| The Killer Ap is Green!
Introduction Speech by John Thackara Table of Contents: * * * * * * * * * Our first aim is to explore two big stories that are changing our lives -- the story of information technology on the one hand and of ecology on the other. We begin by asking what these stories mean for us and how they connect. Our second aim is to consider what we should do about these stories. Do we wait for huge changes to happen to us -- or might we happen to them? Might new techniques, such as design scenarios, help us foster the mental and material changes we must make to use matter and energy more efficiently on the planet? Our third aim is to foster connections -- between people and between organisations -- that will take good ideas and projects forwards after the conference ends. This may sound like a lot to cover in a couple of days, but we do have momentum from the first two conferences. We are not starting from scratch. Doors started in November 1993, as the first major project of the new Netherlands Design Institute. Our theme was the design challenge of interactive multimedia. Our purpose then -- as it is now -- was to ask, in relation to the so-called `information superhighway', not so much what it can do as what it is for. * * * The trouble, as seen from Europe, was that when people started talking about applications or content for these miraculous technologies, it was an anticlimax. It hardly seemed that `tele-shopping' or `video-on-demand' would transform our lives. It was not just that `Goofy-on-demand' sounded banal. That went without saying. We also feared that the only interaction the media industry had in mind for us, as users, was to press the `Pay' button on our remote controls. We thought: There has to be more than this! That is why we organised the first Doors of Perception conference. And very exciting it was, too. 640 people came from 20 countries at short notice and there was an amazing buzz as people came up with radical new ideas. If you'd like a multimedia reminder of what that first Doors was like, the CD-Rom we made with Mediamatic is on sale in the bookstall at de Balie cultural centre * * * The Viacoms and TimeWarners of this world see "home" as a marketplace for multimedia products and services -- a million little boxes full of faceless little people, waiting passively for digital pipes full of `product' to reach them, much like water or gas. But for our speakers last year, home meant much more than that. They compared the qualities of telematic space and domestic space. They talked about real nomads and telematic nomads. They analysed changes to our sense of place, both public and private. They looked at the psychology of belonging to a family, group, or community. They explored the architecture of information and the creation of shared meaning in virtual communities. They said: Yes, network connectivity has fantastic potential, but that potential will only be realised when the insight, intuition and creativity of countless new users is brought into play. Last year's meeting enriched my understanding that innovation -- finding useful applications for new technology -- is a social and cultural process, not just a technical one. With multimedia and the Internet, we have to explore connectivity in a particular context . Home is one such context; work, play, school and the community are others. And in each of these contexts, a dynamic interaction between the personal, the cultural and the technical is constantly under way. You don't dump products into these contexts. You grow new products in them. Several speakers last year spoke of `home' as a kind of `ecology' and less as a building full of things than a space created by processes and information. So when we `left home', so to speak, after Doors 2, and started thinking about a theme for this year's conference, the concept of ecology was already lodged in our minds. * * * I think the same goes for many people, not just designers. The environment is thought of as `an eighties thing' -- yesterday's news. Despite this negative market feedback, we were intrigued by the idea that because ecology is all about the study of connections, there must be some connection between `info' and `eco' issues. So we naively decided to pose the question in Doors 3: How can information technology contribute to environmental sustainability? And here we all are. * * * We decided that the theme of Doors 3 would be matter, because most of us behave, without really thinking about it, as though there is an unlimited quantity of matter for us to use. And there isn't. * * * That's why environmentalists and Christians don't always get on very well. A bit later, but still 30,000 years ago, when there were 4 million of us, we took God's advice and started farming. Some people who are green with a big G say this was our first hostile act against Mother Nature. Agree or disagree with that as you will, but natural resources were limited even when there were only two of us staring at an apple in the garden of Eden. Today, when there are 5.5 billion of us -- and breeding exponentially -- that pressure is intense. To put it mildly, there are grave doubts among scientists as to whether what they call the `carrying capacity' of the planet can withstand eight billion people, which is how many of us there will be by 2020. That is why `matter' matters -- even to the most hollow-eyed net surfer. * * * This is one of the famous charts published by the Club of Rome in Beyond the Limits in 1974 -- a scientific study that, following Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, projected environmental agendas into the mainstream. To me, the chart looks like the flight path of a 747 plummeting into the ground. Only this particular superjumbo has the whole human species on board. And the content is about