Marco Bevolo and Filiberto Amati interview on their upcoming book “Nexus” (MIT Press):
Julio Mario Ottino, Guggenheim Fellow, and Co-Director, Northwestern University’s Institute on Complex Systems
Bruce Mau, Co-Founder, and CEO, Massive Change Network, Chicago
Transcript
Filiberto Amati
Hi, this is Filiberto Amati. And I’m here today with Marco Bevolo, and we have two esteemed guests for our next episode on the future of design and design thinking, and Marco is going to introduce them.
Marco Bevolo
Thank you very much. We are thrilled to have Julio Mario Ottino, who is with Guggenheim Fellow and Dean at Northwestern University. But most importantly, today is here as co-author of the Nexus new book, he wrote with my dear friend, I hope you share the feelings and design legend Bruce Mao. So actually we are here today to have a an informal conversation about the book, the content of the book, the design of the book, and what the book tells us about a better future. So I would like to start with with a question that is actually very basic, but very crucial. You mentioned somewhere that you worked on this book across the seven years of conversations of exchanged. What is that, ultimately trigger the need to put all your of your conversations into a quite remarkable and quite substantial publication like this where there is an academic side design side? And a very strong message. What is the motivation? What is the spark?
Julio M. Ottino
I would say there was no spark. I mean, we Bruce and I connected shortly after he did the massive change show in Chicago. I mean, they were some crucial points in the conversation. I think one point initially was a little table where I put our technology and science and compare them in different categories. That was one. Somewhere in the middle of those 10-12 years, Bruce showed to me the three issues of transformation find a hairy haltzman. That was also crucial. At some point, the lessons of the book became important. But the conversations were frequent. But we never sort of the gas publisher or anything like that. And then maybe because I thought I were running out of time. At the end of 2019, I decided to assemble the notes we had. And this was over Christmas. By about end of February, I had something semi-decent, give working. Just to have a test on how decent The notes were. I approached a couple of publishers. And once one said, Yeah, we’re interested in this. I told Bruce it is the time to do it now. And then the pandemic and the lockdown is started. And that’s when basically for us. It was we were all at home. We live maybe 150 yards apart. But it was all by some we have lots of meetings every week. And at some point, we formalized relationship with MIT Press. But there was no trigger. As I said, it was providential that at the end of 2019. We assemble, I assemble the notes. And the three goals. And I will let Bruce comment on this. For everything that we include in the book, especially with images. There were probably two other images that were not included. In fact, I showed recently to someone who was interested more in design, an earlier version, and this version, and I would say, maybe 20% of the images in the book, were in that previous version. So no, it was a lot of accumulation, lots of conversations. Which made the design easy, because we know exactly what we both like. Yeah, but it was no people ask about this agreement. I don’t think we ever have.
Marco Bevolo
Now well, actually, actually, actually, we’ve both it’s total nonsense to speak of the design of the book and the content of the book, because since his collaboration with Cole after, I think the design and Paola Antonelli in the movie, Mau, by Jonah and Benjamin Behrman really demonstrates plastically how the typography becomes an accumulation and meaning itself. But I have to say, Bruce, and please contradict me and shoot me if I’m wrong. If I look, too, the Nexus compare the two. And Mao, MC 24, or massive change? I think this book to me looks a little bit like, as a book designer, you have been going back to some of your earlier work with zone books. There is a different a different approach. There is a more I would say almost minimalistic approach to the actual book design. How do you? How do you see it in your, in your, in your trajectory as a book designer? So it’s actually a bit of a peculiar question, maybe?
