So I will tell you a little story about human-centered urban development.

Also know as “Love thy City” if we borrowed a little from Shakespeare.

I will begin with showing you a short movie to tell the situation on earth.

Life, a miracle of the universe appeared around 4 billion years ago.

And we humans, only 200 thousand years ago.

Yet we have succeeded interrupting the balance that is so essential to life.

In 50 years, in a single lifetime,

the earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity.

We know the solutions are there today.

We all have the power to change.

So what are we waiting for?

So this is from the “HOME” movie by Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

So this message, what are we waiting for, is very true.

Because the society and the earth is changing very rapidly.

We have been accelerating population, accelerating globalization, accelerating consumerism and as well as accelerating greed.

So we desperately need to change and proceed.

And I think design is one of the best tools to create this change.

And Buckminster Fuller once said,

The best way to predict the future is to design it.

Which I think is very true.

Unfortunately, when we working with city development,

this is quite often driven by the developer's drive for maximum profit.

And I think we need to rethink this.

And instead, try to think of systems and policies going beyond this

and looking for adding value to the city and its future development.

We have to rise, go up, take this helicopter perspective and trying to see the big picture.

And get a holistic perspective and count in everything that is important.

And, we have to ask questions.

And then I think we should not ask the ordinary how and what.

How what to do things?

We have to start with a much bigger question.

The why question.

I think this is extremely important because otherwise we quite often go wrong.

Why are we doing certain things?

Why is it important?

Why is it done in a certain way?

And why we have to think differently?

Also developing a city is not a project.

You bring things, people together;

Then it’s ready after a certain time.

It’s an ongoing process.

City is an epic continuation.

City grows for hundreds and thousands of years.

So it’s not a short time project.

We always have to remember this.

We have to be very dedicated, always very dedicated.

I tell you a short story about a farm just to understand this dedication we need.

Let’s see. Yep, we have to be dedicated.

There was a chicken talking to a pig.

And she said, “Pig, why don’t we throw a big party?”

“bring all our friends.”

And then pig said,

“Yeah, what a great idea! Let’s have a party. But what should we eat?”

And then the chicken answered,

“Uh, what about bacon and egg?”

“Mmm…” The pig responded,

“That’s involvement for you, but it’s a great commitment for thee.”

And I think this is the way we have to be truly committed.

Maybe we don’t have to offer a certain part of our body.

But still, there’s difference between involvement and commitment.

So I will tell you shortly 7 stepping stones to cross the stream of change,

and take you to the other side firm and dry.

Therein 7 steps.

I actually borrowed them from myself.

The book called Make Design Matter.

There are 7 of them. I’ll introduce them one by one.

The first one is about the importance of thinking transdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary

and find different ways of thought, to identify new opportunities for revolutionizing the energies.

So let’s bring about unlikely marriages.

I will tell you about this. It’s a termite.

And this represents a building in Harare, Zimbabwe.

The American artist Mick Pearce got an assignment to create a new head office for Old Mutual in Harare.

And he would like to save a lot of money for the energy bill.

So he teamed up with a termite expert.

They created this big mound.

It could be up to 3-4 meters high.

Inside it has a lot of different channels because the temperature in Harare is extreme.

It could be 50 degrees in the daytime and down to almost 0 during night time.

And the termite could only stands for 1 or 2 degrees change.

So in this stack, they have tunnels

and even open or close them with wet clay, which makes the temperature stays the same inside.

So they got together and they used this idea to create this head office for Old Mutual.

Which has no heating system, no air conditioning and it saves 90% of the energy bill.

So this kind of hybrid-thinking creates fantastic new opportunities.

No.2, we have to have a cultural approach in everything we do.

We have to transform.

Not only innovate, we have to transform and look through the lens of humanity.

And to be able to do that, we have to understand the citizen of the future.

Who they are, their dreams, we have to understand the lifestyles, and all the different subcultures in the world.

I did a few trips myself yesterday and talked to the younger generation here in Taiwan.

So I got a little clues of the future.

And meaning is paramount because we are all desperately seeking meaning in life.

So we produced arts, sculpture, literature, ballet, music, art, we even film.

While we are getting inspired, you got inspiration.

And create this emotionality and identities that most cities desperately need and seek today.

And Victor Papanek once said,

The only important thing about design is how it is relates to people.

It sounds quite obvious to all of us, but we tend to forget this quite often.

So let’s make design social.

This is from The High Line in New York.

This was a rusty relic.

This was an old railway.

And it used to stand there for 50 years without use.

And the city were to take it down a lot of times.

But this group, Friends of the High Line, came together and created the public park.

And this is one of the most popular parks of Manhattan today

and all the properties, values rising around

and it was so fantastic to walk there so next time you’re in New York, you have to go there.

