Ruben, I wanted to sit down today and talk a little bit about the strategy tour as we
anticipate and plan our activities for next year and get a little bit of a sense from
you about your experience in Detroit.
The fact that Detroit is going through its own transformation and picking itself back
up seemed to me like a really great moment to visit the city and see what people are
doing to apply not only this time but ways of thinking differently for how do we build
the city.
So you're asking me this question, I have all these flashes of the moments and the places
that we visited and they are each a favorite for a different reason.
For me, for example, the one thing that we had at Kate's house was an amazing moment
of just thinking about what post-industrial society in Detroit may look like, if anything
she might be a prototype for that.
So that's a warning of the spectrum of someone who's doing something out of her house and
out of a repossessed home where she bought, under the hand, the world that Channel A is
doing to develop products in Detroit, something like a watch that hasn't been done in these
countries for so many decades was an amazing example of the end of the spectrum where you
can see cash investment of millions of dollars into putting something together that looks
really amazing.
And it's operating on a global platform now.
So that was one of the things that I think came out loud and clear in our visit to Detroit
was the range of activities and ventures at different ends of the spectrum at different
scales.
So you have Kate's farm, which we view as sort of like a micro entity or a hyper local
is a word that we've been playing with where essentially the services or the infrastructure
that she's put together is serving her immediate community, people that she knows and sees every
day.
So a step beyond just local.
And so there is that, like people talk about Detroit as being this like wild west, but
there is that in a sense.
And like if you just go out and do it, you're going to be able to do it.
Low barriers to entry.
So you don't need a lot of capital to be able to do something in Detroit.
So this idea of just rolling out your sleeves and doing something.
All they have to do is really have an idea and an act on it.
And to me was quite remarkable.
Part of what we're seeing with a lot of the innovators in Detroit is that they were taking
what could be liabilities or could be seen as weaknesses or are challenging.
They were taking challenges that the city is facing as a whole and turning, flipping
those challenges and challenges into opportunity areas.
I mean, the perfect example is Recovery Park where they're taking unemployed ex-cons and
recovering addicts and figuring out a way to provide them with jobs.
They're taking deserted land, which is it and the kind of exodus from the city and taking
that abandoned land and figuring out how to repurpose it and at the same time keep the
people who are still living there intact and not displacing them out of their homes.
So sort of combining and then the problem of access to good, healthy food, there isn't
enough of that for the people that live in Detroit, they're taking all of these problems
and combining that into their opportunity area and making that their business model.
But then you go to Detroit and you see something like Ponygrain where you're really in people's
workspaces, there's this element of social innovation, always there.
Other governments, other cities could go and actually learn how to do things differently.
There are a lot of strengths that have emerged out of a difficult situation.
Cities like Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia were amazing things that happened socially and
how an opportunity to just immerse yourself in that moment of history.
I think ultimately it will lead to you seeing every situation in a new way.
In the large cities like Bogotá and Medellín, just to name a couple, there are definitely
things that are facilitating the creation of solutions in Colombia that could have global
relevance.
One of the things that I was looking at was how much investment is coming down from Silicon
Valley into technologies that are being involved in Colombia, which to me is unforeseen.
Colombia has been experiencing amazing growth and I think particularly with startups there's
kind of similar to Detroit, there's this drive to just get stuff done, roll up your sleeves,
and for a fraction of the cost of what things can work, can cost here.
The whole country is excited about the possibility of finally achieving peace with an armed group
that's been around for over 50 years.
That is a massive challenge, both in problem framing and problem solving.
I think these are the kinds of opportunities that make you realize that if those things
can be framed and solutions can be pursued, then the kinds of things that we as designers
are dealing with on a regular basis, we can learn from those and apply it to our own work.
What you said also points to this idea of cities in Latin America, influential cities
in Latin America, operating more as a network.
All these places are not even necessarily geographically near one another.
But what about if we think about them instead as a network of cities that can influence
and leverage one another?
For us, it's really invaluable to bring a multidisciplinary group of thinkers, business
people, designers, students together to help us have the necessary deep discussions about
what does this change look like?
What does it mean?
How could it be tied to the other things, the stuff that we already have, body of knowledge
around?
How does that change our existing body of knowledge?
Where do we need to evolve?
So what was your thinking as far as coming with us on the tour?
I didn't know what to expect.
I was excited about coming to Detroit.
For me, one of my key takeaways is that the world strategy to me was like a life experience,
something that just helped me enjoy as a person and think of things in different ways.
I remind myself of the resourcefulness of people that not everything has to be driven
by big budgets or technology that at the end of the day is about the human desire to make
change and to impact change and that we all have the capacity to do those things.
