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What is Design?

The dictum for which Einstein is famously quoted,”You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” bears a pointed similarity to the way we are presently enmeshed in a no man’s between an unknown future and well-trodden past. That is, we are generally accepting of the fact that our world has changed from its industrial-model platform; yet we continue to plan, design, build, educate and think as if it has not. The comparison to war and peace is inexact but illuminating. The idea that one will get us the other is a fantasy lived and re-lived throughout the ages. By the same token, new systems for human viability will not emerge from continued industrial machine age thinking.

There is a chasm, therefore, between the way we built our industrial age society and the manner in which we will navigate a post-industrial future. They bare so little resemblance that we have a hard time imagining that future, letting go of some of the major characteristics of the past to grab hold of… what? We’re not sure. And reaching for something we’re not sure of makes little sense to us. We have spent no small amount of energy greatly trying to eliminate uncertainty in many aspects of life. But this situation requires us to orient ourselves in this chasm of great uncertainty – a feat which points to our greatest weakness.

The even greater conundrum, it seems, is that it is up to us to change our own thinking and ways of learning about the world going forward. Instead of honing in on small problems, reductive elimination of unwanted elements and specialization, there is a need to zoom out to a point where can ask very broad questions, like, what is design?

The systems scholar Bela H. Banathy wrote extensively on this subject of societal transformation, asking some great questions and positing some rather intuitive points about changing the ways we live.. The following is from his research paper, We Enter the Twentieth Century with Schooling Designed in the Nineteenth. (Copyright 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

The design of social systems, such as education, is a future-creating human activity. People in these systems engage in design in order to create and implement systems, based on their vision of what those systems should be. Or, they may redesign their existing system in order to realize their changing expectations and aspirations and the expectations of their environment. Competence in design enables us to create systems that enrich the quality of our lives and add value to the systems in which we live and work.

In general, people in our educational systems are not yet aware of the potential and power of systems design. Education in design and expertise in design are limited to a few technical professions. But when it comes to the design of systems in which we live and work, we are the experts. When it comes to designing educational systems, the right and responsibility to design are shared by those who serve the system, who are served by the system and who are affected by it. It is such collective involvement in design that makes a system authentic and sustainable. Furthermore, each and every community is unique. It becomes the task of each and every community to design its own unique educational system. Nobody has the right to design educational systems – or any social system – for someone else. The age of social engineering by outside experts is over. We have arrived at the age of ‘user-designers’ people designing their own systems. That is what true empowerment is about. But empowerment cannot be given; it has to be learned.

A precondition of engaging in educational design is the development of competence among ‘user-designers’ that enables them to design their own system. Only the attainment of design competence makes empowerment a reality. Without it, empowerment is just an empty word, nothing more than political rhetoric. Thus we have to create opportunities and programs for design learning, for the development of design competence. People empowered by such learning will become competent individually to design their own lives and, collectively, to design the systems in which they live and work, design their communities and design their systems of living and human development.

Emphasis mine.

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The Wow & the Now

Because picking out the common literary motifs across highly-developed agricultural systems is not something one could do over a lunch, or even two, it becomes necessary to highlight and infer. Here we bounce around the periodic table that is now, that often occasions a wow, however polite.

How could something not be about the environment? The case for more traffic roundabouts.

I think I mentioned something similar, or forgot to, recently. But… navigation systems destroying localized knowledge?

What’s a dynamometer, you ask?

One of my work colleagues was on the teevee talking about this concept last night, and he would definitely know. I figure the more said about this the better. ‘Urine my parking spot,’ indeed.

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The Pleasure Principle

Happiness is a kind of Dodo, an odd bird, though certainly not extinct. It means as many different things as there are people, though our predilection for collective experience has shaped a view toward happiness that we generally agree on. Departures from this are seen as just that – alternative, avant ‘something’, deviant – indeed that is where these concepts come from. But we have given the pursuit of happiness such a central role in our public and private lives, it has become the thing we guard the most as well as infringe upon most regularly. The very flexibility of happiness in this regard seems to be its key and its lock, if you will.

