Why I wrote
this book.

(Visions for a better world

The Future in Stories)

"As inventors we’re obliged to dream, to be unconstrained in our quest for progress. Always to be pushing at the barriers."

-- Clive Sinclair, in the TV movie "Micro Men"

It started in 1980. I was a shy and introverted 13-year-old boy who had just entered secondary school at the Athenaeum Adolphe Max. My new school was one of three lucky athenaeums chosen for a pilot e-learning programme. One day the Principal, Jean Berger, announced the installation of Control Data's PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) terminals in a dedicated room. As I had managed to avoid the Dutch language classes, I started to spend all those free hours tinkering with this system, from terminals connected to the world by rudimentary modems, to a protocol that wasn’t yet the TCP/IP of the Internet we know today. With their tactile screens, the PLATO terminals were many years ahead of their time– thanks to tiny wires forming a one-centimetre grid. They displayed vectors instead of pixels, and even though they were a bit slow to refresh, they were still very accurate. A few years later, in 1982, the Vectrex game console was also using this technology.

Discovering incredible potential

My first hack was a little programme in TUTOR that mimicked the first screen, where users entered their login and password to start the terminal. When I was leaving the room, I would make sure to display a fake screen with the mention "PRESS ‘NEXT’ TO BEGIN" on each of the four terminals. The next day, I would collect the passwords of everyone that had used the terminals in the interim and I would write them down in a notebook. No one noticed anything. They were all connecting over and over and soon enough, I started to collect teachers’ passwords that allowed them to create accounts for students. One day, I even collected the system engineer’s password, and then I could start playing network games that were blocked at school. I played Moria, an adventure game in an elementary, 3D labyrinth, and Dogfight, a flight combat simulator, also in 3D, with images refreshed every second, as opposed to 60 frames per second today. Hundreds of us were playing simultaneously across Europe and the USA.

To me, it was far more thrilling than comic books, and the system became my passion. During Dutch classes, during breaks, after classes before the caretaker kicked me out, you could always find me there. Once, I even managed to spend a whole night playing with people in the USA while my father was away.

Most of the other students weren’t interested in the system. The experience was very basic, but my imagination was running wild. I anticipated 3D images as realistic as the ones I saw during the CGI sessions at the Cartoon Festival. I imagined a much faster network with thousands of colours. I felt that there was the potential to change the world.

Love at first sight

In 1982, during a trip to London organised by my Protestant Religion teacher, I spent all my pocket money for food during the trip to buy a Sinclair ZX81. Although I was starving, I was so happy to finally have my own computer. As soon as I got back, I connected to an old TV set in the attic and started to leaf through the manual which was dedicated to BASIC programming. After devouring it from cover to cover, I fell into coding. It was love at first sight. I spent my nights coding Breakout or Pong, copying pages from magazines, until my father cut the fuses on my floor to force me to go to sleep. The programme would erase itself because I had no back-up system. The challenge was to get a result before he cut the fuse. Even in the dark, I kept reading pages of code by candlelight. Already not very talkative, at this time I almost stopped talking to other human beings. During class, instead of listening, I was writing lines of code in my notebook. At night I would test them.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' "

-- Isaac Asimov

Of course, I then bought a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and started to work on the Z80 assembler. After trying to reimplement the Moria game (which was challenging with only 48K of memory), I devoted myself to coding a Power 4, whose main quality was the multi-coloured interface and sound effects. The intelligence of the software was so rudimentary that it was impossible to lose against it. But I understood that the user interface wowed players and could be used as an illusion to hide the flaws of a rather simple programme. I also coded a system that scrolled messages across the TV screen, using large pixels with basic typography. My plan was to sell them to local grocers for advertising purposes. But the unreliability of the tools for storing the code (audio cassettes) nipped this project in the bud.

