Our Common Future 2.0: Sustainable Thinking Acting

Our Common Futute 2.0 was a crowdsourced project to create a book with a vision on sustainability for the year 2035, led by Prof. Jan Jonker. I was editor on one of the chapters and created the illustrations for the book.

May 2011

Context

In 1987 the Brundland Report or 'Our Common Future' was published. The report identified the themes and issues related to sustainability and offered a view of the future. Almost 25 years later the project 'Our Common Future 2.0' (OCF 2.0) tries to do the same for the next generation. The goal of the project is to develop an inspiring future for society with a group of 400 people in a short amount of time.

People could sign up to participate in the project and indicate what themes they were interested in. They did not have to be specialists in any field and most participants did not know each other. For each theme a group of about 20 people started to write a 100-page report with their ideas about the future in that theme. The views in these reports are then summaried in shorter articles written for a general audience. Together these articles form the end product, a book, which will be presented at a final conference in Arnhem on May 20, 2011.

My Contribution

I was not part of the 400 initial participants, but I was one of the editors that summarized a 100-page report into an article that appeared in the final book. In addition, I created or reworked or edited the illustrations in the book. To be clear, I did not design the cover or general layout of the book, only the figures in all the articles. Some of the illustrations can be found here (without context):

Flickr album

The book was published and, briefly, a best-seller and is called 'Duurzaam Denken Doen' (Sustainability Thinking Acting). It can still be bought online in different versions: Dutch paperback, or as Dutch ebook, and finally as Endlish summary in paperback.