The Foundational Challenge: Stewardship, Responsibility, and Designing a New System with Indy Johar
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 552 Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2024
⏱️ 97 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
(Conversation recorded on October 3rd, 2024)
While humans, like all animals, are subject to certain fundamental realities, we also possess the unique ability to shape the world around us through physical infrastructure, laws and institutions, and our economic and social systems. And yet, it's important to remember that, as today's guest would say, what we design designs us back. In short, the systems and structures we build influence our cultures, values, and identities.
Today, Nate is joined by architect and professor of planetary civics, Indy Johar, to explore the relationship between system design and human behavior - and what might be possible for transformational change. Along the way, they discuss the impact of sunk costs on our ability to change, the importance of new language to describe and respond to our human predicament, and envision future governance and economies that could enable the full spectrum of what it means to be human.
What sorts of unconventional ideas, like self-owning land and technology, could lead to economies that are capable of sustaining humans as well as foster a healthy planet? How do our current societies prevent us from embodying and living into our greatest gifts as human beings? Is it possible to intentionally redesign our systems at the physical, structural, and psychological levels in service of all the entangled life inhabiting the Earth?
About Indy Johar:
Indy Johar is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, as well as the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing), and Open Desk (open source furniture company).
Indy is also a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, which is the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization. He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School. He is currently a professor at RMIT University.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think people can perceive the violence in their economic realities. |
| 0:04.8 | And I think this is where the thesis or peace actually invites a new psychological state, |
| 0:10.3 | as well as, I think, language of freedom. |
| 0:12.9 | And I think the freedom not just of economic choice, |
| 0:16.1 | which I think is usually a freedom to escape the tyranny of the system, |
| 0:20.1 | but a freedom to be radically human, |
| 0:22.3 | which is to construct a system that ennobles us in a different way. |
| 0:28.5 | You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how |
| 0:34.4 | energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together |
| 0:39.0 | and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to |
| 0:44.5 | inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. |
| 0:55.3 | Today I'm pleased to be joined by architect and mission steward of Dark Matter Labs, Indy Johar. |
| 1:03.9 | Indy is also the co-founder of the Architecture and Urban Practice, Architecture Zero, |
| 1:09.8 | a founding director of Open System Labs, and a non-executive |
| 1:14.2 | international director of the Blocks Hub, the Nordic Hub for Sustainable Urbanization. |
| 1:20.2 | India is taught and lectured at various institutions, including Harvard, MIT, and the new school, |
| 1:27.0 | and is currently a professor at our MIT University. |
| 1:31.9 | Today, India and I have a very wide boundary conversation about how the structure and design of our physical systems in our culture shape our values and behaviors and how they in turn shape the system back. |
| 1:47.9 | We also dive into some emergent projects and ideas, what he calls fissures that may be key |
| 1:54.0 | to leading us towards better human and planetary systems. Perhaps this conversation can plant the seeds of change in viewers like yourself to |
| 2:06.1 | create your own movements wherever you are towards more pro-social futures. |
| 2:11.4 | This was a conversation that unexpectedly, uh, |
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