SUMMARY
Trillions of dollars of climate finance need nature to be machine-like. But nature is not a machine. So how shall we proceed? In this 20′ talk, I explore two questions: Can AI serve all of life, not just human life? And if so, how?
BACKGROUND TO THIS TALK
In Shanghai, at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Yongqi Lou (Vice President at … [continue …]
A cultural disconnection between the man-made world and the biosphere lies behind the grave challenges we face today. We either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as resources whose only purpose is to feed the economy. This ‘metabolic rift’ – between the living world, and the economic one – leaves us starved … [continue …]
Learning the phrase “Whatever Makes Your Dough Rise” was one of many gifts I brought back from a Fellows’ retreat last week at the Good Work Institute in the US. Here is an update on my recent texts, talks and xskool workshops.
XSKOOL WORKSHOPS 2018
Our xskools are … [continue …]
The Design Museum in London opens at its new home this week with, as its centrepiece, an exhibition called Fear and Love curated by Justin McGuirk. I contributed the following text to the book.
I was asked to write a provocation for DAMN magazine in Italy.
1 Change and innovation are no longer about finely crafted ‘visions’ of some future place and time. Positive change happens when people reconnect – with each other, and with the biosphere – in rich, real-world, contexts. Rather than ask about utopias, I challenge city leaders to answer … [continue …]
An interview with Jonny Gordon-Farleigh, the editor and publisher of STIR magazine. Current and back issues of the magazine are available in the online shop
Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Your new book, How to Thrive in … [continue …]
Photo: Michelle Cocking
In myriad projects around the world, a new economy is emerging whose core value is stewardship, not extraction. Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. These … [continue …]
Ugly Indians don’t blame their fellow citizens, or politicians, or ‘the system’: They act first, and then they talk. They make it “our” problem, not “your” problem.
Do you simply love iPhones, wind turbines, cloud computing, and electric cars? Good, because the following may be of interest:
This is the text of my talk at the OuiShare Festival in Paris today.
Did any of you wander around in a group last night – trying to agree on a place to eat?
Welcome to the sharing economy!
Sharing is … [continue …]
The Tending and Grooming Station (below) is a wondrous collection of combs, brushes and other obscure (to me) gadgets. They are used to primp and revive pre-loved sweaters and cardigans that have been disfigured by bobbles and pilling – those unattractive fuzz balls that appear when short fibers misbehave on woolen garments.
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem
The signs on the small van describe the services it supports: Taxi; Pick-up; Delivery; Assistance; Vendor; Security; Rental.
Seven functions, one vehicle. As imagined in a project in Belgium … [continue …]
In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion.
In China, ‘battery-bikes’ are outselling cars by four-to-one. Pedelec sales are soaring in Europe, too. Is this the start of system-wide phase-shift in transportation?
At a workshop in Delhi last year, during the UnBox Festival, I … [continue …]
In fashion, despite more than 400 eco labels, an incremental ‘do less harm’ approach has addressed the symptoms, but not the principal cause, of our difficulties: an economy based on perpetual growth in a finite world. A new and global ‘leave things better’ politics affirms our co-dependency with living systems and the biosphere. The Commons, and the sharing or Peer-to-Peer economy, … [continue …]
Health and wellbeing are properties of social-ecological systems - so how you design in those?
Including a physicist, a mathematician, an actuary, an ecologist, a stoic, and a Druid.
So you want to do good? Here's how to avoid the sloppy assumptions that can underly 'design for development'.
Yesterday’s G8 Dementia Summit made much of the fact that millions will now be spent in a race to identify a cure or a ‘disease-modifying therapy’ for dementia. The likely outcome will be the creation of a Dementia Industrial Complex – and the mass production of un-met expectations.A better way for nation states to spend money on dementia is in the … [continue …]
“The global economy treats nature and material resources as if they were infinite, and knowledge as if it was scarce. We have to swap those two around”. (Michel Bauwens). Audio interview below the fold.
Having enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution (*) Ecuador is now exploring how this principle, and the principle of open knowledge, might reshape its economic … [continue …]
http://www.doorsofperception.com/?attachment_id=5172
In 1996, Ivan Illich (above) agreed to speak at Doors of Perception in Amsterdam on the theme of ‘speed’. The philosopher-educator surprised us by bringing along two fellow speakers: Sebastian Trapp, a field biologist, and Matthias Rieger, a … [continue …]
Exhibits and competitions should be a means to an end, not the end itself. What would be a worthwhile end?
Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries, but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, just e50 would go to the cook … [continue …]
[Illustration from http://www.hhs.gov/open/initiatives/hdi/]
By some accounts the world’s information is doubling every two years. This impressive if unprovable fact has got many people wondering: what to do with it?
Many big brands hope that the analysis … [continue …]
(Illustration: Sameer Kulavoor Ghoda Bicycle Project)
At a workshop in Delhi a few weeks back, during the UnBox Festival, Arjun Mehta and myself posed the following question to a group of 20 … [continue …]
The UK government’s digital services platform, gov.uk, has won the Design of the Year award – and if I were running a big IT consulting firm grown fat on big government contracts, I’d be worried.
Gov.uk is a revolutionary web operation that governments around the world are beginning to notice. Twenty four UK government departments will be on the … [continue …]
Over the ages we’ve invested huge amounts of effort and energy to keep cities and nature separate. What would it mean if that were about to change?
The writer Thomas Berry described as the ecozoic the “reintegration of human endeavours into … [continue …]
The term metabolic rift describes the alienation between humans and nature that opened up with the growth of the the modern economy. Could the growth of bioregionalism, and research into ‘social-ecological systems’, be signs that the rift may be healing? And … [continue …]
Computer rendering by Christian Kerrigan.
