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Dear Colleagues,
For those of you who do not know it, I am passing on John Thackara's
Doors Report,
an excellent monthly newsletter. Entertaining, thoughtful, provocative
-- and sometimes
offering genuinely important information on how design affects the
world and those
of us who live in it.
Highly recommended.
Follow the links below to subscribe. It's free and it's valuable.
Yours,
Ken Friedman
--
>>> Doors Report <[log in to unmask]> 1/5/2010
10:32 PM >>>
Doors of Perception Report
January 2010 - Line Loss
by John Thackara
This free monthly newsletter brings you stories of how design can
contribute to the
resilience of communities and regions. It also announces Doors of
Perception events.
Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://www.doorsofperception.com/mailinglist/
Back issues: http://www.doorsofperception.com/mailinglist/archives.php
**** **** **** **** ****
THIS MONTH'S HIGHLIGHTS
Why Are We Here? - - - Greener on paper? - - - Telepresence With No
Illusions
- - - Designing An Associative Life - - - Transition: The Movie - - -
Read My
Lips, Not the Label - - - Hand-made Clothes Fort All? - - - Move Your
Money
- - - Visual Voltage - - - Sustainability in Bangalore - - - Social
Media In
Brazil - - - Mass Design of Health - - - World In A Shell - - - Barter
Economy Section
**** **** **** **** ****
WHY ARE WE HERE? [Good question]
In March, this email newsletter will be eight years old; its sister
Doors of
Perception blog will be ten; and the Doors website, where it all gets
archived,
will have been online for sixteen years. That's a lot of content - and
to what
end? The way we see it is that we hang out near the door of the design
tent;
look outwards; and tell people about interesting things happening
outside.
Sometimes we invite passing strangers into the tent to make new
friends. And
from time to time, we set up our own tent when we spot an interesting
new
challenge for design. People seem to find what we do valuable - if hard
to
place. And we enjoy doing it, even if the business model to pay for it
remains... emergent. But if the the stories below are true, we have to
start
doing what we do differently, and soon. All suggestions welcome.
GREENER ON PAPER? [Communicating sustainably - or not]
Are we e-writers really so green and virtuous? There's growing evidence
that
humble emails, such as this one, pack a hefty environmental footprint.
McAfee,
for example, calculate that a single spam email generates 0.3 grams of
CO2
emissions. On that basis, this newsletter has a ten kilogramme
footprint. Once
the internet's infrastructure costs are factored in, that number
probably
underestimates things by a factor of ten. Kris de Decker, in "The
monster
footprint of digital technology", has written an excellent explanation
of the
hidden costs of communications hardware; and Don Carli, who coined the
term
"media carbon", reminds us that "computers, eReaders and cell phones
don't grow
on trees; their spiraling requirement for energy is unsustainable".
Buoyed by
studies such as these, paper-using industries are fighting back. Martyn
Eustace,
for example, director of the newly-launched TwoSides initiative, states
that
"producing and reading a traditional newspaper can consume 20% less
energy than
reading news online for more than 30 minutes...print and paper products
can be
far more sustainable than the equivalent electronic version". Decker's
argument
is disingenuous. "Far more sustainable" does not mean sustainable: It
means,
"unsustainable, but less so than the other way". Greenwasherish
language games
diminish public appreciation for the many positive actions that the
paper and
fibre industries are engaged in. Framing the question as print vs.
digital is a
bad idea because the life cycles of both print and digital media have
negative
environmental impacts. Don Carli puts it well: "This is not a time for
the print
media pot to call the digital media kettle black. The fact is that
neither print
nor digital media supply chains are sustainable as currently
configured".
http://tiny.cc/LVxZO
http://www.forumforthefuture.org/greenfutures/articles/campaign_debunk_myths_print
http://tiny.cc/L7f60
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/06/embodied-energy-of-digital-technology.html#more
http://tiny.cc/vx7g7
http://www.sustainablecommunication.org/resources/articles/53-which-medium-is-more-sustainable-paper-or-digital
http://tiny.cc/0dLlS
http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_web_final2.pdf
TELEPRESENCE - WITH NO ILLUSIONS [Tools for not traveling]
So it seems as if carbon footprint of the "virtual" newsletter you are
reading
is heavier than we thought. But it's still nothing compared to the
travel
footprint of its author. For the last nine years my business model has
been:
write interesting stuff for free, and then get paid to give talks, run
workshops, and organize conversational festivals. Face-to-face is
always best,
but the carbon footprint of my travel to work has been, and remains,
excessive -
tonnes and tonnes a year from my flights and TGV journeys. For the last
three
years I've reduced the total number of trips by ten percent a year -
but that's
too slow a change. I simply have to do a lot more of my work remotely.