I then devoured a book about the popularisation of computer languages, published in French by Eyrolles. I discovered Fortran, Pascal, Prolog and LISP. I did an internship in an association that was recovering old mainframes programmed in Fortran. I also developed a management system for the school’s library on a computer running CP/M. Then I got my first PC assembled at Infoboard, with my first database management tools – Dbase, Foxpro – and I sold my first software (an armory management system). I played a lot with the Prolog language because I was convinced that one day it would be possible to teach computers to simulate human reasoning.

With great power comes great responsibility."

- the Peter Parker principle, in the Spider-Man comic books written by Stan Lee.

I understood that computers gave humans superpowers and that I could use them to compensate for my weaknesses. I also understood that this revolution would profoundly change the world. I was no longer living in the real world or in the present, I was living in an imaginary universe modelled on a reality, where wonderful things were possible. I could literally see the potential of every tool, even if its performance was quite poor in real life.

The fruit of knowledge

In 1989 my mother, who ran a word processing office, bought a Macintosh SE/30 which I promptly monopolised. I fell in love with its windows, its menus, and the mouse which made the software intuitive. I used it to make magazines with SuperPaint, which I printed with an ImageWriter II, then photocopied. I had replaced the print cartridge in my ImageWriter with an optical reading head – a mini scanner that allowed me to digitise photos or drawings in low resolution. To get good results, I first enlarged the drawing in the photocopier, scanned it, then reduced the scanned image in SuperPaint. This gave me incredible outcomes at the time. When I wanted more professional results, I would go to our Apple dealer and print my work on a LaserWriter, which I thought would cost more than I could ever earn in a lifetime.

The shopkeeper was often impressed by my tinkering. One day in September, when I had just graduated – late – from high school, he offered me a job. The mission was to help a company that had just bought a brand new, beautiful Macintosh IIfx with 256 colour screens and Aldus PageMaker – for a few days. A total dream for me. I immediately accepted, and that's how I started a career as a graphic designer at Paparazzi, a below-the-line communications agency, where I worked for 18 months. I very quickly proved to be indispensable and converted the whole agency to Mac. While working at the agency, I had a short spell studying Typography and Graphic Design at La Cambre, a Brussels school of visual arts. Thereafter I moved on to computerising a photoengraving company with Scitex systems, which I connected to an Apple 'Tops' network to reduce costs and increase possibilities with the first versions of Photoshop. I learned image processing, engraving, offset – and how to face sleepless nights.

One day, as I was stopping by the Paparazzi agency to collect payment on a late bill, the head of the studio, Catherine Decarpentrie, offered me a job to create our little prepress office. I accepted, and that same night I chose its name: Ex Machina. After a period in a shared office, we established our first private office in a garage in Forest, a commune of Brussels. Thus began an adventure that would require a whole book. It was a wonderful time - there were less than 20 of us in a huge room, and I knew exactly what everyone was doing. The first 10 years were crazy; we did pre-press, CD-ROMS, interactive terminals, then the first websites, and basic video editing. I was living on-site, next to my servers that I babysat at night. I was working non-stop, and I loved it. My partner literally had to force me to go on holiday.

From Ex Machina to Emakina

Over time, our cutting-edge technological innovation attracted prestigious clients– Belgacom, Coca-Cola, Electrabel, Apple, Swatch, to name but a few., and proposals to buy out our little agency came pouring in. But I was not ready to give up my independence and freedom. In 2001, a group of entrepreneurs who had founded an e-business agency proposed that we join forces to found Emakina. This became a reality 20 years ago on April 1st, 2001. Since that day, we have never stopped growing and in 2006 we went public. The confidence of the market gave us the means to undertake an international adventure, first in Europe, then in Asia, the USA and Africa. We are now present in 20 countries, on four continents.

I have always tried to use technological innovations in a creative way to generate value for clients. When I founded Emakina, my ambition was to exploit technology in the pursuit of new, creative applications for them. I loved to throw "world firsts" out into the middle of the office shelf. The world is a big place with many people brighter than me, so I was unlikely to invent anything that didn't already exist somewhere, and it's hard to outdo what already exists. But by exploiting the latest technological innovations in a very creative and original way, with clear objectives, strategy and a good plan, it’s possible to create unique new services, applications or content that create value for a customer, ex nihilo.

