bodies.

As problematic as fashion can be, it’s a playing field for change; a place where boundaries are tested.

It is a language through which to express ourselves, and to transcend our bodies, even if only for a moment. It is also a powerful tool for thinking about the past and what may lie ahead.

The modifications facilitated by clothing allow us to accentuate, hide, or play with our appearance, but they tend to be ephemeral and restricted to the surface of our bodies.

Though we can already alter ourselves via a plethora of cosmetic procedures, as new wearable and implantable technologies emerge, the boundaries between fashion and the body may begin to blur even further.

As fashion becomes ever more intertwined with technology, we will become increasingly able to augment our bodies in ways that both transgress and transcend traditional notions of gender. We might then come to understand that there are more than two ways to be human. ////

THE FUTURES OF HEALTHCARE

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Ilya Parkins is an associate professor of gender & women’s studies at the University of British Columbia.

Laura Dempsey is a foresight analyst at Idea Couture.

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B y D r . W e n d y Sc h u l t z

When are women not thinking about the future? From the earliest days – whether planning for food, planning for childcare, planning for the household, anticipating others’ needs, anticipating their own, anticipating challenges in achieving goals – it was ingrained.

Jamais Cascio once argued that humans are innate forecasters, giving the example of Paleolithic hunters knowing where the spear would hit the prey. But what about the innate anticipatory talents of the gatherer side of the human family? They were able to apply anticipation forecasting to when trees would blossom and fruit, when wild grasses would ripen, and how many skins needed tanning to clothe the tribe’s new members. Flash forward five millennia, and thinking about the future is now both a theoretical and applied discipline, an academic field, a practice, an art form. Especially with women – but where are they?

Last summer’s Avengers: Age of Ultron blockbuster included a party scene with an amusing moment where Maria Hill – a tough woman in her own right – turns to Tony Stark and Thor and asks, “Gentlemen, where are the ladies?” She takes a gentle poke at the testosterone levels in the Avengers’ headquarters and the very visible preponderance of males on the Avengers team.

A similar moment arose after the World Future Society’s (WFS) 2015 Conference in San Francisco, when Rose Eveleth of The Atlantic summed up her impression of the field in an online article asking, “Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?”

She interviewed both Amy Zalman of the WFS and Cindy Frewen of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), who both acknowledged that the stats indicate only one-quarter and one-third, respectively, of their members are women.

Eveleth interviewed other female futures researchers as well, who variously pointed out that the lack of a hard and fast definition for

photo: jen backman

Women in Futures: Gentlemen, Where are the Ladies?

“futurist” makes them difficult to identify, whether male or female.

As for why the futures stage spotlights so few females in the field, futurist Madeline Ashby suggested that maybe it’s the tendency of male futurists to give people what they want: a strongly stated positive vision of the future – even if that’s a highly uncertain outcome. Women, with a long history of a marginalized, precarious existence under threat, tend to view futures as containing many more shades of grey – and black. Nuance, sadly, doesn’t sell as well as drama.

Eveleth’s article kicked up a social media storm, and the tweets were flying furiously in the futures, singularity, visionary, foresight, anticipatory, and planning communities. Responses varied. Rather predictably, a man – Jeb Kinnison – suggested that men are innately “more vigilant” and hence, presumably, more subject-focused and anticipatory by nature, going on to say, “…an effort to force more women into futurism means less good futurism and more feelz as guides to policy and planning. Which means a less dynamic future for everyone.”

One woman – Cathy O’Neil – said how she hasn’t had either training or experience in futures besides a keen interest in the subject, but would jump into this pool since it’s clearly crying out for a woman’s critical perspective to widen the dialogue beyond the merely technophilic. All three of these writers – Eveleth, Kinnison, and O’Neil – committed the same error: a lack of rigorous investigation. They took the technodeterministic flashiness of singularitarianism and the big business focus of scenario planning consultancies and the popularist futures pundits as the whole field.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a global community of women and men in futures continued fifty years’ worth of critical, creative, rigorous work, outside the media spotlight.

