Design Better - 尼克·福斯特:能、应、可能、不——一种全新的未来设计思维 封面

尼克·福斯特:能、应、可能、不——一种全新的未来设计思维

Nick Foster: Could, Should, Might, Don't—a new way to think about designing for the future

本集简介

大多数设计师习惯于处理已知的问题——我们与用户交谈,收集洞察,根据反馈进行迭代。但当你为一个尚未存在的未来设计时,会发生什么?当你为尚未出生的人,或多年后才可能出现的技术创造产品时,又该如何? 今天的嘉宾几十年来一直致力于为未来设计,这是一个设计规范最多也只是模糊不清的领域。尼克·福斯特曾在谷歌X担任设计负责人,主导了200多个“登月计划”项目,涵盖飞行器到核聚变等。 尼克撰写了一本富有争议的新书,为如何应对未知领域的设计提供了实用指导。在《能、应、可能、别:我们如何思考未来》一书中,他指出,我们陷入了可预测的思维模式,而这些模式实际上正在削弱我们预测未来的能力。 我们与尼克探讨了为什么大多数对未来的想法都落入四个有问题的类别,以及在为未来设计时伦理的重要性。我们还谈到了“数字虚构”和数据驱动预测的潜在危险,他与从未接触过设计师的博士科学家合作中学到的经验,以及硅谷对KPI的痴迷如何扼杀了长期思维。 个人简介 尼克·福斯特 RDI 是一位位于加利福尼亚州奥克兰的未来设计师。 他职业生涯中一直为苹果、谷歌、诺基亚、索尼和戴森等全球知名科技公司探索未来。作为谷歌X的设计主管,他领导一支由设计师、研究员和原型师组成的团队,开发诸如脑控计算机接口、智能机器人、平流层互联网气球和社区级核聚变等新兴技术。 尽管尼克的许多工作极具雄心,但他以务实甚至略带叛逆的方式看待未来而闻名。2013年,他创造了“未来平凡”一词。2018年,《财富》杂志称他为“全球最具影响力的推测设计领导者之一”;2021年,他被授予“皇家工业设计师”称号——这是英国设计师的最高荣誉,以表彰他对该领域的重大贡献。他同时也是一位出色的作家和公众演讲者,出版了多部著作,并在全球各地与观众分享他对未来的思考。 *** Design Better 付费剧集 本集为广告支持版本,面向所有人开放。如您希望收听无广告版本,请升级为我们的付费订阅,您将每月额外获得2集无广告剧集(共4集)。付费订阅用户还可访问纪录片《设计颠覆者》及我们不断增长的书籍库: 您还将获得与往期嘉宾的月度AMA、无广告剧集、折扣和工作坊优先准入权,以及我们的月度通讯《简报》——汇总节目中发现的深刻洞察、引语、阅读材料和创意过程。 立即升级为付费会员

双语字幕

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设计师们常常喜欢处理那些有既定模式、有明确开端、中间和结尾,以及明确发布时间的产品。

Quite often, designers like to work on a thing that has a sort of established pattern and a beginning, middle, and end, and a ship date.

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但我认为,当你在探索未来时,那是一个不可预知的领域,必然会充满无数的死胡同。

But I think when you're exploring the future, it is an unknowable space, it will undoubtedly be filled with an infinite number of dead ends.

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你必须敢于迎难而上,告诉自己:这也许就是那个对的方向,但更有可能的是,它会失败,或者无法产生你期望的结果。

And you have to be comfortable throwing your chest at that and saying, this might be the one, but it's more than likely to either fail or not yield the kind of outputs you're looking for.

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大多数设计师都习惯于处理已知的问题。

Most designers are comfortable in the world of known problems.

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我们与用户交谈,收集洞察,然后根据反馈进行迭代。

We talk to users, gather insights, and then we iterate based on feedback.

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但当你为一个尚未存在的未来做设计时,会发生什么?

But what happens when you're designing for a future that doesn't yet exist?

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当你为尚未出生的人,或多年后才可能出现的技术设计产品时,又该如何?

When you're creating products for people who haven't been born or technologies that might not emerge for years?

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今天我们的嘉宾几十年来一直致力于为未来做设计,这是一个设计规范至少在很大程度上都模糊不清的领域。

Well, today's guest has spent decades designing for the future, a space where design specs are ambiguous at best.

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尼克·福斯特曾领导谷歌X的设计团队,参与了200多个登月级项目,涵盖飞行器到核聚变等领域。

Nick Foster led design at Google X, where he worked on over 200 moonshot projects, from flying machines to nuclear fusion.

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尼克撰写了一本富有争议的新书

Nick has written a provocative new book

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为如何应对未知领域的设计提供了实用指导。

that provides helpful guidance on how we might approach designing for the unknown.

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在《可能、应该、或许、别做:我们如何思考未来》一书中,他指出,我们陷入了可预测的思维模式,而这实际上让我们更难预见未来的发展。

In Could, Should, Might, Don't, How We Think About the Future, he argues that we've fallen into predictable patterns of thinking that are actually making us worse at anticipating what's coming next.

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我们与尼克讨论了为什么大多数对未来的研究会落入四种有问题的类别,以及在面向未来的设计中伦理的重要性。

We chat with Nick about why most futures thinking falls into one of four problematic categories and the importance of ethics in designing for the future.

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他还谈到了数字虚构和数据驱动预测背后的隐藏风险,他在与从未接触过设计师的博士科学家合作中学到的经验,以及硅谷对关键绩效指标的痴迷如何扼杀了长期思考。

He also talked about the hidden dangers of numeric fiction and data driven predictions, what he learned working with PhD scientists who'd never met a designer, why Silicon Valley's obsession with KPIs is killing long term thinking.

Speaker 2

欢迎收听《设计得更好》,探索设计与科技交汇处的创造力。

This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology.

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我是埃利·伍利。

I'm Eli Woolery.

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我是亚伦·沃尔特。

And I'm Aaron Walter.

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在《Design Better》,我们的主要使命是制作有助于像你这样的人精进技艺、提升协作能力,并从他人的创意过程中获得灵感的内容。

At Design Better, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others.

Speaker 1

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If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com/subscribe.

Speaker 1

我们将在短暂的广告后继续对话。

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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Design Better is brought to you by Wix Studio, the platform built for all web creators to design, develop, and manage exceptional web projects at scale.

Speaker 1

了解更多,请访问 wix.com/studio。

Learn more at wix.com/studio.

Speaker 1

现在,回到节目。

And now, back to the show.

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尼克·福斯特,欢迎来到《Design Better》。

Nick Foster, welcome to Design Better.

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你好。

Hello.

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很高兴能来这里。

It's nice to be here.

Speaker 1

尼克,我们很期待和你交谈。

Nick, we're excited to talk to you.

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你即将出版一本非常有趣的书。

You've got a really interesting new book coming out soon.

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这本书名为《可能、应该、也许:我们如何思考未来》。

It's called Could, Should, Might, How We Think About the Future.

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我们稍后会深入探讨这个框架及其具体内容。

And we'll dive into that framework and the details in there in just a minute.

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人们应该知道,你是一个经常思考未来的人。

I think it's good for people to know that you are someone who thinks about the future a lot.

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有很多设计师在为当下设计东西,但很少有人在为未来设计。

And there are a lot of designers out there designing things for, but not too many people who are designing things for the future.

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你是怎么进入这个领域的?

How did you find your way into that space?

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嗯,我们本可以讨论这句话中所涉及的问题,但让我们先聊聊你的个人经历。

Well, we could talk about the problems therein in that statement, but let's get into some biography first.

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是的。

Yeah.

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这是一个很长的故事。

It's a long story.

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我是英国人。

I'm British.

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希望你能从我的口音中听出来,但我自2012年起就一直住在美國。

Hopefully, you can tell by my accent, but I've been in The US since 2012.

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我在一个叫德比的小镇长大,那里位于奔宁山脉脚下,属于英格兰中部地区,巧合的是,这里也是工业革命的发源地。

I was brought up in a town called Derby, which is at the foot of the Pennine Hills in the Midlands, which is also coincidentally the birthplace of the industrial revolution.

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所以,洛姆工厂就是在这里建成的。

So it was where Lom's Mill was built.

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所以我成长在一个逐渐衰落的工业城镇,从小就对工程感兴趣,像八十年代大多数人一样,生活在科技环境中。

So I grew up in a sort of fading industrial town, always interested in engineering, grew up around technology as most people did in their eighties.

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科技无处不在。

Technology was sort of everywhere.

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我身边都是工程师,从小就想当工程师。

I grew up around engineers, wanted to be an engineer.

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我去了布伦内尔大学,位于伦敦西部,主修工业设计,但获得的是工业设计理学学士学位。

Went to Brunel University, which is to the West of London and studied industrial design, but a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design.

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所以课程仍然相当技术化,是一门应用性很强的工程课程。

So still sort of quite technical, quite a sort of applied engineering course.

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我是詹姆斯·戴森公司最早的工程师之一。

I was one of the early engineers at James Dyson's company.

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所以我一毕业就开始设计吸尘器,但很快就被那里正在进行的新产品开发所吸引。

So when I graduated from my degree, I started designing vacuum cleaners, but very quickly was drawn towards the sort of new product and new product development that was going on there.

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后来我搬到伦敦,进入皇家艺术学院,在那里接触到了批判性与推测性设计,拓宽了我对设计完整角色的理解。

And then I moved to London, went to the Royal College of Art, where I discovered kind of critical speculative design, broadened my understanding of the full role of design, I would say.

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从那以后,我逐渐逐步转向更聚焦于未来导向的工作,最初在伦敦从事大量咨询工作,为快消品公司服务。

And since then, it's been a sort of long on ramp into more pointed futures oriented work, beginning with doing a lot of consultancy work in London, working for FMCG companies.

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做的不是软件,而是主要是硬件和产品类的工作,帮助这些公司思考未来,之后我才决定转为内部职位。

Not so much software, but mostly hardware, mostly product type of work, companies think about the future before I took the step to move kinda in house.

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我开始为索尼工作,帮助他们思考未来可能推出的产品,进行长期新兴技术的探索,之后我转到了诺基亚。

And I began working for Sony, helping them think about future products they might make, long term sort of emerging technologies explorations, and then moved to Nokia.

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还记得他们吗?

Remember them?

Speaker 1

哦,是的。

Oh, yeah.

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我喜欢诺基亚。

I love Nokia.

Speaker 0

对。

Yeah.

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我花了很多时间与诺基亚合作。

I spent a lot of time working with Nokia.

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再次,我在他们的高级设计团队工作。

Again, working in their sort of advanced design team.

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你知道,在大型组织中工作的人都可能熟悉这种实验室、未来研究或高级设计团队。

You know, anyone that works in a large organization is probably familiar with this sort of lab or futures or advanced design sort of team.

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我在那里做了大量工作,思考如何应用一些新兴技术,如何整合新兴行为和社会趋势之类的因素。

I did a lot of work there thinking about how we might apply some emerging technologies, how we might integrate some emerging behaviors, societal shifts, that sort of thing.

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正是这些工作把我带到了美国。

And that's what brought me to The States.

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我帮助在加州森尼韦尔组建了一个高级设计团队,与我们在洛杉矶的小团队合作。

I helped to grow an advanced design team in Sunnyvale here to partner up with a little team we had in LA.

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然后我离开了那里,去了谷歌。

And then I left there and went to Google.

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我知道这故事很长,但我试图让你了解我的背景。

I know this is a long story, but I'm trying to give you an idea of where I come from.

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我去到谷歌,开始在一个非常具体的团队工作,研究未来操作系统以及它们可能催生的新产品类型,之后我担任了谷歌X的设计主管,我在那里待了大约八年,直到2023年。

Went to Google, started working in a very specific team, looking at future operating systems and how they might yield new types of products before I took a role as head of design at Google X, where I was for the last well, for about eight years up until 2023.

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从那以后,我一直在写这本书,并享受一段应得的职业休整。

And since then, I've been writing this book and taking a well earned career break.

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但这就是我的个人经历了,我想。

But that's sort of the biography of me, I guess.

Speaker 2

尼克,我想问一下你早期的职业生涯。

Nick, I have a question about your early career.