"We believe in progress, scientific, rational. And we believe that it must be at the service of humanity and that man must never be at the service of technological progress that has escaped him."

-- Emmanuel Macron during his 2021 speech about “Plan France 2030”

Emakina believes in progress through putting strategy, technology and creativity at the service of users. This has been Emakina's corporate culture since day one. It’s this culture that underpins everything we do – our investments, our recruitment of talent, and our discourse within the market. Emakina is The User Agency. If our projects are innovative and creative, they are adopted by users, and that makes our clients successful. If our clients are satisfied, they continue their partnership with us. It's a virtuous circle.

Applied science fiction

"We need dreamers and idealists, people who have an incredible and difficult vision of how the future fits together, to make things happen.”

-- Michael Dell about Steve Jobs.

To stay ahead of the curve, we must look at users; we must anticipate their needs and wants to be ready for our clients. We must constantly imagine a positive future to build the path that leads to it. There are several approaches to this. Futurists develop scenarios based on the innovations of the present. Unfortunately, the world is in crisis, and basing ourselves on the present leads to rather catastrophic scenarios. We chose to start with a user experience in the future in the form of a fiction. Then we came back to the present, to its scientific publications, its innovations, its trends – in the form of an essay. We found our North Star and then we built the path to go in its direction. It's a new genre that combines fiction and essay. I’ve called it "Applied Science Fiction".

Ex Machina was founded 30 years ago. So naturally, we asked ourselves where we would be in 30 years. This book explores what might happen between 2021 and 2051, in 30 articles devoted to 30 areas. Each article begins with a short fiction. In our agency language: a User Experience consisting of a situation lived by one imaginary character (or more). Then we share our vision of a possible future. In our language, we start with insights to establish our foresight. Finally, we look at the technological trends, and the recent innovations that make these stories more or less plausible. You can find full online references on the websites mentioned on the last page.

Three approaches to the future

Three Emakina teams have been working on this project, each with a specific area of expertise.

Blue articles: Our content specialists have an investigative journalistic approach. They investigate the state of the art, the latest technological trends and scientific publications to come up with their stories. At the helm are Manon Dubreuil, Paula Fitzhenry, Jean-Christophe Detrain and Cédric Godart.

Green articles: Our User Experience consultants are all part of the DXD (Digital eXperience Design) team at Emakina.BE. Their stories are intimately linked to their understanding of future user needs. They take into account the sociological evolution of society, as well as the impact of technology to elaborate their scenario. The tandem consists of Content Designer Sarah Claeys, and UX researcher Iva Filipovic. Another DXD team-mate, Design Strategist Vicky Demesmaker, helped realise the Fighting Crime article with her background and knowledge of Criminology.

Orange articles: Our visionaries start from their imaginations, fed by their insatiable curiosity towards all sorts of subjects, and a technological intuition to discover improbable but often possible futures. This is the spitting image of Brice Le Blévennec and his talented sparring partner, Johannie van As.

From Science to Fiction

The articles are ordered from the most probable to the craziest. Each article is placed on a scale from Science to Fiction.

Science: The first articles are fairly close to the state of science and, barring accidents, their advent is highly probable.

Innovation: The following articles anticipate innovations that are fairly logical and, with the current acceleration in the pace of innovation, are fairly likely.

Disruption: At the heart of the book, these articles explore possibilities that depend on radical innovations that are still at research stage.

Vision: These articles are predictions, disconnected from the feasibility of available technologies, but human inventiveness has no limits other than those of physics.

Fiction: The latest articles take the concept to its extreme. We will imagine the wildest possibilities in a world where today's physical barriers have been broken by scientific discoveries yet to come.

Brice Le Blévennec – Founder and CEO of Emakina Group