Bruce Mao
No, no, that’s a I think it’s a good question. I think at one point, I realized, this may be the best book design that I’ve done. In the sense that the synthesis for Julio, and I was really deep. And you know, who they were mentioned that, that kind of diagram, the chart that he made early on. And, you know, I’ve been doing Nexus, my whole life trying to, you know, I started, you know, when I was in high school, I was intending to be a scientist, and kind of, at the last moment, became an artist and, and studied art. And so it’s, it’s really always been kind of part of my mind and my language, in my imagination to kind of bring these worlds together, but I’d never named it as such. And when Julio showed me the little chart, I was so blown away, because what he had done was to look at the three domains of art technology and science, and 23, dimensions 23 different. It wasn’t so complete, then. But it was that going that way, looking at all the different dimensions of the domains to understand how they are different, how they’re the same? And what are the kind of what happens, what operates, what’s the operating system, within each of the domains? And what’s the language that you need to kind of develop to be able to synthesize those worlds. And so for me, this book is really a book where the subject of the book is really the practice of my life. And, and my, you know, creative design practice. And so the synthesis, I think, was really quite, you know, something quite special. And in some ways more than any other book that I’ve ever worked on, because it was itself the subject of the work and, and so for me, the collaboration was as who said, super easy. It was, you know, 10 years of coffee and three years of Zoom’s something like that. And it was really one of the Great’s intellectual Adventures of my life. I mean, Julio is a very, you know, he’s, he’s quite modest, but he’s a very special intelligence, some very special talent. You know, being a painter and a scientist. And being someone who actually is a Nexus person. He really understands what that means. And we had collaborated earlier on a practice at Northwestern that he called whole brain engineering. It was really introducing, in some ways, a kind of early Nexus model to say, look, you know, we need, we not only need quantitative excellence, we need qualitative excellence to you know, we, we need the whole brain to do the best possible work. And it really, I think, was quite, quite radical. To introduce that.
Marco Bevolo
Yeah. And actually, one of the concepts that you present in the book is that of the blur glorification. And that’s a concept Filiberto and I found in our research in our practice, as well, from another side, we do
Filiberto Amati
border America because yeah, you guys never disagree. I always disagree with Mark, it’s probably because we are from these different, you know, sides of Italy, different countries.
Marco Bevolo
It’s also quite rare that there are two guys from Torino is in this case. But clearly him
Filiberto Amati
while it’s already enough for me, usually, so but anyway, now, before we discuss about the blue, I really liked the origin story, because it feels very natural. No, it’s like, you plant a seed, and then, you know, little by little it grows in you nurture it, of course, you need to water it, and then there wasn’t a decision, let’s let’s do this together, or there wasn’t a lot of conscious feels very, you know, natural in that sense. But what is Nexus? What does it mean that why Nexus? Of course, before we go into the blurs? Can you explain that to me?
Julio M. Ottino
So, our viewers know now that the next the Nexus is, to me, the place where the people who are part of that the next US have simultaneously the ability to look at things with one with more than one pair of glasses. Okay, so we people go to university and get trained. You go to the law school to learn how to think like a lawyer. A, you go to medical school to think how to think like a doctor in different specialties. And economics the same way these economists learn a language, which they never have to explain to anybody, because you live within that circle of economists or law. So the question is, if you are in one of those domains, and you are faced with issues that require creative thinking, most of the ideas that will emerge, will emerge us things that were kind of already existing in that domain. Okay? What if, somehow, you could acquire a second pair of glasses that will allow you to see reality in two ways at the same time, okay. And there is no recipe to do this. You have to have the desire of doing it. But the idea is that if you could look at things with the eyes of a scientist, and with the eyes of an artist at the same time, been in this space that we’ve called the Nexus A, you will have a much richer set of possible ideas, they think in a space will increase. The downside may be that some of the ideas that will come to you will be He kind of diametrically oppose a but the ability of we say that that’s also good, because the ability of handling contradictions. I mean, if you never have to handle contradictions in your life, I think you’ll probably have a very narrow lens, you’ll see everything with one lens. And there are lots of examples in the world of single lens view, in effect. So the Nexus is the place where these modes of thinking coexist, at least in the minds of individuals. But we make the point that these this also applies to teams that could be next have teams. A nexus team, probably in order to function has to have some connective tissue there that are probably these nexus thinking people. But the team itself could be something that operates in this enriched space that we call the Nexus. Sorry, the explanation is kind of long. But that’s, that’s the that’s my view of it, maybe maybe in broadcasts a shorter one?