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我最早的实际设计工作是担任设计工程师,我知道头衔的含义可能各不相同,但我想知道在戴森公司,这份工作是否也类似——我处于机械工程与工业设计的交汇点,帮助将工业设计转化为更易制造的方案,并融入设计考量。

So my very first real design role was as a design engineer, and I know titles can mean a lot of different things, but I'm curious at Dyson if it was something similar where I sort of sat at this intersection between mechanical engineering and industrial design, and I would help translate industrial design into something more manufacturable and take into design considerations.

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因此,我认为这让我既培养了对两者的欣赏,也掌握了一种介于创意与技术工程术语之间的语言。

And so think I it gave me both an appreciation and sort of a vocabulary that sat somewhere between kind of creativity and more technical engineering realm of terms.

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这个角色是否也是如此?

Is that true for that role?

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这是否引导你走上了这条道路,还是别的方向?

Did that set you on that path or a different thing?

Speaker 0

我的天,那都是很久以前的事了,埃利。

I mean, it's very long time ago, Eli.

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是的,不过。

Yes, though.

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我认为我的职位是设计工程师,那是一个非常注重生产的角色,当时正处于CAD的早期阶段,我努力将设计意图转化为可实际制造的实物。

I think my job title was design engineer, and it was very much a production oriented role working in the early days of CAD, trying to convert sort of design intent into physically manufacturable objects.

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但我觉得我加入戴森时,正是它人气急剧上升、发展非常顺利的时期。

But I think I joined Dyson at a time when it was really exploding in popularity, doing really well.

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我认为,这正是大多数公司开始更明确地思考的时候:我们已经渡过了难关。

And I think that's when most companies start to more pointedly think, okay, we've got over the hump.

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我们已经建立了受众。

We've built an audience.

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我们已经积累了一批我们喜欢的客户。

We've built a bunch of customers that we like.

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现在该更认真地思考未来了。

Let's start to think more pointedly about the future.

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而我恰好在这个时候加入,当时公司非常热衷于思考还能开发什么产品,不只是吸尘器,而是其他哪些产品?

And I think I happened to join at that time when the company was very keen to think about what else it might make, not just what are the vacuum cleaners it might make, but what are the products?

Speaker 0

他们该做一款烤面包机吗?

Should they do a toaster?

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他们该做一款熨斗吗?

Should they do an iron?

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他们该做一系列各类消费类产品吗?

Should they do any number of sort of consumer products?

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幸运的是,我被调入了这些早期项目之一,其中一个最终投入生产的项目是洗衣机项目。

And thankfully, was drafted into some of those early projects, and one that made it to production was a washing machine project that we worked on.

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再次地,刚开始去理解有哪些新技术可用,哪些新的生活习惯和行为正在出现,市场是什么样子,产品格局如何,并试图构想出可能融入、取代或颠覆这些格局的新产品,这让我感到非常有乐趣。

And again, just starting to wrap your arms around what new technologies were available, what new habits and behaviors were starting to emerge, what the market looked like, what the product landscape looked like, and trying to conceive of new things that might fit into that or take over that or disrupt that was something I found a lot of pleasure in.

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这满足了我的好奇心,但本质上仍是一个应用型工程角色。

It sort of fed my curiosity, but it was very much a sort of an applied engineering role.

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在洗衣机项目中,我主要负责的是齿轮箱,这可以让你大致了解一些精密齿轮的设计,需要承受很高的扭矩负载等等。

And the part of the project that I worked on the most on the washing machine project was a gearbox, just to give you some ideas of scinted gears, a lot of high torque loads and things like that.

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所以这确实是一个应用型工程角色。

So it was very much an applied engineering role.

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但我父亲是铁路工程师,我出身于这样的家庭。

But my father was a railway engineer, and I come from that kind of stock.

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但我逐渐意识到,我内心渴望某种更深层的东西——我不想用‘创意’这个词,因为工程师本身就有极强的创造力,但我更向往一种更具探索性、表达性,更贴近人与行为,而非材料与制造的领域。

But it became very clear to me that I sort of had a hunger for something more, I don't want to use the term creative because engineers are wildly creative people, but something more exploratory, expressive that felt a bit closer to people and habits than it did to materials and manufacturing.

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我当然依然对那个世界充满兴趣,但正是这个原因,我搬到了伦敦,进入皇家艺术学院攻读硕士学位,全身心投入一个让我感到归属的地方,周围都是陶瓷艺术家和时装设计师。

I still have a, obviously, keen interest in that world, but that's the reason I moved to London and started an MA at the Royal College of Art and just landed with both feet in somewhere that felt like home, surrounded by ceramicists and fashion designers.

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我妻子是一名版画家,也是时装设计专业的毕业生。

My wife's a printmaker and fashion design graduate.

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置身于这种差异之中,真正帮助我激活了大脑中更富好奇心、创造力和表达力的那一部分。

And just being around that difference really helped me sort of switch on that more inquisitive, creative, expressive part of my brain.

Speaker 1

我注意到,有些设计师——并非所有设计师——非常能适应模糊性,面对含糊不清的简报、不明确的材料或限制条件,他们反而能游刃有余地工作。

One thing I've noticed about some designers, it's not all designers, some designers are very comfortable with ambiguity, and having a very nebulous brief, not clear sense for materials, constraints, etcetera, some people thrive and operate really well with that.

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但也有一些人必须把一切都明确写出来,获得足够的确定性,才能推进工作。

There are others who really have to have things spelled out to have a sense of certainty to be able to make progress.

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事实上,我们曾与约翰·克利斯交谈,他告诉我们,如今每个人都渴望确定性。

In fact, we talked to John Cleese, and one thing that he said to us is that everybody today wants certainty.

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他们想知道事情的确切发生方式、时间和过程。

They want to know exactly what's going to happen, and when, and how.

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但生活中的大部分都是模糊不清的。

But so much of life is ambiguity.

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你对模糊性有什么看法?

What's your relationship with ambiguity?

Speaker 1

我很想知道这与你的设计过程有何关联。

And I'm curious how that ties into your design process.

Speaker 0

我认为你说得对,许多创意人士、设计师以及需要做决策的人,都需要一定程度的确定性,而这种确定性在长期的未来探索中根本不存在。

I think I agree with you that a lot of creative people, a lot of designers, a lot of people that have to make decisions require a level of certainty that in long term futures exploration just doesn't exist.

Speaker 0

你必须天生就能从容应对模糊性。

You have to be naturally comfortable with ambiguity.

Speaker 0

在各个层面上的模糊性和不可预测性都非常重要。

Ambiguity on every level as well and unpredictability on every level as well is very important.

Speaker 0

而我对这种状态的态度是,我在这片领域中相当自在。

And my relationship to that is I'm pretty comfortable in that space.

Speaker 0

我不介意身处大量不确定性之中。

I don't mind being around a lot of uncertainty.

Speaker 0

我认为设计的作用在于打磨边缘。

I think the role of design can be really useful in knocking the edges off.

Speaker 0

我听过有人形容它就像滚石一样,磨掉尖锐的边缘,逐渐赋予事物某种形态。

I heard somebody describe it as like tumbling rocks, knocking sharp edges off and gradually giving something some form.

Speaker 0

如果你进入一个旨在探索长期未来的项目——我们可以稍后讨论什么是长期——但如果你带着一种所有事情都已知、一切都确定、你对一切都很安心的心态去投入,那很可能你根本没在做长期未来项目,因为我们知道,变革的节奏正在加快,而且一直在加快,你必须学会接受‘我们其实并不知道那里有什么’,并在未知处标上‘X’,意识到‘不知道’本身也是推进过程中重要的一部分;清楚自己不知道什么至关重要,你可以选择暂时搁置这些问题,留待日后解决,或者你可能永远都不会知道,而只能选择相信并迈出一步。

And I think if you go into a project that has a intent to explore the long term future, and we can get into what we mean by long term, But if you go into a project with the intent to explore the long term future and everything is known and everything is certain and you're comfortable with everything, then you're probably not doing a long term futures project because we know that the drumbeat of change is increasing, has been increasing, and you have to become comfortable with like, we don't really know what's there and putting a kind of X unknown there and saying, actually knowing that we don't know is useful too as part of a process of moving forward, knowing what you don't know is really important and you can sort of leave that to be held and try and solve later, or you might never know and you just have to take a leap of faith.

Speaker 0

但我确实同意你的观点,对模糊性的适应能力是你最需要的核心技能。

But I do agree with you that comfort with ambiguity is sort of the primary skill that you need.

Speaker 0

当我们为谷歌X部门招聘人员时,发现很难找到能够适应这种程度模糊性的设计师,他们可能从事一些永远不会发布、可能只持续几周调查的项目。

And when we were hiring for people at Google X in particular, we found it quite challenging to find designers who were comfortable with that level of ambiguity, who might work on things that never ship, that might only last a couple of weeks of an investigation.

Speaker 0

因为我认为设计师通常喜欢处理有明确模式、有开端、中间和结尾、有发布时间,甚至可能后续还有更新或第二版的项目。

Because I think quite often designers like to work on a thing that has a sort of established pattern and a beginning, middle, and end, and a ship date, and maybe there's some updates or something later on or a version two.

Speaker 0

但当你探索未来时,那是一个不可知的领域,无疑会充满无数的死胡同。

But I think when you're exploring the future, it is an unknowable space and it will undoubtedly be filled with sort of an infinite number of dead ends.

Speaker 0

你必须敢于迎难而上,说:这也许就是那个关键点,也许能带我们走向有趣的方向,但更可能的是,它会失败,或者无法产生你期望的成果。

And you have to be comfortable throwing your chest at that and saying, this might be the one, this might take us somewhere interesting, but it's more than likely to either fail or not yield the kind of outputs you're looking for.

Speaker 0

因此,我们确实很挣扎,试图找到那些愿意一次又一次投入自己、精力和积极态度的人,去面对这些并非完全不可能、但极其复杂、可能最终一无所获的难题。

And so we kind of struggled with that actually to try and find people that were willing to throw themselves and their energy and their positivity sort of time and time and time again at these sort of, not necessarily impossible totems, but these difficult complex things that might not result in anything.

Speaker 1

企业通常难以接受不确定性,因为它们必须运营生意、赚钱、面对投资者,并负有责任。

Businesses are often not comfortable with ambiguity because they've got to run a business, they've got to make money, they've got investors and they're accountable.

Speaker 1

所以,谷歌X以及你们在那里所做的工作,我认为非常独特——有大规模的项目,充满未知,却能得到投资,并获得足够的缓冲时间去尝试解决问题。

So Google X and the work that you were doing there, I think is rather unique, that there's large scale projects with a lot of unknowns that are invested in, that are given a decent amount of runway to try to solve things.

Speaker 1

你能跟我们讲讲,拥有这样一个实验空间的感觉是怎样的吗?

Could you maybe tell us a little bit about what that was like, having that sort of space to experiment?

Speaker 0

这绝对是一种巨大的特权。

I mean, it's a huge privilege.

Speaker 0

这一点毫无疑问。

There's no two ways about it.

Speaker 0

我知道有无数人会在这样的环境中如鱼得水,非常渴望进入这样的环境,但这样的职位实在太少了。

I know countless people that would thrive in an environment like that and would love to be in it, but those roles are very few and far between.

Speaker 0

所以从一开始,这就是一种特权。

So from the get go, it is a privilege.

Speaker 0

我认为人们常犯的错误是,他们总觉得这就像玩乐,是一种他们渴望的自由状态。

I think the mistake that people make is they often feel like it's play and it's a level of freedom that they would love.

Speaker 0

但这份工作的现实是,你确实需要逼迫自己去努力产出成果。

But the reality of that work is you do have to try and push yourself to try and deliver things.

Speaker 0

而很多这类工作都没有明确的关键绩效指标或投资回报率,因此很难为其正名。

And there are no KPIs or ROIs on a lot of this work, so it's very difficult to justify it.

Speaker 0

当你身处这样的角色时,常常会面临一些人的质疑,他们觉得你身处象牙塔,拥有极其优越的地位,而他们自己则在主营业务中拼命赚钱,你却在这里的象牙塔里无所事事、胡乱创造一些疯狂的东西。

And I think when you find yourself in those kinds of roles, you're often sort of challenged by people who think you're in some sort of ivory tower or in some incredibly privileged position, and they, the sort of global they I'm referring to there, feel like they're over in the main business making all of the money, and you're over here in your ivory tower just having fun and creating crazy things.

