Posts Tagged ‘design’
“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play”*…
We all know that our behavior has to change if we’re going to continue healthily and happily to inhabit the earth. And we all have a few ideas of changes we can make to make a difference. But they are mostly incremental and remedial. What might a society designed to have a healthy relationship to its environment look like? Spencer R. Scott has some guidelines…
Many see the Industrial Revolution as its own kind of Renaissance. Over the past 300 years it enabled an accumulation of wealth that the world has never before seen. Yet, industrialization and the fossil-fuels that aided its growth did not come without a price. As a recent report warns, six of nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded. This unprecedented material abundance is only enjoyed by some, yet has polluted and put at risk the whole world’s air, rivers, oceans, forests, and food, and has caused two of humanity’s largest crises: climate change and the biodiversity crisis. The era of the industrial civilization is foreclosing on itself, and many are now pointing to the need for an ecological civilization to take its place. This would be a true Renaissance, where human and ecological flourishing alike are at the center of everything we do.
Before industrialization, humanity existed in an agricultural civilization during which productivity was low and people were organized around meeting basic needs. The industrial civilization ushered in a new high-productivity era that inevitably affected peoples’ values, lifestyles, beliefs, and the institutions that governed them. An ecological civilization will similarly necessitate a major paradigm shift. As Jeremy Lent asserts in “What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?”, we need “a transformation in the way we make sense of the world, and a concomitant revolution in our values, goals, and collective behavior.”
From Latin, ecology means “knowledge of home” and ecological means the “applied knowledge of home.” While the old industrial system is characterized by an indifference to how life on this planet works, an ecological civilization operates with ecological principles at its core – with behaviors, values, goals, and institutions organized around the applied knowledge of life on Earth.
In her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus outlines some of Life’s Principles here on Earth:
Life runs on sunlight. Life rewards cooperation. Life builds from the bottom up. Life banks on diversity. Life recycles everything. Life builds resilience through diversity, decentralization, and redundancy. Life optimizes rather than maximizes. Life selects for the good of the whole system. In short, life creates the conditions conducive to life.
Inspired by Benyus’ Life’s Principles and the work of sustainable development scholar, Jiahua Pan, I created 6 ingredients for an ecological civilization…
Six ingredients for a more resilient future: “An Ecological Civilization is the Renaissance We’ve Been Waiting For,” from @SpencerRScott.
* James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
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As we think systemically, we might spare a thought for Guillaume Amontons; he died on this date in 1705. A physicist who made formative contributions to the understanding of friction, he was also an accomplished designer of scientific instruments– perhaps most notably, the air thermometer, which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) to measure temperature. His approach led to the emergence of the concept of “absolute zero” (long before the advent of cryogenics). These days, there’s more attention at the other end of the scale…
“A suburb is an attempt to get out of reach of the city without having the city be out of reach”*…
In mid-twentieth century, in contrast to the noisy and diverse city, the suburbs were seen as spacious, segregated, and quiet— a much more promising state of affairs to corporations bent on expansion. American cities had been spreading out into metropolitan areas since the 19th century; but for most of that time city centers remained the hub of economic and social life. As Luise A. Mozingo explains, that began to change after World War II; residents and businesses alike began to leave…
… As a number of scholars have emphasized, the iconic suburbs of white, middle-class, nuclear families were a well-known part of this story but by no means all of it. Added to prewar suburban expansion, the rapid restructuring of postwar metropolitan areas formed a complexity of patches, spokes, and swaths of separated, specialized, and low-density land uses in the peripheral zones around older city centers, including industry, retail centers, ethnic enclaves, and working-class neighborhoods. This rapid decentralization created the conditions that were conducive to the invention of specialized suburban management facilities by large corporations.
To many privileged Americans of the 1950s and 1960s, the center city appeared to be in a state of inexorable decline. The proliferating automobile inundated the center city’s gridded 19th-century street pattern, and “congestion” seemed intractable and highly detrimental to economic activity. Increasing numbers of people of color walked the streets. Vacancies and abandoned properties were on the rise as tenants relocated to the suburbs and owners could find no replacements. New construction in the city center required homage to an ensconced and layered system of political patronage. Even then, wedging in new skyscrapers that could accommodate large corporate staffs in a single building proved difficult in blocks divided into multiple parcels of land and built out with varied buildings, including many used for industry. To redress these perceived shortcomings, the urban renewal process acquired property, removed tenants, destroyed buildings, and reparceled land in order to insert freeways, offer large lots for corporate offices, supply parking, and confine the poor to mass public housing. In the process, it took apart what remained of the vitality of the old urban core and added to the inventory of open urban lots and dysfunctional neighborhoods. The center city was noisy, diverse, crowded, unpredictable, inflexible, expensive, old, and messy — a dubious state of affairs for postwar capitalists bent on expansion.
