A note to the reader in 2005: the first version of this manuscript came from the talk-track for a Keynote Address I gave at the 4^th International Congress on “Learning in the Third Millennium” in Catamarca, Argentina, April 14, 2000, to an audience of 4,500 people. After that, I’ve added a number of other pieces that originated in my consulting work during the last few years. Be warned, this is not an academic article. I’ve added a few references here and there when I had them handy, but the various presentations on which the manuscript is based relied mostly on stories, photos, cartoons and graphics. And another important disclaimer: this was written before 9/11 and before the dot.com meltdown!

Acknowledgments: My thinking and the ideas presented here have so many different sources that I am quite frankly at a loss to acknowledge them individually. First, there are the many people who have been my informants (or “consultants”, as anthropologists would say now) have let me hang out with them, so I could observe how they construct and reconstruct their lifescapes; then there are my colleagues, especially those at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) and IRL, the now defunct Institute for Research on Learning, whose ideas have found a home in these pages; but there also are the many, many writers, thinkers, and decision makers whose thinking about lifescapes I have had access to. I thank them all. But I do want to pay a special tribute to, and offer a very special thanks to, my techie (how am I supposed to spell that?) collaborator at Xerox PARC, Andy Berlin, who taught me yet another set of interesting ways of looking at the world. Without him, this manuscript would have looked considerably different.

1. Why Lifescapes of the Future?

Our world is changing. Not only in the Silicon Valley of California where I live some of the time, but all over the globe. Even in India where cubicled systems engineers write code for global companies while their fathers sell digital watches in the street. 

Even in countries like Switzerland where people are likely to say, “Yes, of course. But not here.”

Something is happening in this world of ours. The change happens faster and more ferociously in some parts of the planet than in others, but it is happening everywhere. It may be good and it may be bad. It may lead to even more alienation and fragmentation than we are already seeing, but it also may lead to new opportunities, and new ways of leading more fulfilling lives in the 21^st century.

Our world is becoming connected in ways it never has been. A while ago I was running on a deserted beach in Costa Rica when I saw a startling sight. The tide was way out. A man was standing in the waves, water up above his knees, his head cocked to one side, left shoulder drawn up to his ear — a strange but somehow thoroughly familiar posture. “This man is making a phone call”, I thought. Sure enough, it was my friend Jean Louis who was calling Europe from the one place in this mountainous part of Costa Rica where you could get a good signal for a cell phone.

Now this little beach community has land phone lines and Jean Louis can call anywhere in the world, send faxes and email, and, incidentally, so can I when I need to communicate back to my clients from this remote place. What we are beginning to see is a communication network that spans the globe, that links individuals, institutions, and communities.

Email has connected people who had little contact before. Children in grade school all over the world are “talking” to each other. New communities are forming over the net. Interest groups of all kinds are arising. Physical neighborhoods are augmented and supplemented by virtual neighborhoods.

We talk about the computer revolution. I think the significance of what we are seeing has little to do with computation but everything with communication and connectivity. What is revolutionizing our lives is the fact that the artifacts that humans have been building since the stone age all of a sudden have become interactive, have become sentient, have acquired the possibility to help us see further, move faster, even live longer.

The pessimists among us cry big brother and control. The optimists look for ways of using these new devices and new capabilities to help us lead richer lives, be more connected to our fellow human beings, maybe even generate a rhythm in our lives that abandons the 9-to-5 regime generated by the industrial revolution in favor of a lifestyle that is more suited to what our bodies and souls need to function optimally.

I am no Pollyanna. I am well aware of the potentially dark side of our future. We all, at times, entertain black visions of isolation, of control, of people sitting in gated communities hoarding their possessions, keeping out the world – literally and figuratively. But some of us also believe that the future can be shaped, that trends can be channeled, that positive future scenarios can be created. So forgive me if I paint a mostly positive picture here. I want to look toward what we can become in the future in which we’ll spend the rest of our lives.

But back to Jean Louis. Why is he, a French Canadian, doing business from a beach in Costa Rica? Why do I run my business from a mountainside in that little country, looking down on 40 miles of surf and watching coati mundis steal my bananas while I do my email? Why am I not sitting in California’s Silicon Valley for twelve months out of the year when that is where most of my business connections are?

What we are seeing is that, like Jean Louis and myself, many people, in many parts of the world, no longer hold regular jobs. The world is not doing business as usual anymore and that is true for people like Jean Louis and myself who no longer hold regular jobs as also for the millions of knowledge workers in global companies who are linked to each other in virtual teams. Today much work gets done remotely, as telework. And work gets done by twenty-something-year olds who run multimillion-dollar projects with email and cell phones. Commerce is colonizing electronic markets, and education is becoming decentralized and distributed, while inextricably yoked to the changes occurring in society.