A few people did dive a little deeper. Marshall Kirkpatrick of Little Bird noticed the Twitter flurry and decided to apply logic, and his software platform’s network analytics, to the question. He blogged the result as “125 Top Women Futurists & the End of Business as Usual.” With this network analysis of futures-thinking women who tweet, Kirkpatrick was trying both to identify who was putting out futures-focused information, and also how much they were influencing their peers in the futures dialogue.

Kirkpatrick’s list offered a fairly good first cut at women internationally who are futures-focused. But because it was extracted entirely from Twitter feeds, it missed the non-social media savvy women who are significant contributors to futures thinking worldwide, and of course it missed most of the great founding thinkers in futures studies from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

The content analysis underlying this network mapping was limited primarily to English, so it also missed the global proliferation of futures thinking in multiple languages and alphabets. The Millennium Project of the United Nations University, for example, is a worldwide network of futures researchers, many of whom are women.

A blog article condensed his analysis, and he interviewed a number of the women it identified. One clear theme that emerged was that thinking about the future cannot and should not be limited to thinking about technological advances. To riff on Ashby’s comment about male futurists and the spotlight, “it can’t all be about boys and their toys.” Granted, this is a little unfair to the community of excellent male futures thinkers out there who are both mindful and critical in their explorations – so here’s to excellence, whatever its gender wrappings.

Shortly after Kirkpatrick published his blog, popular futurist Ross Dawson got into the action, pointing out that he often gets asked

where the female futurists are. He took a slightly different perspective, however, in acknowledging that a sizeable community of women in futures and foresight exist – but are not as well known as they should be. He compiled an initial list of 78 female futurists worldwide, with continuing research later expanding to 143.

“I thought it would be useful to compile a list of the world’s top female futurists, for those who are looking for diversity in their insights into the future,” Dawson said. “It is tricky defining a futurist, so while we have largely selected those who describe themselves as working in this space, we have also included others whose work is largely that of exploring the future.”

Dawson’s effort provides greater geographic diversity than Kirkpatrick’s network analysis, but there’s a lot of overlap in their two sets. Yet even taken together, these represent only the tip of the iceberg. Many of the women mentioned are teachers and trainers in futures, and have guided multiple generations of futures graduates into practice.

However, a lot of the women studying in the field end up working locally. Professor Eleanora Barbieri Masini focused on women’s futures at the Gregorian University, and many of her female students are now actively engaged in their home countries – for many of her students were from developing economies. Are women less well known as futures researchers and thinkers because they are more likely to be working locally, getting the futures job done, and less likely to desire taking center stage and courting the media? Maybe we need an entirely new research strategy for this question.

An even bigger question in the industry is why our field doesn’t have more of an impact, which was recently discussed on the APF listserv. Why aren’t we getting our messages across? Why aren’t we transforming the world and future possibilities? After all, futures studies, both academic and applied, has existed for over fifty years. What was interesting about that conversation – which featured both male and female futurists – is that many of the people participating have, in fact, had significant impacts on the world.

So what’s the problem? Are we all just envious of those people who do grab the spotlight? Do we all want, or need, to be Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk? Is it go big or go home? Here’s an idea – maybe we should put our money, hands, time, and talent where our chaotic, complex mouths are, and be happy at sticking to the local knitting of futures by taking on the motto, “Supercriticality!”

Supercriticality is the point at which one last grain of sand dropped on the sandpile causes its collapse. If we focus on adding critical and creative futures thinking into every dialogue, every action, every part of our social and professional networks, if we knit the futures one chat, tweet, game, prototype, and story at a time, then we are adding grains of sand to the pile of potential transformative change. We engage other people in adding grains of sand to the pile, until we have involved enough people that someone will drop that last grain of sand that transforms the world.

It’s not showy, but it gets the job done.

