We were delighted to take notice of another project which shares our passion for positive, optimistic futures! Our friend and much admired fellow design fiction future-storyteller Anab ‘Superflux‘ Jain was one of eight people (others included a biotechnologist, a policy advisor, a permaculturalist, an educator, a retired civil servant, an urban designer and an architect ) involved in a unique project which ran from June 1st 2009 to October 11th 2009 to imagine ‘optimistic futures’. Funded by the Arts Council England and Watermans Gallery, the Power of 8 was part of the London Design Festival 2009.  The magnificent 8 welcome you to Acres Green …

“Rolling orchards stretched beyond us as we wandered through the edible gardens of Acres Green. Spots of colour peppered the greenery and branches hung low with the weight of ripening produce. As we looked closer we saw that each tree was actually growing different varieties of fruit. What we originally understood as a tangle of different trunks was actually an intricate technological graft. On parting the leaves we found strange flesh-like prosthesis that seemed to bind limbs from different species together. We realised that to maximise harvests the communities of Acres Green were experimenting with augmented orchards and designing strange new natures.”

Check out the Power of 8 website to feed on more, nifty futurefood incl. pan-city feral cidre businesses, Beamer Signum Apis Melifera aka beamer bees, living hills, flocking clouds, etc. Well done, 8!

Image courtesy of The Power of 8

As car manufacturers shift away from oil and towards electricity to power our future vehicles, a new race is on. The target this time: lithium, basis for the lithium-ion batteries to be found in everything from electric vehicles, to mobile phones, cellphones, laptops, anti-depressives etc.  The place: Chile (for now), Bolivia (next) … The salt lakes near Uyuni in Bolivia are believed to contain an estimated 28 millions tons of lithium, or 90% of the world’s reserve according to experts. The car industry currently runs on 16.000 tons per year. As the production and demand of electric cars ramp up, the demand for lithium is expected to be anywhere between 54.000 and 500.000 tons per year. At such rates, estimates of shortages starting from as early as 2015 are no exception as automobile, pharma, ICT and many other industries will be fishing in the same pond for the same type of fish.

Although lithium is no fuel (it is not consumed through usage) and lithium-ion batteries ‘can be recycled’ (note: they do contain substances harmful to the environment in case they should end up in landfills and pollute water reserves) other worries arise concerning the socio-economic impact of lithium mining activities in the aforementioned countries.

On a more fundamental level – a more philosophical one if you wish – nature and history teach us that monoculture is generally a bad idea (cf. resilience). So whether we like it or not, we need to (re)learn to think in terms of a mix, of diversity once again.

Image courtesy of PeriodicTable.com

In the past months newspapers have been full of high profile people declaring how the automobile industries in Europe and the US have missed their window of opportunity to transform themselves. Critical voices are bemoaning lead positions lost to automobile companies in booming markets such as China and India, where the focus on hybrids and electric vehicles appears stronger.

So much emphasis is being place on not having the right new car line up to face the future that one wonders why so little attention goes to ‘mobility‘ as a system that needs fixing instead of merely ‘the car‘. Joel Makover - author of Strategies for the Green Economy - illustrated this beautifully a while ago in his blogpost entitled: Reinventing Mobility: It’s Not Just the Cars, Stupid! One could even assert that radical innovation efforts in this respect are hindered by government subsidies ‘to save the industry’ (cf. the argument: ‘too big to fail’).

We have seen cars running on electricity, on air, on algae, on acid, … yet they are still cars as we know them (no, we are not fishing forflying cars). And cars, no matter how nifty, pose certain problems … e.g. idle time storage (aka parking), they rely on heavy, expensive infrastructure subject to wear and tear (cf. roads), they tend to clog rather than swarm intelligently, they are driven by people – like it or not, we are a mitigating factor in terms of safety, efficiency, etc. etc.