Speaker 0

所以,身处这样的位置确实是一种巨大的特权,但它也需要一种韧性和持续向前的动力——这种品质,恐怕不是很多人都具备的;你需要一遍又一遍地尝试,去真正推动那些尚未开启的门扉,甚至只是努力寻找与新技术对话的途径,并通过设计来打开这些对话。

So it is a huge privilege to be in that position, but it does require a level of sort of tenacity and forward momentum that, again, not a lot of people maybe have in them and being able to do things over and over again and try to really push at those, not even open doors, but just trying to find ways into conversations with new technologies and use design to try and open up those conversations.

Speaker 0

如果说X有一个明确的流程,我总喜欢称它为X。

To say there was a process at X, I keep referring to it as X.

Speaker 0

我们必须小心,因为我在谈论的是Google X,它自己就命名为X——登月工厂。

We've gotta be careful here because I'm talking about Google X, which itself names itself X, the Moonshot Factory.

Speaker 0

所以我会称之为Google X,以明确说明。

So I'll refer to it as Google X, just to be clear.

Speaker 0

当时确实有一个名义上的流程,但由于我们探索的领域非常广泛,从飞行器到核聚变再到预测引擎,你不可能为这样的工作制定一个固定流程。

There was a sort of nominal process, but because of the breadth of things we were exploring from flying machines to nuclear fusion to sort of prediction engines, you can't have a process for something like that.

Speaker 0

必须有一定的进展,但任何可重复的、有步骤和阶段的流程概念,在这种类型的工作中都会崩溃。

There has to be some level of sort of progress, but any notion of a sort of repeatable process with steps and stages just falls apart in that type of work.

Speaker 0

我认为我们有着非常强烈的文化,那就是迅速淘汰那些看起来无法带来我们期望成果的想法,而我们的期望是实现大规模变革和巨大的商业机会。

And I think we had a very strong culture of killing ideas quickly that seemed like they wouldn't yield the outcomes we were looking for, which was sort of major scale change, huge commercial opportunity.

Speaker 0

所以,我们确实有一个流程。

So we sort of had a process.

Speaker 0

说实话,我对流程有点抵触。

I'm a little bit process allergic, if I'm honest.

Speaker 0

我觉得它太教条了。

I find it too prescriptive.

Speaker 0

我不希望像按照乐高说明书那样去构建我们想创造的东西,因为你随时可能需要做出意想不到的转向,并陷入漫长的停滞期,那时你必须极其坚韧,真正相信自己的方向;而如果你面前有一个严格、成型的流程要遵循,我根本不认为这能带你走向有趣的地方。

I don't want to follow a Lego manual to make the things we're trying to make because you have to take strange left turns at any moment and find yourself in these sort of bogged down months where you have to be super tenacious and really believe in something, when you have a really sort of strict, well formed process in front of you that you're trying to work through, I just don't think it gets you to interesting places.

Speaker 1

对,这对我来说完全说得通。

Right, that makes total sense to me.

Speaker 1

我完全理解在探索全新领域时对过多流程的抵触,但确实存在一些转折点,我特别想到的是:有一个广泛的探索阶段,然后当我们有了某个成果时,就需要将其商业化。

I totally understand the allergic reaction to too much process when it comes to trying to get to brand new spaces, But there are some gear shifts, and I'm thinking specifically about there's this broad exploratory phase, and then there's, we've got something here, and now we need to commercialize it.

Speaker 1

历史上充满了那些原本极具创意的想法最终胎死腹中,或被其他公司如早期的苹果公司接手带走的故事。

History is riddled with stories of brilliant, innovative ideas that sort of died on the vine or got picked and transferred into other companies like Apple in the early days.

Speaker 1

你知道,公司必须擅长商业化。

You know, companies gotta be good at commercializing.

Speaker 1

你如何看待将一个研发项目转变为盈利的主流产品?这是否也在你的思考范畴之内?

How do you think about that, of turning something that is an R and D thing into a mainline money making product, or is that even in the purview of your thinking?

Speaker 0

我参与的大部分工作都属于你所说的早期设计阶段。

Most of the work I've been involved in is what you would call early stage design work.

Speaker 0

所以,可以说是处于创意链条的非常非常靠前的位置。

So very, very, very far up the ideas chain, let's say.

Speaker 0

我认为每一个项目都是将大胆构想转化为务实成果的漫长、严谨而艰辛的过程。

And I would say every single project is a long and rigorous and laborious translation of audacity into pragmatism.

Speaker 0

我来自非常务实的背景,因此我不参与那种对未来空想的世界。

I come from quite a pragmatic background, and so I don't play in the sort of fantasy world of futures.

Speaker 0

我不参与那种‘假如只是想象’的《杰森一家》式狂想,沉迷于对未来的幻想。

I don't play in the just imagine if kind of Jetsons wild eyed, you know, dreaming of the future.

Speaker 0

我知道有人这么做,而且对他们有效。

I know people that do and it works for them.

Speaker 0

但这对我没用。

It doesn't work for me.

Speaker 0

我喜欢尽早进行这些务实的对话。

I like to have those pragmatic conversations as early as possible.

Speaker 0

这些对话确实涉及商业性的问题。

And they do involve things like commerciality.

Speaker 0

这些对话也涉及诸如:我们到底在谈论什么?

They do involve things like, well, what are we actually talking about here?

Speaker 0

我觉得我拥有一套技能,能够以富有成效的方式提出这些问题,而不会阻碍前进的动力。

And I feel like I have a set of skills that allows me to ask those questions in productive ways without creating sort of roadblocks to forward momentum.

Speaker 0

但我确实认为,对一些人来说,试图把所有这些都记在脑子里,并说‘等等,我们最终是要做出一个东西的’,这有时会让人不堪重负。

But I do think that it can sometimes be crippling for some people to try and hold all of that in their head and say, well, hang on, we're supposed to be making a thing here at the end.

Speaker 0

所以我认为,你必须找到一些方法来切换模式,在某些时刻进行开放式的探索,对任何想法都保持开放。

So I think you have to find ways to sort of mode switch where you can have moments of open ended exploration where you're sort of open to any idea.

Speaker 0

但我认为,如果被困在这种状态中,正是未来学研究最容易犯下重大错误、陷入那些高高在上却毫无意义的探索的地方。

But I think getting trapped in that space is where futures work, make some of its biggest mistakes and can get trapped in some of these lofty but pointless explorations.

Speaker 0

让我给你举个例子。

Let me give you an example.

Speaker 0

我在谷歌X的团队非常小。

My team at Google X was very small.

Speaker 0

这是一个由多学科背景人员组成的小团队,我们通常参与谷歌X最早期的项目。

It was quite a small team of multi disciplined people, and we work typically with the earliest stage projects within Google X.

Speaker 0

所以为了让你有个概念,谷歌X专注于长期探索性项目,而我们则参与了这些项目的最初阶段。

So just to give you some idea, like, Google X is focused on long range exploratory projects, and we were involved in the earliest stages of them.

Speaker 0

因此,我们接触的是原始的科学、原始的工程和原始的想法,然后运用设计师的技能去试探性地推动它们,比如:这可能会带来什么?

So we were working with raw science, raw engineering, raw ideas, and then turning the skill sets that designers have to just start poking it like, well, what might this yield?

Speaker 0

这可能会导致什么样的结果?

What sort of things might this lead to?

Speaker 0

试图发现我所说的科技的内在倾向。

Trying to discover what I call the grain in a technology.

Speaker 0

比如,科技本身倾向于指向什么方向?

Like, where does the technology sort of want to point?

Speaker 0

我们可能会创造出什么样的东西?

What sorts of things might we make?

Speaker 0

然后通过电影制作、叙事和原型设计,再次向我们合作的发明家或科学家提出问题:这就是你们的意思吗?

And then using filmmaking, storytelling, prototyping to again sort of ask questions back of the inventors or scientists that we were working with and say, Is this what you mean?

Speaker 0

你们说的就是这种东西吗?

Is this the kind of thing you're talking about?

Speaker 0

一旦我们开始达成共识,比如发现确实有实质内容,我们就可以引入那些了解市场方向、社会结构或潜在经济机会的人,诸如此类的人。

And then once we start to get agreement like, oh, there's actually a there there, we can start to bring in people who understand the market it might be trying to work into or understand the social constructs it might be dealing with or the financial opportunities that it might yield, those sorts of things.

Speaker 0

但很快,我的团队就会退出这个项目。

But very quickly, my team would then back out of the project.

Speaker 0

我们会帮助他们招聘首批设计师,或就他们的设计策略提供建议,然后回到起点,与另一支团队、另一个项目或另一项科学工作重新开始。

We would help them hire their first designers or advise them on what their design strategy might be, and then go back to the beginning with another team or another project or another piece of science.

Speaker 1

你在Google X工作了这么多年,参与了这么多项目,学到了什么?

What did you learn from working at Google X for so many years and working on so many projects?

Speaker 1

你从中学到了哪些对你职业生涯有帮助的经验?

What did you learn that you take forward in your career?

Speaker 0

其中一个关键的领悟是,我认为很多设计师总是和太多其他设计师待在一起,这容易导致一种点头附和的群体思维,形成一种没什么成效的共识。

One of the key learnings actually is I think a lot of designers spend a lot of time with a lot of other designers, and it can lead to a sort of head nodding groupthink and an agreement that's sort of not very productive.

Speaker 0

我发现一件既具挑战性又令人深受启发的事是,我身边有很多人拥有两个博士学位,却从未接触过设计师,从未翻过一本设计杂志,根本不了解设计是什么,也不清楚我们为什么在场。

One of the things that I found quite challenging but learned to find quite inspiring was I was around people with perhaps two PhDs who'd never even met a designer, had never opened a design magazine, didn't really know what design was, weren't quite sure why we were in the room.

Speaker 0

我能说的是,设计不仅仅是挑选沙发上的靠垫。

And being able to say, you know, design is not just choosing the throw cushions on your couch.

Speaker 0

设计也不仅仅是平面设计。

It's not just graphic design.

Speaker 0

设计是所有这些,以及更多。

It's all of these things and more.

Speaker 0

实际上,我们对人的理解可能比你更深。

And actually, we understand people perhaps in a way that you don't.

Speaker 0

我们理解欲望。

We understand desire.

Speaker 0

我们理解制造。

We understand manufacturing.

Speaker 0

我们理解意图。

We understand intent.

Speaker 0

我们理解逻辑。

We understand logic.

Speaker 0

并不是说你不懂,而是我们能以有意义的方式补充,帮助你节省金钱、节省时间、避免走入死胡同,从而让你重新思考设计对人们的意义。

Not that you don't, but we can add to in meaningful ways that can help save you money, save you time, save you going down dead ends, that suddenly you start to reframe what design is for people.

Speaker 0

对我来说,最大的收获是走出我自己的——我不想用‘泡泡’这个词,但就是那种每个人都知道我们在说什么的社交结构,它可能会变得有点像宗教团体。

That is the biggest learning for me is that getting out of my own, I don't wanna use the term bubble, but like my own social structure where everyone sort of knows what we're all talking about and it can become a bit culty.

Speaker 0

但当你和一个毕生致力于核聚变研究的人在一起时,说:‘嘿,我是个设计师。’

But being with somebody that spent their life trying to work on nuclear fusion, for example, and saying, Hey, I'm a designer.

Speaker 0

我们接下来要一起做什么?

What are we gonna do together?

Speaker 0

太棒了。

That's fantastic.

Speaker 0

真的非常棒。

Really fantastic.

Speaker 0

我认为这让我意识到,设计实际上低估了自己。

And I think it taught me that design really undersells itself.

Speaker 0

它确实低估了自己,而设计可以成为更广泛的东西。

It really does undersell itself and design can be this much broader thing.

Speaker 0

它可以作为一种帮助思考的工具,与其他任何事物一样。

It can be a tool to help think as much as anything else.

Speaker 1

你所描述的那些没有设计经验的核工程师等人,他们理解你的观点了吗?

The folks you're describing, the nuclear engineers and so forth who had no experience with design, did they receive your message?

Speaker 0

我的意思是,情况是混合的,对吧?

I mean, it's a mix, right?

Speaker 0

有很多故事。

There are many tales.

Speaker 0

我的意思是,在我担任那里的设计主管期间,我们完成了超过200个项目。

I mean, we worked on over 200 projects during my tenure as head of design there.

