Solar car races, the hydrogen economy, biofuels and ethanol, ‘killed’ electric cars, … Not a day goes by without another article in the newspaper about the cost of mobility with respect to climate change and experiments to meet the challenges we face.

Now, Indian car manufacturer TataMotors is developing another solution : the air car. No hydrogen, no biodiesel, … tabula rasa … imagine a car engine running on mere air. To pull this of, Tata teamed up with Guy Negre’s small but sophisticated MDI Group in France who pioneered the engine running on compressed air.  Refuelling of the car can be done at a station delivering compressed air or via an on-board compressor (3-4h full recharge time). Aside its environmental friendly character, the MiniC.A.T. as it is called,  also runs at an extremely low cost of about a euro per 100 km (1/10th of a petroleum-based car).

Taking it a step further, why not making the car actually clean the air it ‘breathes‘. Just to hammer home again the notion that we should learn to look beyond break-even, zero-emission, zero-waste technologies to those that add to the quality of our environment.

If Tata would use its critical mass to speed up the development of the cars and roll them out in a timespan as groundbreaking as the technology, it would not only rip open the market for sustainable mobility solutions (if taking cues also to develop the car itself in a sustainable way, cf. Ford’s Model U), but also show a wonderful example of leapfrogging at such a major scale.

Slashdot has an article online that once again shows the impact of technologies such as Google Earth which – in McLuhanesque terms – extend our senses, in raising awareness, convincing people, moving them to (re)action, influencing or even altering their behaviour etc.

“On Monday, an environmental advocacy group [Appalachian Voices] joined with Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth. This new layer will tell ‘the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth.”

One only needs to look at the advertising industry to understand the power of crafted audiovisual information in influencing human behaviour. There’s a large body of research on this not only in the advertising world, but also in the fields of media & behavioural studies as well as more recent endeavours in the academic world concerning the possible roles of technology in this, e.g. so-called captology (Stanford University’s fascinating Persuasive Technology Lab, who also run a blog here).

In a sense, creating images of possible futures or making them ‘experiencable’ or tangible in various ways, fits in similar categories as they influence how we make decisions today.

Transport, whether of people or goods, is considered a key challenge in solving our sustainability equation. Movement will always be necessary, no matter how (g)local we get, so solutions need to be found on how to do this better than we currently go about it: better as in better for people, planet and profit.

In the Netherlands, an experiment is now looking into how to use open slot times on existing tram trajectories now used for public transport as a way for cargo trams to transport goods from, to and around the city, more efficiently (and spewing out less dust and carbondioxide) than current goods transport by truck, van and car. The relative inflexibility of a centralized, fixed network medium will only offer a partial solution, but nevertheless an interesting ‘helping hand’.

‘The more trucks off the road, the better’ is an often heard motto in today’s world. Traditional players in the market are shifting to more mainstream positions, e.g. the railway companies (in many countries dealing with saturated networks and/or ageing infrastructure) or internal navigation/shipping facilitators, they all fight for a piece of the cake. But also wilder ideas of subterranean freight pipeline transportation systems and airship cargolifters, try to get stuff off the road and tackle the last mile problem of traditional, fixed network, centrally organized transport infrastructure.

Because of the heavy infrastructural weight involved, the transport sector seems to occupy an especially difficult position as regards opting for radical innovation vs. incremental innovation. But can we afford to take little steps? Do we have the time? What if the assumptions underlying current road-based goods-transport (cf. pollution, energy consumption, safety hazard, hindrance to person(al) mobility, … ) no longer hold in the future?

UPDATE: One of our readers John Maryon reminded us of Volkswagen’s CargoTram in Dresden and also mentioned that his organization LeRail is organizing an international shortliner – dedicated train operations in Europe – conference to be held in Paris March 29-30. Thanks John!

Only few days apart two of the world’s probably most inspiring gettogethers have/are taking place, i.e. Doors of Perception in New Delhi, India (this year’s theme: “juice: food, energy & design”) directed by John Thackara and TED in Monterey, California (this year’s heading: “Icons. Geniuses. Mavericks.”) brainchild of Richard Saul Wurman and now curated by Chris Anderson (no, the other one).