Friedman already reminded us that historically speaking truly radical innovation is most unlikely to come from the regime players, the dinosaurs. So imagine IKEA building cars … is what design student Robert Larsson set out to explore in his concept vehicle. How about looking at the automobile industry as a major smart grid player. Or imagine a carmaker shifting to become a smart grid energy player. MeetSchwarmStrom or an ambitious network of mini gas-fired power plants for the home (goal: producing as much as two nuclear reactors within a year). Lichtblick and Volkswagen team up to … perhaps become a major future energy player on the smart grid market? With cars charging at home and charging or providing peak balancing to homes, offices, etc. (after all they spend the majority of their lifetime parked, +90% according to some).

Most of you will be aware of MIT’s Smart Cities project featuring stackable cars (like shopping carts indeed), roboscooters and mobility on demand services. Also Carlo Ratti’s Senseable City Lab at the same MIT looks into ways in which are cities and its users could become smarter, something of which also mobility could benefit in myriad ways. Check out the beautiful EyeStop (up for testing in Turin, Italy). In this respect, of course there are the major IT players looking into the role ICT could play in untying the knot we have gotten ourselves into, e.g. IBM’s intelligent transport. Yet mobility is not only about cars and their infrastructure, we tend to forget about walking. Take a step back and think about it: how much space in a city goes to car-related mobility – which means standing still most of the time and hindering human traffic – and how much is actually still people-space?

If you do wanna see a far-out car concept that could tackle some of mobility’s challenges, check out designer Ahmad Filiz’s fascinating globule concept design for Peugot.

Most of us know about the water treatment capabilities of plants such as bamboo. Some might even already be using it to treat wastewater in their backyard. We were also taught in school that trees and plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, in other words they allow us to breathe. We also know that too much CO2 is not good for us: headache, shortness of breath, loss of concentration/focus, etc.

Radiator company Jaga (yes, the funky Belgians who built the Belgian waffle at Burning Man 2006) developed Oxygen radiators to keep CO2 levels in classrooms, offices, hospital & living rooms under control by pumping in fresh air. Turns out that opening up a window does not really do the same trick as air circulation needs a serious boost in order to pump up oxygen levels in a decent way.

Yet there is more in the air that we breathe than CO2 that we ought to worry about. People suffering from health anxiety might actually want to ‘link out’ before reading the next sentence.  Some indoor environments turn out to be 5 to 10 times more polluted with all kinds of toxic chemical compounds than the heavy traffic outdoors.

Kamal Meattle already gave us a few options in terms of plants to keep around our houses and offices in order to provide us with cleaner air to breathe. Now, meet Andrea. Some of you might have met her at Paola Antonelli’s amazing Design and the elastic mind exhibit last year at MOMA NY. Andrea is a nifty little system designed to maximize the potential of using plants (take your pick: Spathiphyllum (spath or peace lily), Dracaena marginata (red-edged dragon tree), Chlorophytum comosum (spider plant) or Aloe vera) around your living quarters to help purify the air. It has been developed by Mathieu Lehanneur and Dave Edwards (Le Laboratoire) and has now been prepped for commercial release (October 8th, 2009).

How about a car version of Andrea? No, not for inside the car, maybe a plant-based skin with the same properties. Purify while you drive …

The Apollo mission gave us pictures of our planet from space. Finally we could behold our planet from a distance. We could look at it as an object on the table in front of us, within reach, and as we did our planetary awareness grew. Confronted with several planetary challenges now, our planetary conscience is now gradually shaping up as well. Aside from looking at our planet, NASA’s Earth Observation System (EOS) reads our planet through satellite data. Access to this information is a prerequisite for learning to understand our planet better. Now we can not only look at our planet, Prof. Shin-ichi Takemura’s amazing Tangible Earth project allows us to interact with our planet and the data emerging from it by touch.

In view of coming up with solutions to the challenges we are facing, sensing our planet has become sheer necessity. We increasingly do so in real time as well: within mouseclick reach we check webcams on the other side of the planet, we can download data from weatherstations around the world, etc.
Until recently, the sensing world was pretty much the playing field of NASA and the likes. The future promises to be more open in this respect (see  also open source efforts such as GSN) and consequently much larger – and since we’re talking data: more powerful. Years ago, in describing his wish of an Earth Witness Project, our fellow future explorer Jamais Cascio already pointed to opportunities opened up by the convergence between labs on chips, mobile phones and sharing networks to create an open global sensor network.