I am an anthropologist by training. I have worked in Europe, the United States, and a number of developing countries, tracing the influence of social and technological innovations on work practice, quality of life and organizational change. For the last 15 years or so, with my colleagues at Xerox PARC and the Institute for Research on Learning, I’ve studied how people learn at work as they take on new technologies, new organizational structures, new management ideas and incorporate them into their working lives. As applied anthropologists and systems designers, we used to go into a workplace and observe the local culture, its formal and informal aspects, what people say as well as what they do. We called those studies “workscape studies” because we came to understand that work is not simply a set of specified tasks to be carried out as instructed, but much more like an arena, a territory that needs to be traversed and explored, with well-trodden paths and unknown caves; with teams to be formed and mountains to be scaled. Like landscapes, workscapes have histories and are constantly exposed to the force of the elements, to seasonal fluctuations, and to human action. We studied how those workscapes change by spending time with people in their workplaces, as attentive observers and inquisitive participants.

But then something strange happened. The workplaces went away. Managers were not to be found in their corner offices. Employees were somewhere other than the sales pit or the team meeting room. At the same time, jobs were going away. Corporate hierarchies became flatter. Workers all of a sudden were supposed to make decisions on their own rather than following orders from above. While training departments in corporations disappeared, universities began to complain about decreasing enrollment in technical and scientific curricula, especially for advanced degrees. It seemed that in the new economy some students could find tempting jobs with a minimal amount of training. Or was it that different kinds of skills had become necessary for which conventional training was not the right preparation?

We looked at this situation and began to realize that while jobs were going away, there was plenty of work to be done. People in the US, and particularly in fast-paced Silicon Valley, worked more hours than ever before[1]. As a matter of fact, the boundaries between what is work and what is home life are blurring for many people. If you read email before your morning shower, send a fax before going to work, and get paged during your vacation for an urgent customer problem, where is the boundary? It became clear that if we wanted to understand how people learn, change, and adjust to the new technology-rich world, we would want to go beyond the evanescent workplace. This is why I talk here about “Lifescapes” and about “Living, Learning and Working in the Lifescapes of the Future”.

For the rest of our time together, I invite you to look at those arenas in our lives that in the old world used to be separated by discrete boundaries (like those between work and leisure, education and job, work life and retirement) -- arenas that under the twin pressures of rapid technological advances and fast-moving societal changes are beginning to blur and integrate in ways that alter the very essence of our lives. I propose to take a look at some of the trends that have been emerging in the first part of the 21^st century, not only in technology (which is what everybody is talking about) but also in the world at large. We will examine a series of evolutionary and societal trends that will allow us to ask probing questions such as: How do the new technologies fit into the lives of creatures that have three million years of evolution behind them? What happens when jobs go away? What kind of homelife is it when several members of a family run a business from home? In what ways does increasing life expectancy affect people’s attitude towards change and permanence, work and recreation? What does global mobility, real and virtual, mean for a world that is on the one hand tearing down political and economic borders and on the other constructing new ethnic and ideological enclaves? What does technology development have to do with the ways in which knowledge is created, managed and transferred? What new opportunities are opening up? Where is the family going? What is happening in the world of work? In the global market place? By examining the crucial currents that shape the lifescapes of the 21^st century we’ll set the stage for thinking productively about the kinds of learning and working ecologies that may arise in the current century.

What I am not proposing to do here is to make predictions of the future. The success rate of futurists is abysmal anyway and I have no intentions of joining their ranks. Remember that nobody predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nobody predicted the rise of the Internet. As Mark Twain said, predictions are difficult, especially when made about the future.

What I do believe is that we can look at incipient trends, focus on developments under our noses, pull up some of those currents that are “invisible in plain sight”, and give some thought to what they may imply for life in the 21^st century.

But before we look at the future, let’s be mindful of the past. 

2.  The Lesson from Evolution: We Are Social Animals

Let us look at what we as physical and cognitive organisms that have evolved for millions of years bring into the third millennium. Just as there are physical characteristics of molecules (like asymmetries) that allow certain kinds of attachments and not others, so our human evolution has provided structures in our physical, cognitive and affective make-up that favor certain kinds of developments and not others.

Way back in prehistory, millions of years ago, some of our prehuman ancestors must have hit upon the idea of picking up a rock to smash a nut, or a stick to dig up an edible root. How did such innovations spread within the band? How did others in the group learn to do that? They didn’t do it by going to school or reading a book of instructions. They did it by watching and then trying it themselves. And this is still one of the easiest ways for us to learn about new technologies. The most significant lesson from evolution is that we are, anciently and inescapably, imitative social animals.

Capabilities and functionalities that have a long history, that are ancient in human behavior, make some things easy for us to learn and some things hard. Some things we humans are inherently good at, such as learning by observation and imitation, recognizing complex patterns, making meaning of something by co-experiencing it, picking up meta-messages as well as object messages – these are all part of our evolutionary heritage. So is stereoscopic vision (necessary when you have to jump from tree limb to tree limb) and our ability to attend to multiple tasks in a multi-media, three-dimensional space.

