Hasta La Ideas

This is the first post in a year-long series, Apocalypse 2012, where our favorite futurists, resiliency and disaster experts examine the role of design to help you prepare for…the end?

It’s a pretty fascinating time to witness the demise of the most powerful and rich nation in the history of the world. All doom and gloom aside, for those of us who fancy ourselves drive-by-ethnographers, it’s good people watching. What’s more, it’s predictable and rhythmic, as events occur and pundits pundit and protesters protest, all to the steady beat of mass production. There’s no need for unnecessary anticipation, as we can easily guess when the next occupier will be tear-gassed, or when the next presidential hopeful will make an audacious and racist remark; we’re pretty much guaranteed a rhetorical and canned response from our administration, followed by news of a pop star acting drunk and disorderly. It repeats so frequently, and with such a blanded regularity, that nothing is unbelievable, nothing too grotesque. An electric fence to keep the immigrants out? Of course that’s what a presidential candidate would propose. New functionality to see what pornographic videos your friends are watching, right now? Of course that’s what Facebook is building. This is the tongue-in-cheek fallout the feeds the Daily Show, only it isn’t really very funny, because it’s real, and you can’t turn it off.

It’s perhaps obvious to point out that the world we live in is interconnected, yet the simple statement is at the crux of our downward digression: our political system is intertwined with economics, intellectual property is connected to technology, design is at the heart of consumption and marketing feeds the beast. It’s a system, and so our critique of it should be systemic, and so too should be our strategies for change. But most of us can’t think of systems, because they are too big of which to think. We witness items, or people, or unique instances, and we critique and celebrate those, because they are tractable. To denounce Michele Bachmann as insane is misleadingly simple, but to rationalize her rise to power is harder, because it requires empathizing with her supporters, understanding her world view, acknowledging the role she’s played in a political machine, examining her relationship-through-policy with large companies, teasing out the relationship between these companies and religious entities, and holding all of that in your head while asking yourself, “Did she really just say that ‘there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas’?” Seven plus or minus two, and our brain quite literally can’t make sense of the world around us.

To maintain any resemblance of happiness, the skill most of us will require in the post-apocalyptic, post-United States industrial block is sensemaking, the ability to synthesize large quantities of often incomplete or conflicting information—and we must direct that skill squarely at the humanization of technology. In the history of economic prosperity and advancement, there have been only a select few armed this magic ability: us. The “creative class”, those with—god help us—”creative quotient”, have learned this skill largely through on-the-job training. And then, we’ve focused our efforts on producing things no one needs and marketing these things to people who literally aren’t equipped with the education, the confidence or the discerning ability to judge.

Wealth inequality, from my perspective, is not the point of clash between the 1% and the other 99% (although, like in any system, money is intertwined in just about everything). The clash is about the ability to understand systems—to make sense of complexity—and then, when possible, to wield or manage these systems to our collective advantage. The political process is not separate from banking, lobbying, manufacturing, educating, importing, exporting, fighting or praying—and neither is the process of design. To say “we’re part of a global economy” is to trivialize the complexities of the man-made world. We’re part of a global technological system, and everything —including, thanks to companies like Monsanto, nature—is now a part of it. The power currency of the next era is sensemaking through systems thinking, and the occupiers are starting to realize that they don’t have any money to spend in this new economy.

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A little Monday morning distraction for you all; back in February I started a post in the discussion forums entitled “Vehicles Spotted in Your Neighborhood”. Over the past six months forum members from London to Montreal have posted twenty two pages (22!) of the most interesting assortment of vehicles, from super cars to jalopies, all of which are infinitely interesting. Check them out HERE and add some of the local flavor from your hood!

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Design Droplets and Interphase Design present Industrial Design: In the future, where to from here?, an interactive panel led discussion to celebrate World Industrial Design Day 2011 and explore the future of the Industrial Design & Product Development professions in Australia that will be held in Melbourne on July 1st.

The design industry in Australia is an ever changing and fluid entity, full of challenges that we don’t always fully comprehend. From government policy to changes in consumer behaviour and the emergence of new technolgies, with new challenge appearing everyday there are a vast array of changes that all have far reaching impacts on our profession and our ability to successfully innovate and stay competitive in a global marketplace.

Panelists will include Colin Redmond (Interphase Design), Andrew Fallshaw (Bellroy), Nicolas Hogios (Toyota Style Australia), Fiona K Boyd (RushCrowds & Arts Hub), Antony DiMase (DiMase Architects) and Alister Montgomery (KPMG).

If you are in that part of the world, learn more and register >>> HERE <<<

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Sunrise in Ushuaia, Argentina

Today, June 8, is World Oceans Day. Around the world there are events happening in classrooms, businesses, parks and beach fronts to create awareness of the role oceans play in our daily lives.

To mark the occasion, I’m not inviting you to participate in an event for just a day. Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing a series of experiences from my time living in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica last March.

Our role as designers, the ultimate storytellers, in saving Antarctica is paramount. Piles of plastic would not be floating in the Ocean if such products had been designed in a closed loop. Aerosols wouldn’t have opened up a hole in the atmosphere if manufacturing processes were designed more responsibly. Business propositions to exploit the natural resources in the poles would not exist if energy efficiency and better sources of energy were more broadly used.

Designers have a time and a place to engage: The time is now and the place is your own community. You don’t need to live in Antarctica to contribute.

Departing the Port of Ushuaia aboard the MV Sea Spirit.

The ultimate goal for this series, Becoming an Antarctican, will be to share with you the idea that Antarctica IS part of the ‘real world.’ The continent belongs to no one; at the same time the shape of humanity itself would be different without Antarctica.

There lies the lesson, and the warning flag.

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“WE ARE ALL WORKERS” is the message that accosts me every day as I wait in the crowds for the bus to work. Sure, Levi’s hoi polloi proclamation is true enough in their recent campaign, well, save for the idle rich and a workless 9.1% of the U.S. But are we really the workers we imagine or romanticize that we are? My daily routine, like many of you, involves floor to ceiling windows, perfectly climate-controlled environs, about ten hours a day in front of a wide-screen monitor, and a spine-friendly standing desk (a recent addition). This hardly hearkens back to a time when work meant sunrise to sunset in the field, factory or (for the unluckiest) mine.

The “Go Forth” campaign, developed for Levi’s by presumably moustached, plaid-clad art directors within its target demographic at advertising juggernaut Wieden + Kennedy, is just one illustration of the Manifest-Destiny-ian wildfire issuing from Brooklyn to the Mission District and beyond onto the frontiers of the Internet in search of the handmade, authentic, imperfect and purportedly “genuine.” One of the campaign’s centerpieces, a minute-long video featuring a misappropriated voice-over of Walt Whitman’s poem, “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” is a marvel of modern advertising. My first listening, hunched over my glowing laptop screen in my darkened living room, elicited goosebumps. Not so much for the choppy, almost angry scenes of twenty-somethings pulling on jeans, mimicking the poses of statues and running aimlessly with torches, but for Whitman’s words from 1865; words that sprung out of a nation on the verge of destroying itself, ringing tinnily out of my equally tinny speakers hundreds of years later.

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