Mission
We live in a world characterized by tremendous complexity. A seemingly infinite number of issues, perspectives, values, relations and conflicts account for just some of the elements in the incalculable reality we face as humans today.
The current age of post-modernism has been called the information age or the networking age. Nothing in our modern reality can be understood isolated; everything exists in relation to something else, everything is deeply interwingled in processes that unfolds across social relations, sections of populations, national borders, languages, cultural understandings and political or religious ideals.
Each of us is ourselves responsible to stay updated on what happens in the world. At the same rate as we all get more connected, as the globalization gets stronger, as technological advances happens faster and as our way of working and relating changes, the complexity increases. And so does the requirements to those who try to make sense of it all.
To stay informed we use a number of channels and tools to support us in collecting knowledge and deducing meaning from it. In this age of digital abundance we would expect new tools for supporting these processes to emerge. Today, though, most tools are still relatively crude and still builds on models or metaphors from the non-digital reality.
With the rise of the Internet a radical change in the traditional roles of meaning creation has been made possible. Easy access to knowledge and many perspectives on the same issues has been strengthened. Through the blogosphere the possibilities for conversations and reflection has never been better. Still, there hasn’t really been much innovation that utilizes the potential of the available technology in a very practical and unifying way.
There is a growing sense of urgency for these tools to be invented. Today all the information and perspectives of the world are reduced to a daily resumé in a fixed amount of pages in a newspaper or a fixed amount of time in television and radio. But the existing structures of mass media are not sufficient to capture the complexity of our world
Even though access to variety and many perspectives on the same issues has been strengthened through the Internet and tools such as RSS and newsreaders, most of the current methods of keeping up to date are still restricted by physical and economic constraints, still adscript to local perspectives and mostly limited by non-digital means of communication.
We can only act wisely in this challenging age if we are well-informed and understand the context of the massive amounts of information that constantly enters our reality. Most tools today simply aren’t capable of helping us with that.
During this project we will break down media into all the parts it consists of and thereby build a creative catalog of elements, that can be combined, played around with and used for creating new media models for the future. We will examine processes in the new ecosystem of information and aim to present realistic scenarios of how we can give rise to better understanding, reflection, sensemaking and global conversations in the complex reality of tomorrow.
Read more about what concrete plans we have with the project.
