“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

Sorry for the brief hiatus. Here’s a round-up of massive changes in progress:

“Genetically modified foods have caused no end of anxiety and distrust. But not genetically modified shirts. Why?

“Readers may imagine the reason is that there is no such thing as a genetically modified shirt, and they would be half right. The shirt genome has yet to be mapped, and the heritability of sleeve length is not widely accepted in either the textile or molecular biology community.

“That doesn’t mean there are no genes being fiddled with in the making of that oxford cloth button down. Genetically modified cotton, also known as Bt, or transgenic, cotton, is grown all over the world and is present in unknown numbers and styles of garments. (more…)

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

We will eradicate poverty.

It is not crazy for us to think about having within our power, uniquely for the first time in the history of the world, the chance to end extreme poverty within a generation. That is what the numbers show.

- Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute

In Massive Change we argued, in unison with Sachs, that “when citizens of the one world we share - in Africa’s heartland, most poignantly - are starving and dying of curable diseases every day, it is our duty to direct our dollars to sustainable economic development, not already bloated military budgets. An integrated strategy will result in the deepening of global security and the alleviation of abject poverty and its indicators: violence, terror, and disease. It will depend on the formation of policies for the prevention of future conflict and partnerships between the world’s rich and the world’s poor. Countries in need can’t do this alone.”

The millennium development goals put in place by all UN member states in 2000 to reduce extreme poverty by 2015 required that poor countries pursue good governance and responsible economic and social stewardship, while rich countries helped “well-governed poor countries through expanded aid, trade, and technology transfer.” Many African countries - Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Benin, Ethiopia - have shown exceptional leadership and effort in the transformation of dire political scenarios into thriving democracies. They have the will, but they still lack the way.

Although the governance is admirably in place in many instances - in Africa and elsewhere - the means are sorely lacking to build the necessary infrastructure and social services that will help impoverished nations on the road to self-sustainability and eventual prosperity. Now that we can create a world of shared prosperity, what will we do? (more…)

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

Project Management as a Change Agent.

I’m very excited to introduce our first guest author! Josh Polley has taken on the issue of the role of project management in delivering massive change.

Massive Change celebrates the innovative use of materials, science, and design to better the world and mankind. Inherent in every one of the examples are project management tools and techniques that steer the product through its life cycle. The subjective nature of how actual success of the project is measured, and who measures it, is often where the rub lies. The designer may see the creation of the product alone and deem it a success. The actual customer the product is made for probably expects some sort of reasonable return on investment. The project manager decides, organizes, plans, controls, and leads all aspects of the project; ultimately making this person responsible for the “success” of the project. Below are brief accounts on the profession and how designers can shape not only the projects, but the tools to help manage them as well.

Poor project management practices have been identified with the Transrapid Shanghai train (Massive Change example) and although technologically advanced, some consider this project a failure. No actual downtown station due to a change in project scope, limited hours of operation, and high cost of tickets all contribute to the fact that the train travels at only 15% capacity. These and other negative aspects of the project could have been avoided with proper project management, which would have resulted in greater use and therefore greater project success. (more…)

“Now that we can do anything, what will we do?”

Welcome to Massive Change Weekly, an electronic newsletter sharing news about groundbreaking achievements in global design.

Vanity Fair Celebrates Change

Everyday it seems that the design-for-change becomes more and more mainstream. The current issue of Vanity Fair, the “Special Green Issue”, is a case in point. The cover is part doom and gloom (”A Threat Graver Than Terrorism: Global Warming - how much of New York, Washington and other American cities will be underwater?”), and part an optimistic call-to-action (”A New American Revolution”). That’s followed by a gloomy, the end-is-nigh preface by Graydon Carter, who complains that his book on George W., What We’ve Lost, didn’t sell that well because it was a “horrific downer”. True enough. In contrast to the sense of hopelessness in Carter’s book, though, the May 2006 issue then goes on to celebrate some of the amazing change initiatives that are taking place in the world, despite the woeful misguidedness in Washington, though as we acknowledged in these pages a few months ago, even there Bush’s call for an embrace of ethanol suggests that the embrace of positive change is terrifically widespread.

Many of the stories and characters familiar to followers of Massive Change show up in the VF special issue, as well as many other developments worth checking out, including:

AOL co-founder Steve Case’s new Lime lifestyle media platform (cable TV, satellite radio, internet, PDA and mobile phone programming), promoting a clean, green lifestyle (http://www.lime.com);

The Twike (featured in the Massive Change exhibition), a human and electric powered hybrid (http://www.twike.com); (more…)