Mansfield Rising 2.0 🚀
Eight local residents are attending South By Southwest (SXSW), a world-renowned festival for tech and ideas in Austin, TX. Follow along with their daily blog posts as they research and develop new ideas to bring back to Mansfield.
While passing through the blanket of clouds into Austin airspace, I let my mind wander through multiple expectations.
Though I was born in Texas, I haven’t been here since I was five years old and had no notion of what may be below. Hills? Desert?
As we pass through the veil of cotton, I’m surprised to be greeted by a familiar sight — flat plains, farms, simple sprawl dotted with a mix of development and trees. This feels a bit like flying into Ohio.
And as we exit the airport into the comfortably humid (I expected arid) heat and begin our trek into the city, I’m greeted by more strangely familiar sights. Old houses, deeply touched by time and wear. Some have the quality of our own Victorians, others with a distinctly southwest flavor, but there is a key difference that breaks me from the familiar Ohio feeling: Many of them are businesses.
Some are homes AND businesses. Cafés, barber shops, tattoo parlors — one building even has all three under one roof. Behind and alongside the rows of houses-turned-businesses are more that remain as their original use, but many of them have incorporated the bright, playful, and artful nature that the converted houses have.
Beautiful buildings burst into the skyline in both geometric and flowing lines as we enter the city. We explore the SXSW venue, a catapulting building with ceilings that go for floors and floors. We see the rows of food trucks prepared for the massive influx of people, hungry for both information and cuisine. You can feel the energy of what is to come, and the scale of the event is formidable.
Transitioning to the nightlife section of 6th Street, we encounter venue after venue of live music and bustling bars, all nestled into historic buildings with plenty of their original character intact. Oh, and more food trucks.
The next morning I begin my (now daily) coffee pilgrimage to Proud Mary Coffee. As I cross one of the many bridges here and the sun begins to dance across the city’s impressive crop of buildings, my mind begins to fixate on bridges.
Bridges as an abstract concept — a narrow path between two distinct ways of being or time/place. As mentioned, there are a surprising amount of similarities one could draw between Texas and Ohio — not in size, but in feeling.
As I pass the converted houses once again, I attempt to cross the bridge of time to see how this thriving section came to be. I realize that it probably started with one house, and with one comes two, and before they knew it they had created a space unique to them while still paying homage to what came before.
Through the many MANY sessions at SXSW there is plenty of information to be had about future thinking, and particularly about how change can be brought to a large range of different cities.
The opening session I chose was from MIT about emerging tech trends in 2024 that would significantly affect the widest range of communities. From artists to the medical field, there is a way to utilize AI.
Some of the fears surrounding AI is that the more we use it, the more powerful it will become, taking our jobs and creative influence. Every fear was matched with an angle of hope, thankfully, and in some ways it seems as though AI may bring us back to a level of humanity that we’ve lost. More on that later.
Another session called From Rust to Tech focused specifically on the rising Silicone Heartland quality of the Midwest, and how it can capitalize on the growing trends. Much of it concerned investment, both from the outside but most importantly from the inside.
Real, lasting, change comes from entrepreneurs investing back in their communities and helping grow secondary businesses. Encouraging and supporting talent while focusing on reinvestment into the communities from where they come from is a proven recipe for success.
Then came a session called The 4 Elements of Non-Obvious Thinking, which left a significant impact and reminded me of the wandering thoughts I had about Austin’s development and bridges.
One of the speaker’s primary points was about what he called Mental Time Travel: Imagine a future scenario and then allow your imagination to fully inhabit the moment. How does it feel? What are the implications? If that future is desirable, what is the bridge to get there? What you imagine is what will be, and he urged us to imagine the non-obvious, the positive, and above all, creatively.
If we lose our ability to imagine a different reality, we doom ourselves to a calcified existence for ourselves and our communities. One of the benefits of AI is that it can very quickly rearrange concepts into something unexpected. It can surprise us. Being confronted with something we didn’t expect is a perfect way to kickstart our minds into thinking differently.
Finally, a keystone session for AI was Creativity in Flux: Art and Artificial Intelligence. When I mentioned AI returning our sense of humanity, I think it can do so through a few avenues.
To produce detailed and effective images with AI, you have to be very specific in what you describe. This means that you yourself have to imagine in detail what you want to create, which is the absolute basis for creative thinking. It also allows people who normally wouldn’t think of themselves as “creative” to think in this mindset and gain the personal growth and satisfaction one attains through creation.
AI can create things that are unusual to us, but it can also function as a mirror. Bias is one issue that developers have encountered while working with AI that is more revealing about ourselves as humans than it is about how AI functions. For example, an image generator can begin to create only white male executives even with prompt tuning and molding. An AI can only work with what data sets it is trained on, so by this logic we can see our own bias and lack of diversity in the content we produce.
To build a bridge from one place to another, from the past to the future, is not something done in one fell swoop. It takes just one person to lead the charge of change, even if it’s from their very home; once that first step has been taken, it can become a domino effect of transformation that can turn average places into incredible places.
To allow your vision and imagination to travel, and then to believe in the destinations, are the first steps in building a bridge to the future.