In the fourth episode of season two of our Back to the F**kture podcast, Martin Raymond speaks with techno-optimist Bethany Koby-Hirschmann about the importance of a healthy relationship between children and technology
Technology and optimism are words we seldom find in the same sentence, never mind linked together with the same hyphen.
Yet techno-optimism, as we will discover in our latest Trend Briefing, is at last coming into its own thanks to the outlook, technical ingenuity and vision of entrepreneurs such as Bethany Koby-Hirschmann.
Some of you may know Beth as the co-founder of Tech Will Save Us, where she produced a range of sharp, smart, DIY kits and wearables that allowed kids – and their less articulate parental playmates – to learn the basics of coding. Others will know her as the founder of FAM, the family inventions studio that’s already making waves in the world of health, wellbeing and the future happiness of families.
But this isn’t health, wellbeing or happiness in the traditional sense; it is health, happiness and wellbeing in the tech sense. Or, rather, it is about recasting technology – and our children’s relationship with it – in ways that are more positive, proactive, optimistic and life-affirming.
It is also about re-assessing the role that families play in envisaging tomorrow, and how in turn they can use this optimistic understanding of technology and their relationship with it to make that future better, more inclusive and family-friendly.
To this end, she prefers to call herself the chief vision officer of FAM – ‘more iterative, focused and descriptive of the job itself’ – rather than the more familiar chief executive officer, which she, like fellow optimist and business thinker Simon Sinek, have issues with as a title. ‘I mean, what do they do? What does the job title even mean? How does it explain the value you bring to a company?’
Like Sinek, she believes it doesn’t, and so opts for a descriptor of a job that both believe should be more imaginative, inspiring, and crucially, future-facing. To build tomorrow, she tells me in another meeting we have before our on-air conversation, we have to envisage it first, not as a shiny, white, flawless, super-domed entity, or for that matter, one of toxic rains, humming neon or out-of-control shadow corporations, but by enlisting the help of the very people who will inevitably live there – parents, care-givers and, more importantly, children themselves.
