I’ve written multiple works of speculative fiction that have helped organizations accelerate preferred futures by helping them bring the future to life, both within Autodesk, and beyond.

The end of my mother’s life famously signaled the end of her profession. Not that anyone is mourning the downfall of architecture; not with all the death and destruction that the uprising brought about. After all, her profession was dying long before she did. Her father, also an architect, and a huge influence on her, had long predicted the end of their profession.

Though my mother died several years ago, I remember clearly those last days working alongside her in her studio, its view over the Thames, her sketches alive in the north light. Her words, equally alive, changing with the ebb and flow of her creativity. When the ideas flowed, her voice bounced gently around in euphonious loops, as silvery as the light. And when she lost focus, and her ideas became diffuse, I became the locus for her once again: “Would you like some coffee, darling? I’d love to hear what you think of this idea. I’m struggling to move it from fiction to fact.”

Although she was a renowned architect - renowned for being the last ever architect - to me she was equally a storyteller.

Today, to quiet the noise of the miseries that have flowed from the uprising - the displacement and devastation that sudden sea level rise has brought to the world - I sift through and order these stories. I imagine them placed along an exponential curve that I’m looking down.

Way below me - just below the knee of the curve - are the tales of grandfather. These stories seem so disconnected from the world I’m working so hard today to regenerate. In these stories I see how the architecture he practiced was built on a foundation of conformity. He didn’t know how this foundation would crumble as the world became increasingly computable, and, with it, equally mutable.

For all my grandfather’s creativity, he still applied rigid design rules, and used rigid design tools. Software bought in little boxes, installed on bigger boxes: boxes which in turn housed the primitive building blocks of rectilinear silicon and equally hard-edged logic. No wonder his work now looks so rigid. Maybe it’s because his ideas were so confined.

Today, it’s our human capacity to unpick the problems of the uprising that’s confined. We’d known sea levels were rising for decades, but we underestimated - and largely ignored - how far they’d continue to rise, and how fast.

It seems much longer than eleven years ago that my mother and I stood aghast in the kitchen at home, watching on the outernet the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet suddenly breaking away from its rocky precipice. When the comfort we sought in hot tea evaporated, we moved quickly to red wine. “Nothing is permanent,” my mother uttered into her glass, “we must design for uncertainty. For variability.”

We all went back to stifling the significance this event triggered, but when ancient glacial ice walls soon started collapsing under their own weight, we knew that with them also went our chance of avoiding the rapid, runaway collapse we saw start to quickly unfold.

My mother’s generation didn’t know it, but they’d been born at the very knee of the exponential curve. The stories my mother told me in her later years were all about rapid change. Environmental change. Societal change. Technological change. Political change. My mother suddenly saw how brittle many of the world’s systems were; how many were still underpinned by the rigidity of her father’s era.

But as history now tells us, fluidity was the thing that emerged from all that rigidity. Fluidity of computing, combined with a sea of sensors, led to fluidity of data. And this data gave us the insights we’d for so long looked hungrily to humans for. The buildings my mother had, for so long, designed to be inspectable, were fast becoming inscrutable. That’s when my own professional focus shifted toward regenerative algorithms and how machines could help us reinterpret and rebuild our world. For the first time, the work my mother and I both did had a shared axis.

Like the ice sheets, the practice of architecture was irrevocably shifting. It was a measure of how dramatic this shift was that our vocabulary moved in parallel. No longer were buildings constructed. They were compiled. It wasn’t long before the era of human-driven architectural design was finally over. The role we occupied now was to mentor the outernet’s learning network to glean the right knowledge from the sea of data that was being streamed at it.

Some things didn’t change. We still worked in our studio, and my mother still told me tales about my grandfather. “Architecture was so elemental back then”, she’d say. But just as my relationship to machines had changed, so had my relationship to these stories. The retelling of these tales now blurred them, making them increasingly foggy and nebulous. Today, they still seem otherworldly, though so much has happened in my lifetime that still seems unreal to me.

We’d grown so used to a pattern of extreme weather events that we didn’t find them so extreme any more. But suddenly this pattern changed. The first big rise hit eight years ago, and seemingly overnight our coastlines shifted, and with them, our borders. And people. Lots of people. Many moved quickly, because many had to. Many didn’t. Both groups ended up displaced, dislocated. Society as we knew it was collapsing. And so were its systems.

The brittle systems broke, and the ones that didn’t break were those that had some degree of elasticity, even if initially so many of them were stretched almost to breaking point. When the size of our design space became simply too big for us humans to grasp, the world looked to the outernet and our regenerative algorithms. There was no other option: even the simplest problems were just too big for humans, particularly as the unrest that was triggered by sudden sea level rise had wiped out so many of them.