Speaker 0

再次强调,有些项目只持续了一周,有些则持续了多年。

Again, some of them for a week, some of them for many years.

Speaker 0

在这整个范围内,你总会遇到对设计有不同理解的人。

Across that spectrum, you're always going to run into people who see design in different ways.

Speaker 0

有些人把设计看作是复印店或国王海岸那样的地方,就是:你能给我这个吗?

There are people that sort of see design as a photocopy shop or a King Coast where it's like, can you give me this?

Speaker 0

你能给我那个吗?

Can you give me that?

Speaker 0

我需要在周五之前拿到。

I need it by Friday.

Speaker 0

有些人只是认为你是个用户体验设计师,只需要在Figma里把东西做出来交差就行。

There are people who just think you're sort of a UX designer who just needs to sort of ship them something in Figma or whatever.

Speaker 0

还有一些人其实并不了解设计,但他们很愿意倾听,会说:你能给我讲讲你具体是做什么的吗?

There are others who don't really know anything and are keen to lean in and say, actually, tell me what you do.

Speaker 0

我该怎么利用它呢?

How can I use that?

Speaker 0

公司似乎很重视你作为资源的存在。

The company seems to put value in having you here as a resource.

Speaker 0

那你能告诉我为什么吗?

So tell me why that is.

Speaker 0

你能做些什么?

What can you do?

Speaker 0

这是一个非常广泛的光谱,我认为有一些人原本持怀疑态度,但当我们让他们理解了我们的工作后,他们逐渐爱上了它;反过来,也有一些人一开始很喜欢我们的工作,但随着项目转变成其他方向,或者他们作为领导者成长后,反而觉得我们的工作用处变小了。

It is a huge spectrum and I think there are people that I won over or we won over who were a bit skeptical and sort of fell in love with what we did a little bit more once they understood it and vice versa, people who liked what we did at the beginning, but maybe found less utility for it as their project changed into something else or they evolved as a leader.

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所以我认为,这其中确实包含了多种不同的体验。

So I do think it's a multitude of experiences there.

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那我们来聊聊你的书吧。

Well, let's talk about your book.

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首先,为什么要写一本书?

First of all, why write a book?

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你已经做了这么多不同的事情。

You've done so many different things.

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为什么非要写一本书呢?

Why write a book at all?

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自从1998年我毕业以来,就一直在不停工作。

I've been working nonstop since I graduated in 1998.

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我花了一年半时间读硕士,但我认为那也是工作的一部分。

I took a year and a half to do a master's degree, but I consider that work as well.

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2023年离开Google X时,我突然有种感觉:我积累了太多零散的想法、观点和见解,它们在我脑子里越堆越多,让我难以理清头绪。

When I left Google X in 2023, I just had this feeling that I'd been accumulating so many sort of half formed thoughts and so many sort of ideas and opinions and perspectives that were all just starting to gum up in my brain, and I was sort of struggling to make sense of them.

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所以当我离开后,利用这段休息时间,和妻子一起去度假,好好喘了口气,几个月里开始把一些想法记下来。

So when I left and I took this break and I went on holiday with my wife and had a nice sort of deep breath for a few months and just started to jot down some of these thoughts.

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原本这些想法可能只是变成一些Medium文章,或者LinkedIn上的一些浅薄见解,但它们却越来越频繁地涌出来,逐渐凝聚成我自己的主张和观点。

And maybe they were gonna become kind of medium articles or some kind of thirsty think pieces on LinkedIn or something, But it started to come out of me more and more of this building of my own thesis and my own opinion.

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我现在快五十岁了,已经做了很久,积累了很多东西。

And I'm nearly 50 now, so I've been doing this a while and there's a lot of it.

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我意识到,我对人们思考未来的方式有着非常鲜明的看法。

I realized that I've got quite strong opinions on the ways in which we think about the future.

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当我开始和一些人分享一些早期的小文章或零散想法时,他们说:‘这可能有点东西。’

And as I started to share some early little mini essays or little bits of thinking with some people, they were like, oh, there might be something here.

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然后,显然我继续不断扩展、深化这些想法,直到它变得有些难以掌控。

And then obviously, like, I started to build on that some more and build on that some more until it became a little unwieldy.

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我们开始把它分享给一些经纪人和其他人,他们说:‘是的,我觉得你确实有东西。’

And we started to share it around with agents and other people, and they said, yes, we think you've got something here.

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所以这并不是我原本有意为之的。

So it wasn't necessarily intentional.

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我离开时并没有说:‘我有一个论点,必须把它公之于众。’

I didn't leave and say, I've got this thesis and I need to get it out there.

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这只是一个自然而然的过程,我不想听起来像个硅谷式的自助大师。

It was just a process of without wanting to sound like some Silicon Valley self help guy.

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这就像一个疗愈的时刻,因为我有了空间和一定的经济稳定,可以喘口气,好好想想接下来想做什么,以及我真正相信什么。

It was sort of like a therapeutic moment to just say, I've got the space and a bit of financial stability where I can take a breath, have a think about what I might wanna do next, about what I actually think.

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当你日复一日地从事这种工作时,几乎没有时间停下来思考:我为什么要这么做?

When you're in this type of work day after day after day, there's not a lot of time to just stop and think and say, what am I doing this for?

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我到底怎么想?

What do I really think?

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因为你收件箱里有一百件事,日程表里也有一百件事,都需要立刻处理。

Because you've got a 100 things in your inbox and a 100 things in your calendar that all need addressing right now.

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所以,是的,我休息了一段时间。

So yes, I had a bit of a break.

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我好好思考了一下。

I had a bit of a think.

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想法逐渐凝聚在一起,幸运的是,我签了一本书的合约,于是被推上了轨道,像滚雪球一样积累了势头。

Thoughts started to come together and fortunately signed a book deal, and then I was sort of on the hook, and it became a rolling stone that gathered some momentum.

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现在,我来到了一个真正感到自豪的境地。

It's taken me to a place that I'm actually quite proud of now.

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我认为,写作这一过程在设计师群体中被严重低估或忽视了。

And I do think the process of writing is really undervalued or maybe under respected within designers.

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我并不觉得这关乎向世界宣告你的观点。

And I don't necessarily think it's about telling the world what you reckon.

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而是关乎确保你自己对所持的观点感到安心,或者能反复审视自己的想法。

It's about making sure you're comfortable with what you reckon or like playing it back to yourself.

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因此,对我而言,写作一直扮演着这样的角色。

And so I've always found writing to be that for myself.

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所以,写下八万五千字,花时间去梳理结构、划分章节,对我来说受益匪浅。

So doing 85,000 words, taking the time, trying to put some structure behind it, trying to chapterize it has been hugely beneficial to me.

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我认为,无论我接下来投身什么,我都会带着更清晰的结构和对多年来模糊想法的坚定信念去面对。

And I think whatever I move into next, I think I will do so with much more sort of structure and belief in what I loosely thought for many, many years.

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是的,写作就是思考。

Yeah, writing is thinking.

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这背后有大量的科学依据:当你把想法从头脑中表达出来,你就能看到它、回应它,并以新的方式形成和调整想法。

And there's a lot of science behind this, that this process of getting an idea out of your head, you see that, you can respond to it, and you can formulate ideas in new ways and respond.

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这就像一种富有成效的自我对话。

It's sort of like a dialogue with yourself that is productive.

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让我们谈谈标题中提到的框架:可以、应该、可能和不要。

Let's talk about the framework that is alluded to in the title, could, should, might, and don't.

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所以对于我们的听众来说,你能解释一下这些意味着什么吗?

So for our listeners, can you break that down, what that means?

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我认为首先要说的是,多年来我在这类书中注意到一种趋势。

I think the first thing to start with is there's a sort of tendency that I'm picking up and I have picked up over the years in these types of books.

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当我说这类书时,我指的是给设计师、商务人士等写的书,它们倾向于创造某种术语、框架、矩阵、方法,或者某种可以在白板上罗列的快捷工具。

And when I say these types of books, I mean books for designers, books for sort of business people, let's say, to kind of coin a term or create a framework or a matrix or a method or something to scroll on a whiteboard or create some sort of shortcut tool.

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但我真的不想这么做。

And I really didn't want to do that.

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在我的实践中,我发现这种方式用处不大。

I don't find a lot of use for that way of working in my own practice.

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斯图尔特·坎迪认为这些是智力假体,我挺喜欢这个说法,但这个词也带点贬义,因为我认为它取代了培养一种严谨的内在直觉和锻炼这些能力的过程。

Stuart Candy, I think, calls these things intellectual prostheses, which I kind of like, and there's a bit of stink on that, let's say, because I think it substitutes developing a kind of rigorous internal gut feel and a training of those muscles.

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这在某种程度上简化了那个过程。

It sort of shortcuts that somewhat.

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因此,我真不想写一本包含五个步骤、教你如何更好地进行未来思考的书。

And so I really didn't want to create a book that had a sort of five step plan of how to become better at doing futures.

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所以它根本不是那样的。

So it really isn't that.

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为了理解它究竟是什么,让我来说明一下:我试图引发一种认知,即思考未来非常重要,几乎肯定比历史上任何时期都更重要,然而,我们中没有人,无论来自哪个学科,都特别擅长这一点。

In order to understand what it is then, let me get to that, what I'm trying to do is trigger a recognition that thinking about the future is very, very important, almost certainly more important now than it ever has been in history, and yet none of us across many different disciplines is particularly good at it.

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我认为这代表了我们未来的一种关键性弱点。

And I think that represents a kind of critical weakness in our future.

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因此,我提供了一种分类法,而不是一个框架,来说明:当我们任何人被要求思考未来时,无论是在职业生活中、在公共领域、在新闻中,还是在酒吧里,我们往往会落入这四种思考模式中的一种。

And so what I've done is offer maybe a taxonomy as opposed to a framework to say, when any of us is called upon to think about the future, either in our professional lives or in public or in the news or down the pub, we tend to fall into one of these four buckets of thinking.

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我想要做的,是希望通过将思考未来这一宏大过程划分为四个更易管理的类别,至少让我们能勉强理解它。

What I wanted to do was hopefully by carving up this big process of thinking about the future into four more manageable buckets, at least we can kind of wrap our heads around it.

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当我们自己谈论未来,或听到别人谈论时,我们就能说:啊,这听起来有点像‘可能’型未来观,或有点像‘应该’型未来观,从而理解这些模式的起源、优势与局限。

And when we find ourselves talking about the future or when we hear somebody doing it to us, we can say, Ah, that feels a bit like could, or that feels a bit like should futurism, or and understand the sort of origins and strengths and weaknesses of that.

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所以,我不想过分强调这一点,我真不想为人们创造某种工具或方法。

So without wanting to sort of overplay the point, I really don't want to create some sort of tool, technique for people to use.

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这更像是,我认为这些情况一直在发生,这导致了整体上非严谨、不平衡、有偏见且不适合目的的未来研究。

It's more just, I think these things go on, and I think that leads to sort of non rigorous, unbalanced, biased, unfit for purpose futures work across the board.

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因此,我写下了这些内容,这个过程也让我不断对照自己检验这些观点。

And so that's what I've written, and it's been a really interesting process of checking myself against some of these as well.

Speaker 1

我们将在短暂的广告后继续这场对话。

We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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It's the all in one platform that's built to help you scale.

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And stop reinventing the wheel for every project.

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You can create shareable design systems with reusable assets, apps, and components.

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Wix Studio's AI powered CMS lets you turn a single layout into hundreds of dynamic pages.

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It's an incredible platform.

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Speaker 1

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Speaker 1

现在,回到节目。

And now, back to the show.

Speaker 2

您能详细介绍一下您开发的这个框架吗?这样观众能了解其中涉及的内容。

Could you walk through the framework that you've developed this could, should, might, don't, so audience can get a sense for what's involved?

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基本上,我认为普遍存在四种主要的未来思维类型。

Basically, there's four major types of futures thinking that I think exists across the board.

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首先,你绝对不应该把这些看作是维恩图中彼此分离的圆圈。

And the first thing from the get go is you shouldn't think of these as like separate circles on a Venn diagram.

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我认为它们全都相互重叠,边界是模糊的,但也许它们可以代表一张地图的四个角落。

I think they all overlap, the edges are blurry, but maybe they represent kind of corners of a map.

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通过将它们提炼为某种夸张的典型,我们可以更好地理解这片领域。

And by pulling them out as maybe caricatures, we can start to understand the territory a bit more.

