Hasta La Ideas

During the 2012 Design Ethos DO-ference, nearly 100 designers, design students and design experts in social innovation teamed with community members of an economically-depressed area of Savannah through a choreographed sequence of asset-focused workshops. Each workshop group engaged in a participatory design process for three days, with an eye toward generating concrete deliverables and strategies for realistic implementation. Six design experts were invited to participate in the workshops, then to offer their observations on the process: the below essay is Cameron Tonkinwise’s contribution.

Take and Give

Every act of creation involves destruction. To build a chair, you must kill a tree, or two.

An ethical designer believes that what he or she has created is worth more than what was therein destroyed. Presumably the chair is more beautiful than the tree, or provides respite to people more important than cute, furry nesting creatures, or at the least, gets used for longer than it took the tree to grow the wood.

A truly responsible designer will realize that it is not enough to merely make a piece of good design and hope that it gets used long enough and well enough to justify the resources consumed to make it. A truly responsible designer will do more to ensure that that happens: marketing the designed chair to communicate its value; providing instructions about use and care and maintenance; perhaps providing repair or return-to-maker services. In this way, whatever destruction was necessary for the creation of such an artifact is more than recompensed by the ongoing valuable services afforded by that artifact.

Econferences

The economy of destruction and creation in relation to conferences has always irked me. Conferences are immaterial events—exchanges of knowledge and networking—but they have huge material footprints. Attendees must emit tons of climate changing gases to get to these events, where they are accommodated and fed and beveraged, and invariably given a pile of crap in never-to-be-used-again conference-specific dysfunctional satchels. Conferences can go green, serving up local produce to delegates, ensuring that all way-finding is on recycled material, etc, but in the end these will only ever amount to tinkering with the vast material destruction required to convene people together.

And yet we all acknowledge that valuable experiences are afforded by conferences—meetings and learnings that seem still impossible in any kind of virtual context no matter how thickly bandwidthed its multimodal media. In this case, the task is not just to minimize the ecoimpact of conferences, but to maximize their value, to make sure that all those carbon miles are more than mitigated by the productivity of the conferencing experience.

Recently there’s been a spate of innovations in conferences, blurring the line between conferences, courses, tourism and television: from TED to Dark Mountain. A very interesting innovation was the 2012 Design Ethos Conference hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design. The principal organizer, Scott Boylston, made the classic design innovator’s move: if I am going to get a large number of incredibly interesting designers, design thinkers and design students together, shouldn’t all that intellectual capital be used to accomplish something beyond exchange amongst itself? Given that all those human resources will be co-located at one time, couldn’t they be thrown at some local problems needing social innovation? Wouldn’t that make up for the ecoimpacts of bringing all those people together—not just for the world, in that it would be a better distribution of the value generated from those resources; but also for the participants themselves, who would now not only get from this conference meeting and learning, but also the experience of making, of making contributions to situations of much-need?

So the Design Ethos Conference was also a DO-ference, with participants working on a series of initiatives in the inner city Savannah neighborhood of Waters Avenue. And indeed it was incredibly valuable, to the local community by all reports, and to the conference participants, from what I saw and heard. Apart from what the DO-ference accomplished, the resource destruction involved in the gathering were also accounted for by the exemplar that this innovative way of conferencing set. Having seen how productive a conference can be, all other conferences now seem to me heavily on the ecodebt side of the ledger.

But the DO-ference was no easy undertaking. There are 3 lessons that can be learned about what is in involved in trying to make a Conference on Social Design more valuable than the ecoimpacts involved.

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Fifty billion dollars is the Hurricane Sandy damage estimate for the New York region. Which is nuts; it means if we spent $49.5 billion on defensive measures, we’d still be $500 million ahead.

Of course, even if spending that much were politically possible, we’d never be able to anticipate and design solutions to every single problem. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t trying. One major issue is being addressed with a fascinating potential solution: The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate is hoping to reduce subway flooding by installing gigantic, inflatable plugs.

If this problem and that solution were presented to you at design school, you’d quickly home in on the two big issues: Materials and deployment. What are the things made out of, and how do we get them into place? At first I thought the same thing all of you probably did—we deploy Jose Carreras and a team of Metropolitan Opera singers into the tunnels during a hurricane, and put them to work blowing up gigantic balloons that only their lungs could fill—but the DHS went a different route.

