2022 Forecast

The Scandinavian Recipe for

As the world is navigating the global post-pandemic, humanity is in the midst of re-thinking life as we know it. The crisis landscape has become our new normal, and we are being forced to come up with creative solutions for numerous conflicts: the health crisis, the climate crisis, and humanitarian crisis that has followed.

In Scandinavia, we have a long tradition for human rights and values—think the Nobel Peace Prize, the welfare state and The Danish Capital Copenhagen coming out on top in the 2021 year’s ‘Monocle’s Liveable Cities Index. But how do we put our legacy to use in the current quest for a better post-pandemic tomorrow?

Spread Studio has collected 4 Covid-related drivers, golden C’eeds, that can fuel solutions for the future. Even a better one.

Words: Sidsel Solmer Eriksen

On a global scale, the one thing we can all agree on in the aftermath of the recent pandemic, is that it leaves us with no ‘normal’ to return to. Consumer behaviors are shifting in real time, digital development has accelerated with an unseen pace and left us with a new world order, where algorithms and data are the new currency, that can be traded for health care for an entire country, and cyber crimes are being used as powerful new weapons in warfare. Over the past two years, we have witnessed developments, we would never have been able to imagine just a few years back, and it leaves many of us with a feeling of despair for humanity, as global waves of alienation and fear of the future have risen to affect the global community as a whole. Everything about being human has been overturned: How we think, how we engage, how we trade and how we create for the future.

Modern age leaders, thinkers and philosophers alike agree that the pandemic has given rise to not primarily a health crisis, but a human crisis that have raised the existential question on how we live in relationship with each other and the Earth.

The word ‘crisis’ comes from the ancient Greek ‘krisis’ and ‘krino,’ meaning ‘to decide’ and ‘turning point.’ So think of any crisis as a moment in which a decision is made to take a different direction. In this perspective a crisis is also a tipping point. An opportunity to do things in a different way. A time of in-between where our efforts are best spent to re-think and re-invent societies, relationships, power balances and everything in between.

The human species has always regarded itself a the superior species due to our capacity to conceptualize and create. But the irony and the tipping point of the current crisis could be, that we as a species has become the very reason to the numerous ways our life has become unsustainable. If we want to not only survive, but also thrive in the future, we have to find new ways to sustain life for ourselves, our community and the Earth.

In Scandinavia, more specifically, Denmark, we are world famous for a specific period in history called The Danish Golden Age. During the first half of the 19th century, Denmark was host to a time of exceptional creative production that still benefits Denmark as a nation today. Think the Neoclassical style of Copenhagen, that has put the city on the top as world travel destination, the works of Hans Christian Andersen, the proponent of the modern fairytale and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Also the science scene furthered as Hans Christian Ørsted achieved fundamental progress in science, and the art scene which is most commonly associated with the term the Golden Age: Danish Paintings from 1800 to around 1850 which encompasses the work of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg and his students, as well as the sculpture of Bertel Thorvaldsen.

So what fostered this incredibly productive period in history, that left Denmark with a legacy, a golden heritage with an international reach that still benefits Denmark as a nation today? What were the golden factors for the enhanced human creation?

As one would think, the Golden Age, does not arrive from a period of golden opportunity, quite the contrary in fact. The Golden Age was born in time shortage, a time of crisis. The period followed immediately after a time where Copenhagen had suffered from fires, bombardment and national bankruptcy, leaving the country in economic and moral despair. The identity as a nation had to be restored, and under the slogan, ‘what we have lost on the outside, we have to build again on the inside’, the creators of the time were able to produce a body of work to restore the faith in humanity and their future.

In this context, we can look at the current crisis landscape as a land of opportunity to ask different questions, try new things and cultivate the golden solutions for the future. This time not to restore a nation but to restore the world as a whole. The imbalances of the global village call for global solutions, and with inspiration from the creators of the Golden Age, we can once again look inward to our own human resources in order to create new golden seeds as answers to our pressing questions.

In our annual forecast, Spread Studio has collected 4 future seeds, leading key trends, we think will be leading the way to the a golden New Age - on a global scale.

WORK & SCIENCE

The Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi argues that our current crisis is a very crisis of imagination where we have lost the ability to imagine something new and something better. Berardi calls for a re-imagination of a more inclusive ‘us’ and a future where we just don’t accept a world dominated by politicians and tech and pharma companies. Instead we should make a stop and connect to ourselves and ask ourselves, how we would like the world to be in order to use societal structures and technology with purpose and intent. We need to re-imagine living scenarios and future paradigms. Berardi argues that we need to implement the mindset of the arts into our everyday lives and business structures. We need to start by asking better questions. Just like an art piece, we have to start with the wonder and the question instead of rushing towards the thinking and technical solutions.

