One may well call Geoffrey West, physicist and former president of the SantaFe Institute such a specialist. Via reasoning inspired by metabolic processes West is developing quantitative, analytic, mathemitizable, predictive frameworks in order to understand how cities – complex social systems – work exactly. One of his findings is that, unlike other physical and biological processes cities do become more efficient: the bigger the city, the (exponentially) higher its production and wages. In cities, more patents are produced, they are more innovative …

Based on these findings the growth of cities is a positive trend. From the point of view of sustainability also major advantages of living in a city can be discerned. The impact smaller towns have on the environment are relatively high. Based on this understanding the Chinese government had hundreds of thousands of people move from the rural Ordos plains to the newly buit Ordos City. In “City vs Country: The concrete jungle is greener” Shanta Barley gives some more examples of why densification of cities should be supported:

• The carbon footprint of inhabitants becomes lower
• The scale of waste generation becomes substantial enough to be an efficient and economical resource for energy production
• It helps decreasing overpopulation since urban women have better access to family planning and birth control, often have better employment opportunities and have their first child later.

How would these insights and examples contribute to the ongoing debates on sustainability? One could argue that these developments support efficiency, no substantial change. By all means they clearly stem from a belief in or the need for technology to solve sustainability issues instead of finding new ways to bring more balance in the earth’s ecosystem (Medea vs. Gaia Hypothesis).

Exaggerating, one could say that West believes that the closer one would bring people together, the better the ideas will pop up. However, West also realizes that with the pace of growth of cities, it will be hard for human kind to keep being innovative…

See also the New York Times Magazine’s article A Physicist Solves the City and a conversation with Geoffrey West on Edge.org entitled Why Cities Keep Growing, Corporations and People Always Die, and Life Gets Faster .

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Combining this principle with Bill Joy’s Law – “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” – companies are increasingly starting to mobilize crowds in order to come to innovative ideas. According to futurist consultancy Toffler Associates (40 for the next 40) “Technologies will not be developed in-house. Successful organizations will become adept at integrating large problem-solver networks, linking “answer seekers” with “problem solvers” across the globe to rapidly harness the brainpower of international experts.” InnoCentive is good example here.

Many multinationals recently developed platforms in order to collect ideas in the field of social and environmental innovation. See for example Toyota’s Ideas for Good, Sony’s Open Planet Ideas and Pepsi’s Refresh Everything. Undoubtedly contributors will come up with many fascinating ideas, but the real challenge in solving social and environmental issues might not be to come up with a set of innovative ideas itself, but to find ways oto motivate people to act upon them. As Richard Ashcroft puts it:

“Usually what drives me is circumstance, habit and short term reward. So the trick is to find ways to rewire my habits, change my circumstances, and make the rewards pull me in ways I want to go, and not in ways that are harmful to me. “

So it’s not only about understanding a situation, but just as well about being provided with incentives to solve a problem, to overcome a ‘bad habit’, let go of a temptation or do something about one’s laziness. In order to support one’s willpower and to increase one’s karma FrogDesign developed the temptd. This app, specifically designed in order to improve personal health, aims to build a community of supporters, as well as professional coaches and trainers, to support youth at moments when they need it the most: “Temptd makes even the smallest decisions meaningful as part of a game in which ‘players’ benefit from helping each other and themselves.”

So in the future we might not need (just) the wisdom of crowds, but rather the social pressure and the competition of crowds (Bill’s Law of Joy ;-)) in order to make the world a better place?

We might, according to Jane McGonigal, need to find a way to motivate gamers – which seem to be perfectly able to effectively collaborate in order to achieve personal and communal goals – to apply their skills in the real world instead of in the virtual world. Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR foresees that in the next decade the framework in which the motivations and how we actually influence people’s behavior is being decided upon. I’m curious what external forces might drive me in the future…

Image by MrToledano

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The event, and the MetropolitanAgriculture.com learning network as such, are an initiative of TransForum (& Reos Partners), a project-cluster partially funded by BSIK money which concluded its 5 year long series of activities at the end of 2010. TransForum focussed on the sustainable development of dutch agriculture in relationship to its urbanizing context.

The MetroAg Innoversity set out with joint scenarioplanning workshops “explore the opportunities for Metropolitan Agriculture based on contextual characteristics, assets and challenges in each city”, inspired by input from stakeholder interviews within participating cities. Later on, groups were formed to incubate ideas and draft prototypes. The summit gathered experiences and insights gained and looked ahead as how to scale and create enduring projects and processes.

At the occasion of the Summit, Jan Kees Vis, programme director of Unilever’s division of Sustainable Agriculture, used three words to sketch the pillars of his image of the future: “The right to food, ethics, metropolitan agriculture”. In the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, the company commits “to source 100% of [their] agricultural raw materials sustainably by 2020.”

Via Ventiquattro

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Few aspects of our lives are so diverse yet again so similar across cultures as the way we say goodbye to our beloved ones. No matter how universal or how grounded in tradition, not even this aspect or moment in our lives is immune to the creative forces of reinvention.

A few weeks ago, funeral directors in Flanders (B) asked the legislative powers to allow for resomation , “a water and alkali-based process that turns bodies into a mix of liquid and minerals. Resomation uses less energy than cremation and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gas emissions.” (read more)

While environmentally friendly coffins have been around for a while now (see also Citelli & Bretzel’s Capsula Mundi), complete sustainable funeral services are popping up as well (e.g. Groene Uitvaart). Yet sustainability is not the only buzz finding resonance in the way we deal with the ends of our lives. In their “Afterlife” project, designers Jimmy Loizeau and James Auger elaborated upon the idea of a microbial fuelcell powered by the decomposition of the body of the deceased. To what purpose would we want to put life’s last remaining energy of our beloved ones?

Back in 2006, Eindhoven’s Design Academy showcased fascinating student work under the heading ‘post mortem – rituals surrounding death and funerals’ at the Salone del Mobile in Milan. While much attention goes to objects, a more interesting question is as to how rituals might change over time. For example: suppose we do get to the point where people can download their brain to a computing entity – whether hard- or wetware – , what would the ceremony be like? Or how much poetry can be brought to cryonic procedures?

PS: also check out some of Nadine Jarvis‘ inspiring work.

Image courtesy of Nadine Jarvis. Bird feeder is made out of beeswax, ashes of the deceased and birdfood.

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“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

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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

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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

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