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第一种未来主义是我所说的‘可能型未来主义’,这可能是我们最常见的、公众最接受的未来研究类型。

So the first type of futurism is what I call could futurism, which is probably the most familiar and publicly embraced type of futures work that we see.

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如果你在谷歌图片搜索中输入‘未来主义’这个词,看到的就是这种类型。

And it's what you see if you type the word futuristic into Google image search.

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它全是那些过于雄心勃勃、充满激情、夸张过头的东西——飞行汽车、类人机器人,还有我们经常见到的那种空灵的水晶城市。

It's all of the sort of overly ambitious, excitable, over the top stuff, flying cars, humanoid robots, these ethereal kind of crystal cities that we see so much.

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我建议听众去谷歌图片搜索输入这个词,或者更直接地,使用我们现在任何一款图像生成器,输入任何关于未来的内容,你都会得到这类结果。

And I encourage listeners to go to Google Image Search and type that in, or more pointedly, to any image generator that we now have and just type in anything about the future, and you'll get this kind of stuff back.

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我认为它建立在科幻法律的基石之上。

And I think it's built off a backbone of science fiction law.

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我认为,这种媒介的发展及其套路、美学和主题痴迷,塑造了这种思考和描绘未来的方式。

I think it's built off the growth of that medium and the tropes and the aesthetic and subject obsessions of that medium has led to this way of thinking and this way of portraying the future.

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它也建立在现代主义的基石之上,即我们可以通过进步、机械化、工业化以及这种强烈的进步观念向前迈进。

And it's sort of built off a backbone of modernism as well, the idea that we can move forward through progress, through things like mechanization and industrialism and this notion of strident progress, really.

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我认为这种观念渗透到了我们的电视文化与媒体中。

And I think that seeps into our television culture, into our media.

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我们在新闻中也能看到它。

We see it in the press.

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我们还通过历史上的世博会等场合体验到它。

We also experience it at things like World's Fairs, you know, through history.

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在1939年的世博会上,通用汽车公司展出了未来世界展,其中有一个巨大的立体模型,人们乘坐汽车飞越其上,展现了一个因汽车和高速公路而发生巨大变革的世界,这毫不意外,但这是一个极其不同、张扬炫目的世界。

In the nineteen thirty nine World's Fair, there was a Futurama from GM, which had this huge diorama that people flew over in these cars that portrayed the world as this hugely transformed place, unsurprisingly through cars and freeways, but this hugely transformed, ostentatiously different place.

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千禧穹顶也是类似的东西。

Millennium Dome was something similar.

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迪士尼的Epcot也类似,试图重建并对未来提出宏伟的愿景。

Epcot from Disney was something similar, trying to sort of rebuild and have these grand visions about the future.

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迪拜的未来博物馆也是如此,它同样宣称要探讨世界的未来,但内容却都是我们熟悉的元素:机器人、送货无人机、机械狗、喷气背包等等。

And the Museum of the Future in Dubai is something similar too, which is, again, it purports to talk about the future of the world, but it's got the same sorts of things, the robots, the delivery drones, the cyber dogs, the jet packs, all the stuff we're used to seeing.

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这种思维还延伸到了像CES这样的贸易展上。

And it also extends into things like trade shows, like CES.

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我们看到这些所谓的未来学家站在舞台上,以宏大而模糊的方式谈论未来,展示令人惊叹的数据和事物。

We see these kinds of could futurists on stage talking about the future in sort of lofty but kind of vague ways, showing us amazing statistics, amazing things.

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正如我所说,CES展台的前端常常充斥着大量充满激情、夸张的未来主义展示。

And like I said, CES often has a lot of these bombastic pieces of overt energetic futurism at the front of their stands.

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这种思维方式的问题在于,它深深植根于科幻的理念和框架,因此也受制于科幻的固有特性——科幻几乎总是围绕英雄展开叙事,而这些未来图景也显得非常英雄主义。

The problem of that way of thinking is because it builds so heavily off the ideas and the backbone of science fiction, it also falls prey to the fact, you know, science fiction is almost always built around storytelling around a hero and these kinds of futures feel very heroic.

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但事实是,未来将充满像你我这样的普通人。

And the truth is the future will be filled with people like you and me.

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未来将充满从事普通工作、谈论普通事务的普通人,与他们讨论这些话题,往往比讨论英雄与反派更能带来启发。

It will be filled with ordinary people having sort of ordinary jobs and having conversations about those things can be much more yielding than having conversations about sort of heroes and villains.

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我认为,这种科幻小说的底层逻辑显然也开始渗透到那些创造未来的人的思维中。

And I think this sort of backbone of science fiction law has also obviously started creeping into the minds of the people creating the future.

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在我过去的许多工作中,我参加了无数次会议,与来自各种背景的许多人交流。

So I was in countless meetings in numerous of my previous jobs with lots of people from lots of different backgrounds.

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很多时候,人们都会提到《杰森一家》、《少数派报告》或《黑客帝国》这些作品。

And the number of times things like The Jetsons or Minority Report or The Matrix get referred to.

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在谷歌X实验室,所有的会议室都以科幻机器人命名,比如R2-D2、HAL 9000,而微软的助手Cortana的名字则取自《光环》中的角色。

At Google X, all of the meeting rooms were named after sci fi robots like R2D2 or Hal nine thousand and Cortana, Microsoft's assistant, is named after a character in Halo.

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杰夫·贝佐斯将他的控股公司命名为Zephyr LLC,灵感来自《星际迷航》中发明曲速引擎的角色科克伦。

Jeff Bezos has named his holding company Zephyrm, LLC after Zephyrm Cochrane, the Star Trek character that invented the warp drive.

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这样的例子数不胜数。

It sort of goes on and on.

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OpenAI曾试图聘请斯嘉丽·约翰逊为语音助手配音,显然受到她出演作品的启发,并将他们耗资5000亿美元的人工智能项目命名为《星际之门》,致敬1994年的科幻大片。

OpenAI trying to hire Scarlett Johansson to do the voice assistant after watching her, obviously, and naming their $500,000,000,000 artificial intelligence program Stargate after the 'ninety four sci fi blockbuster.

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所以,我认为这种‘可能的未来主义’正是这种现象的体现?

So I think could futurism represents that?

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它代表了那种充满活力、明显未来主义的未来思维模式。

It represents that sort of energetic, overtly futuristic type of futures thinking.

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我认为我们经常看到这种情况。

And I think we see this a lot.

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当我与科技和设计圈外的人交谈时,每当谈到未来,总会听到这些老生常谈的套路。

And when I talk to people outside of my world of technology and design, it's the sort of tropes that get fired back at me when any conversation about the future tends to kick into gear.

Speaker 1

是的,你指的是人类发生巨大转变的超验情景。

Yeah, so you're talking about transcendent scenarios where humans are so dramatically changed.

Speaker 1

我经常观察到,那些非常擅长预见人类和文化下一步发展的人,往往对人类体验有着敏锐的洞察力,理解作为人类的意义,以及这种状态并非仅存在于当下,而是始终如此。

What I often observe is people who are very good at thinking a few steps ahead of humanity and culture, they just have finely tuned observational skills about the human experience, what it means to be a human, and the continuation that it's not just like this single point of time, and it's always been this way.

Speaker 1

实际上,过去的情况是不同的。

Actually, it's been different in the past.

Speaker 1

所以,我不确定你是否也会关注过去。

So, I don't know if you look to the past as well.

Speaker 0

是的,我经常关注。

Yeah, all the time.

展开剩余字幕(还有 230 条)
Speaker 1

当你在做研究,试图思考未来五到十年可能是什么样子时,该从哪里开始呢?

Where does one start when you're doing research and these early phases of trying to think about what could be in the next five to ten years?

Speaker 0

最简单的方法就是看看你窗外的世界,真正审视自己的生活。

The easiest thing is to look outside your own window and truly look at your own lives.

Speaker 0

我认为这是我们能做的最好的事。

I think that's the best we can do.

Speaker 0

我的意思是,趋势研究非常流行,尤其是在设计领域,但其他行业也是如此,甚至金融行业的人也会关注爱好和习惯的趋势,这确实有一定的实用性。

I mean, trends work is very, very popular, particularly in design, but in other industries too, even in the finance industry, people look at trends of hobbies and habits, and it has some sort of utility.

Speaker 0

我从未真正使用过这类研究。

I've never really used that work.

Speaker 0

我也做过趋势研究,所以我知道其中很多内容有多肤浅。

I've also done trends work, so I know how shallow a lot of it is.

Speaker 0

也许我说得有点刻薄,但我觉得,仅仅把二十张图片或二十个数据点凑在一起,就能说服观众认为存在某种趋势,而这种趋势在现实中可能根本不存在。

And I'm maybe being a bit rude there, but I think by collecting 20 images together or 20 data points together, you can convince an audience that there's a trend there that sort of maybe doesn't really exist in reality.

Speaker 0

但我觉得你关于未来建立在过去的基石之上的第一句话,恰恰是未来学最容易迷失的方向——因为它把未来描绘成一种所谓的‘总体艺术作品’,仿佛是凭空创造出来的,而不是从现实中自然演化而来的。

But I think your first statement about the future building upon the past is exactly where could futurism tends to lose its way because it portrays the future as a, you know that term, Gesamt Kunstwerk, like a single piece of artwork that you've created somewhere out of nothing that doesn't generate itself from anything.

Speaker 0

但将未来理解为一种累积性的地方,一个像沉积岩一样层层叠加过去的场所,明白我们确实生活在一个拥有ChatGPT的世界,但同时也依然存在衣架、晾衣夹、粗笔和我们从祖父母那里继承来的椅子。

But understanding the future as a sort of accretive place, a place that piles on the past like sedimentary rock, and understanding that, yes, we live in a world of chat GPT, but there are also coat hangers and clothes pegs and big biros and chairs that we inherited from my grandparents.

Speaker 0

能够将未来描述为当下的演进,是一项至关重要的技能,因为人类的变化速度远没有我们想象的那么快。

Being able to talk about the future as an evolution of the present is an absolutely vital skill because humans don't change as fast as we think they do.

Speaker 0

我们可以在社会层面构建新事物,可以迅速改变观点,但人类核心的动机基础,自我们能够追溯以来,一直保持得相当稳定。

We can build new things socially, we can change our opinions quite quickly, but the core sort of motivational backbone of human beings has remained reasonably similar for as long as we can track.

Speaker 0

我认为,理解人类如何适应这种变化与流动的浪潮至关重要——有些事物会迅速变化,但也会保留大量过去的元素。

And I think understanding how humans fit into that changing, shifting tide where some things will move very, very quickly and change very quickly, but will also retain lots of things from the past.

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我认为,这正是某些科幻作品能够做得很好的地方。

I think this is actually somewhere where some science fiction can do quite well.

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比如《黑镜》,或者第一部《银翼杀手》,虽然其中存在巨大的变革和技术飞跃,但在《银翼杀手》中,依然有破旧的皮夹克、雨水和污垢。

So things like Black Mirror, perhaps the first Blade Runner, where, yes, there were big changes and big technological shifts, but there were also still, in the case of Blade Runner, kind of rotten old leather jackets and rain and bits of grime.

Speaker 0

而在《黑镜》中,则有令人不适的对话、难看的毛衣之类的东西。

And in Black Mirror, there were kind of uncomfortable conversations and bad sweaters and things like that.

Speaker 0

能够同时展现变化与延续,是一种真正的技能,但很多人似乎并不具备这种能力。

Being able to sort of show change alongside continuity is a real skill and a lot of people don't seem to have it.

Speaker 1

我最喜欢的关于未来的寓言之一是玛丽·雪莱的《弗兰肯斯坦》。

One of my favorite allegories for the future is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Speaker 1

是的。

Yes.

Speaker 1

这部作品是写于1812年左右吧?

Which was written in, what, 1812?

Speaker 1

当时拿破仑战争期间,由一位年轻的少女创作,其语言、对话和人类经验的悲剧性,至今仍像当年一样鲜活而富有现实意义。

During Napoleonic Wars by a young teenage girl, and the language, the dialogue, the tragedy of the human experience feels as fresh and relevant today as it must have been back then.

Speaker 0

是的,完全正确。

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 0

理想型未来主义会极力想象所有可能性,设想事物可能变成什么样。

Couldfuturism is that one that really pushes into imagine all the things, imagine what things could be like.