In contrast, the suburbs seemed to warrant a sense of forward-looking optimism. At the city’s edge, an effective alliance of well-financed real estate investors, large property owners, local governments, federal loan guarantors, and utopian planners opened property for speedy development. Building along federal- and state-funded road systems that brought these large tracts of land into the economy of metropolitan regions, this alliance conceived of low-density, auto-accessed landscapes of highly specified uses with plenty of parking, and wrote these forms into stringent zoning and building regulations. Once built, these suburban expansion zones were deliberately resistant to change, with the end of producing both social stasis and secure real estate values.
The suburbs as a whole may have been diverse, but the process of building their component parts created insidious racial and class divisions. While the separation of different classes and races of home dwellers is the best-understood part of this spatial process, all kinds of workers were categorically set apart in discrete landscapes as well — corporate executives from factory labor, retail clerks from typists, electronics researchers from accountants. Hence the suburbs were predictable, spacious, segregated, specialized, quiet, new, and easily traversed — a much more promising state of affairs to corporations bent on expansion.
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My book “Pastoral Capitalism” describes how pioneering projects established the essential landscape patterns of the corporate campus, corporate estate, and office park and how, from those few early projects, other corporations followed suit in great numbers. These landscape types became embedded in the expectations of the corporate class and could, at a glance, embody both the reality and prospect of capitalist power. Hence, the development forms have remained remarkably consistent for six decades. By the end of the 20th century, the suburbs, not the central business district, contained the majority of office space in the United States. This was a new and potent force in the process of suburban expansion…
More at “The Birth of the Pastoral Corporation.”
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As we ponder the prominence of the periphery, we might send altitudinous birthday greetings to Louis Sullivan; he was born on this date in 1856. An architect, he was hugely influential in the Chicago School, a mentor to Frank Lloyd Wright, and an inspiration to the Chicago group of architects who have come to be known as the Prairie School. He is considered by many to have been the “father of modernism” in architecture (the phrase “form follows function” is attributed to him) and (as he pioneered the steel high-rise) “the father of the skyscraper.”
Indeed, in Sullivan’s honor, this date is National Skyscraper Day.
“There is nothing nicer than a kitchen really made for a cook. Things that are designed to be used always have an innate beauty.”*…
In an earlier (R)D, we looked at Lillian Gilbreth‘s hugely influential design for “The Kitchen Practical.” At roughly the same time, a similar, but interestingly different design was debuted in Frankfurt. 99% Invisible has the story…
After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive housing effort was, in many ways, eye-poppingly impressive, with all new construction and sleek, cutting edge architecture. But one room in these new housing units was far and away the most lauded and influential: and that was the kitchen.
Many consider the Frankfurt Kitchen to be nothing less than the first modern kitchen. [It did pre-date Gilbreth’s creation by a couple of years, though it’s unclear whether Gilbreth knew of it.] A few of these kitchens still exist, some in museums. And it’s strange to see one there, because to modern eyes, it doesn’t appear to be high art. It just looks like a kitchen.
But so many things that we totally take for granted now as standard kitchen features were pretty unheard of before they showed up in the Frankfurt Kitchen. Things like a cookstove that wasn’t also your house’s heat source; well-planned storage to stash your plates and glasses; a way to wash dishes that didn’t involve hauling a heavy tub of water into the house; and slatted racks for drying dishes over the countertops.
Standardization ruled this design. Before, for example, there weren’t long surfaces that were uniform in height. Most kitchens just had whatever random assortment of tables you could throw in them. The Frankfurt Kitchen, countertops and all, was mass-produced off-site — which was a totally new phenomenon. It was designed to fit in relatively small apartments. So, here is perhaps the most visibly striking thing about the kitchen: it is super compact.
To the woman who designed it, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the Frankfurt Kitchen was a revolution. Not just because it was part of a huge effort to get people housed, but because of its wildly efficient layout. It was designed to fit, and to bring modern appliances and architecture to the masses — but it was also designed to conserve the user’s energy. To make cooking as fast and easy as possible. And to Schütte-Lihotzky, that ease was political…
Schutte-Lihotzky was methodical and scientific in her planning. She studied how women used their kitchens, and mapped out their movements like football plays or complex dance steps, with little lines across the floor, and streamlined accordingly, until she came up with this very design – a kitchen in which no single step or reach of the arm was unnecessary.
