Seth Raphael, the tech-savvy magician and founder of X-Pollinate, speaks with frog design’s Sam Martin for their 11th issue of Design Mind. The article is titled “The Alchemist: The sufficiently advanced magic of Seth Raphael” and it’s among a number of other great articles in this issue dedicated to the presentations and conversations at the TED Global Conference in 2009.
The opening line references Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction, which also wrote about recently, that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Seth believes the converse also is true, that “any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”
The interview is short but sweet and gets right to the heart of the matter, that “magic allows someone to have complete mastery over the environment around them and the ability to do things that aren’t possible. In many ways, technology has the same goal.”
I suspected that designing a magic trick might be something like designing a service, so I was quite pleased when I saw this last bit from Seth:
“Start by imagining what you would do if you could do anything. Then work backward from the desired effect or outcome, step by step. Brainstorm with people in a completely different domain and study the minutiae of everything involved: the tiniest detail may lead to a breakthrough. And lastly, just wait. The best tricks take years to germinate, until one day they materialize, as if by magic.”