For a preview of my talk in DF, check out La ciudad ecozoic
(= my text from earlier this year – in Spanish)
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Conferencia: Mexico City 13 November
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The Twitterati Have Spoken: It’s “Desert of the Real ”
I’ve been invited to do this year’s Puma Sustainable Design Lecture at the Design Museum in London on 8 November. It’s a tremendous honour, obviously – but also a challenge: London is a global epicentre of information overload, and design-land is suffering from eco-fatigue. What title for the talk, I wondered, would grab any attention? As a true scholar, I therefore posted some alternatives on Twitter – and this is the verdict.
Desert Of The Real
Humanity’s troubles did not begin with with the industrial age, but much earlier – when we placed language, art, and number above other ways of knowing about the world. Science then helped us transformed the Earth’s resources into tremendous wealth – but at a grave cost: We ended up living in a ‘desert of the real’ in which we feast on nutrient supplies in blissful ignorance of their origins. Awash in information, we’e starved of the meaning once given to our lives by our embodied interactions with the biosphere. Can design help foster the ecological and systems literacy we need to escape from the desert of the real? The Puma lecture will challenge designers to reconnect with their wild side.
Details: Design Museum, London, Friday 8 November.
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Ten answers from Brisbane
My hosts last week at the Asia Pacific Design Library in Brisbane (which, on reflection, is probably the finest new library I have been in) asked me a few questions before our xskool:
Q: What does a typical day look like for you?
A: When I’m on the road, which is nearly half the time, I get up between 5 and 6, make the custom porridge which I bring from home In vacuum-sealed sachets, and then prepare the talk or workshop that I promised myself I would prepare in advance, but never do. I spend probably an hour a day reading stuff and tweeting about it; (I don’t use tweetdeck so I tweet manually, trying to catch people in their right timezones). I then head out into the world – walking wherever possible – where, to my regret, no day is ever typical.
Q: What can attendees to the Think Outside lecture expect to hear?
A: I’ll talk about what I call “leave things better tourism” and give plenty of examples – from Fair Trade walking to watershed regeneration projects. Nobody wants to be a ‘tourist’ any more; the word implies passively consuming experiences that have been conceived by someone I don’t know for whom profit margins are more important than the health of the place I am visiting.
Q: Where do you go to get design inspiration?
A: Five metres in any direction usually does the trick; there’s always a person, a plant, or a place that makes me happier when I know they exist.
Q: What are your top 5 favourite design books?
John Gowdy, ed, Limited Wants Unlimited Means
Stephan Harding , Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, and Gaia.
Robert Neuwirth System D: The Stealth of Nations
David McKay, Sustainable energy – without the hot air
Robin Murray, Co-operation in the Age of Google
Carolyn Steele, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives
Q: If you weren’t a designer, what would you do?
A: I’d be a forester
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Desert of the Real
Here is the text of this year’s Puma Sustainable Design Lecture which I gave on 8 November at the Design Museum in London.
The invitation to do this talk arrived around the time I was stopped in my tracks by this perplexing sight (above) in one of those endless corridors at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. Who commissioned such a thing, and why? What, if anything, was in their mind? Where did they procure that cheesy stick-on foliage? Is that a robot digging away behind the window – or does it have a driver? What does he make of the living wall that’s not, in fact, alive?
I can’t promise to answer all those questions in my talk this evening, but I will discuss three perplexing issues which I believe are related. First, I’ll explore the notion that we are living in a ‘desert of the real’. Second, I’ll look at what the desert of the real has meant for environmental communications. And thirdly, to conclude, I will explore alternative ways of knowing and being in the world – and ask what these might mean for design. Read More »