And it seems like he is on to something. A researcher at the University of William and Mary who has analyzed 300,000 Torrance Test scores since the '50s, has found that creativity scores began to nosedive in 1990. The Torrance Test has been used for decades to evaluate creativity has allowed researchers to track how well scores on the test line up with achievement and is actually considered a better predictor of real-world success than traditional IQ tests. The research concluded that we are in the midst of a creativity crisis. And unlike the decline in IQ scores, scientists have a pretty good guess what's causing our collective creativity to tank: Our hurried, over-scheduled lives and ever increasing amounts of (time) interacting with electronic entertainment devices.

In short, we're too busy and entertained for creativity to blossom and lacking what it demands: activities like long walks (and showers, and yoga, and gardening and fishing) that demand just enough attention to allow our minds to wander. Einstein understood this. That's why he spent hours floating on his sailboat letting his mind gestate the brilliant ideas that revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos.

Actively scheduling time to think, reflect, and experiment into your days, putting reasonable boundaries on your use of passive tech (there are obviously countless ways to use your devices to express yourself and create), varying your routine and your company, and getting out for more long walks can all help ensure you're bucking the trend and nurturing your personal creativity.

LIFE QUALITY & MENTAL HEALTH

In the US, a trending phenomena called The Great Resignation has made million of Americans quite their jobs. The term covers a movement of so-called ‘early retirement’, where people in their prime time of their workforce years have left their jobs before expected. In the UK alone, it is estimated that 1 million fewer people are in employment than before the pandemic. Two of the most concerning issues about the early retirement phenomena is that: 1: Many have not yet returned to the work environment and 2: A lot of these people are in the age of 30-45 years old.

It seems that something about the way, we think about work has changed and possibly we are standing at the threshold of a work revolution, where we no longer want to be defined by our work value, whether as a result of a protestant mindset of work ethics or a market economic rationale where the human value is being reduced to the size of their economic contribution.

More and more people are waking up to a feeling of emptiness, as they find that their work title no longer adds value or give meaning to their lives. Now it is not only a matter of finding work/life balance, but a matter of finding deeper meaning in the way we work. Collectively, we are faced with the pressing clarity of the answer to the questions: Is my work contributing to creating a better world? Or is it adding on to the list of concerns, that are root to the very problems?

Many companies and workplaces are now seeing that a sustainable approach in respect to people and planet are not only nice-to-have but need-to-have in order to attract and keep their employees. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are increasingly being implemented in workplaces that call for a global agenda on global problems.

In Sweden, the initiative Inner Development Goals (IDGs) are taking the agenda a step further. Founder Jan Artem Henriksson believes that due to the complexity of our challenges, we need to shift our attention to what is going on inside of us in order to find clairty. He argues that most politicians not are getting the leadership training and the capacity building they would need to successfully deal with their responsibilities. He believes that if we are to change our world, we have to look inward first, to build our own skills to see the change that is needed of each one of us and and then apply them for outward change. This is a change that includes individual responsibility, but also gives the power back to the individual. And when we unite these individual changes, the world will change as a result of them.

ECONOMY & EXCHANGE

As matter of fact, money is just the latest currency invention, and new times birth new inventions. Less than 250 years ago, indigenous communities in Central America like the Mayans used seeds as a medium of exchange. Why? Because they captured the most value. A seed can produce a plant that can produce food, shelter and all of our most valuable resources. If you don’t plant them, they die. This form of exchange discouraged people from keeping large stockpiles of seeds to themselves. The result is a culture and eco-system where the respect of nature and human generosity interplay and seeds that are not needed are shared with those who do need them.

The opposite appears when a system is based on something like gold. This system is based on the fact that something must be scarce in order to have value. Wars have been waged and environmental landscapes destroyed in order to accumulate this scarce product in the past with competition, hoarding and wealth concentration as a result. In recent time, we created money to replace gold and later decoupled it from gold. This so-called fiat currency is based simply on trust in the governments that issue them. When there is no trust in the issuing body, the currency loses all its value.

Something about modern times has made us return to this thought of nature as the initial value, the idea of seeds as a currency.

In 2008 as united agreement between Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland's prime ministers, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was built in an abandoned Arctic coal mine in Norway. The ‘doomsday’ vault works as a global seed bank reserve designed to preserve crops and plants in the event of global disaster. In remained untouched until 2015, where Syria had to ask for the first withdrawal in history in follow up on the civil war, which had left the country barren.

A big concern for most countries during the pandemic, has not only been the handling of the pandemic as a health crisis, but also as a government trust crisis. And if there is on thing history has shown us over and over, is that, when people lose trust in their countries, nations, government and leaders, grass-roots begin to form, rage begin to temper, and over-turnings become possible. Good and bad. Progressive and chaotic. The line between justice and injustice begin to blur and can result in civil-right movements at best and civil-war movements at worst.

The pandemic has only fueled the over-turning of our current money-system, as Fiat-money are increasingly being replaced by cryptographic currencies (cryptocurrencies), for which Bitcoin was the pioneer. Once considered a grass-root movement for the few, now is a top-of-the mind interest of tech companies such as Facebook. This has proved that algorithmically backed currencies can actually exceed the values that are attributed to government backed currencies. It means that value exchange backed by nothing more than code can be just as accepted on a global scale as those backed by politicians and central banks. 