Their man with a plan is Dr. Ever J. Barbero, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering with a specialty in advanced materials. (He’s been working on the problem for years, prompted half a decade ago by a surprisingly prescient DHS.) During his materials research phase Dr. Barbero contacted a company called ILC Dover, which is like a super design-build firm specializing in product design for government and industry—they made the airbags for earlier Mars Rover landings—and they recommended he use Vectran (even though I believe Jose Carreras is allergic to it).

Vectran is technically known as an “aromatic polyester”—I don’t like the sound of that, but it probably can’t make the NYC subway system smell worse—and it’s comprised of fibers spun out of a liquid crystal polymer. It’s moisture-resistant and “stable in hostile environments,” so we could even use it at that sketchy J-train station at Sutphin Boulevard. It’s typically used as a reinforcing material in boat sails, ropes, high-end bicycle tires, and even woven into the strings of rackets made by Yonex for badminton, a sport I’m told Jose Carreras is quite good at.

Says the Department of Homeland Security of the Resilient Tunnel Project, as it’s officially called:

“We’re utilizing the strongest fabrics in the world,” explains [Project Manager Dr. John] Fortune. “Textile engineering is cost-prohibitive, so we sought to obtain fabrics available on the market.” Using a commercially available fabric reduced development costs and will make plugs more affordable for mass transit operators.

In Dr. Barbero’s early trials, he had an enormous spherical plug made of the stuff—and it tore right down the middle during testing. The water pressure in a flooding tunnel is apparently very high, unlike in my shower. Barbero then doubled down on the layers, adding an inner polyurethane bladder, and added a third layer on the outside made from Vectran belts woven in a cross-hatch pattern, like those Nike Innevas. The idea is that if one belt failed, the surrounding ones would prevent a catastrophic failure. But there is more testing to be done, with an estimated several more years before the thing is ready to go.

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photo by Nicole Nadeau

photo by longest august

Mid-lower-Manhattan-blackout, I need to relocate my two dogs and I to somewhere with electricity and internet, so I can continue to earn a living. I didn’t know who would and wouldn’t have power and did not pre-plan a fallback location. But now I remember I’ve got a buddy staying at his boss’ townhouse in the east 60s, within the powered zone. It’s a longshot that they’ll allow dogs, but he’s the closest place I can walk to while towing two dogs, carrying my computer and lugging my own food & water.

But I won’t walk up there unannounced; because I failed to work out contingencies in advance, I’d better ask before showing up. I can’t call him, obviously, so I put rain gear on and head outside to make the 2.5-hour roundtrip.

What I see outside makes me change my mind about walking. The amount of damaged trees, huge branches in the street, collapsed awnings, and generally heavy things sitting in places they oughtn’t, makes me think a long walk would be dumb. There are a lot of once-securely-mounted things on the average city block that can fall on you, and I don’t want to be killed proving the law of gravity.

A second, more surprising thing I see that also makes me change my mind: there are tons of people outside—and taxis. It’s not easy getting one, but ten minutes later I’m in a yellow Crown Vic headed uptown.

As we reach the 30s I see people on the sidewalk talking on cell phones, so I pull mine out and switch it on. Service! I call my buddy, and during our brief, choppy call, he apologetically tells me we can’t be accommodated. Ah well. I have the cab turn around.

The most amazing thing I saw on that cab ride was this: No traffic lights were working below the 30s. And traffic, both pedestrian and vehicular, moved through those latter parts of the city flawlessly. Admittedly it wasn’t a rush-hour level of traffic, but even still I’d have expected lots of near-misses, stymied pedestrians who couldn’t cross, honking horns and curses. But there was none of that. My driver slowed at each intersection to look around, as did every other driver. Pedestrians watched cars going in the same direction as them, and crossed intersections when those cars crossed. We never sat still for more than a few seconds and it never seemed even remotely dangerous.

At just two major intersections we went through (23rd & 3rd and Delancey & Bowery) were there foot police directing traffic. Every other block worked flawlessly with no signals, just quick negotiating glances between drivers and pedestrians. I have more to say about this at the bottom of this entry.

