"process in which they’re working is a bit like a scientific process where you have a hypothesis & you try to experiment not knowing what the outcome is going to be."

"…how can I say anything which someone will be able to see in 20 years in the form in which it was created…serious…new contemporary problem, how do we make something work in a situation where the means of production are in a maelstrom or things are politically or financially falling apart? I don’t expect bookstores…libraries…Google, Facebook, Yahoo or Twitter…Microsoft to survive 20 years, I don’t expect NATO to survive. I don’t know about the EU. This is not like a gospel of despair or anything I just really think we could do something magnificent by just rising to the scale of the actual problem."

"Experience design is the first school of design that can actually encompass literature as a wing of itself."

"[I]t would be a shame if everything was virtual or written in a way that precludes the tangibility of things."

"placekraft is an interdisciplinary research module devoted to generating and studying: tactical urbanism, speculative cartography, ephemeral/vernacular architecture, and itinerant practices."

"we attempt to invent things and create culture. It’s not just enough to invent something and see it once, you have to change the world around you, get underneath it, interfere with it somehow, because otherwise you’re just problem solving. And I wont say that design has an exclusive hold over this – you can invent things and change culture with art, music, business practices, ethnography, market research; all of these are valid too – design just happens to be the way we do it…our things should be hopeful, and not just functional…beautiful, inventive and mainstream…you could see our work as experimental, or science-fiction, or futuristic…our design is essentially a political act. We design ‘normative’ products, normative being that you design for the world as it should be. Invention is always for the world as it should be, and not for the world you are in…Design these products and you’ll move the world just slightly in that direction."

"You are likely getting useful, provocative insights from people who were never your colleagues in the past. These are people with thought-processes somewhat orthogonal to your own, who nevertheless show up repeatedly on your search engines as you perform your own work. ... I think this situation is a fact-on-the-ground for a densely-networked, digitized society. I also think the pace of this phenomenon is accelerating. I don't believe we will get a choice about it. If it's inevitable, then we should exploit the inevitability. Now, my larger suspicion here -- let's call it a hypothesis -- is that there is some grand unified theory for speculative cultural activity. In other worlds, "speculative culture" is not a crazy-quilt, it is a nexus. Every creative discipline has methods to shake up its preconceptions and think inventively. I want to catalog, compare and contrast those methods. I surmise that they have some inner unity, a consilience."

"Within four or five decades of inconsistent contact, the Library of Congress sends out a new, 21st century Alan Lomax to visit those thriving offshore subcultures and record their folk songs and oral histories."