Not all cryptocurrencies are created equal but most of them focus on democratizing the money system and re-distributing wealth. It’s the algorithms behind them that differentiate one from another. Robinhood is in a mission to give leverage technology to encourage everyone access to the financial markets, not just the wealthy. Seeds was born from the inspirations of the Mayan’s seeds of currency. The Seeds ecosystem takes advantage of both the ancient and the modern: the technology offered to us by cryptocurrencies, and knowledge learned from the flaws of fiat currencies.

The Seeds currency uses the algorithms of cryptocurrency to assign the same importance to the values and behaviours the Mayan seeds did. These algorithms place importance on collaboration, distribution of wealth and the health of the whole system by removing the element of scarcity and rewarding efforts that benefit the whole.

In the rise of the cryptocurrency, there has been a response to add value, creativity and democracy, in short: human values. In the past years we have seen a surge in crypto-collectible more commonly know as Non-fungible tokens (NFTs). An NFTs is a cryptographically rare, non-fungible digital property. Unlike cryptocurrencies, which need all tokens to be similar, each crypto-collectable token is distinct or exclusive in amount. The contrast with bitcoin and other tokens is that every NFT is distinct. Duplicates of NFTs are not possible. Crypto investors tell NFTs to develop their prices from how limited they are. They get reserves as collectors’ elements in digital wallets. Over art and sports, people have similarly found benefits for NFTs in primary estate and gaming.

HEALTH & HUMANITY

According to the Global Humanitarian 2022 report, humanitarian action will need to adapt to new and challenging realities. The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a heavy toll in developing countries, civilians continue to be the most affected by conflict and extreme poverty is rising. Climate change effects are devastating, forced displacement is at record levels and 161 million people face acute food insecurity. By 2022, 1 out of 29 people in the world will need help. This is a significant increase from the 2015 number which was 1 out of 95.

With the pandemic years, we have witnessed the gap of inequality widen. We are still waking up to the effects on both a on a global and individual scale as a sort of butterfly effect, where a change in one place of the world will effect someone in a different part of the world. Today, we are all citizens of the global village, and a return to Native wisdom teachings where the ‘I’ cannot be happy unless ‘the other’ is happy have gotten a new urgency to it, whether that ‘other’ is a human being, an animal or a piece of land.

One of the paradoxes of a crisis is that our metrics are being turned upside down. As we are getting richer, we are not necessarily getting happier. In many countries around the world, wellbeing levels have stagnated or even declined despite continued economic growth. While increases in income have brought about substantial improvements in longevity, health, and literacy, they have also been accompanied by rising inequality, persisting poverty, and worsening climate change. The Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen has covered this paradox of western progress and uncovered findings, that depression and anxiety disorders are responsible for greater wellbeing losses on both an individual and societal level than almost any other illness under consideration. The institute suggests that we change our thoughts on investment from the traditional ‘Return on Investment’ rate (ROI) to a ‘Happiness Return on Investment’ (HROI) rooted in empirical evidence of subjective wellbeing.

Connection also directly impact our health as a species. It is by design a necessity for human beings. An almost 80 year old study from Harvard University shows, that living in strong communities helps us live longer, happier lives. The study places healthy relationships side by side with factors such as the quality of our genes and physical workout for improved health - including lower blood pressure, better cholesterol levels and less pain. One of the reasons why togetherness and social relationships play a major role in our health is, that activeness such as socialising with loved ones, intimate conversations and bodily contact release the body’s ‘cosiness hormone’ oxytocin, that helps reduce stress, has anti-inflammatory effects and can strengthen the immune system. Humans are biologically wired to be with other people, and the release of oxytocin in our bodies has a calming effect on our nervous system, as it lowers blood pressure, soothes anxiety, worry and pain, and reduces the amount of stress hormones in both men and women. It even causes wounds and injuries to heal faster.

Something about the way we connect seems to be going in the wrong direction, with decreasing wellbeing and happiness as a result in spite of economic growth rates. The pressing question we need to ask ourselves increasingly before venturing out with new and creative solutions, is this: How can we produce the greatest happiness return for humankind? How can we create strong communities and think in ‘good-for-all’ solutions? The answers to these questions are entirely up to us, and they will determine the world we will live in. We might as well better begin today than tomorrow.

In Scandinavia, we can look back to our heritage and the time of the Golden Age to find inspiration on how to move forward in the current crisis landscape, that of a global pandemic, that asks us to create once again new solutions, this time not for a single country, but for the world as a whole. As we have seen before, it is not the conditions, that are needed to create a better future, but the human creativity, clarity and connection. This time calls to us all, whether we work in creative industries, with science or politics, to ‘build again on the inside’ in order  to come up with new ideas and solutions for a better world.

Today, the call is not only one of nationality to create a golden age for ourselves, it is one of humanity: Creating a golden age for humankind. Returning to the values that a better ‘we’ is a better ‘me’, a healthy earth is a healthy human species, and a stronger community is a stronger immunity.

-Sidsel Solmer Eriksen,
Founder SPREAD STUDIO

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