Speaker 0

如果你过度这么做,或频繁这么做,或单独这么做,它会自然地让你脱离现实,陷入幻想和不切实际的期待,我觉得这没什么帮助。

If you do that too much or you do that too often or you do that on its own, it takes you away naturally from reality and takes you into sort of fantasy and sort of wishful difference in a way that I find kind of unhelpful.

Speaker 0

应当型未来主义则略有不同。

Should futurism is something slightly different.

Speaker 0

因此,它被单独归为一类。

And so that's why it's got its own category.

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我认为‘应然未来学’围绕着对未来的确定性或必然性的观念构建。

I think should futurism is built around this notion of certainty or assuredness about the future.

Speaker 0

它试图明确未来将会是什么样子。

And it tries to identify what the future will be.

Speaker 0

这非常有帮助,因为它缩小了我们的可能性范围。

And that's quite helpful because it narrows down our realm of possibility.

Speaker 0

如果你说未来将会是这样,那么我们就可以从这一点倒推回去。

And if you say, well, the future's going to be this, so we can work backwards from that.

Speaker 0

它源自一种预测的世界,借助占卜术,试图从诺查丹玛斯等人的预言中窥探未来。

It comes from a world of sort of predictions and using soothsaying and trying to figure out the future from Nostradamus and all this other stuff.

Speaker 0

但在当代社会,我认为这最典型的体现就是我们所说的公司战略,即麦肯锡、贝恩、BCG这类公司的方式:基于历史行为和数据,将一条实线变成一条虚线,然后说:它指向这里,所以这就是未来。

But in contemporary society, I think that's best exemplified by what we call kind of corporate strategy, the kind of McKinsey, Bain, BCG way of taking historical behaviors, data, and then turning that solid line into a dotted line and saying, well, it's pointing here, so that's the future.

Speaker 0

我见过很多这样的情况。

I've seen a lot of this.

Speaker 0

我见证了这种咨询和企业战略工作的兴起。

I've seen sort of the growth of this kind of consulting and corporate strategy work.

Speaker 0

数字赋予这些故事的确定性,这种数字虚构所具有的分量,远超我们所做的设计工作或讲述的故事,因为数字本身有种特殊的力量。

And the certainty that numbers give to those stories, that sort of numeric fiction holds an awful lot more weight than the kind of design work that we do or the stories that we tell, because there's something about numbers.

Speaker 0

数字有一种特质,能让关于未来的叙述显得比我们通常能讲述的故事更加严谨和相关。

There's something about numbers that make stories about the future feel much more rigorous and relevant than the stories that we can typically tell.

Speaker 0

因此,企业战略之所以发展如此迅速,是因为它令人倍感安心。

And so that's why corporate strategy has grown so quickly because it's so reassuring.

Speaker 0

你看到一个数字,说到2035年将达到260亿。

You see a number that says 26,000,000,000 by 2035.

Speaker 0

你会想,好吧,太好了。

You're like, well, okay, great.

Speaker 0

但那些虚线只是故事。

But those dotted lines are stories.

Speaker 0

它们并不是真相。

They're not truths.

Speaker 0

一旦那条线从实线变为虚线,它就不再是数据了。

Once that line goes from solid to dotted, it ceases to be data.

Speaker 0

那时它就变成一个故事了。

It's a story at that point.

Speaker 0

我经常听到企业战略人士引用韦恩·格雷茨基的一句话:我滑向冰球将要去的地方。

There's that Wayne Gretzky quote that I hear a lot of corporate strategy folks using, which is, I skate to where the puck is going to be.

Speaker 0

我可能说得不太准确。

I may be butchering that a little bit.

Speaker 0

这确实彻底颠覆了那种认为‘我知道未来会怎样,你今天就必须这么做’的世界观。

And that really does sort of explode that worldview of saying, I know what the future holds and you need to do that today.

Speaker 0

这种对未来的预测和断言,我称之为‘应该式未来学’。

And that sort of prediction and assertiveness about the future is what I call should futurism.

Speaker 0

当人们知道我的工作内容时,他们最先问我的往往是预测。

When people find out what I do, one of the first things they ask me is for predictions.

Speaker 0

这似乎是他们对像我这样的人所期待的东西。

That seems to be what they want from people like me.

Speaker 2

比如,什么

Like, What

Speaker 0

你觉得这个会怎样?

do you think is gonna happen to this?

Speaker 0

或者,我该投资那个吗?

Or, Should I be investing in that?

Speaker 0

或者,机器人真的会做到这一点吗?

Or, Are robots really gonna do this?

Speaker 0

我不知道。

And I don't know.

Speaker 0

我不知道。

I don't know.

Speaker 0

没人知道,这才是真相。

Like nobody knows, that's the truth.

Speaker 0

我认为应然未来主义最大的弱点在于,当我们开始把世界视为一种可以破解的系统,认为可以用我们的算法和数学来建模和分解时,就会在未来的认知上构建一层确定性,而这可能是适得其反的。

And I think that's the biggest weakness of should futurism is that when we start to see the world as a kind of system to be decoded, something that we can model and break down with our algorithms and our maths, it builds a layer of certainty about the future, which can be counterproductive.

Speaker 0

它让我们感觉好像能理解某些事情。

It can make us feel like we can understand something.

Speaker 0

只要我们调整一下参数,输入正确的数字,就能准确预测未来会发生什么。

And if we just tweak the knobs and plug the right numbers in, we can certainly tell what the future holds.

Speaker 0

但事实上,正如我们所知,我们现在所面对的许多事物都是超对象。

But the truth is, as we know, that many of the world's things that we now live with are hyper objects.

Speaker 0

它们太过庞大,无法被映射。

They're just so unmappable and so vast.

Speaker 0

而且进入这些系统的数据总是不完整的,有时是隐藏的,并且越来越具有随机性和多变性。

And also the data coming into them is always incomplete, sometimes hidden, and sort of increasingly stochastic as well and variable.

Speaker 0

因此,任何能够预测未来的想法都变得不那么确定了。

So any notion of being able to predict the future becomes a little less certain.

Speaker 0

我认为我们现在已经开始看到,许多我们认为稳定的事物正在发生变化。

And I think we're starting to see that now as many of the things we've thought of as being stable.

Speaker 0

任何事情都可能发生。

Anything could happen.

Speaker 0

勒布朗明天可能会对你的品牌说出一些糟糕的话,或者一艘船在苏伊士运河倾覆,瞬间你所有的预测建模技术都会失效。

LeBron could say something awful about your brand tomorrow or a ship could overturn in the Suez Canal and all of a sudden, all your predictive modeling techniques just sort of fall down.

Speaker 0

所以我认为我们需要理解的是,未来和当下就是所谓的VUCA:易变、不确定、复杂且模糊。

So I think what we need to understand is that the future and the present is that term VUCA, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

Speaker 0

我认为我们需要更深入地理解这一点,而这也是当未来学孤立进行或走向极端时,真正会失败的地方。

I think we need to understand that more and that's where I think should futurism, when done in isolation or to extremists, should futurism really falls down in that regard.

Speaker 2

我想先提一个看似随意的旁注,但它会引出一个真正的问题。

I'm gonna hit on what seems like a just rough side note for a minute, but it leads to a real question.

Speaker 2

但之前你提到了《飞出个未来》。

But earlier on you mentioned Futurama.

Speaker 2

直到你提到它,我才发现它源自现实世界中的概念。

Until you said it, I did not realize that it originated from a real world thing.

Speaker 2

我只是非常喜欢这部由《辛普森一家》创作者制作的动画片《飞出个未来》。

I just I love the show Futurama, the cartoon that was from the Simpsons creator.

Speaker 2

它们经常以幽默的方式描绘看似遥远未来的场景,但这些场景其实反映的是我们当下正在面对的问题,比如社交媒体,以及其他可能带来反乌托邦后果的事物。

And and they often will play out scenarios that are sort of in our present in what is supposedly a distant future in humorous way, but it also explores some things like social media, other things that we're currently dealing with that have these potentially sort of dystopian consequences.

Speaker 2

我想知道,在你的框架中,你是如何思考去探索这个‘不要’象限的?那里似乎潜伏着怪物。

And I'm curious if sort of in your mapping, how you think about how do we explore this sort of don't quadrant that there'd be monsters over here?

Speaker 2

我们该如何讲述这些故事,以确保我们意识到这些技术可能会把我们引向一条并不想抵达的道路?

How do we tell those stories in a way that make sure that we understand that these technologies might lead us down a road that we don't really wanna end up in?

Speaker 0

是的,我们稍后可以再回过头来谈‘可能’,但‘不要’是我所讨论的第四个象限。

Yeah, so we can maybe come back to might, but don't is the fourth of the quadrant that I talk about.

Speaker 0

这个象限涉及不确定性、恐惧感以及令人不安的未来。

And that is the world of sort of uncertainty, fearfulness, and uncomfortable futures.

Speaker 0

它关注的是可能出错的事情,以及某种未来或向世界引入某事物时可能带来的负面后果。

And it's focused on what might go wrong, what negative consequences might come from a certain type of future or the externalities that come with introducing something to the world.

Speaker 0

恐惧具有极其强大的力量。

Fear is incredibly potent.

Speaker 0

它从我们年幼时就被深深植入,我们所有的童话、童谣等都围绕着恐惧的故事构建。

It's sort of drilled into us from an early age, and all of our fairy tales and our sort of nursery rhymes and things like that are built around stories of fear.

Speaker 0

比如小红帽、狼来了,它们都在告诉我们:如果你做了这些事,坏事可能会发生,所以请不要这么做。

So Little Red Riding Hood, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, they all say, if you do these things, bad things might happen, so please don't do them.

Speaker 0

这基本上是‘应该’的反面。

It's sort of the opposite of should.

Speaker 0

就像是‘不应该’。

It's like shouldn't.

Speaker 0

正如你所说,科幻作品也非常喜欢探索这个领域。

Science fiction, as you said, loves to explore that space too.

Speaker 0

因此,有很多科幻作品都在探讨反乌托邦、社会崩溃、技术过度扩张以及其他类似主题。

So there's quite a lot of science fiction work that looks at dystopias and societal collapses and technological overreach and all of these other things.

Speaker 0

实际上,科幻作品非常喜欢在这个领域中发挥想象。

And science fiction loves to play in that space actually.

Speaker 0

在这一领域中,数据也常被用来展示即将发生的崩溃,我们对这类表现方式已经非常熟悉,比如阿尔·戈尔的《难以忽视的真相》以及当前对气候数据的预测等。

And data is often used too in that space to kind of show impending collapses, and we're all very used to that from things like Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth and current projections of climate data and things.

Speaker 0

但这其实可以追溯到20世纪70年代的《增长的极限》,它试图说明:这些事情正在发生,我们应当警惕其可能带来的后果。

But it goes back to limits to growth from the 1970s, being able to sort of say, these things are happening, we should be careful of where this might lead.

Speaker 0

甚至更早之前,托马斯·马尔萨斯就曾预测过粮食生产与消费的曲线,并指出:总有一天,这两条线会相交,我们将陷入所谓的‘糟糕境地’。

And even before that, Thomas Malthus, who was projecting curves of sort of food production and consumption and saying, at some point, those lines are cut across and we're gonna be in a quote unquote bad place.

Speaker 0

我所称的‘不要未来主义’正在出现一种更细致的版本,它不再只是说‘停下、抗议、推倒一切、掀翻桌子,这很糟糕’,而是试图理解我们所讨论的事物可能带来的深远影响,以及伴随我们行为而来的全部潜在后果,并从第二层、第三层的连锁影响角度去思考这些问题。

There's a more nuanced version of what I call Don't Futurism emerging and has emerged, which instead of saying, let's just stop and protest and tear it all down and flip the table and say, this is bad, actually what it involves is sort of understanding the depth of impact that the thing we're talking about could have, the full scope of implications of the things that could come along with what we're doing, and thinking about that in a kind of second and third order implications layer.

Speaker 0

不仅仅是它可能带来什么,而是它之后的事物可能产生什么影响,努力构建对这种我们可能正在启动的复杂网络的理解。

So not just what might happen to it, but what might happen to the things that come after it and trying to build that understanding of the sort of web of complexity that we might be setting in motion.

