I’m doing a talk in Oakland – followed by a conversation with David McConville - on 16 April, 7-9pm.
We badly need change. Change labs are springing up around the world. Mission accomplished?
Not so fast. Although building prototypes is exciting, and launching a start-up is a buzz, transforming a system is something else again. Are we confusing frantic activity with the achievement of meaningful Read More
The blog tour is a kind of online relay in which different bloggers write about their work and writing process, and invite others to take up the baton and do the same. My post below follows the philospher Andrew Taggart, who invited me; Andrew followed Dougald Hine; Dougald followed Emily Wilkinson.
Question 1. What am I working on?
I just agreed with my publisher to complete a 60,000 word book by 30 June. It’s about re-wilding, a leave-things-better economy, and design. So far, it’s going well – I’ve already written six lines. They begin, “It’s Read More
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem
The signs on the small van describe the services it supports: Taxi; Pick-up; Delivery; Assistance; Vendor; Security; Rental.
Seven functions, one vehicle. As imagined in a project in Belgium called Mobilotoop the van, when coupled with a pay-per-use leasing framework, and radically distributed computing, becomes an element within an asset-light mobility ecosystem.
Mobilotoop asks, ‘how will we move in the city of the future?’ - and does not worry too much about the design of vehicles. ’Cloud commuting’, in this context, is about accessing the means to move when they are needed (such as the micro-van, above) rather than owning a large heavy artefact (such as a Tesla) that will sit unused for 95 percent of the time.
The first cross-over project of Design Platform Vlaanderen, this two year research project focuses on potential connections between people, vehicles, places and services that – as a single ecosystem – generates new mobility solutions dynamically, and continuously.
With a focus on connections that bring us not just faster but also closer to one another, Mobilotoop is about a system that enables new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value.
This may all sound abstract, but Mobilotoop is way of thinking whose time has come. Economics, more than green thinking on its own, will drive the transformation from here on.
Until now, we’ve moved ourselves – and stuff – about the city in ridiculously wasteful ways. A snapshot from The Netherlands: of the 1,900 vans and trucks enter the small city of Breda each day, 90 percent of those deliveries could be done by bike, or e-bike. Once all system costs are included, a cargo cycle can be up to 98 percent cheaper per km than four-wheeled, motorised alternatives that now clog our roads.
Mobilotoop envisions a mobility culture in which every ride is an encounter, every traveller an entrepreneur.
Mobile media, flexible vehicle designs, and adaptive infrastructure, enable everyone to be a user and a supplier of mobility services. Every commuter can deliver a package on her way to work. Every walker might collect sensor data about the quality of the sidewalk surface, or the air. The electric motor on a pedelec might be used to drive a balcony hoist.
(above: the Mobilotoop exhibition)
In Mobilotoop’s imagination, radically adaptive use is not only about cash transactions. A borrowed vehicle properly used and returned – or a service well-executed – adds to your reputation as a sharer. This enhanced reputation gives you access to use credits, discounts on services, or the use of other vehicles, equipment, and workplaces.
(Below: the Mobilotoop book)
A new scheme in England connects office workers with living systems by means of a ‘wild mirror’: each workspace is twinned with an equivalent area of ecosystem regeneration.
The restoration of degraded ecosystems — or creating new ones — is gathering pace in different parts of the world. According to Richard Coniff, China is planting 90 million acres of forest in a swath across its northern provinces. In North America, too: restoration projects costing $70 billion are under way to restore or re-create more than seven million acres of marsh, peatland, floodplain, mangrove, and other wetlands.
These large-scale, government-led efforts are conceived as green infrastructure by governments in response to such practical issues as flood control. This ecosystem regeneration is Read More
This year’s Doors of Perception Summer Xskool (in August, in Sweden , in partnership with Konstfack and FuturePerfect) explores what it can mean in practice to move from a ‘do less harm’ approach to sustainability to a practice of leave things better.
In what ways can design help people interact with living systems in ways that help both of them thrive? And what practical steps might one take to test the effect of small actions on the system as a whole?
This year’s Doors of Perception summer Xskool explores what it can mean in practice to move beyond a ‘do less harm’ Read More
On Friday 14 March I’m doing a talk and discussion in Dublin.
(Image: Richard Giblett)
To effect system-level change – in health, energy, food, or mobility – a first step is often to reframe the question. In health, for example, ninety-five percent of person-to-person care happens outside the bio-medical system – so how do you innovate there? Read More
In Sharing Energy In The City, EDF and the the French National Research Agency (ANR) have challenged designers to rethink the production, harvesting, distribution, use, exchange and consumption of energy in our everyday life. They asked me to submit this text as fuel for the discussion.
The modern city has been shaped by the availability of cheap oil and resources, and plentiful credit. Massive resource and energy flows have been used to build skyscrapers, heat and cool buildings, move and treat water, feed people, and move them and their goods around.
This expansion of cities involved the stupendous use of energy. Tom Murphy, a physics professor, calculates that U.S. energy use since 1650, including wood, biomass, fossil fuels, hydro, nuclear, etc, has grown at a steady 2.9 percent. Those 360 years of more-or-less steady growth help explain Read More
In China, ‘battery-bikes’ are outselling cars by four-to-one. Pedelec sales are soaring in Europe, too. Is this the start of system-wide phase-shift in transportation?
At a workshop in Delhi last year, during the UnBox Festival, I posed the following question to a group of 20 design, transport, and city development professionals: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and villages?
The answer was: a lot – and it’s not just about the bikes. We discussed the need for an online catalogue of products and business models to aid decision-support. We learned that micro-finance for independent vendors should be a priority. Traffic architectures, hygiene regulations, and disinterest of municipal authorities, were an obstacle. Opposition from place-based retailers was an issue. Topography, and climate, could not be ignored. As the to-do list grew, the scale of the challenge seemed ever more daunting.
But a strange this has happened. The obstacles we identified in Delhi seem less daunting today than a year ago. Something big is afoot. E-bikes in China are outselling cars four to one. Their sudden popularity has confounded planners who thought China was set to become the next automobile powerhouse. In Europe, too, e-bike sales are escalating. Sales have been growing by 50% a year since 2008 with forecasts of at least three million sales in 2015.
I have the strong impression that a cloud of discrete but related developments is converging. Read More
Keep Your Stuff Alive
The Tending and Grooming Station (below) is a wondrous collection of combs, brushes and other obscure (to me) gadgets. They are used to primp and revive pre-loved sweaters and cardigans that have been disfigured by bobbles and pilling – those unattractive fuzz balls that appear when short fibers misbehave on woolen garments.
Every object has a dark side – and that’s especially true in fashion. Two-wash-two wear tea shirts have a devastating impact on watercourses, air quality, soil toxicity, and human and ecosystem health, in many parts of the world.
It is one thing to draw attention to the hidden costs of fashion – quite another to figure out what to do about them. Exhortations to “buy less, wash less” are little match, on their own, for a global system whose very survival depends on Read More »