Sweating the small stuff as we build global futures

It’s easy to get caught up in big ideas and grand notions of what’s important as we think about global futures–climate change, planetary health, complex systems, global governance, and so on. But how we imagine, design, and set about building the future is also deeply dependent on the finest details of technologies we create, and the risks as well as the opportunities that these open up. And these in turn are often rooted in a fine-grained understanding of the tangible world we inhabit. This is something I’ve been thinking about quite deeply over the past few days as I’ve followed a breaking story around the potential health risks associated with an engineered nanomaterial that’s being used in some face masks.