I remember what big news this shift in our relationship with machines was - at least in academic circles - but then the uprising really hit us. From the initial devastation of sea level rise had emerged many new forms of destruction. And everything that would have been news before, was just noise afterwards. Suddenly the debate about our practice was, in the other sense of the word, truly academic. Especially after we all saw what fluidity really looked like.

The Maldives, the Seychelles, the Solomon Islands, Micronesia. All lost. Lost islands. Lost habitat. Bangladesh, Vietnam, Japan, and the Netherlands. Flooded. Abandoned. Infrastructure destroyed. Economies too. Conflict. Disease. Displacement.

Many people died during this time. Most of them not nearly as peacefully as my mother. But given time, a new equilibrium began to emerge. Rigidity gave was to fluidity on many fronts. Once rigid borders became fluid. As did labor. And capital, though it remained as nebulous as ever. Capital had been flowing through fluid channels for some time, and it didn’t take long for the economic system to flow towards new opportunity found in such rampant liquidity.

Fluid landscapes were something that we accepted as a new normal. But from this flowed so many abnormal changes. So much variability. And it wasn’t just architecture that was being rebuilt around this new dynamic. The whole world was. If design challenges were big before the uprising, they were immeasurably so after.

But there’s hope. The regenerative design efforts that were so vocally championed by the world’s last architect - my mother - are adapting to our newly fluid landscape. The algorithms that I trained and tuned with her are allowing the built world to be regeneratively designed. And with people assembling their own buildings and their own communities, we’re getting fresh insights from the smart materials that were such a breakthrough a few decades ago being reused and recompiled. I have an amazing vantage point from which to watch new insights flow as the world gets regenerated.

There’s no end in sight to everything that needs to be done, but I’m starting to see patterns forming in the data. They’re nebulous of course, but occasionally I see glimpses of the future. And in these glimpses I can sense my mother’s pioneering work woven through it all. I can see her values, her humanity, her stories. And I think the shape of things to come looks a lot like who she is. Who we all are.

 © Darren Brooker

Eyes closed, Heath basked in the sunlight, his thoughts as diffuse as the desert light. Through the warm glow drifted Ramtin’s voice: “I mean, just because money was what made you…it’s still just money.”

Heath’s focus slowly came back to the room as Ramtin finished his thought, “We’ve been paying machines in energy for years, so why not use it to pay for everything?”

Heath realized Ramtin was echoing his own words back to him, so he didn’t rush to answer. He’d been thinking about his controlled experiment in the aerospace industry. Given that this was a relatively bounded ecosystem, he’d helped move it, as one, into a post-carbon era. Photons now fueled this entire ecosystem, and Heath had proved that photons, with a little help from Blockchain, could also become a payment system.

“I’m okay with killing money. I’m more worried people will think big tech is back again,” replied Heath. His gaze shifted to the paperwork laid out on the table – a funding agreement for his TerraPhoton Currency Platform – and his thoughts continued to orbit around the last word. “Platform is such a dirty word these days.”

“But everyone will see how two-sided it is,” countered Ramtin, “and the fact that it ends forgery?! If you’re worried, think how that might help with the optics!”

Like energy, the TerraPhoton currency can neither be created nor destroyed. He’d inadvertently found a solution to forgery. At least of money. The drifting aroma of fresh coffee signaled his wife’s arrival. “Good morning you two. What are you both plotting?”

“Just the usual Julia,” said Ramtin. “That little post-carbon economy idea your husband has. He’s just worried that people will conflate mining photons with mining cognition.”

“I was actually wondering how many TerraPhotons that might be worth,” countered Heath quickly, pointing at the Hockney on the opposite wall.

“Were you?” smiled Julia. “Or were you wondering whether…” she paused for dramatic effect, “you might be making one of those things….what are they called Ramtin, those things that other people make?”

“Mistakes?” laughed Ramtin. Julia slid by Heath to sit on the sofa facing the windows, as Ramtin took the opportunity to press Heath. “The time’s right. Proving this out in aerospace was a huge thing, and the material dematerialization it’s fueled is incredible.”

Julia picked up where Ramtin left off. “Now energy and payment are two sides of the same coin, the incentives to use less energy in making things are built into the system. This has the potential to make the whole world more symmetrical.” She paused. “Darling. It’s worth dematerializing money at the same time.”

Heath picked up the pen from the table. He looked out to the soft Black Rock desert landscape. He felt the weight of the pen in his hand. In the distance, the sun glinted off one of the solar hydrogen balls that had suddenly become so ubiquitous.

 © Darren Brooker