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17 September 2008
Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:13:03 GMTIn the Bubble
John Thackara
Notes headed with the chapter they come from.
On closer inspection however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car manufacturers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand—but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact. 5
Lightness
Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It’s a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed silicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory—a total 630 times the mass of the final product. The “fab” of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip’s weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. 10
One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as an emission or as solid waste. 11
The pièce de résistance in the extraordinary Natural Capitalism is that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, by the average North American consumer is roughly one million pounds a year: a “million pound backpack.” 12
ELIMA, the Environmental Life Cycle information Management and Acquisition project. 13
A lot of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many eco-design tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints into design action points by measuting pressure on the environment in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered, consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred litres of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tendolf, to five megajoule-pounds of heat and twenty litres of water. 15
Buckminster Fuller I think designed a super–bathroom, of which a mist shower played it’s part. I’ve wanted one ever since. It just sounds awesome, and how hard can it be? Why aren’t they sold at Home Depot?
TNS (The Natural Step), one of many “frameworks introduced to give us a better view of the big picture.”
- Minimize the waste of matter and energy.
- Reduce the movement and distribution of goods.
- Use more people and less matter. 16
…five types of capital enable us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital. 17
It’s the accumulation of such tiny acts that weighs heavily on the planet. A relationship, or flow, or accumulation, or change, is by its nature invisible. An important new task of design is to make these behaviors and changes within systems intelligible. We need new ways to understand the morphology of systems—their dynamics, their “intelligence”: how they work, what stimulates them, how and why they change. 22
We’ve embarked on an operation compared by Ezio Manzini to “changing the engines of an aircraft while in flight.” “It may appear a difficult task,” understates Manzini, “but consider this: during two centuries of innovation, until now, we have reduced the role of labour in production by even larger proportaions. We have done it before.” 23
The Hanover Principles, prepared by William McDonough’s architecture firm. 25
Shaking off out culture’s mechanical conception of the world, the idea of controllability, and our all-round anthropocentrism will be especially difficult. Writes Theodore Roszak: “Ecology, as the study of interconnectedness, has a psychological dimension—the transition from egocentrism, to ecocentrism. Copernicus took us out of the center of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the center of the biosphere.” 26
Mentions Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium, which looks interesting but I can’t find a copy or much of anything but passing references. 26
Speed
The acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime, the Earth may lost half of its living species, species that it took tens of millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 32
the age of acceleration
The Greeks, Levine explains had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. Kairos, however, means qualitative time—the time of opportunity, chance, and mischance. If you go to bed because the clock says 10:30, you are adhering to a chronological time sustem. if you go to sleep beacuse you’re tired, you are following kairological or event time. 33
Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” 33
The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social affairs and refer to the clock as “the devil’s mill.” 35
Beethoven: “the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music.” 49
Mobility
Throughout the world […] 244 million containers are moving around, or standing in yards, or waiting to be delivered, at any one time. If all these containers were placed end to end, the line would stretch to the moon and back eight times. Their contents account for about 90 percent of all the world’s traded cargo by value. In other words, 85 percent of all the goods and materials in the world are not in factories or shops, but moving, or waiting to move—on the road, in the air, or on the sea. 55
“There is far too little information in the so-called information age”, “we feel compelled to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form”, “Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” 63
“[The human brain] comprises the equivalent of one hundred billion squids linked together. Overall the human brain is the most complicated thin in the known universe—known, that is, to man, to itself.” —Edward O. Wilson.
