Had a chat with an inspiring person yesterday - a 24 year-old ‘futurist’ called Liz Cahill. She’s one of the organisers of the Live Futures 2020 Festival happening this Sunday (Nov 11) at Victoria Park in Camperdown in Sydney (www.globalyouthfutures.org)…

She was quietly inspirational - intelligent, articulate, 24 (!) and utterly optimistic. Must be hard for futurists to remain so given that they quite often have to come up with doomsday scenarios in their line of work, predicting various outcomes for the future of the planet… However an optimist she was and is and I suspect she will always remain, which I admire.

When she was leaving she gave me a new thought - something I kind of knew but had never articulated, which was that people are now more creative in their lives than ever before… We all have cameras in our phones, we can edit and record and make movies on home equipment, write blogs, build myspace and facebook home pages, communicate creatively to each other - more than ever. I knew that but it hadn’t quite consciously occurred to me until she made the point.

Maybe that’s why she hasn’t lost hope. If we all make art - and approach it that way (art with a small “a”), maybe those ‘conversations’ we have with each other will add up to something great. And beautiful. And new. And r/evolutionary.

It’s a definite possibility.