As we often ignore the big problems in favor of smaller, more manageable ones, happiness can be difficult to deal with. Not being happy, per se, but defining what it is and going on from there. Simply because the royal We have attached many things to this idea or achieving it (a combination of property and resources that equal a certain level of luxury) those things must then be compromised as we pivot toward becoming more planetary minded. But does this mean we will have to compromise our levels of happiness? This is a high-minded question, surely, weighted-down with the concrete boots of bourgeois comforts that surround us, that make happiness, like most other things, needlessly more complicated than it needs to be.

But it’s the tale of the green tape, right? If we could just cut our consumption of food, fuel and shelter by eighty per cent and not be concerned about its impact on our happiness, the prosperous way down would lose both its spartan implications and its sex appeal and hence, become a limp marketing tool. It would seem to imply that we would become ambivalent about our self-preservation, which is impossible. So what are we trying to preserve if not our most flexible characteristic, i.e., our definition our happiness?

 

Via, the new economics foundation has released its second Happy Planet Index, an attempt to quantify happiness in terms of some factors more tangible than GDP, but also as a function of resource consumption. This is interesting on its own and represents multiple philosophical tangents at once. One way of getting to the point of being able to perceive and then opt for the reality of less is to release ourselves of some of the constraints we have battened to our happiness. 

Whatever it is, SUVs, suburbs, exurbs, plastics, a forty-hour work week with two weeks of vacation per year, a cellphone plan as individual as you are, the idea has grown more rather than less contained, simply because of all the pre-requirements.

The ways we use happiness to sell ourselves products bares a rather perverse relationship to the methods we use to shield our delicate selves from some of the unsavory things necessary to live as we do. What we are doing is protecting our happiness as if it were a sort of achievement in and of itself, and not a journey that could entail many things. That could even be quite different and nonetheless, still make us happy.

After all, if we can compare ourselves to others and imagine how things could be worse, can’t we also imagine how they could better?

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Holy Bleeding Billboards

Of course, my first thought was that the bleeding signs were for some kind of latter-day interstate-side stigmata, but they’re not:

To remind drivers to drive carefully during the rain in Papakura, New Zealand, the local government put out a rather disturbing billboard that bleeds when it rains. The billboard may be terrifying, but apparently it’s effective: there hasn’t been a fatality since.

That first thought was a product of living in an area where people/companies/churches regularly use billboards to put up ridiculous sounding messages from G_d, i.e., “Don’t make me come down there.” Seriously. You wouldn’t believe it.

But the rain/bleeding message about driver safety… now that sounds much more promising. It might even  begin to turn people against driving so much. Sort of like if we passed a law that said we label all plastic with how long it will last, a kind of expiration date or half-life, that would give some context to the ratio of how long we use a thing vs. how long it lasts. There wouldn’t be anything scandalous about this, necessarily; it would just be contextualizing some of the matter in our lives. Like collecting all the plastic you ‘use’ over the course of a year, piling it up in your yard to get a good idea of the volume. ‘Use’ because often a plastic spoon or stirring stick (!) passes through our hands for a only a few seconds before going into the trash. We don’t even think about it. But it goes somewhere. And stays, for a very long time. A few seconds, and you know it happens all the time.

We’re all so accustomed to this flavor of mass communication, that, turned toward some of our most ridiculously wasteful habits, it might begin to make some inroads. So, there are major possibilities for this brand of outdoor shock treatment. Giant reminders of the disposable nature of the society we’ve built would make some mad, some who’d rather not be bothered – and they could blame the plastic people, like I blame the G_d people. But then maybe they would know how embarrassed those G_d signs make me feel. For us all.