Bruce Mao
Well, I have a, I have a, I have a kind of purpose for the Nexus, which is that the challenges we now face don’t fit so neatly into the classical categories. They are really higher order complexity challenges. And therefore they really need the Nexus perspective, they need a way, you know, we need a way of looking at them in new ways. Because imagining that you’re going to solve these new problems with the old categories, is not really plausible. So that’s what we really saw when we did massive change. And so when Julio began talking about the nexus in the synthesis, for me, it was very natural to say, of course, that’s where we have to go. That’s, that’s, you know, that’s what we’re going to need, if we’re going to be successful in this new world.
Marco Bevolo
Yeah. Well, actually, before going to the now I will say before going to the blur, because before touching on the blur, you mentioned the Nexus team and in the book, and also in the recent interview with faster company, you speak of a renaissance thema is opposite to a renaissance man. In this book, there is a lot about Italian Renaissance. There is a lot about floorings. Yeah, Leslie and Leon Battista Alberti, I wanted to ask you, what would be the ideal Renaissance team? Your perspective and why is a renaissance man not feasible? Any longer as you as you eloquently articulate in the book, and with without doing interviews?
Julio M. Ottino
So I let Bruce handle that, but let me just give you one framing concept about there is no way now that for example, you could talk about a complete mathematician. The last one that fit that category, and we talk about him in the book was Jules Henri Poincare. A, he was the last complete mathematician, the last Universalist in the same way that there is no, it’s not possible to have a complete mathematician. In many other areas, you cannot have a complete anything. It physics is too broad to have one complete physicist. And so our expectations for what completeness is as something embodied in an individual have to be kind of scaled down a little bit. But that doesn’t mean that you cannot expand the concept to a team that has all the components.
Bruce Mao
And that’s really where the Renaissance team comes from. It was first named by Bill Buxton, who became our chief scientist in our studio. Even though I really didn’t have a job for chief scientist, he declared that he was our chief scientist. And he began showing up and helping us when we were working on massive change. And he said, you know, what you’re really doing here is a renaissance team. You can’t have a renaissance person anymore. Because the scale of the knowledge is so great. But you can’t assemble a renaissance team you could put together a group of people who together really embody that special experience of the Renaissance and who To put together bring bring the talent and the knowledge and the sensibility of of that, but you need to understand what that means and you need to understand how to be a team player, you know how to what it means to, to contribute at that level and it takes a special kind of sensibility and talent but also skill to do it and really that’s what we explore in the book try to understand you know, what does it take to work in this new way? What are the lessons we can learn and therefore, the skills we can develop? Roberto,
Filiberto Amati
do you want to talk about the blue, the blue?
Marco Bevolo
Now, we can talk about the blue. Now, we we actually I was really triggered because Filiberto and I did a study about the impact or future developments derived from the the digitalization in essence, and we started with the hypothesis that due to the digital digitalization, you don’t have leisure time and work time you have a continue, because you can see it. You can see it in your bedroom at midnight exchanging emails about a contract with another continent. Or you can be at your office and book your holidays on your mobile. So we explore these Wait 23 If I remember well, people from industry design and this was in 2017. We had Paolo Pininfarina of Pininfarina, we had people from fast moving consumer goods, pharmaceutics. And we’ve wrote a kind of white paper, then we converted this white paper into a peer reviewed paper for worthy leisure journal in 2020. We brought along some insights from the pandemics because of course, during the pandemics, the blurring of physical spaces and digital spaces became radically fast and extreme. It was just for me a coincidence to see that you also, in the next was proposed the notion of the blur, and of course, you propose it from a different angle. So I wanted to to ask you, what’s your view on the blur blurring? And what do you think these are says about the future?
Julio M. Ottino
But by the way, can I comment something before you also mentioned 23. So this, you know, the 23 pair of chromosomes that humans have? It’s remarkable that we have 23. Accidentally, we can pretend Yeah, totally.