Now several companies and grassroots initiatives are preparing to put technology in the hands of citizens. Already we can deduce a lot of information from information we leak by the mere usage of our communication technology, as Carlo Ratti’s Senseable cities team at MIT shows us. Nokia’s Eco Sensor Concept plans to make us more active participants in the game. Imagine millions of always-on, networked tricorder-like devices sensing our planet : local data + networks + sensemaking = global intelligence. Hewlett-Packard is developing the equivalent of a globally distributed stethoscope (CeNSE) to monitor our planet’s health, and look to nanotechnology as an enabling technology. “The motivation for this work is realising and understanding the planet is sick and the disease is us.”, says Dr Stan Williams of HP’s Information & Quantum Systems Laboratory.

An often forgotten challenge is how to use tech already out there to turn them into sensors for our health and that of our planet. Think about the tech equivalent of using ‘useless’ bath-tub ducks which fell off a ship, to study ocean currents.

Although some are still Grail-hunting for ‘one source of sustainable to replace them all’, the more interesting debate on possible future mixes of sustainable energy production, transport and consumption is going strong as well.

According to researchers at Cal State University “high-altitude wind machines could power New York City” (see Wired article). And a consortium of German companies is trying to get Operation Desertec off the ground and use the sunny side of Northern Africa to feed Europe with 15pct of its electricity needs through solar energy. And although many agree with the basics of Kissinger’s ‘interdependence through trade increases peace and stability’ strategy, recent problems in terms of energy provision as a political weapon (e.g.  Russia cutting off gas,  pipelines being attacked elsewhere in the world, etc.) raise fears and warnings regarding creating a new situation of European ‘dependence’.

Solar technology is becoming more powerful each day. Lonnie Johnson (of supersoaker fame) “says he can achieve a conversion efficiency rate that tops 60 percent with a new solid-state heat engine. It represents a breakthrough new way to turn heat into power.” JTEC (or the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Conversion System) “[...] uses temperature differences to create pressure gradients. Only instead of using those pressure gradients to move an axle or wheel, he’s using them to force ions through a membrane. It’s a totally new way of generating electricity from heat.” says Paul Werbos, a programme director at the NSF, one of the funding partners of JTEC.

Yet, of course, there is more out there than just wind or solar, there’s biomass, wave, geothermal, hydrogen, fuell cell, bodyheat, body movement, piezoelectric surfaces,  etc.

There is the science, the technology & the economics, the promises and … the reality. For those of you curious about the numbers behind the current state of the art re: the sustainability/energy discourse, check out David JC MacKay’s astonishing book Sustainable Energy – without the hot air (see his website).

Image: WIRED magazine

Until the end of September 2009, the Musée du Cinquantenaire in Brussels showcases Vegetal City, an absolutely fascinating overview exhibition on the work of Luc Schuiten, the belgian visionary architect, illustrator, author. Years ago Schuiten started working on his archiborescence vision on urban development, as an alternative future to look out for, a way out of the current-day unsustainable impasse.

Vegetal city is a vision of a transformed society driven by a quest for sustainability in which notions of biomimicry provide for a solutioning framework.

“We can’t carry on with individualistic attitudes which boil down to ‘I’ll just do my own thing and let the rest of the world go by.’ We need to change the way our entire society thinks in order to make it compatible with the rest of the world of which it forms part, and on which it ultimately depends.”

Schuiten understands the power of stories to convey his vision. As such he moves beyond the mere aspect of ‘visualizing’ what one means.

Check out the unique exhibition and/or the book.

Tabula rasa planning seldom leads to successful urban planning or ‘liveable cities’. History seems to teach us that organic growth is more successful, in part because the social tissue is given the time to grow along with its physical context and vice versa (for better and worse). Can one plan for organic growth or is it mainly an emergent effect which can only be assessed retrospectively? Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson believe one can and set out to show the world how. Together they devised …

“a strategy to develop informal slums into permanent urban districts through a process of gradual improvement to existing dwellings instead of demolition and rebuilding. Developed in Bombay, India, the Incremental Housing Strategy is intended to allow districts to improve organically without uprooting communities.”