That's
where you can help: tell me of real remote models that work for you,
and how.
LINE LOSS [The problem with videoconferencing]
In power grid design, 'line loss' refers to the waste of electrical
energy due
to inefficiencies in the distribution or transmission system. Line loss
affects
mediated human communication, too. Despite decades of effort by
engineers and
designers, the experience of video-conferencing remains mostly awful.
So what to
do? and how? As a start, there are several events about the subject of
telepresence one could go to this year: in March, "Electrosmog: A
Festival of
Sustainable Immobility" will It will take place in Amsterdam, Riga, New
York,
Madrid, Helsinki, London, Banff, Aotearoa, and Munich. Then, in
November, the
theme of the Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial will be
Teleportation.
In parallel with these events, Caroline Nevejan is editing a special
edition of
the research journal AI and Society about the concept of Witnessed
Presence.
Nevejan poses a question: Could the performing arts do better than the
engineers
and designers? After all, artists have practiced orchestration,
dramatization
and choreography for centuries; by now they know how to set a context,
how to
spark the imagination, how to show the unsaid.
http://www.adobe.com/designcenter/thinktank/tt_thackara.html
http://electrosmogblog.wordpress.com/about/
http://www.citedudesign.com/sites/Evenements/
http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/journal/146
TRANSITION - THE MOVIE [More useful than Avatar]
One way is achieve effective eco-communication is to be James Cameron
and spend
$300 million making Avatar. Another way is to be the Transition
movement in
which hundreds of communities around the world are both stars in, and
users of,
their own film. 'In Transition' is the first detailed film about the
movement
filmed by those who are making it happen on the ground - communities
around the
world responding to peak oil and climate change with creativity,
imagination and
humour. The film is positive, solutions-focused, and fun. It has has
already been
shown in communities around the world and is now available as a special
edition
two disc DVD set, "beautifully packaged in entirely compostable
packaging".
http://transitionculture.org/in-transition/
DESIGNING AN ASSOCIATIVE LIFE [Region-wide social innovation in
France]
Government departments responsible for sustainability, or "the
environment",
are too often constrained by small budgets and modest influence. Their
very
existence allows traditional departments - "industry", "economic
affairs",
"finance" or "transport" - to carry on their ecocidal ways as normal. A
growing
number of individuals in government want to work collaboratively with
their
peers in other silos - but they are often stymied by a system that
imprisons
them. So what to do? Rather than rage against the iniquities of
politicians, a
new French organization called La 27e Region (The 27th Region) has set
out to
help regional governments change by running collaborative projects that
enable
them to experience a new approach to social innovation in practice.
Read more at:
http://tiny.cc/rnUGS
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2009/12/designing_an_as.php
READ MY LIPS, NOT (JUST) THE LABEL [Transparency and labeling]
The UK government has published a new food policy, Food 2030. Among the
most
feeble of its proposals is that companies should clearly label food
with its
country of origin - but voluntarily. As with Copenhagen, we citizens
will have
to do the work that governments cannot or will not do. Some great tools
are
becoming available: Platforms to enable citizens to communicate
directly with
the people who make or grow things. We have written here before about
ThingLink,
and about the Fair Tracing project at the Oxford Internet Institute.
More
recently, GoodGuide has been launched "to lift the marketing veil from
consumer
products and give shoppers better information about the impacts of what
they
buy". Also welcome is an open source project called SourceMap. This is
"a supply
chain publishing platform dedicated to transparency" that is dedicated
to
tracking, documenting, and mapping where all of the components for our
everyday
goods come from. What these projects have in common is a commitment to
openness,
and a degree of socially-grown trust, that today's supply chain
monopolizers
will find hard, over the medium and longer term, to compete with.
http://www.goodguide.com/
http://www.sourcemap.org/
http://www.thinglink.org/weSwitch
http://www.fairtracing.org/
HAND-MADE CLOTHES FOR ALL? [Platforms for design sovereignty]
Could countries such as Sri Lanka achieve design sovereignty by
producing
clothes for customers using communication platforms that connect maker
and
designer and customer directly? A radically dis-intermediated
relationship is
feasible technically. But, as with food, a key requirement will be
transparency
conerning costs. Read more at:
http://tiny.cc/qF3rx
http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2009/12/if_the_shoe_fit.php
MOVE YOUR MONEY [How to be a David to a Goldman]
What concrete steps could individuals take to help create a better
financial
system? A new web-based campaign responds with a simple idea: Move Your
Money.