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Back at the Front, part MCMLXXVII

This could go without saying, but because it is within the purview of our chosen subject matter, and because it contributes in small order to the larger, if inelegant, semantic question, I should point out the several entries in the dictionary dedicated to green, which state

5. not fully developed or perfected in growth or condition; unripe; not properly aged: This peach is still green.
6. unseasoned; not dried or cured: green lumber.
7. immature in age or judgment; untrained; inexperienced: a green worker.
8. simple; unsophisticated; gullible; easily fooled

This will, of course, come as no surprise to most. But much of the very valuable print real estate devoted to the resignation of the governor of Alaska, not least of which is an op-ed in today’s NYT, seems to misunderestimate the most salient aspect of her disqualifications, the one which made her pick as VP the greatest political blunder in a history littered with them. Primarily, she was in no way ready. Though this is tripe, it may be instructive. For not the first time, entries 5-8 above seem to apply to writer and subject. He waxes:

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.

What matters a free education if one learns the wrong lessons? More:

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

None of that is right, and you condescend to address me as ‘dear reader’ at your peril. Reminds me of someone continually addressing all of us “my friends”.  Anyway, these are decidedly not the lessons of the Palin experience, such as it was. She should have never accepted the offer of VP for all of the reasons Douthat gives above but misapprehends with startling precision: she was not ready. Green in the worst way. We seemingly learned this from the 2001-2009 fiasco, but we need to pick the very smartest possible person who is available to be president. [.] That ‘s not different for women or men, black, white, red or yellow, with kids or without, religious or not. It’s an impossible job for the very best among us – and he’s saying it would have been more dispiriting to American democracy if she had somehow managed to make it into office? It’s hairless logic from Plan 9 all over again.

But if you venture out among small-town papers and cable news shows, this is the right-side victimology that greets you: Palin proves a regular person can’t be president. Under attack, all the time, beseiged by elites… what’s happening to this country? I think the question answers itself. Only in a children’s book would Palin be a credible foil to Obama. Her nomination was demeaning to her gender and social class, but only because her ostensible comrades tried to use them as a route to power above the interests of the country. Hey, there’s a story, Mr. conservative op-ed guy.

Okay. Back to your regularly-scheduled Eco meltdown.

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War’s ensanguined cloud

As so many of us celebrate American Independence Day with what we might consider healthy doses of our martial history, perhaps this proclivity should be leavened with some reverence for one of our most sympathetic souls. Walt Whitman was born in Brooklyn one hundred and ninety years ago and grew into a man whose patriotism was indistinguishable from his sensitivity to nature and the suffering of his fellow citizens. From among many elements of his development, this note from an online biography.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Whitman vowed to live a “purged” and “cleansed” life. He wrote freelance journalism and visited the wounded at New York-area hospitals. He then traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1862 to care for his brother who had been wounded in the war.

Overcome by the suffering of the many wounded in Washington, Whitman decided to stay and work in the hospitals and stayed in the city for eleven years. He took a job as a clerk for the Department of the Interior, which ended when the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, discovered that Whitman was the author of Leaves of Grass, which Harlan found offensive. Harlan fired the poet.

Whitman struggled to support himself through most of his life. In Washington, he lived on a clerk’s salary and modest royalties, and spent any excess money, including gifts from friends, to buy supplies for the patients he nursed. He had also been sending money to his widowed mother and an invalid brother. From time to time writers both in the states and in England sent him “purses” of money so that he could get by.

Penury aside, his legacy would have been quite different had he served as a general or president, much less a captain of industry, rather than a poet. What this says about us he says all the better, with much greater elegance and precision, here in Death of a Nature-Lover, from 1843.

Not in a gorgeous hall of pride
   Where tears fall thick, and loved ones sigh,
Wished he, when the dark hour approached
   To drop his veil of flesh, and die.

Amid the thundercrash of strife,
   Where hovers War’s ensanguined cloud,
And bright swords flash and banners fly
   Above the wounds, and groans, and blood.

Not there—not there! Death’s look he’d cast
   Around a furious tiger’s den,
Rather than in the monstrous sight
   Of the red butcheries of men.

Days speed: the time for that last look
   Upon this glorious earth has come:
The Power he served so well vouchsafes
   The sun to shine, the flowers to bloom.

