Listening to: Air conditioning units cooling an empty office on a cold morning.

Part 2 Yesterday

One Persons Design Flaw is Another Persons Opportunity

Some the most interesting thought around the potential opportunities come from Viridian Design Movement and from formal designers like William McDonough. In both cases they look at environmental issues as design problems; basically the product wasn’t designed correctly in the first place or the way it is moved from producer to consumer is designed incorrectly. When looking at the problem as a design issue the key change that needs to be made is the definition of good and bad design. You need to start asking questions like:

“Why does it have tail pipe?”

“Why does it need to be disposed of in a land fill?”

“Why can’t I eat it?”

“What does it need to be packed in a crate to get to the customer?”

“Why is it that I get paid for NOT using it?”

“Why do I have to pay a company for something that falls out of the sky?”

“Why can’t I send a customer the information about my product and they make it?”

“Surely I can use that plastic for something else?”

When you sit with these questions for long enough the problem space becomes terribly exciting because it is rich in opportunity. A recent experience was the catalyst for me in understanding the deep potential of our current situation.

I hate going to the hair dresser for two reasons – they talk incessantly and because I need to take my glasses off I can’t make eye contact. This combination makes me horribly uncomfortable. My current hair dresser is a DJ on the side and because I know a thing or two about the dance music scene I am able to have a vaguely sensible conversation with him with out having to rely on visual cues. Our last conversation was about vinyl records and how the high oil price is putting the final nail in the coffin of the venerable 12 inch. The high oil price is causing a lot of small production companies to stop issuing their material on records. So a whole way of life will eventually die off – not because it was superseded by the CD, but because the raw material was too expensive. Now I don’t care if I was being fed a line or not – for illustrative purposes the message for me was clear; the design flaw is the reliance on an expensive raw product – the design opportunity is casting across the vast realm of material science for a replacement. Maybe the solution is to admit that CDs rule the roost – but maybe there is a solution that allows vinyl fans to retain the analog feel they treasure so much.

Deciding When Information Should Turn into Atoms

It is my belief that the key source of environmentally driven innovation will come from people who understand where the design flaws are in the current system. The key innovations will be taking lessons from software and integrating them into things. The real humdinger innovations will be designing business models that understand when information should turn into atoms. The gestalt that is open to the imaginative person who can see a design flaw and make the right decision about information and atoms is breath taking.

The auto industry is recognizing this change. Cars and the auto production process are changing and the changes they are making are focused on removing the design flaws and shifting the point at which information turns into atoms. I guess there is an irony in the fact that we have lots to learn from the bad boys; but given the fact that they have invested so much into learning these lessons we’d be very silly not to pay attention.

I Like My Complex World

Running for the hills is, at its core, a desire for a simplified world. It is a thirst for a world that is less complex. That saddens me – it is like burning an impressionist painting because the viewer has a preference for Mickey Mouse. I like my complex world, I like the challenge it poses and I like the rewards it provides.

Fifty years from now I want to be able to look up to the stars and see humanity changing and evolving. I don’t want to be living in a wooded village because I have no other choice.

I can understand how a reader might consider this a manifesto for the “technology will save us” crowd. To a degree it is but it is more fundamental than that because I see a huge opportunity for those that want to change the way in which people interact with one another. Looking at the problem as a series of design flaws is both a literal way of looking at social issues (under-educated children can be seen as a symptom of a design flaw in the social structure) and a vector for orchestrating social change (changing the relationship between producers and consumers could change the nature and expression of materialism). I am suggesting that the actual solution to the problems we face is not devolution. It is my concern that I see people thinking that the solution to our problems is to slink back down the path we have traveled, pointing back and saying “here be dragons”. I am suggesting that there is massive change afoot and if there was ever a time to orchestrate social change, now is the time. Slinking back down the path will involve missing the opportunity and we will all be worse off because of it.

We either accept the problems as a challenge and opportunity or we treat it as a threat. Treating it as a challenge will force humanity to grow, treating it as a threat will stunt our growth making us less capable at dealing with the next problem. My fear is that there are not enough believers in the opportunity and too many people cowered in fear.

FIN

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 6:49 pm and is filed under Business, Design/Art, Pragmatic Environmentalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.