Some of us will be the Zaha Hadids of futures studies. But some of us will just be taking care of the daily household chores of shifting sand. Both are useful. Both can be revolutionary and transformational – just at different scales. //// Dr. Wendy Schultz is director of infinite futures and a member of the Association of Professional Futurists, a professional member of the World Future Society, and a fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation.

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NikeWomen’s Week: Bridging CX Visions and Delivery

Channels of CX Translation

01 Strategic Mandate

02

08 Employee Delivery

03 05

04

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By Kelley Kugler

“CX=EX.” It’s a clean shortcut to describe the translation of customer experience (CX) ambitions through the actions and experience of individual employees (EX). It’s also a nice framework for discussions with clients and students. However, it’s far from helpful when describing my role as an “Innovation Strategist focused on CX” among my peers.

Rather than consulting an organization’s management on their long-term growth strategies, my peers are often responsible for managing more practical and immediate realities. Our attempts to find common ground in our days make the break between management’s vision of CX and its relevance to the employee incredibly clear, and, when frameworks and theories only perpetuate the divide, the strongest bridge I find is their day-to-day stories; the EX side of the equation.

For the past nine months, I have closely witnessed the EX behind NikeWomen’s in London, as I lived alongside Helena Thornton, the team’s UK Brand Manager. In living together, I’ve learned that Helena’s employee experience is tightly intertwined with her life experience; tapping out texts to agencies at dinner, recovering from a bootcamp class while giving the

trainer their next event briefing, or editing slides during our conversations on things entirely unrelated. Amidst this multitasking, she makes substantial decisions for the brand, and there is certainly no buffer time to consider whether or not they are aligned to some proverbial North Star. While Ralph Newbrook, the UK Brand Events Manager, puts it as “Helena just gets it,” I just don’t “get” how she can move forward so swiftly and with such an innate understanding that what she is doing is “right.”

The ultimate case study came with NikeWomen’s Week. A week in late January when Nike takes over city gyms worldwide to provide free classes to thousands of female consumers, offer direct access to Olympic-level athletes, and release Nike’s newest products, it’s a major marketing effort for the Women’s category. For Helena, it meant 58 events across London in 5 days.

During this week, I observed just how many channels support Helena’s translation of the NikeWomen’s strategic vision into real consumer experiences. I soon realized that, while the channels between headquarters and the individual may be carefully crafted, those on the ground are incredibly live, close, and fluid. In the end, the circuitous nature of Nike’s communication acts to continuously close the CX translation gap.

photo: scott heavy

06

01 Clear Mission

02 Statement Products

03 Rich Media

Nike’s relationship with women’s fitness covers everything from overcoming personal hurdles (#justdoit), the social aspect of working out (#bettertogether), and the underlying emotional relationship to our bodies (#betterforit). It’s not easy to cut through such complexity with a clear vision that, in the end, makes a difference to the individual employee or consumer. However, Nike’s mission statement – to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world” with the caveat of “if you have a body, you are an athlete” – came through in an incredibly authentic way.

The variety of women I met during NikeWomen’s Week was inspiring – from women who had not worked out in over a year to the fastest women I had ever run alongside. Whether through event design, consumer recruitment, or overarching category marketing, there is an embedded understanding of the team’s ultimate CX goal.

Across events, cities, and media posts, Nike’s products were consistent throughout the week. Statement products – in this case, training leggings in bold cobalt blue through to running tights streaked with gleaming compression technology – created headquarters-approved consistency across visuals and conversations. With all of the week’s pushed marketing activity, the end consumer experience was one of belonging to a larger community.

At the Friday finale, Nike premiered their first YouTube video series, titled Margot vs Lily. Though lighthearted, the series hinges on the tenuous relationship between connecting with a fitness community through online media and building an offline community while prioritizing fitness. It’s a very timely and sensitive conversation among the young female fitness community.

By addressing these issues through a rich media format highly relevant to the target consumer, Nike secured a level of control of the conversation and relieved pressure from employees to prepare and defend a point of view of their own.

