Facing the Grand Challenges of Our Time

”We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

At the heart of technology development lays processes of problem solving. By creating new technologies, and by continuously optimizing existing ones, research and development can provide viable solutions to a very diverse set of problems. The usefulness and success of this approach cannot be underestimated.

There are, however, things in life that do not qualify as a ‘problem’ to be solved. A question such as “what is a good life?” is not a problem we solve in our everyday life, but an issue we continuously reflect upon and, importantly, also change our view upon as our lives unfold. And for expressing some aspects of life, poetry is as precise as biochemistry.

Not only personal issues have this character, many societal challenges do too. Consider the question ”How to build a good house to live in” as an example. In the 1960’s this issue was central to the development of welfare states such as Sweden as to cope with increasing urbanization and a need to improve living conditions. Treating this as a technical ‘problem’, the obvious way to go about ‘solving’ it was then to use the building technologies of the time in an efficient and rational way to create a solution in the form of massive housing projects.

However, this is not a technical problem that can be solved: social, cultural and economical aspects reaching far beyond the scope of building technology made many of these projects socially problematic to say the least. The problem is not just that people need a place to sleep or wash, but that we need a place to live. As a consequence, some of these projects became part of new problems that we are still struggling to address.

For similar reasons, present grand challenges such as how to achieve a more sustainable development must not be reduced to a question of improved technology – it is clear that if we do not also change the way we live, we will not be able to achieve this necessary change. The same holds for issues such as how to actually live with all the technology that allow us to connect everything and everyone. To address issues such as these in the same technological and seemingly rational manner as the 1960’s housing problem is very likely to yield a similar result: technically functional but culturally dysfunctional projects far from the usefulness that we think we will achieve.

To address issues such as these, we need a different philosophy as our starting point. We need to realize that there are important issues that are not problems for us to solve, but complex issues we need to understand. What the Interactive Institute aim to provide is not just solutions,. The products, systems, and services we create are presented not as solutions to problems, but as instruments for initiating change – some things we might create just to illustrate a possibility we need to see in order to shift our perspective, stage a discussion or see a new way forward. This is a shift from developing technology to solve given problems, to developing the processes necessary for turning grand challenges into new areas of research and development. At the Interactive Institute, we believe that this approach will be instrumental when facing the grand challenges of our time, and we will continue to create new areas that cut across disciplines and agendas.