Time Kitchen is a studio for regenerative thinking.
We use conversation, observation, and experiments with ephemeral artifacts to imagine new forms of life.
Our clients include philanthropists, investors, data scientists, mobility providers, shirt makers, and guerilla gardeners.
We’re based in San Francisco and Berlin with global remit.
Offering
Confidential conversation. Like an antagonistic muscle for your habits of mind: probing, pushing back, encouraging fluidity and control.
More than you wanted to know. Migration. Metabolic disorders. Footwear. On matters of human behavior we provide unparalleled depth, texture, and discretion, with a network of practitioners ranging from performance makers to brain imagers and decades of experience operating in sensitive environments.
Omakase. Our signature offering. We propose readings (listenings, viewings, experiments) — that’s the omakase, “chef’s choice” part. You show up. Omakases can unfold over a day, a weekend, weeks, or months. Give us a prompt and we’ll tailor accordingly.
Recent Omakases
The Future: A Retrospective. Many of us seem no longer able to imagine a future. We seem condemned, as Phoebe Bridgers sings, to drown out the morning birds with the same three songs over and over. It is time to find the edges of our concepts of history and futurity — to ask where they came from, lay out their tacit assumptions, and fashion new ways of reasoning about what lies over the horizon.
Uncertainty and Belief. We consider how styles of reasoning from partial information have evolved over the past sixty years, drawing on the fiction of Joan Didion, Thomas Pynchon, and Jordan Peele among others. You’ll come away prepared to reason critically about habits of inference, your own and others’.
How to Listen. In this workshop — devised for a loudspeaker maker — listening offers a way into a deeper attunement to the inchoate possibilities all around. We begin with sound and continue with the other senses. Our attention is finite, but the demands on it grow by the day. Let us practice listening with intention.
Complicated People Never Do What You Tell Them To. Food, drugs, houses — anything you can design, people will find a way to misuse. Building on our work with guerilla gardeners, we consider grassroots innovation as a fundamental fact of human activity — from the 50,000-year history of using fire to create open woodland in Australia to street takeovers today.
About
Josh Berson is an anthropologist, novelist, and maker of procedural noise. He has held appointments at two Max Planck Institutes (Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the History of Science) and the Berggruen Institute and is the author, among other things, of The Human Scaffold and The Meat Question. His advisory portfolio includes SAS, the Institute for the Future, Synapse Partners, Bang & Olufsen, and A.BCH.
Alex Booth is an unfoldment practitioner and strategic advisor. She studied the aesthetics of experience and identity at Harvard. Since then she has worked with Deloitte, Twilio, Morgan Stanley, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Novartis, and a variety of tech start-ups and organizational change/executive coaching consultancies.