“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.

Massive Change odds and sods this week.

Here’s a great website, RED, an online journal put out by the Design Council: http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/mt/red/index.html. Red says it’s “challenging accepted thinking on economic and social issues through design innovation.” The Design Council itself is a British agency incorporated by Royal Charter that “enhances prosperity and well-being in the UK by demonstrating and promoting the vital role of design in a modern economy”, across business, education and other public sectors. It was founded in 1944 as the “Council of Industrial Design” by Hugh Dalton, the President of the Board of Trade in a British government, at the height of WW II. Today, it provides “online knowledge and other design resources” and “a series of projects that see designers and other experts working directly with selected businesses, schools and public services organisations to integrate design thinking and methods thoroughly into their strategies and systems”. RED is an incredible resource and highly recommended by us.

Our readers write: Michael Lea drew my attention to this article in SEED magazine. “Eco-friendly city planners searching for sustainable materials and technology should look to traditional communities such as cave villages for inspiration, says a researcher and former architect. Jiang Lu, an assistant professor of interior design at Eastern Michigan University, has spent the last year studying cave dwellings in Shaanxi Province of China and noted the practical methods that power their sustainable existence. She recommends that would-be sustainable city planners in the West design dwellings based on local materials and culture, connecting architecture with daily life. ‘Their life cycle is so simple, so pure. They don’t waste anything; they don’t have any impact on the environment,’ she said. ‘That’s really impressive’.”

Although I’ve never been, apparently the Aspen Design Summit is an incredible annual event for “massive change thinking”. This year’s summit is being moderated by John Thackara, who describes himself as a “symposiarch who designs events, projects, and organizations. He is also the Director of Doors of Perception (Doors), a design futures network with offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore. Founded as a conference in 1993, Doors now connects together a worldwide network of visionary designers, thinkers, and grassroots innovators. This unique community of practice is inspired by two related questions: ‘we know what new technology can do, but what is it for?’ and, ‘how do we want to live?’.” Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth (http://www.brucemaudesign.com/manifesto.html) was originally presented at a Doors conference back in 1998. (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.

Set me free.

The most profound impact of information technology has been to transfer the potential of the scientific method - the ever-expanding accumulation of knowledge - to the cultural sphere. Internet protocols allowed us to link any two computers, enabling an explosive global network of networks. Emerging grid protocols for distributed computing allow us to link everything else - data-bases, simulation and visualization tools, and the unused computing power of machines - generating a worldwide cultural accumulation beyond imagin-ation, available to anyone, anywhere.

Learning to share: To imagine that any one closed group could solve the complex problems we face today is folly. The free and open software movements promise to overcome our territorial attitudes and take advantage of our collective potential.

Information doesn’t want anything, but people want it to be free so that they can trust it. Hidden information always makes you wonder who’s hiding it and why.

- Esther Dyson, chairman of EDventure Holdings

In his book Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling talks about information now seeming like everything to everybody. He writes, “Information is commerce, media, politics, science, art, education, military power, a good, a service, a dessert topping, a floor wax, porn…” We’re clearly soaking in it. Its abstract pervasiveness, though, should not make it any less important - in terms of scrutinizing its contents - than anything else. We ought to create enough of a critical distance from information that we can ask questions about the operating forces that bring it into being. (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 design evolution (II).

On the front page of the Globe and Mail Monday morning this week as a feature article, “Will consumers have a beef with test-tube meat?“. And in the New York Times Science section, there appeared today an article, “Cloning May Lead to Healthy Pork“. What’s going on?

According to the Globe, “scientists can grow frog and mouse meat in the lab, and are now working on pork, beef and chicken. Their goal is to develop an industrial version of the process in five years. If they succeed, cultured or in vitro meat could be coming to a supermarket near you. Consumers could buy hamburger patties and chicken nuggets made from meat cultivated from muscle cells in a giant incubator rather than cut from a farm animal.”

The benefits could be enormous: meat could be engineered to have the nutrition portfolio of salmon, for example, thus greatly reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Further, theoretically in vitro meat could reduce the risk of diseases like mad cow and avian flu. Finally, engineered meat could reduce the environmental impact of soil depletion, irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides and energy now necessary to produce animals for slaughter. And it would reduce the amount of manure and other waste.

The Times article reported on scientists who have successfully cloned pigs that “make their own omega-3 fatty acids, potentially leading to bacon and pork chops that might help your heart.” (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 design evolution.

When Franklin, Crick, and Watson discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, the realm of the living was rendered as a system of information. Since then, we’ve grown in our capacity to explore every aspect of life as we know it - from biological systems and products to new forms of intervention in medicine and genetic engineering. As Alvin Toffler wrote in The Third Wave, “Second Wave thinkers conceived of the human species as the culmination of a long evolutionary process; Third Wave thinkers must now face the fact that we are about to become the designers of evolution.”

That being said, it will do us no good to put ourselves above nature. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson has said, “our species and its way of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.” As “designers of evolution” it behooves us to learn from its genius. I recently met Julian Vincent, professor of biomimetics at the University of Bath in the UK. Vincent, trained as an engineer, started his career with the intention of engineering nature but soon realized that engineering probably had more to learn from nature than the other way around.

Biomimetics, or biomimicry, the application of methods and systems found in nature to the fields of engineering and design, has its modern roots in the thought of Buckminster Fuller, but its importance is now gaining critical mass. One of the leaders in the field today is Janine Benyus, author of Biomimicry: Innovations Inspired by Nature. (more…)