Balestra had his first experiences in participatory design and construction in a project for a school and community centre in one of the slums of Rio, which was documented in the movie “Sambarchitecture“. Sara worked on a strategy to connect Stockholm, framing the future urban development as urban bridges between segregated suburbs.

In the Incremental Housing Strategy, several simple housing typologies have been developed which can easily be expanded. In the meantime …

“Organic patterns that have evolved during time are preserved and existing social networks are respected. Neighbors remain neighbors, local remains local.”

In parallel with their project, the Indian government initiated a grant programme spending 4500€/family to upgrade their dwellings in slum areas (City In-Situ Rehabilitation Scheme for Urban Poor Staying in Slums in City of Pune Under BSUP, JNNURM).

An interesting take on sustainability, quality of life and another beautiful example of “designing for the other 90%” … or as Balestra puts it:

“After creating works for Rem Koolhaas at OMA/ AMO, Neutelings Riedijk, NL architects, and Thomas Sandell, I found it essential to search for the opposite experience: to work for the ones who cannot pay”

Via Dezeen

For years we have heard about rainforests disappearing from our planet at worrisome rates. Now, a recently published article in the International Herald Tribune notes that a few developments – in scenario terms: drivers of change – have perhaps been neglected too much in past attempts to assess the future of rainforests. As farmers are leaving their land for the city for example, the jungle is spreading out again.

“By one estimate, for every half a hectare of rain forest cut down each year, more than 20 hectares, or 50 acres, of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.”

Although their capacity to absorb CO2 and produce oxygen is recognized, several experts doubt however whether these secondary forest offer the same ecological qualities as ‘old’ rainforests. 

In discussions with clients we often encounter the phenomenon: years of media exposure to information about certain trends diminishes people’s critical reflection about and on possible countertrends. Even questioning the sheer possibility of the countertrend meets incredulity. Nevertheless, the what-if question remains a valuable thought experiment!

“Wright – an internationally respected scientist – said he knew he was stirring up controversy when he suggested to a conference of tropical biologists that rain forests might not be so bad off. Having lived in Panama for 25 years, he is convinced that scientific assessments of the rain forests’ future were not taking into account the effects of population and migration trends that are obvious on the ground.”

Via The International Herald Tribune

Set to go live July 2009, Amsterdam’s CityCargo is about to liberate the inner city streets of heavy traffic. Goods destined for shops & offices will be loaded onto a specially equipped tram via loading platforms at the edge of the city. In town, small electric cars will unload them from the tram at specific drop off points and run the last mile to their destinations.

Similar initiaves are already operative in cities around Europe and others are bound to follow (Belgian cities: take note and catch up, please). The CargoTram for example runs in Dresden and delivers parts to the Volkswagen factory, the GüterBim already runs through Vienna, etc.

What if these trams would also carry waste out of town? Or filter/clean city air while running?

In 1975 Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia (revisited by NY Times here), a novel which quickly gained cult status (see also video). Three years later, fascinated by the book, architect Craig Hodgetts (of Hodgetts+Fung Design) crafted a set of amazing drawings depicting some of the scenes and concept envisioned in the book, eager to produce Ecotopia for the big screen. Imagine retro-yet-ever-so-futuristic balloon generators over San Francisco Bay, solar-powered high-speed mag-lev trains, helium-filled mylar balloons to lift and orient a wind-powered generator, …

Callenbach said it right: “It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now, but without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center.” 

Inspired by TheArchitectsNewspaperBlog

Technology explicitly designed or employed in such a way as to alter people’s behaviour (in a sense, technology as a medium always does, interaction design for example makes extensive use of affordances for example) is making its way into consumer products in ever more subtle, even poetic ways. According to Wired …

“Ford and Honda’s next-gen instrument clusters feature trees (a vine in Ford’s case) that grow more lush as drivers learn to hypermile — the fine art of maximizing fuel economy. Leaves grow like crabgrass in springtime if you use a light touch on the accelerator and go easy on the brakes. Drive like Jimmie Johnson and they’ll wither faster than General Motors stock.