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04 Large Scale Adaptations

06 Relationships and Repetition

In CX, we often tout the idea of “think global, act local,” imagining inventive adaptations to niche events, language, and players. In contrast, NikeWomen’s Week demonstrated how CX can go local in a very big way. Resting in shavasana at the top of the Shard and warming up in the Ministry of Sound, I felt my excitement for London very much rejuvenated by these iconic city venues. By prioritizing the ways to adapt CX mandates to their location most effectively, London’s Women’s team delivered an experience that resonated far more powerfully than any inventive tailoring of the tiny details.

So much of a memorable CX relies on improvisation by the brand’s live hosts.

While Helena coordinated logistics backstage, the Nike Master Trainers led the consumer experience front and center and on the spot. When microphones cut out or alarms sounded, it was Helena’s gradually developed trust in these trainers that powered a response that felt practiced, comfortable, and controlled in front of the end consumer.

05 Embedded Inspiration

As I joined the team’s cab rides at the end of each day, I listened in on Helena’s ad hoc conversations with her teammates; interesting questions asked by consumers, commentary on the room’s energy, and overall sharing of the good and bad. While in boardrooms, we often recognize the value of a research debrief or formal regroup, these potent conversations of unstructured sharing served to actively refine the experience throughout the week.

Nike is known for using professional athletes to inspire their product innovation.

However, this practice evidently influences their services and experiences just as strongly. During NikeWomen’s Week, I trained with professional track and boxing athletes, and it was clear through our conversations and their interactions with employees how actively engaged they are in their relationship with Nike.

By consistently embedding inspiration in product, service, and experience journeys, consumers and employees alike develop a grounded and clearer understanding of the brand’s story.

07 Facilitated Transportation

08 Valued Recaps Through articles and anecdotes, I had heard about the fanatical archiving practices of Nike’s Innovation Kitchen, but I realize now this behavior deeply pervades the company.

Helena’s recap of NikeWomen’s Week consisted of an animated email with a video reel, noteworthy results, and vivid imagery.

While surely a self-fulfilling reflection of an employee’s hard work, it also serves as an important artifact to continuously reset the bar for CX possibilities. By recognizing the value of these recaps and following through on applying their learnings, organizations create a strong translation loop from CX mandate to delivery and back.

Surely this is only one model. However, by monitoring how CX pioneers like Nike drive vision through to execution, leaders agnostic of industry may better borrow, curate, and adapt their own channels of translation. If optimizing a business’ potential today relies on balancing the CX=EX equation, organizations must equally support the crafted conversations of strategic mandates, the fluid interactions among the individuals delivering, and all essential bridges in between. //// Kelley Kugler is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

// By consistently embedding inspiration in product, service, and experience journeys, consumers and employees alike develop a grounded and clearer understanding of the brand’s story. //

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Create/ Erin M. Riley

What is the relationship between the traditional nature of tapestry and the modern-day themes you depict?

I am much more overt with my content.

Tapestry was a medium that depicted layered and complicated imagery that symbolized many things; they might appear one way, but the meanings behind them were different. My work is similar in that a viewer doesn’t know my perspective immediately, but they are forced to confront challenging imagery and then think further into symbolism.

You often take images that would otherwise be transient (perhaps texted or sent on Snapchat) and turn them

into an art form that not only has a longer shelf life, it’s also very time consuming to create. Can you further describe the role of time and temporality in your work?

When I was growing up, image sharing was very new – but it always came with implications. If you sent images to someone you didn’t know, they might send the image to others. But, for me, this was never threatening, mostly because I was taking images I felt great in, and was actually enjoying the free advertising.

I dated men who played in bands and was always open to other people seeing me in a sexual manner. However, because I had grown up in a very sober environment, I was never thrust into social settings where inhibitions were easily lost. To me,

photos were taken in a careful manner, and considered quickly.

The older I got, and the more the internet exploded, the need for constant visual stimulation was exacerbated. I was finding that, no matter how happy I was with images, lovers were needing more and more to stay interested – I was finding myself annoyed. By weaving these images, I am giving them the time I feel they deserve.

