On Saturday, November 3, a festival for the future-minded took place at London’s Bankside. WIRED Next Gen aimed to bring tomorrow’s thinking to the next generation, inspiring participants aged 13-19 to see themselves as part of a future that is being built.
With speakers from across sectors and walks of life, from the movies to science, gaming and activism, the hope of WIRED’s Next Gen event was to put power in the hands of the young.
Kicking off with a mind-boggling guide to dreaming big was Niamh Shaw, who walked participants through her circuitous route into all things space. “I’m five months old… the moon landing seemed to be something personal to me, because my dad worked for General Electric, which is an American company,” Shaw says. This early beginning to cosmic thinking saw the cogs start whirring for Shaw, now an engineer, scientist, performer and communicator, whose work presents the human story of science, creating theatre shows, public events and contributions to media with this focus. Everything amazing that has ever happened to her, she says, was never part of a big plan. “Future leaders,” she says, “as long as you know what you’re curious about – that’s the most important thing to figure out right now.”
In her final year at university, Ameenah Begum started looking into the circular economy and sustainable systems to see if there might be some way she could mitigate the world’s unending waste-creation and turn what seemed like waste into something useful. Begum created Cos Watercolours, which “upcycles” cosmetics destined for landfill into shimmery watercolour paints. Not only does it reuse what would otherwise be turned into trash – it has a cosmic shimmer! In 2008, 120 billion units of packaging were made from the cosmetics industry worldwide. “We need to start thinking of everything as quite a big issue – something small might actually be one of the contributing to the waste that we have in this planet,” Begum says.
John Underkoffler is the CEO of Oblong Industries – he is probably best known as the advisor on science of the near-future for the landmark sci-fi film Minority Report, and is the person who imagined its futuristic interfaces. “You’re all here because you’re curious. You’re curious about the world – you’re curious about technology. You’re going to invent the future, you’re going to synthesise it, you’re going to build it, you’re going to imagine it,” Underkoffler said. How to do this? The best idea, trick, and tool for getting inspiration is to go as far away from where you’re supposed to be as possible. In the design of user interfaces, which use physical principles to help us access an entirely abstract realm, the heart of invention is a leap into the unknown. Underkoffler lent his extensive experience in computer graphics and large-scale visualisation to films such as the Hulk, Taken and Iron Man.
With its aim of empowering the young, WIRED Next Gen provided a stellar array of workshops interspersed with great speakers. After a short round of demonstrations and a break, participants filtered into one of three workshops for the next half hour. Whether investigating electromagnetism with the Royal Institution, mastering the digital world via the art of coding with Lloyds Banking Group, or designing a mobile app to help solve a social problem with the Design Club, participants were certainly kept busy. After a further short interlude, they were back to choose between a crash course in how to ignite inner belief, hosted by Abracademy, receiving a guide to digital song-writing with Abbey Road Recording Studios, and learning how to become a successful YouTuber with YouTube its very self.
Next up was a proper break for lunch accompanied by some live music, before heading straight back into hands-on workshops. So that participants didn’t miss out on all the knowledge on offer, many of these workshops were on rotation throughout the day, with the afternoon sessions also filled with stunning opportunities to learn. ‘Alt, ctrl, retweet’ was a crash course in digital democracy hosted by The Politics Project; ‘Blow up the Death Star!’ taught participants how to create their own animation flipbook while Roblox and Code Kingdoms taught guests how to build their own video game. There were workshops on how to kickstart a career in tech and in how to make the internet great again, with Jess Wade of Imperial College London.
For the final part of the day, participants were back into talks, kicking off with Lizzie Daly. A regular face on CBBC, Lizzie was the resident wildlife expert on The Let’s Go Club on Cbeebies. She has also worked on National Geographic and is a presenter for BBC Earth Unplugged. What does it mean to coexist with animals in the modern world, she asks. Conflict is today prevalent across the world and we need to work to raise awareness about preserving the symbiotic balance between humans and animals. Communicating her own fascination with and care for the natural world to a younger generation has propelled Daly throughout her career, and at WIRED Next Gen she tried to impress upon her audience this sense of wonder and the need to protect our planet.
BBC presenter and film-maker James Young was a tech fanatic even before an accident six years ago that left him a double amputee. He sadly lost his arm in accident on public transport and has since been exploring the relationship between humans and technology, having had his own arm's nerves rewired so that he can operate a bionic arm – he says it's a messy work-in-process to try to integrate the organic and the inorganic worlds, and has been doing a lot of hard thinking about its potentials and horizons. “We’ve had two million years just on the opposable thumb of evolution – and hundreds of millions of years getting to where we are and building this body as it is. So do we think we can just come along and build something better than what mother nature has crafted through selective pressure and evolution? It sounds like it could be tough,” Young says.
Teenage activist Amika George lived a perfectly ordinary life when she came across an article about period poverty one morning before school as she ate her breakfast. She learnt that there were girls across the UK who had to miss school each month because they couldn't afford menstrual products – and she was furious. She founded the #FreePeriods movement online, aimed at eradicating period poverty in the UK, and found that there were hundreds if not thousands of people out there who were just as angry as her about this injustice in one of the world’s richest countries. “People started sharing it with their friends and family – I just saw this massive explosion online,” she says. In a couple of weeks it got over two thousand signatures. Her campaign helped to secure £1.5 million to help provide free period products – and she came all the way from university to talk about what she had managed to kickstart.
Finally, of course, came Fortnite. Zak Parrish is a Senior Developer at Epic Games and he helps teams realise the full potential of the Unreal toolset – the game engine behind Fortnite – and showed the Next Gen how they can use this technology to accomplish virtually any project. It was once a major challenge to get into designing games – but that has all changed, Parrish said – it's really never been easier to get into games design. “It’s never been like this before,” he said. “When I first started getting into this, it was actually very hard to get into games. You’d have to find some very expensive school, which would be way out in the middle of nowhere, that would probably require you to fly to a whole different country, and sign a lot of paperwork and pay a whole lot of money so that when you got done you’d be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. It’s not really that way anymore. You can learn this stuff right now. If you wanted to, you could probably go home and make a game tonight.”
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
