Larry Keeley (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)

Table of Contents:
Summary
Introduction
Chicken Little
Futures that Weren't
Interdependence and Control
Automobile Accidents
What Can Designers Do?

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Summary
The problem with predictions over the past 150-odd years is that most of them, advanced by even the finest minds of their day, were, and still are, simply dead wrong. Larry Keeley is a strategist who focuses on issues of planning for design breakthroughs. The theme of Keeley's speech is the non-linearity of future progress and the implications of that in our dealings with today's ecological crisis. How is a systemic approach to be achieved in planning? The concept of interdependence and its relationship to control are vital. Keeley focuses on what he terms incidental environmental improvements, critical innovations that came about in unpredictable ways. In his view, such innovations can be very profitable. He singles out the automotive industry, whose lack of design sophistication did not prevent some of the most important innovations enabling new kinds of integration of information, economy and ecology. Keeley then outlines the role that can be played by designers in relation to enterprises, consumers and regulators in achieving sustainable development and concludes with nine, general `golden rules' to follow when implementing network-based inventions, in his own words: a simple take on collective intelligence.

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Introduction
I will speak about the ecological side of our Info-Eco equation. I want to try to give you a sense of how we can address these kinds of issues in ways that are systemic: -- that have to do with the re-design of artefacts and with learning from one another and from our interdependence. My approach to this may be offensive to a number of you, as it will be somewhat less esoteric and intellectual than you may be expecting. In fact, I am going to be somewhat like my friend Chicken Little.

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Chicken Little
Chicken Little was wandering along one day when an acorn hit him on the head. He decided that the sky was falling and rushed off to tell the president -- I mean the king (you guys still have kings over here, right?) Off he rushed down the road to the palace, hollering for all he was worth: The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Along the way, he ran into Henny Penny and Turkey Lurkey, who joined him in his race to alarm the powers that be. Needless to say, it was Foxy Loxy they met next. Said Foxy Loxy: Well, you may not be able to get all the way to see the king. You'd better take shelter in my underground space, for the moment. There's room for all to sit comfortably. Of course, they went to the underground space, where they were safe from the falling sky, but which they never came back out of, as it was the fox's lair.

Chicken Little and warnings about the sky falling are some of the things that motivated me to come and try to talk to you today about what I might call the fabulous future of filth -- ways that we in the design sorority and fraternity can re-invent the world around us and address the changes that we are visiting upon one another as a civilisation.

I am basically trying to make three points. I am going to talk about how environmental problems are very real, but now and as ever grossly overstated. They are not overstated because people do not mean well or are not honest, but because people are unaware of how terribly non-linear future progress is for all civilisation (this is my second major point.) Critical innovations happen in truly remarkable, unpredictable ways, and will be very profitable, too.

The third thing I will talk about is how designers can play a critical role in conditioning or accelerating these important solutions to the problems that we are trying to address.

A very long time ago, an important book was written by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, which has ushered in a veritable orgy of books basically about how the sky is falling. Rachel Carson's book was brilliant. It went a wonderfully long way in helping everybody to understand evils like DDT and many others. Alvin Toffler told us twenty years ago that the world was changing far faster than human beings could ever begin to evolve and catch up. The world's pace of change has increased geometrically since then. All of these different books are giving us stories about why things are disastrous and are going to become ever more disastrous faster than we can catch up from behind.

However, this is a thesis that I am finding in the commercial world to be completely without deep merit. This is why I am going to talk to you about the problems with predictions.

As a strategist, I focus exclusively on issues of planning for design breakthroughs. I work with designers. Most views of the future extrapolate the present and the past. This is very logical. People assume that the near future will be much like the recent past. But when you come to issues that are systemic -- that involve things like the ecology, Internet or interdependence of human beings -- you discover that, in overwhelming numbers, to a very startling degree, these predictions are plain and simply dead wrong. This is a fascinating and a humbling thing for a person in my profession. So the propensity for breakthroughs is always understated. My particular wish is that designers not make these kinds of mistakes.

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Futures that Weren't
Designers, more than others, should be able to understand that the progress of the future is excitingly non-linear.

I want to call your attention to some past prognostications, each of them from people who were absolutely in the most critical position to know what they were talking about at the time they made these statements.

In 1845, it was deemed by the powers that then were that rail travel would be impossible, because people would not be able to breath while they were travelling at high speed. That is a fascinating point of view, but one that did not turn out to be true. Transportation has always been a big theme for prognostication. Thomas J. Watson Sr., who put IBM on the map, (he was manufacturing calculators and adding machines) quite logically stated that these computer things are far too big to be affordable. The CIA, the Federal Government and some national banks are going to need one and that is the whole market: five buyers, at most! Hilarious! As recently as 1977, Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, told us that none of us would have any reason whatsoever to have a personal computer in our own homes -- or a computer of any type in our homes, for that matter.