Rachel Armstrong, who develops synthetic biology applications for the built environment, believes it could be possible to grow an artificial limestone reef underneath Venice using ‘metabolic materials’ – photosensitive protocells, engineered to be light averse. Her idea … [continue …]
[Above: for CRIT, Mumbai may look a mess – but the city enjoys ‘high transactional capacities’]
The big Audi that collected us from Istanbul airport contained nearly as many electronic control units (ECUs) as the new Airbus A380. The Audi, … [continue …]
In Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville (below) there is almost no set. Buildings in the town are represented by a series of white outlines on the floor. Dogville was a to-the-limit exercise in what von Trier calls ‘pure cinema’ – a commitment to use only real locations, and no special effects or background music, when making a film.
… [continue …]
[Photography courtesy of Marc Adamus] Here follows the talk I gave last week at the Global Design Forum in London.
“Last week I went a restored paper mill in a tiny village in the middle of Sweden. I … [continue …]
Ritual as Feedback in Bali
The unique social and ecological nature of regional watersheds was the focus of a mesmerising presentation by Stephen Lansing at last month’s poptech conference in Iceland. His key point: Bali’s subak water management system is a “coupled social-ecological system”.
Balinese farmers have been growing rice in terraces since at least the eleventh … [continue …]
For some Icelanders, in a country whose inhabitants have survived 1,100 winters without central heating, the environmental costs of aluminium smelting are worth paying if the alternative is a return to a life in grass-roofed huts.
To many, that choice … [continue …]
Last week the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (which has a new director, Martin Roth) staged a conference about Design & Risk. (The videos are online here). Its keynote speaker, the eminent sociologist Ulrich Beck, was on the … [continue …]
[ This text is a shortened version of my talk at last month’s conference in Philadelphia on Architecture & Energy; proceedings of that event will be published as a book later this year. Whilst preparing the talk, and this text, I also prepared this Reading List for Mr Monti. ]
When … [continue …]
I’d be surprised if many readers of this blog work for the fracking industry. Those charming people spend a lot on lobbying and public relations, sure – but their main aim in life is to remain obscure.
But food and drink? The branding, the packaging, the communications, the stores, the promotions, the trade shows, the hotels, the restaurants? Would I be … [continue …]
How best do you help a resilient economy emerge in a region that has one foot in ancient ways and traditions – its other in the world of global universities and nuclear power?
Left: “The Hill Farmer” by Bedwyr Williams. Right: a nuke
North West Wales has the ingredients to be one of Europe’s most … [continue …]
It’s easy for two people to look at the same information – such as this chart (above) about health costs – and perceive totally different things. What I see is an out-of-control Medical Industrial Complex that’s heading, Icarus-like, for collapse. What many designers see is a sea of opportunity … [continue …]
A splendid new book from Monacelli Press marks the coming of age of urban agriculture – at least for the design world. Carrot City: Creating Places for Urban Agriculture is a timely reflection on design and urban food systems, and on the ways that agricultural issues are once again shaping urban spaces and buildings. … [continue …]
I was emboldened, upon arriving at the Mayo Clinic ‘s Centre for Innovation last week, to learn that people with deep domain knowledge do not make the best innovators. I concluded that I was therefore well-qualified to warn one of the top academic medical centres in the world, each of whose … [continue …]
“Who needs oil when you have rain?” The ad for Landsvirkjun, Iceland’s national energy company, dominates this month’s Icelandair magazine. It sits alongside other ads that feature wild spaces, rugged outdoor clothing, and all-round natural purity. The message is not disguised: Iceland is blessed by massive amounts of clean energy.
The true picture on the … [continue …]
When I arrived at Angsbacka, the site in Sweden of last weekend’s first Future Perfect festival, an alarming array of leaflets was on offer in the foyer : ‘Shamanic De-Armouring’; ‘How To UpGreat Your Life’ or ‘Reach The Temple of your Inner Beauty’; ‘The Journey to Bliss’; ‘A Cellular Dance of Oneness’.
My first … [continue …]
If you’re in Paris before 24 July a spectacular exhibition called The Fertile City: Towards An Urban Nature is well worth a visit.
The show’s OTT poster does not over-promise. The exhibition explores nature in the city from multiple perspectives: historical, social, cultural, botanical, ecological. Two narrative sequences overlap: an “immersion in the urban-vegetal world”, and … [continue …]
[Stop Press: Polydome has been shortlisted for the 2012 Buckminster Fukller Challenge]
A few years ago urban farming in developed cities was a fringe topic that few designers or architects thought much about. There were exceptions: we tried hard [but failed] to build a prototype of Natalie Jeremijenko’s Urban Space Station at Designs of the time in 2007. But the … [continue …]
[The following is based on the author’s keynote at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards in New York on 8 June. He was also on the 2010 jury of the Challenge.]
We will not transition successfully to a restorative economy until systems thinking becomes as natural, for millions of people, as riding a bike. … [continue …]
Built in 1978 by German steel company Krupp, the giant Bagger 288 was designed for open mining trenching. It took more than five years and $100 million to design and manufacture. It can move more than 76,000 cubic meters (~2,700,000 cubic ft) of coal, rock, and earth in a day.
Why would anyone need … [continue …]
[A new book from the Dutch publisher Bis, Open Design Now, includes essays, cases and visuals on various issues of Open Design. The book contains practical guidelines for designers, design educators and policy makers to get started with Open Design. It also includes a preface, contributed by me, that is reproduced … [continue …]
Two images have preoccupied me in recent days.
The first one [below] was taken in a lounge at Paris airport. I remember being struck by the intense design effort that had been made to create a controlled and insulated environment. On the tv screen were images of the popular revolt that is unfolding, bloodily, in Yemen. But the sound was … [continue …]
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