Fortunately, for those of us who are unable to attend, several bloggers are covering the events. For example, follow along with TED via Ethan Zuckerman’s inspiring My heart’s in Accra or Bruno Giussani’s excellent LunchOverIP. Do also keep an eye on the TED Talks videos.

This years TED prizes went to Former US president Bill Clinton, photographer James Nachtwey and biologist E.O. Wilson. Read more about their ‘TED wish’ here. Last year’s winner Cameron Sinclair of Architects for Humanity ‘Design like you give a damn’ fame saw his wish come through in the launch of the open architecture network.

Several bloggers have also posted about Doors, e.g. various food- and sustainability-related blogs, such as TastyThinking, WorldChanging, etc. but I’m sure much more of its content will pop up across the blogosphere in the coming days and weeks.

Take a moment to inspire and energize yourselves.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is often portrayed as a crying man, unable to get a grip on the changing world around him. He saw change as the only constancy … an image that fits well in most foresight contexts.

When people ask which purpose exploring or (en)visioning possible futures serves, there are several answers, but at least two concepts are central: preparedness and awareness. Put (too) briefly, preparedness has to do with thinking things through in advance, with anticipating and learning. Awareness is about looking with more and different eyes, from different perspectives, but also to be confronted with things that are perhaps beyond direct eyesight yet nevertheless present or possibly emerging in one’s environment.

In many ways, awareness helps to prepare for appropriate action, to create change in response to possible change. As such, it is a crucial ingredient to persuade people and organizations to alter their behaviour. In this sense, making things visible, ‘experiencable’ helps to raise people’s awareness, confronts them with things which are otherwise beyond their viewing range.

For example, think sustainability, think any product you might pick up in your supermarkt, take chocolate for instance (yes, forgive me, I am belgian). Like any product, your bar of chocolate has a lifecycle, its ingredients originate somewhere, are manipulated, the waste generated along the way as well as after consumption return to, hence affect Mother Earth somehow (and people’s lives along with it). Most people do not think about this intricate web of little chains of cause and effect associated with your product’s lifecycle. But once you know or rather – once you see – your shrimps might have been fished 3kms from where you live, but travel all the way to Morocco to be peeled and are then transported back to your supermarkt (not to mention dozens of other steps inbetween), you think twice.

Designer Arlene Birt decided to do exactly this, context connection, to tell the background stories to our products and make sure our awareness of their context is raised and we cannot escape informed choice any longer :

“By making the backgrounds visible, design can inspire thoughts about the big-picture influence of a product; and facilitate awareness on the social and environmental impact that results from our food choices.”

In a way, Arlene’s wonderful work extends and improves upon ecolabels, and possibly succeeds where they fail: in touching the people at an empathic level, in a poetic, stylish, subtle way but with a hammer-like effect. Both critical as well as strategic design.

Via Worldchanging

 Bruce Sterling cheers as he sees the dot-green future finally arrive. The tipping point has been passed. In an eco-capitalism article in the Washington Post he writes how he feels the net-generation cybergreens are winning from the 20th century fossil fuel dinosaurs:

“Why? Because they’re not about spiritual potential, human decency, small is beautiful, peace, justice or anything else unattainable. The cybergreens are about stuff people want, such as health, sex, glamour, hot products, awesome bandwidth, tech innovation and tons of money.

We’re gonna glam, spend and consume our way into planetary survival.”

This is indeed a crucial paradigm shift. Green is shifting from a position in which it was considered alternative, anti-capitalist, anti-consumption, anti-establishment and small-scale, to one in which it is very much scalable, at the core of capitalism, decision-making, power and becoming mainstream thought and action. As for consumption, McDonough and Braungart already showed how in a cradle-to-cradle world consumption can actually be a good thing and consuming more can mean helping more instead of destroying more. Winning over people suddenly became a whole lote ‘easier’.

Sterling goes on to say:

“My own favorite sci-fi planetary-saving scheme for naming, numbering and linking to the Internet every piece of junk we create so that it can be corralled and briskly recycled, creating a cradle-to-cradle postindustrial order and averting planetary doom, may sound pretty shocking and alien.”