How many predictions, as we stand here today, are going to seem as ludicrous when we look back at them from some not-very-distant future?

My contention is: the vast majority.

But to return to our ecological theme and the exciting future of filth: it is interesting to me that for the first time in a long time -- and relatively recently -- some other points of view have crept in. Things like Greg Easterbrook's collection of essays about environmental optimism -- the sense that there might be some evidence that we are addressing things systemically. There is also Ronald Bailey, who talks about how many people are becoming quite successful by just worrying about the sky falling. I am not particularly citing these as correct, either. I am simply saying that it is interesting that it has taken this long for a balance to emerge with regard to these particular kinds of ideas. The one thing I know for sure is that when you think about these kinds of issues and ideas, you must think in the context of interdependence.

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Interdependence and Control
We have all been talking about that in various ways. I found it fascinating that in this notion of collective intelligence, there is a peculiar ambiguity about where the issue of control lies. Control is everywhere and nowhere, but mostly nowhere, in my view. Highlighting the analogy to the coral reef, these are incredibly interdependent and very fragile eco-systems. Everything is dependent upon something else and yet, in a very interesting way, there is no central control. It is this notion of lack of control which human beings mistake for something quite different than it is.

I am very interested in this fascinating approach -- making things interdependent, but non-controlled. I am going to talk about innovations and patterns of innovations and particularly about the ways designers can affect them. I am going to use a simple planning model to give you a sense of different scales of interactions on issues of the ecology. The bottom level consists of point solutions. For example, somebody makes an individual product or service and tries to sell it. The top level consists of things that involve the multiple, simultaneous interdependence of lots of different players. There are also things that are involuntary, in the sense that they are in response to regulations or catastrophes, versus things that are entirely voluntary and that people do on their own. I am going to talk about these three different levels of response with regard to products in the home, agricultural systems and car improvements, each of which I'll briefly illustrate.

These days, if you want to make your home or your person more responsive to issues of the environment, there are scores and scores of things that you can buy: carbon monoxide detectors or different kinds of water filtration systems; better or more efficient home thermostats; you can even now buy a watch from Seiko that gives you a continuous readout of how much ultraviolet light you have been exposed to that day. Those are very simple point solutions. They do make a difference, but they are not very sophisticated.

There is also a fascinating new approach to micro-management of agricultural systems. Tractors in the US are being increasingly outfitted with sensors that allow them to understand the nature of the soil, including acidity, pesticide content and other aspects. Using satellite connection to computer systems, they then respond immediately to treat that soil in ways that allow it to be more productive, without harmful additives to the soil itself. This is also a fascinating systemic approach.

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Automobile Accidents
But I am particularly fascinated by the automotive industry, precisely because I happen to believe that the automotive industry around the world is populated by people who are not very sophisticated about design. In my view, the vast majority of the people in the automotive industry wait until regulations come along to do anything that is particularly useful. In America, I know the design community intimately. I can tell you that the automotive industry is populated by a lot of mostly male people who have never quite matured beyond the age of twelve, who mainly love to hear engines go VROOM VROOM. I never really expect automotive design to be very sophisticated. This is why I want to look at what happened anyway in this industry -- despite the lack of sophisticated methods.

I have been in virtually every major design studio in the world for automobiles. The most sophisticated design method I have ever seen is people sitting around reading fashion magazines for inspiration. Yet, they pass laws in the United States about fleet economy, which state: you are simply not allowed to sell cars unless all of the cars you sell collectively exceed a certain degree of fleet economy. Of course, the non-American cars are vastly more efficient than the American cars. In fact, if you took out the recent American penchant for four-wheel-drive vehicles, which are gasoline pigs, you see that car efficiency improvement over time would have increased rather dramatically.

What fascinates me is that it was the advance of these regulations that in unintentional ways led to about fifty different kinds of derivative innovations. When the fuel economy laws came along, the designers immediately concluded: we cannot use spark plugs anymore. We are going to have to use electronic injections. But when you use electronic injections, you have to put a computer in the car. Having put the computer in the car, you start wondering: what else might it do with its excess capacity? You start getting it to do things like anti-lock brakes and airbags. Then, because you have the anti-lock breaks and the computer, you can start to have computer traction control. So all kinds of improvements happen and you end up with new kinds of information centres on the dashboards. This leads to car automotive diagnostic controls, among other things. Intelligent vehicle guidance systems are on the way. This is not because the automotive industry has thought this through. It is because they started to comply with regulations and learned to create all kinds of other things while doing so.

