Kevin Kelly on transdisciplinarity and failures

Founding Editor/Author, Wired Kevin Kelly gave the final key note at IFTF’s Tech Horizon conference in San Mateo yesterday and finished the conference perfectly by tying themes like transdisciplinarity, intentional biology, and simulations of health, energy sources and ecological systems together in a long term view of future technology.

To touch on the former theme, the scientific pursuit to understand and unlock such complexities as the math of Mother Nature, you are not only in need of interdisciplinarity but scientists who speaks more than one language of science methodology, understandings and intuition. A new group of people is required, that have the ability to navigate in fields such as math, biology and engineering all at once. New science fields like nanotech, biochemistry and biomimicry are all boundary objects for this need of transdisciplinarity among the research community if millions of years of evolution are to be decoded and reengineered.

Kevin Kelly finished the key note with some thoughts for action about wider distribution of failures, like the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, so you sort of speak can follow the evolutions of successful technologies or just dead end paths.

I think that’s an interesting point-of-view and another area where scientist can learn from artist since a painting is like 20 layers of failures and one layer of success or a mix somewhat in between the last layer of failure and the first layer of success, if paintings like the Mona Lisa and her smile are to be explained for its attraction.