So guess what is easier for creatures like us whose ancestors were good at seeing/hearing/smelling an approaching predator while grooming a troop mate: would it be sitting in a cubicle deciphering a set of black and white characters on a flickering screen or becoming aware of the suddenly suspicious silence of a toddler while cooking a meal in the kitchen, or hearing the ominous hissing of a valve on the factory floor, or picking out a pilot’s announcement in the cacophonous “sonic soup” of an airlines operations room, or recognizing an ‘FLK’ in the newborn nursery. [2]   Such highly skilled actions are based on unrecognized human capabilities that have their roots in our evolutionary history. And we constantly switch into these confirmatory sensory modes when confronted by too much abstract symbolism. What does a tank commander do when he is totally stymied by conflicting information on his screens? He flips open the hatch and looks out, importing in a glance three-dimensional sight, sound and smell to overcome the limitations of the technology at his command.

Technologies that are easy to incorporate and that support inherent human capabilities will be more successful than others. One reason for the failure of some really cool inventions is not understanding evolutionary patterns, not taking into account that the new technologies have to live with, fit into, the lives of, creatures that have three million years behind them during which their cognitive, sensory, and social abilities and predilections were shaped.

Years ago, my little daughter, in competition with her dog-owning brother, spent hours every day teaching her kitten to “sit and beg” like a dog. After many slices of bologna had disappeared from the refrigerator, she succeeded in getting the kitten to do what was in many ways counter to its nature. But it was hard. In just that way, we have to get trained by constant reinforcement (and maybe threats) to adjust ourselves to technologies that violate our evolutionary heritage. To get good at what we are not pre-adapted to is, of course, possible, but it is good to recognize that that requires long and in some ways “unnatural” training.

Are our bodies built to sit at a desk eight hours a day? Make sense of single-dimensional symbols on an flickering screen? Learn by having a series of PowerPoint slides thrown at us? In the design of new technologies and new work environments, we ignore our evolutionary heritage at our peril.

As we consider the technologies that are currently emerging as possibilities for the 21^st century, what does evolution teach us? Should we ask questions like: When do we need skin contact? What does it take to establish trust? How does one recreate a face-to-face meeting? How can we build technologies that leverage our inherent capabilities by supporting them? Can we build technologies that go beyond support and actually augment human capabilities?

3.  The Lesson from History: Technology and Society Co-evolve

In order to understand the potential impact of the new technologies that are beginning to change our lives, let’s go back for a moment and consider what happened to their predecessors. Let’s examine the role that simpler artifacts and technologies have played in human history and prehistory.

From the dawn of tool use, new technologies have changed human societies. When one of our pre-human ancestors first hit upon the idea of carrying her baby in a sling of vines to free her hands, others in the troupe watched and imitated. Individual inventions became social innovations.[3] How we make a living, how we look at the world and its possibilities, how we relate to others in our environment – all this has always been affected in fundamental ways by new tools and artifacts. At the same time, what society needs and is able to support, has also affected what kinds of tools and artifacts humans develop and actually use. We have a two-way relationship here.

3.1.  Technology is a driver of societal change

Technology is now and always has been a major driver of societal change. New technologies generate shifts in human thinking, social life styles, work practices and relationships. Hand in hand with the introduction of every new tool goes a whole web of cultural practices, attitudes, and valuations related to ideas of progress, sophistication, and consumption. Think of how television changed family life, how the typewriter changed relationships in the workplace, how cars changed dating behavior, or how nuclear weapons changed power relations in the world.

In the 19^th and 20^th centuries it was the large-scale network infrastructures -- water supply, transportation, electrical grids, and so on -- that had a decisive influence on people’s opportunities and lifestyles. Today, the digital networks represent a whole new global infrastructure -- one that will change the shapes of our communities as dramatically as railroads, highways, electric power supplies, and telephone networks did in the past.

The technologies whose birth we are witnessing now will once again change how we think of ourselves and our possibilities in this world. Imagine for the moment what will happen when our medical charts become fully automated, and think about the ways in which an automated patient file would change communication between doctor and patient, patient and family, patient and employer. Giving patients access to information about their medical history would open up entirely new possibilities for educating them (as well as their physicians); for tailoring medical treatment to a patient’s history; for shared decision-making and for medical research. In the following pages, we will look at some of the ways in which the emergent technologies of today will affect the way we work, we live, and relate to each other and, in the course of doing so, again change our ideas of what is possible.

3.2.  Society is a driver of technology change

Adoption of new technologies happens only when those technologies meet societal needs, needs that may actually be invisible because they are latent or unconscious. In order to be successful, any new artifact has to get itself a life, a social life, that allows it to insinuate itself into the routine activities of the people that use it.[4]