The idea, says Honda VP Dan Bonawitz, is “to help drivers improve their efficient driving skills by making the hybrid experience more fun and rewarding.”

The article also includes reflections by Clifford Nass, which some of you with a background in HCI or interaction design might know from the lovely book he wrote together with Byron Reeves several years ago: “The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places”

Reading such developments, one might be reminded of what B.J. Fogg once called captology, which led to Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology lab. Like any paradigm it can be used for better or worse, yet let’s be positive and imagine this kind of design thinking aimed at mentality changes applied to issues of sustainability, good citizenship, healthcare, etc. Imagine waste bins encouraging you to sort your waste, mirrors encouraging you to brush your teeth as you’re supposed to (no scifi any longer), …

Inspired by Wired

… ironing shirts, wasting energy, shortening the lifespan of your shirt’s cloth. The Swedish brand Eton shirts has developed a coatingless cotton-fibre which returns to its original shape after washing. In fact bodyheat is enough to iron your shirt as you wear it. The fibre responds to heat – not unlike shape memory alloys) – to maintain its form.

Let’s extrapolate such a development for a second: imagine a world in which no shirts need to be ironed any longer. Consequences: significant decrease of energy usage since irons no longer need to be heated, presses are no longer necessary, thereby also increasing the lifespan of the shirt since the cloth is spared from several aggressive interactions. Combine that with a waterless washing machine such as Electrolux’ Airwash system. In terms of saving the environment. Nevertheless, it remains to be seen how energy- & eco-efficient the production of the special cotton fibre (and the rest of its lifecycle) is before we can truly assess its impact. From a socio-economic perspective however – like any technological development which renders human (inter)action obsolete – the no-iron cotton fibre – if used on a large scale – might put extra stress on or obliterate ironing shops.

On a higher level of abstraction: think of all the kind of products which nowadays, because of their systemic or material makeup, require labour (implying usage of all kinds of other resources) in order to remain functional, usable etc. Windows need to be washed, houses need to be heated or cooled, etc.

What if … changes at the material/systemic level of these products, which nearly all of us use, could make these ‘wasteful cycles’ of energy. If employed at a large scale, effects (both positive and negative) of these changes can often be exponential in nature as they work their way through the chain of reactions linked to the lifecycle of the product. They alter the system of their ‘ecology’, their context (whether bio-, techno- or homosphere). Glass can be self-cleaning, houses can go without or using a minimum of heating/cooling energy, etc.

Across the Atlantic, the Ten Year Forecast Team of the IFTF recently published a future map laying out the various developments related to sustainability in view of the coming decade, for their client, the Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI). Think: slums as centres of innovation, rogue eco-states, collaborative eco-mapping, bioteaming, biohacking, biocommons, environmental defense forces, deep localism, distributed energy, etc.

Get the map and dive right in. There’s a wealth of information up for inspiration, interpretation and innovation for all.

For about two years already we have been a core partner in setting up “Plan C”, a transition management experiment in Flanders, aimed at catalyzing the societal shift to a world in which materials are managed in a sustainable way.

In a long term oriented participatory process seeded by OVAM (the Flemish Public Waste Agency) and guided by Pantopicon, Resource Analysis & the Center for Organizational and Personnel Psychology a possible future for sustainable materials management in Flanders was envisioned. Smart, creative, entrepreneurial minds from knowledge institutions, business and industry, ngo’s, government agencies etc. formed new alliances and have been smashing heads and hands together to come up with opportunities for radical innovation and structural change. 5 transition teams self-organized into 5 themes:

• closing the loop: cradle2cradle & beyond
• waking up society: towards a behavioral change
• at your service: from products to services
• tailored materials: making ‘making’ different
• sustainable plastics: towards a new basis

Each of these teams has defined a series of experiments they wish to set up and conduct in view of catalyzing structural change in the way deal with materials.

On October 15th, the current Plan C network members (60-80 heads strong) launches its vision, presents its experiments and invites fellow smart, creative and daring heads and hands to join in at a network-mindsstorm event in Mechelen (Belgium) (note: meeting will be in Dutch).

Spread the word and do join in!