In a sense such ‘leftover/product DNA’ could work well in the case one could realize it so that it would only require ‘reading’ and not ‘writing’, if it could become an ‘organic part of the lifecycle’, so that you could ‘scan’ your coffee mug and say: ah, your DNA shows your porcelain is part French, part German and these are your parents, who met there, whose ancestors lived in the soil of northern Italy, but what were you doing on that boat to the U.S. and tell me about how you lost that ear in London and what happened to it? Basically: the lifetime story of a product not merely in terms of what happened to it in general but its ecological meaning, its green-sense. A rather nice viridian design vision …

The future of our world depends upon a variety of uncertainties, including the extent to which we will manage to lead more sustainable lives. Sustainability is no longer an academic discussion, but an actionable must for each and every one of us. There are various ways to go about it and part of the persuasion picture is definitely through social innovation.

Design of the time 2007 - or dott07 in short – is a project set in North East England which not only aims to shed light upon this but also to try and set things in motion by initiating and funding several real-world projects. Directed by John ‘Doors of Perception’ Thackara, dott 07 is …

“an initiative of the Design Council and the regional development agency, One NorthEast” … “[it] enables communities and individuals in North East England to collaborate with designers in real-life situations. These projects are small but important examples of what life in a sustainable region might be like.

Dott 07 projects set out to improve six aspects of daily life in practical ways. They deal with health issues, food, school, energy, tourism, and travel. “

The community projects aimed at opening up new sustainable futures are titled Urban Farming, Low Carb Lane, Design & Sexual Health, MoveMe, OurNewSchool, Alzheimer 100 and New Work.

Knowing John as a master networker and one of the best moderators out there, I can assure you that the twelve-day Dott07 festival which will sum up a year of dott07 in October of this year, will be an event to look forward to.

Even if we might live a zero-waste life today there would still be some of our leftovers of yesterday of which to take care. At the same time, the philosophy of doing less harm still means doing harm, destroying less still means destroying. This is quite different from adding something to the world that has a beneficial effect and/or repairs what has been broken. As such, the sustainability equation is sometimes a bit more complex than often portrayed.

Many turn to nature for inspiration on how to solve certain issues and nature does offer the example in many ways. Already bacteria are widely used in many filtering systems to purify air, water and other substances. Now, human genome sequencer Craig Venter hooked up with Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith “to build from scratch a synthetic organism they want to program at the DNA level to consume carbon dioxide.”

The architecture firm R&Sie intends to wrap their design for the future Bangkok Art Museum dubbed ‘Dusty relief‘ in electrostatic wire that grow ‘fur’ by attracting dust from the air.

Feeding off dirt, dust and pollution is in a sense a very ecological idea in terms of problem solving when one follows lifecycle logic (at least if it is broken down to harmless basic components once again).

Via Bruce’s Beyond the Beyond and Regine’s WeMakeMoneyNotArt

The Swedish-Norwegian Wallenius Wilhemsen Logistics envisions what a car carrier could possibly look like in 2025. Named after one of the world’s most endangered dolphin species, the E/S Orcelle is a concept for a new type of car carrier, able to transport 10.000 cars, self-generating its power from wind, solar and wave energy and using hydrogen-powered fuel cells, all on a zero-emissions basis (air or water). No more oil, no more water ballast …

Sustainability driven to the max would also require to assess the level of sustainability of the ‘product lifecycle’ in terms of usage of resources including energy, waste generation, social aspects etc. Furthermore, in line with McDonough & Braungart one could ask oneself: instead of ‘merely’ maintaining zero-emissions, which positive environmental effect could a ship generate? E.g. filter air, water, …

Let us hope the ship building industry will have a better track record in turning astonishing concepts into reality than the car industry.

Via Plausible Futures

Those who thought Muhammad Yunus would rest on his laurels after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, got it all wrong. Yunus and his Grameen Foundation are working hard to show us another lesson in making this world a better place, including a lesson in capitalism.

Basic idea behind Yunus’ next Big Idea is that capitalism does not work optimally because we see it too narrowly. Companies and their shareholders ought to measure their performance not only in terms of revenue and profit, but also in terms of social returns, of lives they saved or improved. We are not talking about another happiness index or a GDP alternative.

Like McDonough and Braungart’s worldchanging ‘waste=food’ philosophy which I blogged about last year, also Yunus’ philosophy makes economic sense to business people:

“It supports your brand, returns your capital, and you’re not going to lose money and you give your shareholders a vision of doing something good.”

