My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
Many countries today have begun the transition from an industrial wealth system and civilization to a knowledge-based system – without appreciating that a new wealth system is impossible without a corresponding new way of life.
The responsibility for change…lies within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.
Designer’s derive their rewards from ‘inner standards of excellence, from the intrinsic satisfaction of their tasks. They are committed to the task, not the job.
One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.
