written desserts / interview / el laboratorio de las preguntas futuras

Manu García-Lechuz Sierra

Strategic designer, trained in architecture, currently working applying design and innovation methodologies to the process of creating a new business in corporate venture building format with large companies.

How would you explain to someone who lived 100 years ago what you do?
What a strategic designer does, what remains at the end of the day, is to measure and organise. I observe to understand and size up what's in front of me. And then, I invent rules that give a new look at all that, with the purpose of providing companies with alternative visions of reality that help them see new opportunities, close to what they have been doing all their lives but with the possibility of going further. I measure and order to take it a little further.

When you were a child, how did you imagine the future?
I was a person who was very into history. I believed everything I was told that could be, my imagination was built on a more naïve, perhaps innocent, and very possibilistic vision, which I think is also something that is very much lacking nowadays. Precisely because we are increasingly obsessed with the future, we think we know more about it, the more we control it and the less chance we give it to surprise us. This also blinds us.

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What do you see as the technology with the brightest future?
Something to do with language and translation, the interpretation of formats. I think some of this is already happening in artificial intelligence models: how we go from images to texts, from texts to music, from music to images. This ability to transmute languages, to interpret them and even to create new ones is, in my intuition, something with a future. Everything that has to do with relating to each other will have a place.

 

What do you think we should invent that doesn't exist yet?
Remote touch.

The future in 3 words.
Desubiquitous (capable of unsettling us), close (understood from proximity) and surely immaterial, detached from things.
 

What excites you most about what is to come?
The next hour.
 

And what worries you most?
The comfort of discourse. The environmental crisis, for example, is something very big - and we have a certain awareness of it, we live with it... but we have no real responsibility or concern. It seems that just being aware of it makes us participants, but we need a very big common effort, at a planetary level. The accommodation of discourses has to do with this, for me.
 

What question do you ask of the future?
What languages will we use? Or, rather, what language will we speak?