I got a deck of cards from Amplifier Art/Stanford d.school, available here. Every now and then, on a Friday, I’ll pull a card and see where it leads. Today’s card inspired me so much, I had to quit. But here’s what I wrote.

Design Thinking deck card pull

What if products were made to support superhuman abilities?

Choose a superpower. Design a tool to help someone with this power.

The superpower is to see (live, in real time) deep time.

A person with this gift/superpower could look at coal (for one thing) and see the forests of ancient trees going through time, breathing in and out with their prehistoric leaves, seeding out, germinating, going from cotyledons to saplings to trees. They would see the dinosaur bones and the dinosaur poop. They would also be able to see deep time in what is absent, since they can see deep time, they know what happens when. For example, with coal (and other fossil fuels) they can see that fungi developed at some point to break down lignin, and so therefor, we have no more fossil fuels in the pipeline, so to speak (haha). The carbon is processed rather than trapped. The limitations on this superpower are they cannot see the future, though having seen so much of the past and on such vast time scales, they would have a kind of wisdom for the future that might be pretty hard to match.

What kind of product would they need? I can think of products that exist that they might need or want. But perhaps their deep-time worldview would be such that they didn’t want anything other than what they already have. I can imagine a PERSON they would need, a complimentary super-empowered person who could tell stories of deep time in a way that the masses of non-superpowered people could understand. This other person would have such compelling storytelling (digital and otherwise) that they could break through the noise to deliver signaling stories that help or encourage or call other people into reflection and rejection of the over-culture’s dangerous stories of hyper individualism, hyper consumerism, fascism, and artificiality.

But the products, just in case the deep time seer needs/wants them: A device that helps them not get hit by a car while they’re busy seeing a few million years as they walk along the street? A logbook of sorts that can help them record the history they see? I would design both of these products with a nod to sundials, orbits, seasonal cycles. Ice taking over the land and melting/retreating. Geomagnetic reversals and excursions.  

Infinity poses a problem here, though I suppose deep time does have an end point around 14 billion years ago. However, seemingly infinite poses just as big a problem as infinity when one must, even with superpowers, live in a world of people who mostly don’t have the superpower. I’m thinking of the difficulties ents had in communicating with others in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m thinking of the idea that, if we had infinite time to do whatever we wanted (or the impression that we had all the time in the world) we might never do anything, or we might not value what we do, since we are so ingrained with the ideas of supply and demand. Infinite supply, minimal value.  

My son and his friend, almost in unison, suggested that this person would need anti-depressants, but I’m not so sure. If you could see all the mass extinctions and the way life evolved, again and again, then perhaps you would not be so sad to know that insect populations were plummeting. You would know it could come back. Then again, you might feel all the awfulness quite acutely as you imagine causing the death of entire ways of being.

Reflection questions “How could this design be adapted to help people in everyday life? What abilities do you have as a designer? What if we redefined “ability” –what strengths or perspectives could emerge?

I like the questions, and kind of anticipated them in thinking about superpowers as just the regular gifts and talents everyone has. In our world today, those with the ability to see deep time might be people from indigenous and non-capitalist cultures.

What if people thought of all their abilities as superpowers? And would they want products that enhance them? Products that complement them? Many of these questions seem to relate to some of the ideas I’ve seen about protean devices: multi- and adaptable-use devices such as computers, and especially computers equipped with well-designed generative AI. And here we see a weakness of the idea generation process encouraged by design thinking: why would you think of the end product first? Think of what you want, and then make it happen, no matter the costs? Because it could make a profit, make a difference, change the face of the earth? We have and continue to change the face of the earth. “The impact of the opposable thumb is now visible from outer space,” as Susan Murphy says.