Speaker 0

在我看来,这种形式的‘不要未来主义’更有意思——不是简单地指着某事物说‘这是灾难性的、反乌托邦的,我们必须停止’,而是从批判性设计、推测性设计的视角出发,思考:如果我们做了这些事,我们是否能对所有可能随之发生、最终导向我们不希望出现的结果的其他因素负责?

And I think that's more interesting to me as a form of don't futurism, rather than pointing at something and saying, it's disastrous, it's dystopian, we should stop, actually starting to think from a kind of critical design, speculative design background and say, if we do these things, let's be responsible about all of the other things that we can think might happen around that, that could lead to these sorts of things that we might not want.

Speaker 0

这需要一种责任感,而几乎没有任何公司愿意投入这种责任。

That requires a level of responsibility that almost no company is willing to invest in.

Speaker 0

如今有太多积极乐观的情绪、太多推动力,以及太多对这些理念的内部宣传,以至于很难展开关于‘我们其实并不确定’、‘这可能会导向我们无法解决的问题’、‘这可能在未来引发巨大麻烦’的对话。

There's so much positivity and so much momentum and so much sort of internal advertising for ideas that it's very hard to have conversations about we're not really sure, or this might lead somewhere that we don't really know how to fix, or this could yield something that might cause us big problems later on.

Speaker 0

但我认为,我们当下这一代人正开始意识到,我们正生活在一个被前辈们无意中埋下的时间胶囊里。

But I think we're all starting to realize, we in the present, we're all starting to realize that we're living in time capsules that were accidentally planted by our predecessors.

Speaker 0

那些模糊照片中模糊的人们,他们做事时根本没有长远地思考过这些行为可能意味着什么、会导向何处。

Those blurry people from grainy pictures who did things without really thinking long term about what it might mean or what it might lead to.

Speaker 0

而我们实际上正在用一生的时间清理这些遗留问题。

And we're actually sort of spending our lives mopping up that.

Speaker 0

我认为,这种程度的理解正逐渐从边缘渗透到商业、设计和制造领域。

And I think that that level of sort of understanding is starting at the edges to trickle into business and design and manufacturing.

Speaker 0

这不仅仅是企业社会责任。

And it's more than just corporate social responsibility.

Speaker 0

当我们大规模地做事时,它们会产生巨大的影响。

It's an understanding of when we do things at scale, they have big scale impact.

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‘不要未来主义’的挑战在于,尽管我相信它,也认同它的目标,但在组织中实施起来非常困难,因为它没有关键绩效指标或投资回报率。

The challenge of don't futurism, while I believe in it and I believe in its ambitions, it's very hard to do in organizations because it doesn't have KPIs or ROIs.

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你无法为所有你没有做的事情设定衡量标准。

You can't put metrics to all the things you don't do.

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它们会立刻变得无影无踪。

They just become invisible instantly.

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因此,很难证明它的价值。

So it's very hard to justify the benefits of it.

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而且它常常具有对抗性。

And it's often quite oppositional.

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它把团队分成了好人和坏人,这是一种意识形态的视角。

It sort of divides teams into goodies and baddies, and that is a sort of ideological perspective.

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例如,在谷歌X,公司的标语是让世界变得截然更好,却从未真正说明‘更好’意味着什么。

So for example, at Google X, the strapline of the company was to make the world a radically better place without ever really saying what better meant.

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我们假设所有人都同意‘更好’的含义。

And there's assumption that we all agree on what better means.

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对于某些事情,我认为许多人都有全球性的共识,但这仍是一种意识形态立场。

And for some things, I think there's global agreements amongst many people, but it is an ideological standpoint.

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我认为更好的东西,可能在细节上与你认为更好的东西不同。

Like what I think is better is probably different in detail to what you think is better.

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因此,事情就开始变得相当复杂。

And so that's where things start to become quite complicated.

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你不能简单地用好与坏、理想与非理想来划分。

You can't just say good and bad, ideal and non ideal.

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我们必须就意识形态立场展开更严谨的对话。

We have to have more rigorous conversations about ideological stance.

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在一家快速发展的创新公司中,这是一件非常复杂的事情。

Again, a complicated thing to do in a fast moving innovation company.

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我非常希望看到更多的批判性设计、推测性设计和以影响为导向的设计能够进入这些大型组织,因为如果它们刻意置身于这些组织之外,不讲述比企业自我叙述更具启发性或更优的故事,它们的影响将继续有限。

I would love to see more sort of critical design and speculative design and implication oriented design finding its way into these big organizations because I think if it willfully stands outside of them and doesn't tell stories that are inspirational or better than the sort of corporate stories that corporations are telling themselves, it'll continue to have sort of limited impact.

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这正是我对我们领域最担忧的地方:当我看到这里列出的词语以及你对它们的定义——‘可能’、‘应该’、‘或许’、‘不要’——在当前时代,我把它们看作一个光谱,左边是积极正面的,右边则是非常负面的。

This is the area where I have the most concern in our space, is when I look at the list of words here and the way you define them, could, should, might, don't, in current times, I see that as a spectrum of the good things on the left, and then the really negative things on the right.

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在硅谷,任何参与科技行业的人,我认为我们都带着美好的初衷和极大的热情,希望参与创造一个更美好的未来。

And in Silicon Valley, anyone involved in tech, I think we come into this space with a lot of great intentions and a lot of excitement about participating in creating a better future.

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而这种心态伴随着一种天真,一种对可能发生的事情视而不见的乐天派式盲区。

And with that comes naivete, kind of a Pollyanna ish blindness to what could happen.

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而我们这些在科技行业待了数十年的人,已经足够久到目睹过美好的初衷如何带来严重的负面后果——社交媒体、iPhone的普及及其如何改变我们的生活、夺走我们的注意力,还有Instagram等等。

And those of us who've been in the tech industry for a couple decades, we've been here long enough to see good intentions come in and then have really negative outcomes, social media, etcetera, the iPhone, ubiquity, and how that's changed our life and taken our attention, Instagram, etcetera.

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这些都是好东西。

They're good things.

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我们怀着极好的初衷创造了它们,但它们却带来了意想不到的后果。

We created them with really good intentions, but they have outcomes that are unexpected.

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我得承认,如今我对未来五年感到的恐惧和不安,远远超过了我年轻时在设计与科技领域曾拥有的那种乐观。

And I have to admit that these days, I feel a lot more fear and trepidation about the next five years, really, than I feel that hopefulness that I once had as a younger man in design and technology.

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我想知道你对此持什么看法。

I'm curious where you sit with that.

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是的,我的父亲在50年代长大,那时的未来是一个充满希望的地方。

Yeah, I mean, my father grew up in the 50s when the future was a positive place.

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我在80年代长大,那时的未来也是一个充满希望的地方。

I grew up in the 80s where the future was a positive place.

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我认为我们现在正经历一个时代,尤其是从年轻人的数据来看,有一种说法叫‘弥漫性的青少年末日感’,即许多年轻人展望未来时,看到的并不是他们喜欢的画面。

And I think now we're living through an era where certainly if you look at the data on young people, there's this phrase ambient adolescent apocalypticism, which is this feeling that a lot of young people hold that they look to the future and they don't like what they see.

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我们面临的挑战在于‘好与坏’、‘更好与更差’、‘更可取与不可取’这些概念。

The challenge that we're facing is the notions of sort of good and bad and better and worse and preferable and undesirable.

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我们需要就这些词的真正含义展开对话,问问自己:为什么?

Having those conversations about what we really mean by that and sort of saying, Well, why?

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为什么?

Well, why?

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那为什么呢?

Well, why?

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我们需要更深入地探讨,而不是急于下定论,说什么是好、坏、对、错。

And going deeper is what we actually need to be doing more of rather than sort of trying to put a stake in the ground and saying good, bad, right, wrong.

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我认为,当设计师试图与其他学科合作,共同应对复杂庞大的问题时,挑战就出现了。

And I think the challenge with that is as designers try to integrate with other disciplines, trying to make big complex things.

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我生活在湾区的硅谷地区。

I live and work in sort of Silicon Valley in the Bay Area.

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当你身处一个满是人的房间时,你可能会遇到一位65岁的前嬉皮士,留着大胡子,骑着躺式自行车,周末玩《龙与地下城》和《战争游戏》。

When you're in a room full of people, you could be in a room with a 65 year old ex hippie, big beard, recumbent bike, plays Dungeons and Dragons and War Games on the weekend.

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你也可能身处一个满是穿着品牌抓绒衣的人的房间,他们大多是风险投资从业者。

You could also be in a kind of puffy fleeced room with lots of people with branded fleeces who are like in venture capital.

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你也可能和一位计算机科学领域的专家在一起。

You could be in with some computer science guy.

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你也可能和一群对某些事物充满热情、但政治立场截然不同的设计师在一起。

You could be in with a bunch of designers who are very excited about certain things and very different in their politics.

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在这个房间里,所有这些人都可能聚集在一起,共同致力于创造某样东西,而‘更好’与‘更差’的本质就在于此。

The whole nature of better, worse in that room where all those people could be together in the room, all trying to make a thing.

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除非我们真正坦诚开放地展开关于‘更好’与‘更差’、‘好’与‘坏’的对话,并深入探讨:如果我们这么做,可能会发生什么。

Unless you have those conversations about better, worse, good, bad, really honestly and openly and start to flesh out, well, if we do that, then this might happen.

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如果我们这样做,那么我们行为的后果可能会有哪些。

If we do this, then these could be the implications of what we do.

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我只是觉得,我们目前还没有建立起这样的文化,而这实际上非常困难。

I just don't think we have that culture in place and it's actually quite difficult.

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就连我们个人,或许以为自己有一套固定的价值观地图,但其实它每天、每个案例都在变化。

And even us as individuals, we might think we have our own ideological map, but it changes day by day, case by case.

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当面对简单的选择,比如‘我该不该买这个新东西’时,我们不得不调和自己偏好、意识形态、信念甚至自我认知的混音台。

And when given simple choices like, should I buy this new thing or not, we have to sort of play with that mixing desk of our preferences, ideologies, beliefs, ourselves even.

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所以当我们试图让房间里一群各有不同动机、驱动力、偏好和厌恶的人共同做这件事时,难度就变得极大。

So when we're trying to do that with a group of people in a room, each of which have different motivations, different drivers, different preferences, different hatreds, it becomes really difficult.

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因此,我认为我所相信的那种‘非乌托邦式’未来观,是愿意坦诚讨论责任——对我们可能启动的事物所引发后果的责任,并开展开放而真诚的辩论,而不是那种荒谬的未来观:毁灭一切、彻底停止、这是反乌托邦、末日来临。

And so I think the kind of don't futurism that I can believe in is one that's just willing to have that conversation about responsibility and responsibility for the implications of what we might be setting in motion and open and honest debates about them, rather than the kind of dope futurism, which is burn it all down, stop it, this is dystopian, this is the end times.

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因为我只是觉得,很容易忽视那种声音,把它当作过度激动的反对言论而 dismiss 掉。

Because I just feel like it's very easy to ignore that voice and dismiss it as sort of overly excited naysaying.

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我想我们能不能绕回来,虽然打乱了顺序,但回到那些可能的未来上。

I wonder if we could circle back, know we're going out of order, but to the might futures.

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我有一个问题,关于你之前提到的一点:我认为在20世纪70年代,由于保罗·埃利希的研究,我们曾认为正面临一场人口过剩危机,地球上的人口将多到无法维持。

And one question I had was around, I think something you touched on earlier, there is this sense, I think in the 1970s, due to the work of Paul Ehrlich, that we were headed for this overpopulation crisis where there would just be too many people to sustain on our current planet.

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但似乎现在,这一趋势正在发生变化。

But it seems anyway, right now that that trend is changing.

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事实上,许多国家的生育率已经低于替代水平,问题变得完全不同了。

And in fact, a lot of countries have lower than replacement level birth rates, and it's a very different problem.

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所以我想知道,你是如何看待这些可能的未来——当前的数据似乎指向某个方向,但实际情况可能剧烈转变?

So I'm curious how you think about these might features where the data might be pointing in a certain direction right now, but it could actually change drastically.

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这可能也与你之前提到的未来极其不可预测的观点相关。

And that probably also relates to your earlier point about just the future being so unpredictable too.

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那么,你如何调和这些矛盾?

So how do you kind of reconcile those things?

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是的,人口问题确实非常有趣,我长期以来一直对此着迷。

Yeah, so I mean, population's a really interesting one and it's something I've been fascinated in for a long time.