http://moveyourmoney.info/
http://tiny.cc/6a2Tc
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/move-your-money-a-new-yea_b_406022.html
] OTHER EVENTS
VISUAL VOLTAGE [Design for energy awareness, Berlin]
Myriel Milicevic writes with news of Visual Voltage, a series of
Interactive
exhibits at Nordic Embassies in Berlin that explore how to engage
different
senses in an awareness of energy consumption. A one-and-a-half day
workshop for
professional designers will explore design strategies for raising
awareness
about energy-efficiency without imposing a gloomy feeling of guilt.
http://www.visualvoltageworkshop.de
SUSTAINABLE IN BANGALORE [Sustainability conference]
A conference in Bangalore called "Sustainability in Design: NOW!" will
focus on
opportunities for design research, education and practice in product,
service
and system design. Participants will share swap notes on ways to
promote
sustainable systems thinking in design education. The conference
concludes a
three year EU-funded programme called LeNS - Learning Network on
Sustainability
- whose partners are Politecnico di Milano; Indian Institute of
Technology
(IIT), New Delhi; King Mongkut's Institute of Technology, Bangkok;
Srishti
School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore; Tsinghua University,
Academy
of Arts & Design, Beijing; Delft University of Technology, The
Netherlands; and
the University of Art and Design (TAIK), Helsinki. 29 September to 1
October
2010. Deadline for abstract submission 31 March.
http://www.lensconference.polimi.it
SOCIAL MEDIA IN BRAZIL [Rate our friends!]
The Knight Foundation has committed to to invest at least $25 million
over five
years in the search for bold community news and social media
experiments.
The deadline for entries is now closed, but you can still comment on
and rate
the 320 entries for the 2010 challenge. There are some terrific
projects here,
but the Doors house favourite is MetaReciclagem. MetaReciclagem is an
open
network, present in all regions of Brazil, that connects together
hundreds of
people and several organizations with an interest in critical
appropriation of
technologies for social change.
http://tinyurl.com/mutgamb-knn
MASS DESIGN OF HEALTH [Coordinating multiple actors in a complex
system]
One way to redesign a health system is to allow an army of lobbyists
employed by
insurance companies to do it for you. That has been the the Obama way.
Another
approach, tested in Canada last year, is to design a process that
allows all the
different stakeholders to decide priorities together. From April to
June 2009,
close to one thousand health service providers, physicians, community
leaders
and local citizens had a chance to weigh in on health care priorities
for their
region. MASS LBP designed an innovative engagement model to capture
this diverse
range of voices. Their website describes how they did it:
http://tiny.cc/kmd5t
http://www.masslbp.com/projects_detail.php/mhlhin.html
THINKING INSIDE THE BOX [Design tourism]
"Indigenous peoples have been living harmoniously and sustainable with
the Earth
for millennia. They are not only the most affected by climate change,
but also
by its false solutions, such as agro-fuels, mega-dams, tree plantations
and
carbon offset schemes". The World in a Shell project will take a
polliniferoused
container on a journey around the globe to connect with a wide range of
peoples
and cultures. It is scheduled to visit Botswana, Greenland, Mongolia,
New
Guinea, Congo, Ecuador, Laos, the Solomon Islands, Mauritania,
Rajasthan, and
Queensland. The idea is that "it will become a metaphorical treasure
box of the
peoples, cultures, living conditions and natural surroundings of these
locations". This sounds like another example of design students putting
more
effort into engineering than empathy - but I am sure the "indigenous
people"
they turn up to meet, with their box, will be unfailingly polite and
hospitable.
http://www.worldinashell.net/
] BARTER SECTION
HELP GROW OUR RELATIONAL CAPITAL [Spread the word]
This newsletter is free, but it creates value through
cross-fertilisation.
Please share it with your friends, colleagues, clients and
collaborators.
http://tiny.cc/rCArh
Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://www.doorsofperception.com/mailinglist/
Back issues: http://www.doorsofperception.com/mailinglist/archives.php
...AND PARTICIPATE IN THE GIFT ECONOMY
John Thackara, who wrote this newsletter, gives talks, and runs project
clinics,
that help organisations embark on transformational change. He also
organises
regional-scale events that help real-world sustainability projects
cross-fertilise, and grow. If you would like to support this work,
please send
the speaker brochure below to someone in your company (or elsewhere)
who
organises events that include paid-for talks - especially remote ones.
Merci!
http://tiny.cc/YNSzN
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