In April I realized I was going to be graduating soon, and I still hadn’t recieved my contract to teach in India. I started freaking out and thinking I needed to apply for a job. I was randomly visiting BruceMauDesign and saw this call:
I decided to apply. I asked a good friend to read the essays I wrote in response to these questions.
He said:
The easiest way to eradicate poverty is to kill all the poor people.
His point being that any utopic pursuits, especially technoutopic pursuits have a implicit dark side by being absolutist. Buckminster Fuller is still one of my heroes, but one still has to recognize how his philosiphy didn’t always take into account the many ways that humans and various cultures know the world.
My friend scolded me for even responding to such technoutopic absurdities, devoid of the political realities and systematic flaws that would need to be addressed for any massive change to occur. I have to say when it comes to design gurus I tend to lean towards John Thackara.
Thackara’s question: “We know what technology can do, but what is it for?” leaves the door open to slowing down or deciding not to impliment technologies that don’t do what humans want them to do.
But, if nothing else, the range of systems thinkers that the Massive Change gathered is impressive and worth responding to. So I did.
Here is the essay I wrote:
01 In the future how will we communicate?
In the future humans will continue the tendency towards distributed real-time authorship through the medium of ambient information environments. These communication flows will be co-authored by non-human actors such as weather patterns, other living organisms, and changes in the economy.
I look forward to shopping for groceries based on what food scraps the squirrel outside my apartment prefers. If I had a guess right now I would say he likes to eat locally and in season. And I have always wanted the non-native tree on my street to tell me the story of how it got planted there in the first place.
The convergence of the blogosphere, RFID tags and cheap environmental sensors will facilitate rich ambient information environments. These environments will passively display the data streams that now come attached with most living things and most human artifacts. Instead of being presented with information that is global and infinite in scope we will be surrounded by information that is primarily local and reflects who and what is present.
We talk to our plants now, but in the future our plants will talk back.
The outputs of these flows will not just be screens. We will use everything from synthetic biology to augmented reality to foreground some information and put other information in the periphery. Objects will talk about themselves and to each other.
Right now T-shirts talk very slow, and companies mostly design what they say. In the future we will wear our emotions, or at least our flickr streams, on our sleeves. And the clouds rolling out, with our permission, might reconfigure the color scheme on our shirt, to better fit the new light conditions on the street.
In the future there will be very little one-to-many communication that attempts to impose a single truth. An increasingly complex and diverse mental environment will require iterative bottom-up and local communication that will accumulate related truths. It will be up to designers to shape these ambient information environments to take into account the ideas and desires of non-human actors as well as humans, and to promote a sustainable mental environment.
02 Will we shift from the service of war to the service of life?
Yes. The stakes are so high that there is no other option. There will continue to be conflict between communities but humanity will have to undertake its largest project so far: the shift from the service of war to the service of life. The rise of existential threats brought on by nuclear proliferation, environmental catastrophes, and the burgeoning biotech and nanotech industries, will require this shift to prevent humanities obsolescence.
In the short term, this shift will largely be catalyzed by work on global climate change. Now that we understand global warning to be as potentially destructive as inter-national conflict, flows of capital will move away from the military industrial complex and towards the industrial ecological complex. This includes many clusters in the economy such as energy, agriculture, building, transportation, health services, and communication. In the same way that military technologies are adapted for civilian use, we will see a technology transfer from this movement. This will spurn further innovation with the rise of ecological cottage industries. When it becomes more profitable to restore environmental damage than create weapons of mass destruction or mechanisms of mass consumption we will be at a tipping point in terms of the transition.
03 How will we eradicate poverty?
One key to eradicating poverty is to develop and distribute tools and services that promote local, bottom-up solutions to poverty. People who work and play in a place have expert knowledge that is gained through lived experience and cannot be fully captured by outside observers. Instead of trying to force top down and non-local solutions on peoples, we can provide public and private infrastructure and tools for self-improvement and self-organization. A good example of this model is the use of mobile phones by poor rural farmers who are able to skip middlemen, and bring their goods to markets at fair prices. Similarly, the distribution of cartographic authorship through location aware mobile technology and GPS infrastructure will help people self organize access to water and other necessary resources and goods without the top down impositions and corruption of state governments.
However, this bottom up model needs to be supplemented with a global push to redefine the ways we assess value. Policies that only use neoclassical economic models and tools for benchmarking will be unsuccessful in taking into account the natural, cultural, and social value generated by people and situations. A more holistic approach to economics that takes into account these other forms of capital will allow designers the world over to implement new products, services, and situations which are culturally and environmentally sustainable.
Under a natural capital approach the fossil fuel driven economies of the first world start to appear culturally and environmentally impoverished, and in need of change as well. This may well help spurn some of the systemic changes that put NGOs in a position to be more effective. The ubiquity of the global warming debate has already begun to contribute to this necessary change towards a more holistic economics. Industrial ecological models and service ecology design will both flourish under an economics that takes into account a wider variety of capital.
Finally, we must focus on changes on the ground that can have a cascading affect on communities’ success. Focusing on tools that facilitate small, habitual transactions such as microcredit and microfinance have already shown both power and sustainability. In particular, tools that empower and educate women through everyday transactions need to be put at the front of any poverty eradication program.
Post a Comment