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比如说一百年前,美国的预期寿命是55岁。

So a hundred years ago, let's say, the life expectancy in The US was 55.

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如果我生活在一百年前,我的余生可能只剩下五年左右。

So if I was living a hundred years ago, I would have about five years left of my life.

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但自从我出生以来,大约半个世纪前,地球人口已经翻了一番。

But since I was born, so half a century ago ish, the population of Earth has doubled.

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自从阿黛尔发布了那首人们在KTV里最爱唱的《Rolling in the Deep》以来,全球人口净增了十亿多,这在很短的时间内发生了巨大的变化。

Since Adele released that song Rolling in the Deep that people love to sing at karaoke, we've added more than a billion net to the planet, which feels like a lot of change in a very short amount of time.

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那么,我们目前掌握的所有数据和所有预测,都表明这是一个问题吗?

Now, all of the data that we have, all of the projections that we have for is that a problem or not?

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什么才算是一个问题?

And what constitutes a problem?

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我完全不怀疑也不否认这一点。

I don't doubt it or deny it at all.

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我没有理由怀疑,但我们确实需要追问这背后的原因。

I have no reason to, but we do have to ask sort of where it comes from.

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我们必须思考它可能指向何方,以及我们给自己讲述的故事是什么。

We have to ask where it might be pointing next and what stories we tell ourselves.

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比如,我们相信人口增长终将趋于平稳,因此我们投资于医学研究、女性教育以及其他解放性技术、方法和社会变革。

Like we believe that it's going to plateau and therefore we're investing in sort of medical research and education of women and other sort of emancipatory technologies and techniques and societal shifts.

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但我们也必须承认,我们可能会错。

But we do have to sort of say we might be wrong.

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人口增长可能还会继续急剧攀升。

It might continue to get steeper and steeper and steeper.

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如果真的如此,我们那时该怎么做?

And if it does, what might we do in that situation?

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这正是未来学家思维的核心——以多元视角展望未来。

Which is sort of at the heart of the might futurists mindset, which is about looking to the future and thinking in a plural way.

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我想我用了‘未来’这个词很多次,这在谈论这类工作时是一种很时髦的表达方式,因为我们无法预知未来会怎样。

I think I've used the term futures quite a lot, which is a very trendy affectation when talking about this kind of work, which is we cannot know what the future holds.

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因此,我们必须尽可能多地考虑各种不同的研究方向,这至关重要。

So it is absolutely vital that we consider as many different lines of inquiry as we can.

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重要的是进行思考,而不一定非要找到正确的答案。

And the doing the thinking is what matters, not necessarily coming up with the right answer.

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这其中很多源于冷战时期的场景规划工作,比如兰德公司以及赫尔曼·卡恩等人,还有荷兰皇家壳牌公司在场景规划方面的研究。

And a lot of that comes from early work of Cold War scenario planning, Rand and people like Herman Kahn and the work that was done at Royal Dutch Shell in scenario planning.

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我认为,现在我们通常将其宽泛地称为前瞻性思考或战略前瞻性。

And I think now we loosely term it sort of foresight, strategic foresight, let's say.

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这种行业目前或许最能代表商业未来研究的顶尖水平,即思考‘如果这种情况发生,那会怎样?’

It's the kind of industry that perhaps represents best in class for commercial futures work right now, thinking about if this happens, then what?

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如果那样,又会怎样?

If that, then what?

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并将这些类似战争推演的场景延伸至未来。

And building these sort of war game scenarios out into the future.

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而且它非常具有系统性。

And it's very methodological.

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它使用了很多让我有点反感的图示方法。

It uses a lot of the sort of diagrammatic techniques that make me shudder a bit.

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比如沃罗斯锥、未来锥或不确定性锥,你可能听说过这些,它们通过向前推演,尝试在特定时间尺度上描绘出什么是可能的、合理的或可行的。

Things like the Voros cone or the futures cone or the cone of uncertainty, which you may be familiar with, which looks at projecting forwards and starting to try and map out what might be probable, plausible or possible on a given time scale.

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所以本质上,它再次开始关注大量涌入的数据,并试图预测它们可能的发展方向。

So essentially what it does again is it starts to look at massive amounts of data coming in and tries to project forwards like where it might go.

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这与规范性未来学不同,因为它不会断言‘我们的数据表明这一定会发生’。

And it's different to should futurism because it doesn't declare our data says this is going to happen.

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它所做的,是说‘这是我们所掌握的信息,所有这些情况都有可能发生’。

What it does, it says, this is what we've got and all of these things might happen.

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在每一种不同的情景下,我们可能采取什么行动?

And what might we do in each of those different scenarios?

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我以前做过很多这类工作。

I've done a lot of this sort of work before.

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我身边有很多人经常做这类工作。

I've been around people that do a lot of it.

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我认为它有一些好处。

And I think it has benefits.

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它鼓励人们思考未来可能发生的事情,而不是我们希望发生或认为会发生的事情。

It encourages people to think about what might happen in the future rather than what we want to happen or what we think will happen.

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它开始打开这种可能性空间。

It starts to open up that space.

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挑战在于,我们已经见过数百次,人们非常不擅长想象变化和未来的各种情景。

The challenge is, and we've seen this hundreds of times, people are very bad at imagining change and imagining scenarios in the future.

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他们通常无法以指数方式思考,就像雷·库兹韦尔那句经典的话:未来是指数增长的,而不是线性的。

And they typically, they can't think in exponential terms, that classic Ray Kurzweil quote, The future is exponential, not linear.

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我说错了他的原话,但你明白意思。

I've got his quote wrong, but you get the gist.

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我们通常基于以往的经验来构建关于未来的叙事。

And we typically build stories about the future based on our previous experience.

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我常举的经典例子是:魔术师和幻术师之所以有效,是因为当你看到一辆哈雷摩托车从一个原本空无一物的箱子里出现时,你会觉得不可思议,因为我们从未见过这样的事。

And the classic example I use for this is, it's the reason why illusionists and magicians work is because when you see a Harley Davidson appear from a previously empty box, it feels amazing because we've never seen it before.

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我们从未想象过这种情况会发生,因为我们从未经历过。

We've never imagined that that would happen because we've never experienced it before.

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但如果他把三个橙子放进盒子里,然后打开盖子,发现里面还是三个橙子,这对我们来说会显得完全合乎逻辑。

But if he put three oranges in a box and then he opened the lid and there were three oranges in, that would feel completely logical to us.

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我认为这种无法想象的能力,我们之前就见过。

And I think that inability to imagine we've seen this before.

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像诺基亚——我提到过的公司,还有百视达和柯达,它们根本无法想象一个自己不再占主导地位、或者人们不再想用胶片拍照的未来。

Companies like Nokia, who I mentioned, and Blockbuster and Kodak, they just couldn't imagine a story where they wouldn't be dominant or where people wouldn't want to take photographs with film anymore.

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或者即使它们想到了,也会把这种可能性推到‘不可能发生’或‘二十年内不会发生’的遥远未来。

Or even if they did, they put it way out into the sort of impossible, never happen or not in twenty years space.

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因此,我认为这种未来学就是那种面向未来、试图讲述多种故事的类型,但它也被自身的方法论、学术框架所束缚,同时缺乏足够广阔的想象力,我认为这有时会限制它的效力。

And so I think might futurism is that type of futurism that looks to the future and tries to tell multiple stories, but is also hamstrung by its own sort of tying itself up with its own methods and academia and also an inability to imagine broadly enough, which I think sometimes can hamstring it.

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你最近在读什么、看什么、听什么,让你对世界有了新的视角?

What have you been reading, watching, listening to that is interesting and has you looking at the world with fresh eyes?

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当然,我读了不少,但我看了很多YouTube视频。

Obviously, read a fair amount, but I watch a lot of YouTube.

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很容易嘲笑YouTube,上面确实有很多无聊、空洞的垃圾内容。

It's easy to mock YouTube and there's an awful lot of awful stuff on there that's just vacuous nonsense.

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但也有大量优质内容。

But there's so much good stuff.

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如果你能避开那些喧闹浮夸的内容,YouTube就是一个庞大的纪录片、历史影像、分析和随笔的档案库。

If you're able to duck underneath that sort of barrage of the big shouty stuff, It is a huge archive of documentary, of historical footage, of analysis, of essays.

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因此,在写这本书的过程中,我花了大量时间在YouTube上。

And so I've spent in writing this book a lot of time on YouTube.

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至于最近看的内容,我是亚当·柯蒂斯及其纪录片的忠实粉丝,也很欣赏他的纪录片风格。

In terms of what I've watched recently, I'm a big fan of Adam Curtis and his documentaries and the style of his documentaries too.

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他所做的,是将历史影像与当代音乐结合——如果你不熟悉的话,他称之为‘重混历史’,通过串联政治新闻、日常生活和短视频文化中的线索,编织出关于过去的故事,这些故事帮助我们理解当下,甚至可能引导我们走向更有趣、更具启发性的未来。

And what he does is he takes archival footage, if you're not familiar, archival footage with contemporary music, and he calls it remixing history, where he starts to pull on sort of threads of political news, of everyday life, of soundbite culture, pull it all together into stories about the past that I think help us understand the present and maybe start to point us towards more interesting, provocative futures.

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他最近在BBC iPlayer上发布了一部名为《Shifty》的系列片,讲述的是20世纪末英国的生活。

And he's just released a series on the BBC iPlayer called Shifty, which is about living in The UK at the end of the twentieth century.

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这部片子深深触动了我,因为我确实经历过那个时代。

And it really triggered me a lot because I did.

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我成长在一个逐渐衰败的工业城镇,似乎没人关心这个地方。

And I grew up in a sort of tumbling down industrial town that nobody seemed to care about.

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我的父亲因伦敦推行的铁路私有化而失业,而那些人根本不在乎普通百姓的生活。

My father was laid off from his job at the railways by privatization that came from London and just sort of didn't really care about folks.

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纪录片系列《Shifty》迟早会出现在YouTube上,但目前它还在BBC播出,内容绝对引人入胜。

The documentary series Shifty is something that it'll probably make its way onto YouTube at some point, but at the moment, it's on the BBC, but absolutely fascinating stuff.

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我写这本书的目的,就是想做类似的事情:触动人们,促使他们重新审视——当你闭上眼睛想象未来时,脑海中浮现的是什么?

And all I'm trying to do with this book is do something similar to that, which is poke people and provoke them to have a sort of reassessment of when you close your eyes and think about the future, what comes to mind?

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为什么这些画面会浮现在你脑海中?

Why does that stuff come to mind?

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它们究竟从何而来?

And where might it be coming from?

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它们又缺失了什么?

And what might it be lacking?

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我认为,只要我能引发这样的对话,就足够了——打开这扇门,希望之后会有五十位更聪明的人写出五十本更深刻的书。

And I think that conversation, if I can trigger that, that's enough to just crack open this conversation and hopefully there'll be 50 other smarter people who write 50 other smarter books after this.

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但如果我能做到这一点,我就心满意足了。

But if I can do that, I'll be happy.

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太好了。

That's great.

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好吧,这是个很好的收尾,我也想问问,人们在哪里可以了解更多关于你的书、你和你的工作?

Well, that's a great place to wrap up and also to ask you where can people learn more about your book and you and your work?

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了解这本书的最佳途径是 could, should, might,don't.com。

Best place to go for the book is could, should, might,don't.com.

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你还可以通过 nickfosterrdi.com 了解更多关于我的信息。

And you can find out more about me at nickfosterrdi.com.

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太棒了。

Fantastic.

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尼克·福斯特,非常感谢你参加《Design Better》节目。

Nick Foster, thank you so much for being on Design Better.

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哦,这真是我的荣幸。

Oh, it's been my pleasure.

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很高兴和你聊天, chats。

Nice to speak with you, chats.

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本集由埃利·伍利和我,亚伦·沃尔特制作,音频工程与制作支持由太平洋音频的朴 Brian 提供。

This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio.

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如果你觉得这集有帮助,我们希望你能在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你收听优质节目的任何平台给我们留下评价。

If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows.

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或者直接将节目链接分享到你团队的 Slack 频道:designbetterpodcast.com。

Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com.

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这将极大地帮助其他人发现这个节目。

It'll really help others discover the show.

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我们下期再见。

Until next time.

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