“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.

“Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

It’s too often assumed that our global water supply is without limit, yet available fresh water is less than half of one percent of the world’s total water stock. We must look to the limits, clean what we have, and help those suffering from thirst.

According to the United Nations, Europeans spend $11 billion per year on ice cream, $2 billion more than the estimated total money needed to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world’s population. Astounding as that sounds, the reality is that billions go without clean water everyday and more than five million people, most of them children, die from illnesses caused by drinking poor-quality water every year.

According to Maude Barlow, in her comprehensive report on the world’s global water supply (”Blue Gold”), before we can develop a worldwide water ethic, it’s compulsory that we first acknowledge the profound human inequity in the access to fresh water sources around the world. Rather than insisting on the water-rich sharing with the water-poor, and unnecessarily damaging local bionetworks, we need to first look to sustainable solutions. In many cases, the technology to remediate this global condition lies dormant in labs and test facilities all over the developed world. In other cases, corporations like Oakville, Ontario-based Zenon Environmental, Inc. ( http://www.zenon.com/ ), and water stewards like eco-designer John Todd and environmental physicist Ashok Gadgil recognize the capacity we have for action and refuse to sit still on the issue: Gadgil, based in San Francisco at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, has made it his mission to globally distribute his invention, UV Waterworks, a lightweight, cost-effective unit that makes dirty water safe to drink by way of ultraviolet light. John Todd, founder of Ocean Arks International, designs and builds “living” systems to restore balance to distressed ecosystems.

In short: providing clean water to the world is one of the most easily resolved global crises. The design solutions are manifold, ranging from large-scale, high-tech enterprises to ingenious small-scale initiatives. (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 enable sustainable mobility.

The twentieth century is not just a century that has automobiles. It’s also a century that doesn’t have horses. This is an insight that we need to get our heads around in some basic way. We need to overcome this blindness that we’ve had about what the process of time does to us.
Bruce Sterling, futurist and science-fiction writer.

In the Massive Change book, we argued that “the car eliminated the problems associated with the horse and buggy and answered the need for personal liberty. But its success brought about a new set of problems. With millions of cars now clogging up the urban landscape in both the developed and developing worlds, the global design challenge is to dream up lighter, smarter, and less expensive options.”

Science-fiction literature is rich in imaginative future transportation technologies. Robert Heinlein alone proposed the Rolling Road (1940), the Slidewalk (1948), the Copter Harness (1954), the Wormhole Gate (1955), and the Bounce Tube Pneumatic Travel (1956). Asimov imagined the faster-than-light hyperdrive (1951) and the Gravitic Repulsion Elevator (1951). And then there was the “Mattel”’s Hoverboard in Back to the Future II (1989).

Today, the task of imagining faster, smarter, cleaner, more effective mobility is no longer exclusive to the realm of science fiction. Fantastic new products, working prototypes and experimental devices are being introduced by entrepreneurs and visionaries around the world.

The Moller Skycar is a vertical take-off and landing aircraft, or a flying car. Though it is still in the testing phase, it passed its first flight tests in 2003, and its inventor Paul Moller is now developing it for actual deployment. In Massive Change, we generally avoided discussion of anything less than a working prototype, in order to concentrate on Reality, not Hypothesis. But we make an exception for the Moller Skycar, since the ambition seems so primordial that we simply have to accomplish it one day: provide the ability for personal, easy-to-use flight mobility. Leonardo would be thrilled. (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.

Back to School.

When we developed Massive Change, we were struck by the philosophy of Bill Drayton’s Ashoka Foundation ( http://www.ashoka.org” ). Ashoka: Innovators for the Public is a global nonprofit organization located in Arlington, Virginia USA is the world’s largest association of leading social entrepreneurs. Ashoka was founded by Drayton in 1981 to identify and financially support leading social entrepreneurs though social venture capital with the goal of elevating the citizen sector to a competitive level equal to the business sector. Drayton’s notion is that the not-for-profit sector used to mimic the government sector but, yearning to be effective, has recently turned to the private sector as its model. As a catalyst for social progress, the government sector has proven to be depressingly static and ineffective: in the developed world, the model hasn’t changed significantly in 50 years, whereas the business sector has transformed itself several times in the same period. What’s encouraging, is that non-governmental organizations have stepped up to the plate to fulfill the social mandate we once expected of the government, by employing the models of entrepreneurship that have fueled business. Similarly, many business leaders have used their fortune, and their business savvy, to foster significant social progress.

Nowhere has this change in leadership been more evident than in the area of education. The most notable instance is that of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation is committed to creating equity by focussing on health in the developing world, and education in the developed world. Specifically, they have focussed on improving the quality of high school education in the United States. Gates famously declared, in a much-quoted speech, “America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded - though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they’re working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.”

Gates goes on to say, “Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship. The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students, are tracked into courses that won’t ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job - no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach. This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.” (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.

I, Robot.

Suddenly robots are everywhere. Robotics is widely regarded as one of the four areas of technological development that is dramatically transforming how we live and what it means to be human. The other areas are Genetics, Information Technology and Nanotechnology, taken together as GRIN.

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, robots were for me the stuff of Isaac Asimov novels, the Six Million Dollar Man, Lost in Space, and Robby the Robot who originally appeared in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. In other words, robots, for most of us, were clearly in the realm of speculation. Even in the 1980s, with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Blade Runner and RoboCop, it was hard to imagine the now ubiquitous, and exponentially growing, presence of robots and robotics. From the trivial, say Sony’s Aibo mechanical pet, to industrial, military, environmental, and space travel applications, robots are changing everything.

Perhaps one of the most remarkable areas of development, however, is the field of bionics. Bionics refers generally to the exchange between life sciences and design and engineering. It’s a two-way street that involves the design of nature itself, but also mimicking patterns and systems found in nature to better inform design. The case of Jesse Sullivan, featured in the current issue of Business Week, is exemplary. Jesse Sullivan is uses a fully robotic limb through a nerve-muscle graft. His bionic arm, a prototype developed by Todd A. Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, differs from most other prostheses in that it does not use pull cables or nub switches to function. Instead it uses micro-computers to perform a much broader range of complex motions. It also allows him to fully sense pressure. Sullivan had to have his arms amputated at the shoulder after an industrial accident. Seven weeks after the amputation, he received matching bionic prostheses from Dr. Todd A. Kuiken. Originally the prostheses were operated from neural signals at the amputation sites, but Sullivan developed hyper-sensitivity from his skin grafts, causing great discomfort, so he had neural surgery to graft nerves, which originally lead to his arm, to his chest. The sensors for his bionic arms have been moved to the left side of his chest to receive signals from the newly grafted nerve endings. According to Business Week, Kuiken “imagines that one day people might become bionic beings like TV’s Colonel Steve Austin. But he says that’s probably decades away.” (more…)