Last week, the New York Times published a round-up of the different kinds of future information systems that will be connecting the highways, satellite systems, global positioning systems and automobiles to give us a totally different approach to the way we navigate and direct ourselves. Much of this has come from the fact that the average automobile today has three times the computing power of the average personal computer. So just a certain amount of head room -- extra information space -- ushers in a new phase in which information and ecology do in fact come together in interesting ways.

What fascinates my colleagues and me are incidental environmental improvements, that are not being done because we are all trying to make the world a better place, but are just a collateral benefit from doing something else. Network sensors and information systems are quite important incidental benefits. It is very likely that in the near future, we will start to have rich enough interactions through things like the Internet and other kinds of advanced communication systems to no longer need to travel in large numbers over great distances to have the kinds of meetings that have been such a focus of commercial enterprise for so many years. That is one of that kind of accidental incidental advantages, but there are others. In hot parts of the United States like Houston, it is increasingly common for utilities companies, particularly gas or electric, to ask for control over your thermostat. If you give them control over your thermostat, they will give you a standard 35 or 40% discount on all of the energy you use. But it allows them to turn off your air conditioner or turn it down on particularly hot days. This is called something like demand side management. It is allowing increasing numbers of people to have systemic control. You can choose to do this or not, but it allows the utilities to achieve a much greater balance between how they are generating power and how it is being consumed, eliminating the need to build all kinds of new power generation plants. Similarly, in the US, there has been some fascinating improvements in the open market for things like environmental issues and pollution credits. In the United States, you have to conform to a variety of pollution control laws, but if you conform more than you need to, you can sell in fact your credit to someone else who does not yet conform. You would think that that would be a bad thing for the environment. Paradoxically, it is a good thing, because it gives people a market incentive to over-comply. That is fascinating. Similarly, a Chicago Board of Trade recycling futures commodity exchange has just recently come on-line. It has been hugely successful, attempting to trade futures, all kinds of waste, recycled plastics and papers and other similar things.

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What Can Designers Do?
Let me move on then to the really big issues of how designers can pragmatically use information power and their insights to affect environmental issues. I love the fact that designers seem to know when the world is out of balance. I think that this is the kind of insight designers can routinely have. If you trust them and act on it, you can make the world a better place in both simple and systemic ways.

First, designers can have and should have a two-way relationship with regulators, enterprises and consumers. I will take each of these in term and give you some examples.

For designers and regulators, the idea is to design things that obviate regulations or vastly exceed the ways we address them. That is a really nice way for designers to act. To anticipate, obviate, shape regulations, or go beyond regulations to do things that are really smart, even though governments in their wisdom have not yet come to ask for them. So here is an example of how that is happening pragmatically.

Project Excel is an unusually sane thing for the federal government to be doing. It is not common in our country to respect our government. I suppose you all know that we created America because we hated government and that has been fetishised, of course: we now love hating government. This is one rare example of doing something rather smart. In project Excel, if you over-conform to EPA regulations and exceed the limits by 20 or 25%, they permit you to audit yourself. That is really amazing -- it allows the government to get smaller and gives people an incentive to do things better.

Here is another example of intelligence or stupidity in responding to regulations. The General Motors Impact is one of the most perversely named automobiles I have ever seen in my life. (Even in their naming department, they don't have wizards.) They were trying to respond to the Californian requirement to have zero emissions, and thus created an all-electric vehicle. This ignores the fact that whoever generated the electric power in the first place is creating quite a lot of emissions or uses nuclear energy, which is even worse. But the worst problem is that the car uses about twelve thousands dollars worth of batteries, which need to be replaced every thirty thousand miles. The whole thing makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. The Honda's ULEV, or ultra low emissions vehicle, is a car that does not meet the zero emission requirement. It has such low emissions that they are practically not measurable and gets 81 miles to the gallon. I cannot digress into macro-economics here, but I think it is interesting to point out that if we all had automobiles that got 81 miles to the gallon, the cost of oil on the global market would be so low that it would cause us not to use all kinds of solar and alternative energy sources which would have lower impacts. Isn't that sort of depressing?

But I've wandered off the subject.

The enterprise is the next level of intervention that we earth designers should take seriously and address systemically. The name of the game here is to help companies profit from the issues of repairing the environment and to create processes that feed off of waste streams. Mr. Adriaan Geuze showed us a wonderful architectural solution, using cockles and mussel shells to make a space. This is a perfect example of feeding off of waste streams and making environmental services familiar, convenient, cost-effective and competitive. Take stuff that would be good for the whole planet. Make it fun and compelling and important. Another example of this is recycled plastics, which are being turned into pallets and plastic lumber. Easterbrook Plastics in the US has designed a complete line of outdoor furniture that is very impervious to weather, graffiti and other kinds of natural and artificial calamities.

