Renowned futurists and science fiction writers recently gathered at Arizona State University for Emerge: Artists + Scientists Redesign the Future, exploring how emerging technologies are transforming our minds, our relationships, everything we own and the very landscapes in which we live. The workshop Starting with the Universe: Design Science Now hitched cosmic models to design problems in the age of the Anthropocene, an era of unprecedented global change induced by human activities. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Design Science process, the workshop used the Elumenati’s GeoDome Theater, Uniview, and Worldviewer to interactively visualize NASA’s Digital Universe Atlas and animated global datasets to see how understanding a big picture context can help to frame complex problem solving processes.

Photo by Dave Pentecost