Planning ahead, 500 years ahead 24 November, 2003
A post to the Interaction Designers list about Brian Eno’s Long Now project turned up this gem:
Eno was asked by an audience member if he could think of any examples of this kind of long-term thinking in an existing project. He told us about New College, [in Oxford], which is over 500 years old. A few decades ago, the thick oak beams that supported the ceiling were rotting and needed replacing. The headmaster asked the head gardener if they had access to good wood on the campus. The gardener replied that the college’s builders had indeed planted a grove of trees specifically for this purpose, 500 years earlier.
Are modern organisations capable of thinking even a fraction of this far ahead say 20 years? Or is it just that world today is so different and fast-changing that it’s impossible to plan that effectively?