Marco Bevolo
It was a summer I remember some interviews a way to perform in some of suits that were like completely coming, coming from a steam room at the end of the interview, because I was in Torino, when I met Olympian Farina, and it was like 38 degrees and 80% humidity. So it’s a pure coincidence that after the 23rd, I could not in Filiberto could not survive any longer. So we stopped.
Julio M. Ottino
Okay, so because we got to the end the question, if you still remember it, can you tackle that one?
Bruce Mao
Sure. I mean, for me, the the, the idea of, of boundaries and crisp lines between disciplines, is really less than less plausible, that you can see in almost everything that we’re doing, like you suggest, that we are, you know, we are putting things together in new ways, combining things hybridizing. Synthesizing. And ultimately, I think what the what the Nexus, as a project really proposes is that it’s the synthesis that is really the the kind of skill and talent of the future that we’re going to need to develop, that ultimately, we need to solve the kinds of problems that we had And if you think about, you know, the, the way that we approach the problems was that we extracted the problem like an object from its context. And then applied design to that kind of falsely singular thing. Imagining that you could kind of take it out of context. And then once we had a one to one problem solution, equation developed, we put it back into context. And of course, it produced all kinds of new problems. We solved that one, but it, it produced the ecosystem problems that we now have today. And the idea that, that the ecosystem problems are going to be solved by old category solutions, is really not plausible, you know, when, you know, when I talked to Julio about life centered design, which is really the practice that we’re kind of dedicated to and developing, his response is such a clear articulation was, you’re not going to solve climate change with human centered design. Like when you think about the, if we’re obsessed with, with the human experience, we miss the big picture, we miss the big lens. And Julio has, you know, I think his kind of metaphor of the big, you know, seeing the big picture, seeing the big lens, and really beginning to kind of synthesize at that level is for me, what, what, what that really is about, and that means blurring the bounds of blurring the categories to really create new kinds of practices. And that’s, that’s where we’re going to, that’s where I think the kind of great opportunity is. And so for me, you know, when I began to think about that, I think, Well, where are the people who already do this? You know, who are the people who naturally do it? And so we look at cinema, cinema is a practice of synthesis and blurring, that, you know, almost like nothing else. I mean, we have, literally, you know, you look at the credits for a big, big production, and it’s sometimes hundreds, even 1000s of people. And you, but you have, you have a kind of synthesis of all of that into a clear, beautiful, coherent, singular experience. And you can kind of make that the make that happen. And similarly, in architecture, that in architecture, you have, you know, hundreds of inputs to generate one coherent output. And I think that practice of synthesis is really the what, you know, I mean, for me, that’s the future of design. Yeah. Does that make sense?
Filiberto Amati
No, it makes sense. But, here comes the challenge from our perspective, well, what we observe is the also blurry if occation of industries and boundaries between industries with the competition came coming from traditionally non adjacent sectors, you know, let’s talk about an example. If you think about self driving cars in automotive, besides the fact that, you know, in the in that context, the traditional automotive players are basically seeing competition coming from all directions. There is also a component of healthcare as an automotive platform right now. travel and lodging is an automotive platform right now, where the travel industry and the hotel industry thinking of adding, you know, self driving cars as part of the experience to improve the relationship with the customers and so on. It’s all possible futures of course. So, in that context, a lot of industry players are concerned about margins and making money in how the you know, how they see potential big cakes in the future, but how they see that actually, current cakes shrinking. So how do we inspire them? How do we get them to also deal with a bigger problem and the biggest elephant in the room when they are concerned with the reshaping of the industry and enabling most Have them hard time understanding what’s going on. So how do we drive them to do the change that they need to do? In the direction we want them to go? In that sense.