From the 1920s into the present, many architects and home cooks celebrated, even revered the Frankfurt Kitchen. And the echoes of her design are still everywhere. But Schütte-Lihotzky’s feminist legacy is a bit more complicated. She was revolutionary in that she paid attention to the kitchen, a space that had historically been neglected by architects and designers. She laid everything out with the goal of lessening the burden of housework for women. But by the time Schütte-Lihotzky designed this revolutionary kitchen, many feminists had already been questioning whether private kitchens could ever be designed to liberate women. Or whether they were irredeemable, and needed to be abolished. And their stories show just how much design can accomplish… and how much it can’t…
The instructive story of “The Frankfurt Kitchen,” from @99piorg.
* Julia Child
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As we save steps, we might spare a thought for M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher; she died on this date in 1992. A food writer and founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library, she published 27 books (including a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin) and hundreds of essays and reviews. Of her work, W. H. Auden once remarked, “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”
“We all have our price, and mine’s a lot lower than that”*…
From Model Thinking, a modest proposal to end the war in Ukraine…
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the loss of countless lives, hundreds of billions in damage and about $150bn financial and military aid from allies, primarily the United States and the Europe Union (EU).
One potential idea to end the conflict is to pay Russian soldiers, often unwilling combatants, to surrender. Indeed, the Ukrainian government, shortly after the invasion began, offered Russian soldiers 5 million roubles ($48,000), or four years’ salary for the average Russian, to do so.
More than a year later, the scheme has received very little public attention. At the time, Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, said the scheme would have limited effect because Russian soldiers considering it had to weigh it against three large costs, namely the risks of:
- Being shot for desertion by the Russian army
- Ukrainian soldiers disobeying international law and shooting any captured prisoners
- Them being returned to Russia in a peace deal where they would most likely face death or imprisonment for defecting.
Caplan suggests an improvement: offering not only payment but also EU citizenship for Russian soldiers and their families. This means that defecting soldiers and their families can both establish themselves and permanently enjoy an income several times higher than their previous life while facing little risk of forced repatriation. Although this scheme has attracted some interest elsewhere, no attempt has yet been made to model its impact.
In this post, we provide a simple model of the effect of such a policy. Conservatively, we conclude that if there is a <17% chance of death while trying to defect, a $100,000 payment is sufficient to incentivise the average Russian soldier to do so – meaning that it might cost as little as $20bn to end the war entirely…
A fascinating (if perhaps optimistic) analysis of how much Russian soldiers would need to be paid to defect if also offered EU citizenship: “Paying for Peace,” from @DuncanMcClement and @jasonhausenloy in @model_thinking.
* Your correspondent’s motto
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As we put the mercy in mercenary, we might recall that it was on this date in 1958 that the Peace Symbol made it’s public debut at the British nuclear disarmament movement’s march from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire.
Designed by Gerald Holtom, it featured the super-imposition of the flag semaphore for the characters “N” and “D,” taken to stand for “nuclear disarmament.”
“If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize”*…
Alex Murrell on the surge of sameness all around us…
The interiors of our homes, coffee shops and restaurants all look the same. The buildings where we live and work all look the same. The cars we drive, their colours and their logos all look the same. The way we look and the way we dress all looks the same. Our movies, books and video games all look the same. And the brands we buy, their adverts, identities and taglines all look the same.
But it doesn’t end there. In the age of average, homogeneity can be found in an almost indefinite number of domains.
The Instagram pictures we post, the tweets we read, the TV we watch, the app icons we click, the skylines we see, the websites we visit and the illustrations which adorn them all look the same. The list goes on, and on, and on…
Perhaps when times are turbulent, people seek the safety of the familiar. Perhaps it’s our obsession with quantification and optimisation. Or maybe it’s the inevitable result of inspiration becoming globalised…
But it’s not all bad news.
I believe that the age of average is the age of opportunity…
Lots more mesmerizing examples: “The age of average,” from @alexjmurrell.
* Richard Feynman
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As we think different, we might recall that it was on this date in 1976 that Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne signed a partnership agreement that established the company that would become Apple Computer, Inc.– a company that was all about trumping sameness– on January 3, 1977.
Wayne left the partnership eleven days later, relinquishing his ten percent share for $2,300.
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