Just ere the closing of the day,
   His fainting limbs he needs will have
Borne out into the fresh free air,
   Where sweet shrubs grow, and proud trees wave.

At distance, o’er the pleasant fields,
   A bay by misty vapors curled,
He gazes on, and thinks the haven
   For which to leave a grosser world.

He sorrows not, but smiles content,
   Dying there in that fragrant place,
Gazing on blossom, field, and bay,
   As on their Maker’s very face.

The cloud-arch bending overhead,
   There, at the setting of the sun
He bids adieu to earth, and steps
   Down to the World Unknown.

* * *

Independence Day, indeed.

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The Wow and the Now

New thematic posting alert, and I can’t promise this isn’t a slacker work-around to something a little more considered and original.

Nonetheless, two of the integrated sensations of living in our present age are the often-overlapping phenomena of “Wow, that’s amazing,” and “Now they tell us!” You can decide which is which.

Examples A-D:

A patent-pending device by which you can project your own bike lane.

Ant mega-colony has colonized much of the world, without becoming indifferent or uncivil to one another.

Having sex daily is the key to fertility.

A solar cell that can be tuned to the light of a particular latitude.

* * *

WDGM.net – combining exasperation with excitement since sometime last spring.

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How to Ctrl-Shift the Labor Force

I take this is essay in Foreign Policy, via, on the imminent “death of macho,” as mostly another set-up to establish the ever-present victimization of the most persecuted sub-species in the history of the world as seen through the prism of the last 2000 months: the white male. If it can be established to a reasonable doubt that the era of patriarchal hegemony is over, then the ground work can begin to rehabilitate, if not re-establish, its dominance.

Most titans of finance, captains of industry, even ‘fishers of men’ have sought to identify with the working man. Our bizarre allergy to elitism itself originated in what is perceived, from above, as the upward insecurities of the blue collar man, even though this phenomena resembles more a refusal to demean one’s position and accept certain peers, than any contempt for learning or the finer things. Still, the shift from an industrial- to an information-economy, while I might cheer the re-kindled emphasis on the mining of words, does appear to be a leveler from both directions, as the unwanted skills one group disdained and the other couldn’t afford begin to pile toward the center of the plate as the new source of growth and progress.

For several years now it has been an established fact that, as behavioral finance economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean memorably demonstrated in 2001, of all the factors that might correlate with overconfident investment in financial markets—age, marital status, and the like—the most obvious culprit was having a Y chromosome. And now it turns out that not only did the macho men of the heavily male-dominated global finance sector create the conditions for global economic collapse, but they were aided and abetted by their mostly male counterparts in government whose policies, whether consciously or not, acted to artificially prop up macho.

Fine. I’m not going to disturb children fighting dragons with paper swords. But these kinds of built-environments, where fields of straw men bleed seamlessly into subdivided new attacks on old resentments, are sprinkled with acknowledgements of collapse and economic re-alignment. And there, we should welcome the cover fire, even if it is just a sound effect-mimic from the mouths of babes.

How will we shift the labor force, from the chairman’s suite to the break-truck, from burning things to making things? What does that even mean? It’s not just green, of course,  but a whole slew of implications about all the things we’ve built society on that we’ve got to stop doing. And yet, people will still need jobs – more to the point, people will need education, healthcare and the raft of other social services that we have always needed but which been downgraded on the payscale and prestige-o-meter to the point where we ignored them and THAT became as much of an explanation for our deplorable state of waste and natural illiteracy as much as the machinations of a single gender.

So, godspeed the death of macho, if that’s going help facilitate the shift. But I would fear, from the straw sticking out of his sad, thread-bare Zegna, that reports of its death are indeed an exaggeration.

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Sustainable You

In order to keep oneself going, there are basic needs involving inputs and outputs which determine whether an entity dies or remains viable. In the debate over global climate change and whether anything should be done about it, we discuss and reflect on the effects of various elevations in temperature on our ability to secure the inputs necessary for viability. Or we act like there’s no such thing as climate change at all. But we’ll set that aside and believe for a moment that most people are sufficiently convinced.