Julio M. Ottino
So in the in the book, we have the picture of two motorcycles from Harley Davidson 119 12 that has one cylinder, and a leather belt. And we put the 1913, because in that year, they went to two cylinders, and a chamber. And that second picture is the one that carry Harley Davidson until maybe, five, six years ago, okay. But at some point, you have to be aware that all the experience and knowledge that you accumulated in even fine tuning the sound of because Harley Davidson was about the experience, they were selling the next year, at some point, nothing of that matters, when it clear that E bikes are coming in to the horizon. And I think even though there’s only one Harley Davidson, almost every other company has to have an example like that clear in front of their eyes, because almost everything at some point will be disruptive. Okay. And the sooner sorry.
Marco Bevolo
Now, in the book, you mentioned, the name of the I think, the inventor in business leader of a Polaroid at some point. And there used to be only one Polaroid or there used to be Polaroid. Yeah, it’s a little bit the same that technological innovation is disruptive of categories.
Julio M. Ottino
Yeah, absolutely. The case of Edwin Land this, we don’t, we didn’t put this in the book, Edwin Land, his time was more famous and Steve Jobs ever was, is that he was advising presidents and so on and so forth, in the middle of the Cold War. And the question during that time was, how to get the pictures that they used to planes were shooting over Russia. And this was declassified recently. People think that everyone learned, never wanted to go beyond what is basically chemical processes to produce film, like in Polaroid. But he was one of the few people advocating in this circle as adviser to the president, about digital technology. And this was in the middle of the Cold War. And he was advocating this privately. But he never changed that in Polaroid itself. So but that’s a clear case of transition everything that you have accumulated in knowledge on how to polish lenses, even if you are in classical photography, producing classical blots and whatever famous camera was there made in Germany, nothing of that help you when the transition went to digital. So I think no matter where you are, even in science, I think you have to be prepared that at some point, people will say, You know what, we heard enough about you going in the direction we need to go in another one. And this, the sooner you kind of get prepared for this Seesmic change of that awaits to all of us, the better you will be prepared to deal with it. Yeah. Bruce?
Bruce Mao
Yeah, I think you know, if you follow that line, you get to Kodak, and the digital camera was actually invented at Kodak. And the inventor made a demonstration. He patched together this kind of prototype. And he showed that you could make images and show them on a television. And he did some 200 presentations within the company, including to the board and the Even at the board level says, Who wants their pictures on the TV? And they invented the thing that killed them. I mean, it’s it’s really, you know, an incredible story of what you know how this kind of inevitable disruption and this kind of change of scale? Because they thought it was ugly. And it’s a really, you know, it’s a kind of classic Nexus problem. They thought it was ugly. They thought it wasn’t who would want that when they could have Kodachrome.
Julio M. Ottino
So there are two examples that come more from the science side of things. So in the past, a chemist or first rank really respected chemist was the one who could imagine a molecule imagine what properties you would have and then find a way of making the molecule. Okay. And then something happened that was completely inelegant and was what is called combinatorial. Chemistry, okay, that you have a process in which you produce in one shot 1000 variations on that molecule. And the idea is, one of them has to be good, okay. In the same way that the people who are working on artificial intelligence in the 60s and 70s, what the people wanted to find was the algebra fault. They elementary building blocks that can produce human consciousness, okay. And for the people. All of the things about machine learning is inelegant is just brute force. Is, is like, producing paintings by valuations on a computer. But the point is, you have to be prepared for these may not be elegant, but it’s inevitable. And at some point, you have to kind of act accept reality. And maybe we all win, you all will need the kind of odd back pursuing something that doesn’t go in the ministry. Okay. But the question is, how many accolades you can have, if you have some way of thinking that is completely orthogonal to the way that everybody thinks. And so those two are coming more from science, there are very few people now. Chemists like they were in 1950s. And clearly, almost everything now about machine learning and artificial intelligence is, is not like what we people imagine in 1960, and 70, in which, but people were working at that point, involves people with degrees in philosophy, for example, I don’t know where those people are, but the massive change that took place more in the direction of what those guys will have called brute force.
Filiberto Amati
So how do we and I understand the examples? And in a way, it seems to me that CEOs and leadership and companies are more scared about this Kodak slash blockbuster scenario. Then they are, though, about climate change. Because a lot of them are really pretending to do something about it. So how do we how do can the Nexus really helped making this landmark change? For companies?