“Nature doesn’t commute to work.” 72
Locality
A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. 76
“Tourism—human circulation considered as consumption—is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.” Guy Debord wrote that more than forty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle. […] Cultural attractions are like genetically modified food: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem. 77
A city full of people can now be seen as a live database, full of knowledge, time, and attention—incarnated by human beings—that any of us might use. Louis Kahn talked about the city as a “place of availabilities”; with wireless networks and search technologies, the potential becomes actual. 86
Situation
Our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world. Henry Plummer, 103
Place is not given, it is made. Malcolm McCullough, 111
Convivality
The mortality rate of men with cardiovascular disease is inversely related to the level of social connectedness. 114
“When people no longer have the need or desire to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships, medicine becomes the alibi of a pathogenic society.” Illich concluded that we have thrust the bad things of life—old age, death, pain, and handicap—onto doctors so that families and society will not have to face them. 117
Learning
Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe—for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom—or “content,” if you must—are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent. 135
We might reject the narrow focus of much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems; these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. 137
Over-regimented teachers are forced to cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers and students within rigidly organized institutions. 143
Literacy
Design is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. 162
The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 171
Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. Ivan Illich, 180
How much do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by today’s imaging technologies? THese technologies are supposed to give us a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing reality itself. 183
Smartness
We would not be here had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be broken down easily. Julian Vincent, 191
Three thousand lines of code in an electric toothbrush? 195
The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-cending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors, contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics. 198
China is issuing all its citizens above the age of sixteen a smart card id? 201
Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are frighteningly inert. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto), 201
Flow
“partial solutions, continually produced” 214
“We are all designers now” 226
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26 July 2008
Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:29:15 GMTEdible Estates
Attack on the front lawn. A not–all–that–interesting book, but on an interesting trend. My family’s house is on a double lot, roughly 80 feet wide. With front and back yards there’s very likely enough area that we could grow half of the food we eat in the summer. Being in minnesota would limit our choices a bit, but we could get over it and it’s not like there isn’t a grocer 5 minutes away by bike. But we have a reasonable green lawn instead. We have a rotary clipper—human-powered—and so don’t spew carbon into the air mowing it (1 hour of mowing your lawn is the equivalent of a 150km car trip), nor do we fertilize it with chemicals. But when you step back and think about it, the industry behing lawn care is indeed an insidious one.
We do have a decent garden, though most of it’s for show. I started an herb garden in the side yard years ago, which I quickly neglected, but it’s still going. No vegetables though. I just don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to gardening, and I don’t want to mess up my mom’s domain. When I get a place of my own I plan on starting a garden, but then maybe that’s just my deferral instinct talking. Who knows.
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13 August 2006
Sun, 13 Aug 2006 15:01:00 GMT Outsourced Withinvia Kjell Olsen880 days agoFiber to rural areas, living in the boonies with a fat pipe. May be my kind of life.
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19 March 2006
Sun, 19 Mar 2006 15:27:00 GMTA Whole New Mind
Daniel H. Pink
You’re going to need one, according to Pink. With the forces of cheap labor halfway across the world, cheap domestic products available in abundance here at home, and robot computers increasingly able to do what humans used to make their livings at; you’re looking at unemployment.
Pink argues that the american workforce needs to hedge it’s bet on the right brain abilities instead of the left, which we’ve relied on to get where we are now. He cites design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning as the six Ideas most important to the new “conceptual age” worker.
Tell the truth, I hope I won’t have to work a day in my life. But this new sort of industry Pink says is coming out of the woodwork looks lots better to me than cashing people’s checks, or just sitting in front of a computer programming. I guess I’ll take what I can get.
Notes
Reading left to right exercises the left side of the brain, just as moving your right hand does. (Contralateralization). 18
Left brain is sequential, the right simultaneous. 18
Abundance has produced an ironic result: the very triumph of L-Directed thinking has placed a premium on less rational, more R-Directed sensibilities – beauty, spirituality, emotion. For businesses, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful. 33
In a study, patients recovering from surgery in adequately and naturally lit rooms required 21% less pain medication then those in traditional hospital beds. 82
Games are the most elevated form of investigation. Albert Einstien quoted on 183
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08 December 2004
Wed, 08 Dec 2004 19:53:50 GMT Forty Media - Phoenix Web Design - Web Design in 2005Kjell Olsen1492 days agoColor of the year – here I come. I love brown!
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Also somewhat recently
