Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Studio – Photo by Peter Arnold 1998

This post is part of a series of essays bundled under “Travelling without moving”.

Intro of that series can be found here.

The plan/ambition with this series: to share where I have been the last year, what I learned, where I am going, and what is required.

The broader quest is to discover what is required to enable real change.

After the Anxious-post of begin Feb 2021, we continue with “Unbound”. Unbound from thingness that is.

Unbound comes from “Design Unbound”, part of the title of the book (actually two volumes) written by Ann Pendleton-Jullian (APJ) and John Seely Brown (JSB) and published in 2018.

The full title is “Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World”.

I am blown away and intrigued by the insights: this is about having agency in a world that is constantly shifting under you. It is so refreshing after all those business-, management-, leadership-, and self-help-books. It has become a healthy addiction: I am basically reading and re-reading and deeply internalizing everything that Ann Pendleton has written in the last couple of years. I have been haunted by this book. Ann and John put a spell on me.

This book is a game-changer. I highly recommend it.

After a first read/scan of the two volumes, and after a kind introduction by Jerry Michalski and John Hagel, I had my first (online) conversation with Ann and John on 27 May 2021. I wanted to explore a partnership for building a workshop on BANI and work with Ann and John on the response to Anxious, which was related to having agency on a world that is in constant change.

Ann initially very politely declined, but I insisted, and since then we have worked and are still working together on some NDA projects. We now have several calls per month.

How naïve I was at that time. I thought I understood, but Ann very kindly let me discover my own mind-bugs. She also pointed out my reductionist thinking around BANI. She also let me discover other resources and deep-dives to let me internalize what this was all about. The last couple of months have been a humbling experience.

I will not even attempt at summarizing the book.

I just would like to spend some time on the “Unbound” aspect of the title.

The initial title of the book, I learned, was “Architecture Unbound”.

Ann is a practicing architect.

You may discover that she co-designed the house of Carl Sagan. He hired Atelier Jullian and Pendleton, whose principal, Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente, had been a student of Le Corbusier.

The architects designed a new, separate residence for Sagan in Cayuga Heights, and prepared an extensive, two-stage redesign plan for the tomb to turn it into a study for him and his wife.

Carl Sagan house – Cayuga Heights – Picture Durston Saylor in OfHouses

In the book, Ann is applying the practice of an architecture studio to other things than buildings.

Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects Studio

In the video above, you see how architects work together as a family. Where working and failing together – almost as a practice of group-vulnerability – thrives on experimenting and rigorous critique.

Ann describes similar practices of architecture studios and applies them to unboundedness.

Unbound from buildings.

Unbound from things.

The architect as a context designer.

The role of critique in an architecture studio.

The role of Game Play and Game Design

We’ll look into some of these aspects in some subsequent posts in this Travelling without Moving series.

If you want a quick intro (two times 90 minutes) to the work of APJ and JSB, here are two video-vignettes that Ann and John recorded for the IFTF Foresight Talk Series

The main points covered in these two videos are: white water world, pragmatic imagination, from Newton to Darwin to Ecologies, Design for Emergence, Systems of Action, and World Building.

But there is so much more in the book, and the material is so rich, so nuanced, so dense, that I very much invite you to read it, not once, but twice, ever three times.

This is just pure-gold material for anybody who is active in corporate innovation initiatives.

It helps you reset and forget and go way beyond your tactical thinking about startup bootcamps, corporate venture funds, MVPs, Lean, Agile, platforms, ecosystems, and other blah.

You don’t need a head of innovation.

You don’t need an innovation team.

You need a squad that is trained to design for emergence and to tackle wicked problems.

This is about seeing the world differently – a world in constant change – and about seeing the dispositions of the system and designing the contexts for emergence and agency in these complex systems.

Together with Ann, I am working with Hamilton Ray from Collective Next and Amber Case on a Pirate TV episode on Design Unbound.

We plan to release the video before summer. We aim to condense the key insights of the book into a 45 min, a sort of non-commercial trailer for a learning journey that is being put together. The video will be provocative enough to stand on its own as a coherent learning opportunity.

Next time we’ll talk about “Foam”, a way of looking at and reflecting about the world as suggested by German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk.

Hope you stay on board.

Warmest,