Bruce Mao
I think one of the ways is the show and it’s one of the things we do in the book is, is to show the impact of what happens when you really, when you really think at the nexus. If you take the work of Apple or Pixar, or Disney, these are Nexus companies. And if you take a company like Apple and you take beauty out of it, you would be left with a reasonably good technology company that you’ve never heard of, and would have accomplished very little and really changed nothing But when you put beauty into it, the way that jobs really did, he understood. He was, you know, intuitively a Nexus person. He understood that that design was really the kind of methodology that would change things. And he synthesize that and produce the apple. And you create the most valuable country, most valuable company in the history of the world. And I think the fact that business leaders don’t see that and copy it is for me, really shocking that, you know, that you have to explain it. When it’s so obvious that that, you know, there’s a reason that they put designed in California on their products. Because where it’s manufactured is inconsequential. But the design culture in the same way that Florence produced the Renaissance, the culture of the of the design place, really produces the effect, and produces a Nexus culture, capable of changing the world. And that’s really what, that’s really what happened.
Marco Bevolo
Don’t Wayne. Sorry. So please.
Julio M. Ottino
Now one thing that we mentioned very much in passing in the book, and this is based on conversations I had with a friend who is in marketing here is when, at some moment, in the past, or now a company manages to fuse two things that normally go in separate ways, like engineering excellence, and raw emotion. Okay, but that’s what Ferrari was able to do, how they will manage these going to electric cars, God knows. But the idea that you can have two things that people in their minds intertwine. But in most cases, how to separate. There are many instances where this can happen. In some cases, you will probably hide one because you want the image. For example, I think we mentioned in the book, a company who has the most amount of data about everything, I’m probably really bad market in the Facebook, okay. Because it’s all analytical and not emotionally driven. But then there are companies that they look completely emotionally driven, like many luxury cars, the ones under Louis Vuitton, where Tennessee, they clearly have the analytical part back in the map, but they hide the analytical part because what they are selling is all the creative part. So I think if you look under the hood, you’ll find many cases in which these two things are intertwined. In some cases, visibly, like in the Ferrari case, in other cases, hiding one more part because it’s not part of who they project they are. But you need both parts. Which, by the way, is one thing that we we talk in the book, and it was in reference to what Bruce was telling us about extracting a problem. And solving it. But losing the context is something that we at least in conversations, we always say clearly, is that there is no big prize for solving correctly, what turns out to be the wrong question. And that’s a very common instance of over analytical thinking and trying to use tools to quickly because you make the problem conformed to something that you have seen before. But in doing that, you lose all the context that made the problem complex.
Bruce Mao
Really good. That’s a really good point. And, you know, we have we’ve developed what we call a product agnostic practice. In other words, we don’t start with the solution being something that we know you know, so if you ask an architect what the solution is to a problem, the solution will be a building. A product designer will say the solution is a product and the graphic designer will tell you, the solution is graphic design. Whereas if you simply say we’re product agnostic. You know, let’s look at the problem and allow the problem To synthesize the solution to produce the solution that we need, if you can keep that discipline, and that really goes back to the blur that you were talking about, we don’t we don’t start knowing that the problem that the solution to that problem is going to be a specific kind of object. We say, let’s look at the problem holistically. And especially ecologically, you know, from a complex contextual ecosystem, to try to understand what really is happening that will lead us to the solution. And it may be, you know, I mean, it may be nothing at all actually, you know, I’ve worked on projects where the answer was to do nothing. And, you know, my clients don’t know why I didn’t expect it. But when sometimes that is the right one, you know, that is the answer. But that only is that’s only allowable in a in a Nexus world, where you can actually focus really on the synthesis and not on the object.