No.3, act responsibly.

And this goes for when we do products, but it also goes for cities.

Because the future generations will ask new questions.

And we have to change the rules.

Not go on and do what we have done before forever,

because we’ll play a much better game if we are trying to adapt to better thinking.

An example, this is from the Western Harbour in Malmo.

It’s close to where I live.

And it is a good example because this is made in a more interesting human scale.

It’s a completely new development.

But they forced the developers to share the blocks and create a much more diverse city inside it.

And they brought in one of Europe’s best skateboard park.

and it creates an integration between different parks of Malmo.

And I think it’s a good example of future city development.

Because I don't think we should just tear away and build new

because it’s a lot of history and heritage that we get lost.

So let’s remix, reuse, redo, reform, recreate, reinvent and rechallenge instead.

I think we will learn a lot if we do that.

No.4, make it different.

Because I believe standardization is so boring.

Because when I’m coming here to Taipei,

I don’t want to going to another Louis Vuitton store.

I would like to go to the backstreet.

Somewhere here where we are, in the market.

And find the things that are so typical for this place that I cannot find in other places.

I think that’s the important thing because otherwise I don’t have to travel.

I could stay home and do everything.

So I think this super local, super regional is extremely important.

In Sweden, this is a picture from Jukkasjarvi.

It’s about the polar circle. No one would going there because it’s extremely cold.

You can see it in the picture.

But this guy came up 20 years ago with an idea.

Let’s tell a new story.

Let’s use the cold as an opportunity.

So he created the ice hotel.

People love traveling from all over the world to sleep on the reindeer beds.

So it turns out to be a fantastic success.

So elaborate cities.

There is probably something, some building capacities you can use to create the future.

5, share knowledge.

I would borrow something from the software industry.

Eric Raymond, he wrote The Cathedral & The Bazaar about the open-source movement

where the cathedral stands for the old, the controlled, the took down thinking,

and the bazaar stands for the future, the sharing, the generous,

and I think this is important for city as well because the cathedral could represent the old city

while the bazaar is the new.

And you cannot tear the cathedral down.

You cannot move it 5 meters or 100 meters.

You have to tear it down.

So we really have to rethink, to create the city of the future.

Just a little [thing] we have to remember, there’s no such thing as free lunch.

So we always have to share and always give back.

This guy, he’s called Venkatraman Ramakrishnan.

He's a winner of Nobel Prize of Chemistry a few years ago.

And his small institution at Cambridge University.

They got 12 Nobel Prizes over the last 20ish years.

In an interview, they asked him,

How come you got this much Nobel Prizes?

He said, “Because we have the best canteen in the world.”

“What do you mean?”

"Because we meet up, we share ideas. It’s a professor. It’s a student.

We have a morning tea.

We have lunch.

We have afternoon tea."

And this is a famous place for knowledge sharing.

So always share knowledge because it’s extremely important.

And the more you give, the more you will receive.

So For Taipei, where is the canteen for Taipei?

Where is the future, exchange of knowledge going to be?

No.6, be intuitive.

Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.

It’s quite logically when you read it like this. Steve Jobs quoting Wayne Gretsky.

And as well, keep an ear to the ground.

The native American Indians always think 7 generations ahead when they are going into a big development project.

We have to think about future generations because they are the one to come

and will inherit the world we are living.

7, dare to fail.

Woody Allen said,

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

And it’s true.

We have to get going.

Picasso, he made almost 100,000 paintings.

Woody Allen, 43 movies.

He said as well, every director makes a masterpiece after 10 movies so he obviously made 4.3 masterpieces.

And I think I can agree on that.

Einstein, 300 theories.

Edison, 1093 US patents.

So genius is 1% inspiration but 99% perspiration.

It’s a lot of hard work ahead.

So we can learn while we do.

Like Facebook.

Like this is the original script for Twitter.

Put it online and start to make it. Listening what’s happening, adapt and change while you go.

I would talk about one of my failures.

I was working with the music in the mid 90s.

And we had all the big artists. Bruce Springsteen, Tina Turner…

And one day we got an envelope from a new US artist.

I think it was 1984.

I was the strongest person in the office so I was asked,

Should we do this promotional free concert with this artists?

Listening, I looked up to the images.

She was pretty, a little bling jewelry, a little jewelry.

And I was thinking, no, she’ll never have a good career.

So this is the artist.

[music: Like a virgin. Touched for the very first time...]

So yes, I turn Madonna down.

We have to fail sometimes and be able to come back.

So I’m here in Taiwan.

So probably it’s something right in the end.

So time is running out.

Why? Why do we do certain things?

And how do we make a success?