Granting this, even if we can summon the political will to begin to limit greenhouse gas emissions to combat runaway climate change, would the resulting society otherwise be viable into the future? Do we believe we can achieve this and then be able to keep things – living standards, consumption levels – much as they are? In other words, would a reduced carbon-centric model be sustainable?

Many of the policy implications of limiting co2 emissions would necessarily alter the way we live. I trust this is a well understood point – and vociferous opposition to Waxman-Markey suggests that it is. The distaste and outrage toward this kind of change does not mean that it is any less likely. You can see the same evidence in the collapsed housing market, the financial services industry in tatters, the job losses in manufacturing, fractured global supply chains. When will this economy begin to recover? The question, taken with its constituent parts, almost answers itself. Or it should.

Even if there were no such things as rising oceans or the greenhouse effect, we could not sustain anywhere near present levels of energy consumption, and without those amounts of cheap energy, our society as presently construed cannot keep up its requisite levels of inputs needed for viability. We could not even keep it were it is.

Now, whether this adjustment is down or up would depend on nothing so much as our relative capacities for creativity and imagination – of course, the very reasons it all seems so unthinkable to so many. It is, literally. In order for there to be an evolution of our ideas about green, there will have to be a throughway beyond even sustainability.

Image: Henrik Hakansson, Fallen Forest, 2006.

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Protecting Green, redux

While I was watching the USA-Brazil Electric Meltdown Boo-galoo II yesterday, I wrote a long and rambling post on the Waxman-Markey bill’s passage that I ultimately decided not to publish. For all the reasons 2-0 is the most dangerous score in soccer, trying to write about all the reasons other than a warming planet that we should limit carbon emissions is a bit of a fool’s errand, and an unnecessary one at that.

… But this transportation model has corrupted our most basic social arrangements by de-valuing actual community, an isolation enshrined by a complex communication system that leaves us poorly informed across a broad spectrum. With a wealth of information at our fingertips, we are unconcerned about where we’re going or what we’re about to do, and unsure about what happened yesterday, much less last week or five years ago. We have achieved an acute ability to wait until the last minute to do anything, which marks both our prowess and near-native anxiety.

We idle across unnecessary distances, sitting in traffic, hailing this voluntary expansion of sphere as progress even as we sacrifice depth of influence for mere distance of reach. Bold and innovative companies have brought us a succession of needless products demeaning the most basic tools as obsolete in favor of ever-greater complexity; this economy grooms us on its own pre-eminence, via the tenets of disposability, while weening us of any regard for unique settings or uses, moments or sensations in favor of collective experience. Activities that do not directly produce a financial benefit we have come to understand as non-performing. The reality that planetary preservation is an issue worth weaving into our advertising, spending habits, food, shelter and energy strategies, government policies, fashions and other cultural identifiers is a massive acknowledgment that undermines its own cause the wider its use and dissemination.

Is this model in jeopardy? Should it be?

Exhibit A for why I usually read instead of write on Sunday. Fortunately, Paul Krugman is/was having none of that and demonstratively points out that climate change is in fact more than reason enough to pass the bill:

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

That’s the crux right there – they don’t like the policy implications, so they choose not to believe in the problem! It’s the ultimate in convenience, sort of like the new Shimmer – if someone was courageous enough to just point out that being a dessert topping AND a floor polish are converging conspiracies of household indulgence.

Speaking of which, here is a group that deserves special recognition: Democratic reps from districts Obama won who voted against bill. Jim Costa and Pete Stark of California; John Barrow of Georgia; Bill Foster of Illinois; Peter J. Visclosky of Indiana; Michael Arcuri of New York; Larry Kissell of North Carolina; Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio; Peter A. DeFazio of Oregon; Ciro D. Rodriguez and Solomon P. Ortiz of Texas; Glenn Nye of Virginia.