What do you imagine for the future of femininity?

I think gender identity will become more fluid and open. People are already expanding their minds and expectations of what it is to be feminine, and I think artists are helping the ideas become more

realized. I am very much interested in destroying the correlation between femininity and virginity; helping people see that having ownership or a stake in a woman’s body does not make them feminine, it is just continuing the patriarchy.

photoS: Erin M. Riley

by mira blumenthal

Do you feel your work is part of an effort for women to reclaim their sexuality and how it’s depicted in pop culture?

Of course, but it’s also to support and celebrate female sexuality. Women are beautiful and sexuality is an amazing and intimate experience that, when enjoyed healthily and safely, can be empowering, mind bending, self-reflective, etc. I am beyond tired of girl hate and slut shaming

– we are each other’s worst critics and I am trying to do my best to combat that.

Describe the power dynamics between men and women that are illustrated in your work.

I rarely work with imagery of men. In many ways, the depictions of women are from the male perspective, but so much about how young girls and women present themselves is about peer validation rather than sexual encounters. I won’t deny that I am openly interested in objectifying men so that they might be able to empathize with the reason cat calling, sending random dick pics, and harassing women is not warranted – although I am not sure it’s possible. I often get asked why I don’t use my work as rugs, and it’s because women

have been walked over for centuries and I think they deserve more. But I would love to walk all over a dick pic rug.

Do you think using weaving – rather than painting or photography – allows you to depict more explicit scenes and themes?

In some ways, yes, because the medium is talked about over the content. But with a traditional medium comes rules and guidelines that feel strange breaking – but I am long past that. ////

For more information about Erin M. Riley, please visit erinmriley.com Mira Blumenthal is an editor at Idea Couture.

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by mira blumenthal

What sparked the idea for your persona, Joyce?

Creating Joyce was almost an accident.

I’d always taken pictures of myself in private – from the age of 8 to 18. So I was used to experimenting with myself, but when it came to my “serious work,” I’d only photographed models or friends.

I was 19 and all I wanted was to make perfect pictures of perfect girls.

However, before taking these glamour

shoots, I’d always use myself as a stand-in model to test things out alone. I’d pull faces or cover my face completely to make the pictures less awkward to look at.

Each week at university, we had to bring in new work, and one week I had nothing to show except these shots of me acting like a fool. The tutorials were usually sharp and serious, but my tutor just burst out laughing. She was the one who urged me to carry on with it, and so I did.

Do you consider these portraits to be self-portraits, or is Joyce someone entirely separate from yourself?

A bit of both. She’s a fictional character without a story. There’s purposefully no background details, no biography.

I prefer to leave that up to the audience to imagine.

Tell us about your relationship with the color pink. What does it represent to you?

I’ve always loved the color pink and our conflicted relationship with it. People feel

photo: Juno Calypso

Create/ Juno Calypso

weird about the color pink; it can be seen as innocent and juvenile, but also embarrassing and highly sexual when we think about things like blushing, sexual organs, tongues, and lips. If red is love, maybe pink represents suspense – longing, yearning for pleasure. The hope of fulfillment. I think it relates well to the idea of constructed femininity, because we associate the color pink as something artificial, a color not often found in nature.

What do you foresee for the future of femininity and the beauty industry?

It’s a really interesting time right now for those subjects. When I started this project four years ago, I was reading The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf and she ended the book saying something along the lines of: “The only way the beauty industry can stop being harmful to women is when women truly have a choice over it.” I don’t think we are there yet – we are far from it – but there’s something hopeful about the way women of all ages and ethnic

backgrounds are creating this beauty community on the internet. Apart from all the corporate sponsorship, it feels like the start of something.

How would you describe the sexuality you depict?

Solitary. //// For more information about Juno Calypso, please visit junocalypso.com Mira Blumenthal is an editor at Idea Couture.