Marco Bevolo
Well, I we you brought a lot of Italy, from from where Filiberto and I are you brought Ferrari Brunello Leschi, Flores, the Renaissance. And I would like to do something a bit unconventional to wrap up the interview. This is a book. It’s normally not advisable to show a book when you are launching a book. But this is a book I wrote a review about a couple of years ago. It’s called pasture futures and science fiction, space travel and post war out of the Americas. And basically, it’s based on a show curated by John star j montross. It’s covering South American Latin American art about the future in space in the 1960s. And it is it one page it is a 1968 poster of a show, los Luna Argentinians on the on the moon. And I wrote a book review about these, this project. And this is a 1968 collective exhibition in 1970, the Argentinian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, it was all about chemistry, biology and the future. And I made a comment that 1968 was just before the very tough 1970s in Argentina. But still, the Argentinians were radically optimistic. And they were dreaming of going conquering the moon as Argentinians. Now my question would be just a in a in a like, perhaps in a sort of elevator pitch. But how will the next will sir, embody these radical optimism to bring not only the Argentinians but all as all to a preferable future, which is not going to be the moon because in the meantime, we conquered it. But our will the next was bring us forward, from the point of view of radical optimism, which is the characteristic one of the characteristic of Bruce, Bruce is practicing work.
Julio M. Ottino
Bruce, you want to that’s your specialty? Optimation
Bruce Mao
Yeah. I think it is, it is. You know, I haven’t really thought this through but now that you’ve mentioned it, I think Nexus does demand optimism, it demands the belief that we we will be able to synthesize and bring these worlds together. So, it starts from the premise that you that we will have the capacity to do that even though the the worlds themselves and we you know, really, really kind of maps it out beautifully in the book. The words themselves are becoming more and more complex demanding and challenging and and scaling at a you know, at an exponential pace that makes that synthesis more challenging. But you know, the, the belief in the Nexus is a belief and possibility and in the human imagination,
Julio M. Ottino
and also, even though cases are singular and there is always some drawback to every case, okay. at some moments in the past even if briefly. I wouldn’t say humanity, but a few people were able to come together and produce outputs that could have been inconceivable if these people were separate. So we pick a couple of examples in there. Some of them lasted only for 14 years like the Bauhaus, we’re still kind of living with consequences of those 14 years. A other ones not so well known by, you know, these but many people would not blood Mountain College, for example. But I think they this confluence of talents, merging together in a new hole. The expectation is that they will keep occurring. And so if I’m optimistic is on they believe that though, things will happen. And we’ll be able to tackle problems that we think are impossible to solve now. But it’s just based on human record of being able to repeat the things that I my optimism is based.
Marco Bevolo
Well, thank you so much. Julio, Mario. And thank you, Bruce, of course. The next one is just out with MIT Press. There are a five online posters, that microculture digital objects that capture some of the key messages of the next one, there is a sort of newsletter with pricing with audio contributions, which is all available. I think it’s just like every book where we’re Bruce has been involved, it’s going to be a milestone and it’s going to be I remember the book with call us was the Bible of the desk of desktop revolution I on the desk of every graphic designer of the time, and it will surely carry forward the vision and mission. And Filiberto, would you like to wrap up?
Filiberto Amati
No, I just wanted to, you know, thank you, gentlemen. It’s been really a pleasure and an honor or having you with us today talking about the Nexus. Very inspiring conversation. I wish you all the best with the with the book, and keep us in mind in the future. We will love to have the opportunity to chat with you
Julio M. Ottino
again. Fantastic.
Marco Bevolo
And like next week we have we are going to have as our guest, Billy Williams and we are going to extend the discussion in the dialogue about the massive change network, the mouth documentary and some of the ideas we share today with busy Williams, just in one week from now. Thank you so much. Wow. Who your Mario Tina, and thank you and stay tuned. Thank you so much,
Bruce Mao
everyone. Thank you. Thank you
Marco Bevolo and Filiberto Amati interview on their upcoming book “Nexus” (MIT Press): Julio Mario Ottino, Guggenheim Fellow, and Co-Director, Northwestern University’s Institute on Complex Systems Bruce Mau, Co-Founder, and CEO, Massive Change Network, Chicago