Another example: we now smash automobiles into little cubes and wait for them to rust. At the moment, BMW is trying to create an automobile that is 100% designed for disassembly and recycling. Those are perfect examples of things you all know about.

There is a phenomenon called Brown Site Companies. These are companies that are taking over waste sites and learning how to capture all of the economic value out of what has been dumped in them through the years. They take them apart, extracting and selling the methane, for example. Typically, they then turn it into a park or re-purpose it in an interesting way. These are rapidly growing and profitable companies.

Finally, designers and consumers represent a critical relation. One of the most exciting and immediate problems for designers is to make large, diffuse environmental problems understandable and actionable. If you are an information designer or a product designer, there are lots of ways you can address that. You can enable individuals to profit from environmental situations. You can also enable communities -- this is a critical idea -- to co-construct important innovations. The co-construction of innovations is a very good example of productive, collective action.

Here are three examples just from the camera world alone. Canon has made a solar powered camera; Fuji makes a recyclable camera and another innovation is the digital camera, all ways in which people can still take the photographs they want to, but do so in ways that have consistently lower impact on the environment.

Smart appliances fascinate me, too. Quite a while ago, Maytag made a dishwasher that would continually study the amount of particulate matter in the waste water in the drain and would shorten the wash cycle as needed, because it would recognise when the dishes were already clean. As more and more chips are built into appliances, we do achieve factor 10 or 20 in the improvement of efficiency.

I also want to talk about the net impact of these things. How many of you already own something made of eco-fleece? Eco-fleece is a new fabric made of recycled plastic bottles. It is very commonplace in the States, in coats, for example. Eco-fleece is one of the ways we recycle PET-plastic. No fabric has ever risen as rapidly in the aftermarket as this one. And we are witnessing a net effect of these kinds of developments in the form of a significant increase in the market value of recycled materials.

That increase in the market value of recycled materials only emerges when people learn how to re-purpose the stuff and make it attractive. Designers all over the world have said they really do want to commit themselves to using recycled papers, plastic and aluminium in different ways. We are finding startling increases in the market values of these kinds of materials, which is exactly what it takes to create the kind of aftermarket for materials that causes them not to be dumped, but to be re-used. So already, in many of the more populous parts of the United States, there are bands of thieves that go around stealing people's newspapers from their garbage before the recyclers can pick them up. That is how valuable they have become. Wacky, isn't it?

Tom Peters, who claims to be a goofy American management guru, is fond of saying that the world does not get better fast enough if we depend upon one another holding hands and singing Kumbaya. He, in fact, says that we would make more progress faster if we figure out how to become, in his own immortal words filthy, stinking rich off the kinds of things we ought to be doing. My advice to you is that it is possible to take things that are filthy and stinking and use them to become rich. That is essentially the message that I have got for you about truly fixing the environment.

Before concluding, I want to call your attention to Kevin Kelley's book Out of Control, which is about life in a post-control world. Among other things, it contains extraordinary bee stories about how bees make managerial decisions. I would advise you to read at least the first 75 pages of this book, which contain crystal clear explanations about how networks work today, in my view.

I will summarise now with a few more thoughts on the nature of the Net, taken from a forthcoming paper. This is our very simplified take on collective intelligence, not specifically the Internet, but the nature of network-based inventions in general.

The first rule is that generosity begets prosperity. You have to give stuff away to people to get something back and later be rewarded. The second rule is that momentum beats technology. It is almost always better to be simply moving fast than to have great solutions. Remember that Windows version 1.O was a dog with fleas. The third rule is that open systems always win over time. The fourth rule is that derivative innovations are crucial and unknowable. You have to make it possible for lots of people to innovate within and around, using and extending your own ideas. The fifth rule that Kevin Kelly talks about so well, is that there is no central control of anything. The sixth rule is that no one is as smart as everyone -- I think this is what this notion of collective intelligence is all about. The seventh rule is that the net routes around greed: anybody who tries to be a pig gets completely destroyed by the way the net routes around them. The eighth is that familiarity is essential to adoption. People will not rush to adopt things that they do not understand. That has been the problem with things like personal digital assistance and the Newton. Finally, rule number nine is: evolutionary change is eventually revolutionary. People do what they are familiar with, but they do it in large enough numbers that it eventually changes and morphs.

This concludes my humble vision of the fabulous future of filth.