Another thing that struck me was the amount of people, mostly tourist-looking, standing outside of closed subway stations and looking confused. They’d peer past the tape blocking the entrance, as if hoping to see something informative at the bottom of the stairs. I guess those without access to news would have no way of knowing the entire subway system had been shut off; I only knew because it had been mentioned in the radio broadcast.

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Only accessible via a local wifi mesh network, the Red Hook version of Tide Pools lets community members access information and report trouble spots.

Go almost anywhere in the world, and you can load up a map on Google, Bing or Mapquest that tells you where you are and what’s around you. The standardization of maps is an incredibly useful tool—instead of futzing around with how to read the map, you just have to worry about making sure you’re oriented in the right direction (a problem that’s also starting to evaporate with compasses in smartphones).

The problem is, you also lose a lot of diversity along the way. Most online maps are commercially oriented, as likely to advertise businesses that register to be listed as they are to share major community landmarks. And from a bird’s eye view, spaces important for the neighborhood are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the area.

Enter Tide Pools. Developed by Parsons grad Jonathan Baldwin for his senior thesis, Tide Pools is a mapping-system-cum-mesh-network that’s focused on local communities. Billed as “‘Ushahidi’ meets ‘The Sims’ API hub for local needs and culture,” Baldwin’s system differs substantially from global mapping sites like Google: maps can only be accessed when you’re hooked into the local mesh network.

“The original intention came out of working with community in Red Hook,” Baldwin noted in an interview with Core77. “The original piece of investigation was around where mesh networks exist. What kinds of local incentives can be conveyed on a mesh interface to convey the idea of a local network?”

Working with the Red Hook Initiative and now the Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, Baldwin realized that a map was the best way to enhance the local-ness of a mesh network. “It’s open wifi,” he said. “As soon as you connect to it and go to a web site, it automatically directs you to a community splash page.”

This page lists announcements and news feed particular to Red Hook, and soon it will evolve into a more robust interface that includes a community-driven map. Over weeks of meetings, Baldwin and members of the Red Hook community evolved a look and feel, debating over how a school should look. It’s had multiple uses, as he noted on his web site:

Tidepools evolved over months of community meetings, brainstorming sessions and feedback through a forum on the WiFi network. Creating and sharing custom maps emerged from the desire to plot Alerts of where police “stop and frisks” were occurring. Broken building signs led to integration of the Open311 civic reporting tool. Bus arrival alerts came from the sparse, inconsistent public transportation in the area. Spreading awareness of locations and times of Upcoming Meetings & Events soon followed.

A version of Tide Pools rolled out in Detroit for the Allied Media Conference.

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I’ve been observing the growth of mobile in the developing world for years now, ever since I encountered texting culture on a trip to the Philippines years ago, long before SMS caught on in the United States. Behind a small anecdote like this are big numbers and trends.

A recent post on The Reboot’s blog turned me to some great infographics they developed for the World Bank’s Information and Communications for Development 2012: Maximizing Mobile report. The report looks at the growth of mobile telephony and data-based services in handheld devices.

Certainly, “World Bank” and “compelling infographics” are two phrases designers rarely think of together, but as Reboot designer Mollie Ruskin noted, visual communication couldn’t be more important:

We have found that many of our colleagues in the social sector undervalue the role of communications design. This perspective is understandable—when creating a $200 million program to overhaul a nation’s water and sanitation system, the significance of fonts and colors and layout can seem quite minor.

Yet this stance has real drawbacks. No matter how well that water program might get put together, its purpose and intentions must still be communicated to a range of audiences: government officials who need to support the program, community members who are asked to participate, and international policy makers who may decide when and how the money is spent.

See full-size image here.

And so it was great to see the new infographics in place, which make big, complex statistics about mobile for development easier to digest and interpret. Take, for instance, the big bold graphic noting that 75% of the world has access to a mobile phone—a staggering number that seems only more likely to grow in the coming years. Or the illustratations of potatoes, grain and bananas, to show the increased income of farmers in India, Niger and Uganda, respectively, thanks to mobile applications.

The biggest callout box is text, beautifully illustrated to drive home a simple point: “The mobile revolution is right at the start of its growth curve.” Whether you’re a World Bank economist or a freelance designer reading Core77, that’s definitely something to think about.

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