The man to my right stared at me incredulously. He had the seat next to mine in the back of Cowell Theatre, and I had just asked him if he had heard of the speaker on the stage. After a while, he decided I was serious. “That’s Stefan Sagmeister. One of the world’s most famous designers.”
I was serious, and I had never heard of Sagmeister, even though I have an interest in design and, as I found out when he started to speak, we’re both from Austria. His talk, titled Finally Something Good From Stefan Sagmeister, had been organized by the Long Now Foundation. I sometimes go to their events without first checking what they’re going to be about, and I’m rarely disappointed.
Sagmeister was talking about how the positive changes in our world inspire his work. Some of the data points on wars and poverty becoming increasingly rare are lifted straight out of Steven Pinker’s 2011 book The Better Angels of our Nature. One of the most consequential questions of our time is if the recent increase in violence we’ve seen in Ukraine, Israel and other places is a temporary blip, or if the trend to a more peaceful world has reversed.
Early on, he asked the audience how many of us still thought the future was going to be better than the present. He wasn’t prepared for most of the audience, including myself, raising their hands. He must’ve gotten a very different response in other places. But this was San Francisco, a magnet for incorrigible optimists. To his credit, he quickly recovered and the remainder of Finally Something Good went smoothly.
Nehaveigur 