Inspirations & Influences: My Creative Lineage
A running archive of inspirations, influences, and others I consider to be my teachers. For my reference and a directory for others.
Buckminster Fuller
“Don’t fight forces—use them.”
“We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Themes: Regenerative Design, Global Systems Thinking, Optimism Through Innovation
Bruce Mau
“Massive change is not about the world of design—it’s about the design of the world.”
“The future is not about what we know. It’s about what we’re willing to imagine.”
“For most of human history, design has been about solving problems. But now, design is about envisioning possibilities and giving form to the future.”
Themes: Design as Social Practice, Imagination as Strategy, Scalable Transformation
Adrienne Marie Brown
“There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.”
“Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together.”
“Move at the speed of trust.”
Themes: Emergent Strategy, Fractal Systems, Pleasure as Liberation, Collective Adaptation
Neri Oxman
“The future of design is grown, not built.”
“In nature, there is no assembly line. Instead, everything grows in context.”
“We must shift from the age of the machine to the age of organism.”
“I’m not interested in solving yesterday’s problems with today’s tools. I want to design for a world that doesn’t exist yet.”
Themes: Designing with Nature, Material Ecology, Context-Aware Systems, Bio-Digital Synthesis
Stewart Brand
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”
“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Themes: Tools for Transformation, Systems Thinking, Long-Term Culture, Decentralized Knowledge
Kevin Kelly
“Protopia is a state that is better today than yesterday, even if by just a little bit.”
“The future happens very slowly… and then all at once.”
“The technium is not just bits and copper wire. It’s a living system of culture, art, institutions, and ideas.”
Themes: Protopia, Evolutionary Systems, Technology as Organism, Optimistic Futures
Robin Wall Kimmerer
“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world.”
“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved, and then acting. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us.”
“In a culture of gratitude, nothing is wasted. Everything is passed on.”
Themes: Reciprocity, Indigenous Knowledge, Ecological Gratitude, Living Systems, Relational Science
Olafur Eliasson
“I don’t want to use art to tell people what to think. I want to offer them a space to think for themselves.”
“What I’m interested in is how we co-produce reality.”
“Art is not the object, but what happens between you and the object.”
Themes: Perception, Participation, Climate Awareness, Sensory Design, Art as Civic Practice
Marshall McLuhan
“The medium is the message.”
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
“Art is whatever you can get away with.”
Themes: Media as Environment, Perception & Technology, Pattern Recognition, Cultural Operating Systems
Saul Alinsky
“Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
“Change means movement. Movement means friction.”
Themes: Grassroots Power, Tactical Organizing, Pragmatic Idealism, Strategic Disruption
Rebecca Solnit
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.”
“Inside the word ‘emergency’ is ‘emerge’; from an emergency new things come forth.”
“The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as of the grave.”
Themes: Radical Hope, Mutual Aid, Emergent Futures, Place-Based Wisdom, Feminist Historiography
“When the right questions are asked, the organization listens.”
“Extraordinary things begin to happen when we dare to trust the evolutionary purpose of a system.”
“The organization is not a machine—it’s a living system.”
Themes: Evolutionary Organizations, Living Systems Design, Purpose-Driven Work, Conscious Leadership
Tim Ferriss
“Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”
“Don’t overestimate the world and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.”
“The superheroes you have in your mind (idols, icons, titans, billionaires, etc.) are nearly all walking flaws who’ve maximized 1 or 2 strengths.”
Themes: Lifestyle Design, Tactical Experimentation, Self-Initiated Transformation, Learning Through Iteration
The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber and David Wengrow)
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
“The more we examine the evidence, the more it becomes clear: there is no single pathway that led to the modern world.”
“To shift the question from ‘What are the origins of inequality?’ to ‘How did we get stuck?’ is to open up space for a different future.”
Themes: Political Imagination, Social Design, Rethinking Civilization, Anthropology of Possibility
Tom LaPorte
“Everything we do is a rehearsal for how we want to live together.”
“Culture is not what we build—it’s how we build it.”
“Radical participation is a technology of trust.”
Themes: Civic Ritual, Radical Participation, Cultural Translation, Infrastructure as Art, Living Democracy
Terry Tempest Williams
“The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.”
“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”
“We live in a time where silence is not only a political act but a moral necessity. Silence is not silence, but a pause. A preparation to act, to speak, to cast our voice.”
Themes: Ecological Grief, Sacred Activism, Beauty as Resistance, Environmental Justice
Edward Abbey
“The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.”
“Anarchism is not chaos. It is order—voluntary order.”
“The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.”
Themes: Ecological Resistance, Desert Mysticism, Anti-Consumerism, Wildness as Freedom
Jamie Wheal
“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations—we fall to the level of our training.”
“We are meaning-making machines, and the most important question is: what game are we playing, and why?”
“A culture without peak experiences becomes a culture addicted to base pleasures.”
Themes: Peak Experience, Flow States, Myth & Meaning, Ethical Culture Design, Applied Neuroscience
Lo–TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism (Julia Watson)
“High technology is not always hi-tech. Low technology is not low in innovation.”
“Indigenous technologies are not primitive—they’re sophisticated systems developed in direct collaboration with nature.”
“Design that endures is design that listens to place.”
Themes: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Biocultural Design, Symbiotic Infrastructure, Ecological Intelligence
Invisible Countries – Joshua Keating
“Borders are often more about belief than geography.”
“The map we see is not the only map that could have been drawn.”
“In a world obsessed with order, there are always places that refuse to fit.”
Themes: Sovereignty, Statelessness, Political Imagination, Borderlands, Identity Beyond the Nation-State