Danone formed a joint venture with the Grameen Foundation to start the first ‘social business enterprise’:

“The yogurt Danone would make would be fortified to help curb malnutrition and priced (at 7 cents a cup) to be affordable. All revenue from the joint venture with Grameen would be reinvested, with Danone taking out only its initial cost of capital, about $500,000, after three years.

The factory – and ultimately 50 more, if it works – will rely on Grameen microborrowers buying cows to sell it milk on the front end, Grameen microvendors selling the yogurt door to door and Grameen’s 6.6 million members purchasing it for their kids. It will employ 15 to 20 women.

And Danone estimates that it will provide income for 1,600 people within a 20-mile radius of the plant. Biodegradable cups made from cornstarch, solar panels for electricity generation and rainwater collection vats make the enterprise environmentally friendly.

International organizations such as Unicef believe it may be such a revolutionary means of improving nutrition through a sustainable business model that it is watching closely – and may seek to replicate around the world.”

In an abstract sense, Yunus’ philosophy lines up nicely with the multi-perspectival approach often taken in integrative assessment and scenario-based futures studies (think: people, planet, profit). More practically speaking, it shows a win-win-win situation moving beyond the status quo.

BTW, Fortune magazine published another interview with the Nobel Peace Prize winner back in October.

Via Fortune Magazine

Gazing ahead into the future, nearly automatically makes us think about the future past, the present as history.

As species of all kinds are disappearing at worrisome rates, several initiatives are trying to protect, document, collect and preserve. The Norwegian government has, for example, taken the initiative to install at Svalbard, an island near the North Pole, the Global Seed Vault. Compared by many to Noah’s Ark, the initiative will use an old mine to preserve an estimated 1.5 billion samples of the Earth’s seeds in permafrost. The aim is to preserve as many of the Earth’s (diversity of) seeds as possible, especially those of species important to the food chain. Countries around the world are expected to send in samples.

As such the seed bank moves beyond cataloguing life to safeguarding it. Scandinavian ancestor Carolus Linnaeus will be happy. Craig Venter‘s Sorcerer expeditions (cataloguing the genes of oceanic micro-organisms) on the other hand try to map out the Earth’s ‘small life’ that has largely remained under the radar of catalogues and categories.

According to Prof. Stephen Hawking humanity will need to colonize space if it wishes to survive … itself. The risks of wiping out ourselves and our lovely planet, either directly through nuclear wars or designer viruses or indirectly because of environmental changes we are causing, are on the increasing side. As such, we might wish to start planning ‘the great escape’. A doomsday scenario … yet the worries triggering it are even on many optimists’ minds.

Space, the final frontier … we used to hear. Last week NASA shared with the world its plans to set up a permanent base (and launchpad for missions to Mars) on the moon by 2020. Travelling to the moon not only reminds of Jules Verne’s stories, but the idea of colonizing it is also reminiscent of the fascinating Dallas Barr scifi-comics, by Belgian author Marvano (in cooperation with scifi writer Joe Haldeman).

2020 … One might wonder whether the acceleration of change has moved in an opposite direction in terms of space travel. Of course, these are complex endeavours to be planned carefully, yet somehow in terms of ambition in timing there seems to be little resemblance to the adventurous halo of the sixties. There is of course the difference in sense of urgency and challenge between racing against another nation and racing against uncertainties of ‘our condition’ in general.

In general though, it seems that in spite of huge technological advances since the sixties, somehow the spirit, mindset and collective support of making the impossible possible (think space travel, think Concorde, …) appears to be much less present today. Can space travel jumpstart the dream factories again, or will the search for a sustainable world bring about worldchanging at a scale of ‘grandeur’ (Hawking and quite a few along with him see both as interrelated issues or drives).

Image by NASA

There’s a lot of discussion going on these days at Pantopicon HQ about the work of William McDonough and Michael Braungart, in part because of a fascinating documentary on their work was broadcasted on national television, as well as because of our involvement in a transition management project on the issue of waste here in Belgium. Several years ago, McDonough, renowned architect and designer, and Braungart, one of the world’s most important ecological toxicologists, set up McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, an office to join forces on the issues of cradle to cradle design (read the book), based upon a philosophy that “waste equals food“.

On a meta-level there are several parallels with the whole philosophy of biomimicry (make sure to read Janine‘s book), in the sense of taking inspiration from nature as the great teacher. When we say “waste equals food” we take inspiration from nature’s life cycle principle: something ‘dies’ or breaks apart, with the help of its natural environment, mechanisms and elements present therein, it disintegrates and is reduced to food once again for organisms present within that environment, hence giving life. This is the mental image from which we ought to design our ‘stuff’. For McDonough and Braungart it is their ‘driving image’, from which they not only imagine but design the future. In doing so, they go beyond ‘minimal’ and ‘sustainable’, which is not enough, all the way to ‘generative’ and ‘regenerative’ (e.g. integrating plantseeds in biodegradable ice-cream packaging).

To put it in McDonough’s own words:

“The goal is very simple and technical, and the goal is a delightfully, diverse, safe, healthy and just world with clean air, soil, water and power, economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed. Period.”

In a masterful way McDonough and Braungart bring their essentially simple message across and show how it can and is being put into practice. In their philosophy of cradle to cradle design, consumption looses its bad aftertaste, because while consuming, creating waste, one is actually creating food, nutrients for the bio- as well as the technosphere, one is creating value and wealth instead of losses and debts. This added focus on economic instead of a purely ecological argumentation increases their potential impact upon the world of business manifold (cf. their impressive client portfolio).

As McDonough says: “If utopianism is profitable business, than I guess this is utopian.”

As a little extra, check out McDonough’s design for tomorrow’s tower.

Most of you will know Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries‘ project Massive Change with their wonderful slogan “It’s not about the world of design. It’s about the design of the world.” In a context of foresight and future studies this is a powerful reminder to people that the future is not an unescapable wave coming rolling in to wash over us, but something in which all of us can have a hand building it.

On November 18th Massive Change America and the City of Chicago’s Department of Environment are organizing a one-day symposium “Massive Change and the city: Global Visionaries Symposium”, a spin-off of the Massive Change : The Future of Global Design exhibition.

the symposium includes conversations by global visionaries including Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit corporation that operates Wikipedia; Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse; Dayna Baumeister, cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild; Stewart Brand, futurist and author of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Clock of the Long Now, and How Buildings Learn; Mary Czerwinski, cognitive psychologist and principal researcher at Microsoft; Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, and syndicated columnist; Gunter Pauli, founder and director of Zero Emissions Research Initiative of the United Nations University in Tokyo; and John Todd, biologist and leader in the field of ecological design.

Via MassiveChange

The future is not only about tomorrow, but very much about today. Choices we make today influence what our lives will be like in the future. Vice versa, the ways we think about the future today, the ways in which we envision it, also influences the way we look at our choices for tomorrow. The bottom line of all this: start today.
Our long-term thinking friends over at worldchanging.com (also check out their manifesto) have published a fascinating book, titled: “Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century”. As their website describes it, the book is “a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future.” It features a plethora of articles bundled together under seven headings:

1. stuff: about the things we make, buy, use and live with. articles include entries about green design, biomimicry, sustainable food, clothing, trade and technology etc.
2. shelter: about building future-friendly homes. articles deal with themes such as green building and landscaping, clean energy, water, disaster relief and humanitarian design
3. cities: about living green by living urban. the chapter informs about developments in terms of smart growth, sustainable communities, transportation, greening infrastructure, product-service systems, leapfrogging and megacity challenges
4. community: about working together for the common good. think: education, women’s rights, public health, holistic approaches to community development, South-South science, social entrepreneurship and micro-lending, and philanthropy
5. business: about growing sustainable prosperity. articles deal with themes such as socially responsible investment, worldchanging start-ups, ecological economics, corporate social responsibility and green business
6. politics: about progressing toward a free and fair world. the chapter explores developments in networked politics, new media, transparency, human rights, non-violent revolution and peacemaking
7. planet: about restoring and exploring the earth. this final chapter is about the big picture, about everything from placing oneself in a bioregion to climate foresight to environmental history to green space exploration

More information can be found on the book’s website (or click here to hit the bookshop right away).