something called `overshoot', when population fails to adjust to the limited carrying capacity of its environment. The Club of Rome said it meant a `collapse in industrial output and uncontrollable decline in population'. This kind of stuff was rather depressing for our Doors 3 programme team. We set out to organise a simple conference and WHAM! We were hit by these gruesome scenarios about the future of the planet. * * * It doesn't really matter if the figure 20 is scientifically exact; the number could be 8 or 80. The important point about `Factor 20' is that it signifies a break, a jump, a qualitative discontinuity in the way we live on the planet. It means that `making things better every year' -- which is what many industries are indeed now doing -- will not be enough by itself to pull that plummeting 747 out of its dive. * * * So how come we're not screaming in panic? It's as if someone came into your office at work and said: Your house is burning down! and you answered: What a bore, and carried on working as normal. That is how I feel. Eco-gloom is bad enough. Adding guilt is a real turn-off. Being told that a vast, unfolding calamity is your fault almost guarantees that you'll go into denial. I wrote a little play about my own relationship with environmentalism: GREEN: "Do you realise you're killing the planet?" JOHN: "Well no. I never knew. I feel terrible about it. I need a drink." GREEN: "Typical addictive behaviour; you're running away from the fact that you're eating your own home." JOHN : "Oh my God, I'm terribly sorry, I really didn't mean to." GREEN: "Locusts don't `mean it' either, and look what they do." JOHN: "Oh my God, you mean I'm no better than a locust?" GREEN: "Don't flatter yourself; you're worse! At least locusts don't kill their own mothers." You think I exaggerate? There is a picture from a new Greenpeace commercial directed by Roger Corman, that comes out next year. It's a gruesome morality tale about us as children desecrating -- and finally killing -- mother earth. The Guardian, from whom I stole this image last week, call the ad Truly horrific - a bloody juxtaposition of doe-eyed innocents and their bloody deeds. The problem with this ad for me is not that it features violence or nudity, but its assumption that by laying great dollops of guilt onto me, I'll change my behaviour. Frankly, I think it does the opposite and will make me rush out and buy a seven litre Mercedes on credit. Daryl Upsall from Greenpeace, who commissioned the ad, will speak later this morning. I apologise for getting my retaliation in first like this. But I hope he'll address this issue. Guilt and anxiety-mongering are not specific to Greenpeace, of course. A list of the 3,000 eco-books in print reads like a horror movie catalogue. Beyond The Limits, No Turning Back, Out Of Control...In too many of these books, we humans are portrayed as ecocidal maniacs driven by `dark and irrational forces.' I don't believe we are like Darth Vaders, slashing and burning the planet for fun. We're more like passengers on a badly-run railroad. We built it, but as Thoreau famously observed: We don't ride on the railroad, it rides on us. The idea that we are the victims, and not the masters of technology is an old one; but age has not diminished its superficiality. The ecological crisis is not caused by out of control machines, but by living, human and industrial systems that are out of kilter with each other. * * * Four Dutch philosophers were commissioned by the Dutch government to address the question: Why do we behave toward the planet in the way that we do? Behaviour, they explained, is determined by the way people understand their situation, by their conception of themselves, of the reality that surrounds them, and their place therein. To advocate a change in lifestyle is to change the frame of meanings within which people live. Hippocrates said much the same 2,500 years ago. To understand the disorders in any subject, he said, we must study its environment. Treatment of the inner requires treatment of the outer, because the greater part of the soul lies outside the body. Frames of interpretation about the planet cannot be changed at will. We need to distinguish between the spectacular and the meaningful. We can look at spectacular images of the planet, or hear dramatic stories about it, and still not connect emotionally. As Laura Balbo explained on Tuesday, the way we change is through reflection: thinking about the subject and trusting in our intuition that `things are not right'. * * * Rather, we hope to develop fractal consciousness about the systems, flows, and processes that surround us. The way is long if one follows precepts, said Seneca The Younger, in 65 AD, but short if one follows patterns. Or, as Marco Susani observed on Tuesday: We need to develop a new aesthetic, rooted in everyday life. We don't need new rules of behaviour. First, a number of speakers will take us through the major Info and Eco scenarios, the `driving forces' swirling around us as we contemplate the future. Our speakers will explain how scientists think about sustainability -- about the economic consequences of paying full price for the impacts we make on the planet and on the cultural consequences of globalisation. The session called Mental and Material considers the relationship between matter, information and behaviour. What does de-materialisation of the economy mean and how do we speed up the process? At the same time, how might we re-sensitise ourselves to the physicality of our bodies and the planet in such a way that we take better care of them? Later, some of the world's most accomplished innovators in digital media will make technical and artistic presentations within the context of `reconnecting the imagination to the planet.' Tomorrow, there will be a discussion of `collective intelligence.' This session will be chaired by Derrick de Kerckhove, our digital Teilhard de Chardin. With every day that passes, wrote de Chardin six decades ago, it becomes a little more impossible for us to act or think other than collectively. Derrick tells me that it is also a basic tendency of information networks to join up with each other; the big question for me is whether, with pervasive connectivity, the sum will be greater than the parts. * * * One way that connection will be made is by design. In the final session of the conference, tomorrow afternoon, we explore the use of design scenarios as a tool to stimulate the mental and material changes we have to make to achieve sustainability. For most of this week, 180 people have been working at high intensity in 12 design workshops on a range of specific responses to our question: How might information technology contribute to environmental sustainability? This word scenario is important. Because what we're not doing is predicting what will happen. Rather, we're taking hypotheses, and then asking what kind of design processes might have led to it. Designing backwards, if you like. To identify the things that need fixing, we used a process called `back-casting' in which a kind of story is told about everyday life in a world that has achieved a Factor 20 balance. The group works out the consequences and turns them into `stories' that describe how life is organised in this new situation. * * * * * * Another group has been looking at the concept `Beyond Being There', about the use of telematics to replace environmentally damaging business travel and commuting. The idea sounds logical but, as we learned at last year's conference on `home', a much deeper understanding of the social and physical contexts of communication is needed if any impact on damaging mobility is to be made. Our third and final aim is to foster connections between people and between organisations that will take good ideas from the conference forwards when formal proceedings end. We're certainly not getting into the business of global summits and grand plans to save the planet. But what we do think we can do is plant tiny seeds, in the form of ideas, and maybe also projects, that may produce one or two of the millions of answers we need to find. But we are not leaving this third aim to chance. I've tried to emphasise that by "connectivity', I mean connectivity between people, companies and ideas, not just the use of the Internet in a technical sense. We are also using the new communication networks themselves to make this happen. Our Doors team includes some experienced pioneers in the use of the Internet, World Wide Web, video conferencing, MOOs, and other media environments which have the capacity to engage individuals around the world. We have already used multimedia to disseminate the results of our first `Doors of Perception' with a CD-Rom and the results of the second conference were put onto the World Wide Web. However, at this year's conference, we're trying to use the Internet not just as an output device, but as a bridge among the participants. So we're building something called DOME, which stands for Doors On Matter Environment. The idea is to give each workshop group its own space on our web site and put in questions, texts, links to other sites, book lists and so on -- all the input you need to get a workshop started. Then, attached to that static stuff, we're building a discussion space where the participants can actually `talk' to each other about this material: their messages are lodged immediately in the DOME discussion environment, where other participants can all see and respond to them. I have no idea if this technical side of the process will add a little or a lot to the overall Doors programme. But the point is that we're getting our fingers `virtually'. * * * When we look at the principles of sustainability outlined by people like Paul Hawken, for example, `minimising the waste of matter and energy' or `reducing the movement and distribution of goods', or `using more people and less matter', we see that it is all involved with re-designing the systems that deliver us necessities -- food, clothing, shelter, mobility -- and the systems that deliver us information, culture and meaning. This is not exactly what people usually mean by `Green design' or `eco-design.' Green design tends to be concerned with today's industry, or what they call `end-of-pipe work': re-designing existing products to be recyclable or less wasteful. This is important work, but `end-of-pipe' is only half the story when it comes to achieving sustainability. For that, we have to design completely new ways of living. Nature is a very complex and interesting system. So is the Internet. So is the economy. So is the cell, the tree and the mind. We don't really know how they work. Mechanical metaphors don't work. None of these systems is a dysfunctional device that we can turn off or `mend'. Scientists have described them as complex, adaptive systems about which we should try and develop a kind of fractal consciousness, to think about the patterns of forces at play. It's true that we will only reach Factor 20 if large numbers of people work together to an unprecedented degree. But an equal and opposite requirement is that individuals and small communities have the confidence that small, private acts can also make a difference; we may all be `in this together', but we will all contribute in different ways to a solution. Some of these ways will be driven by connectivity; others will not. Peter Schwartz, an expert on scenario-making, explains that they provide a common vocabulary and an effective basis for communicating complex -- sometimes paradoxical - conditions and options. |
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updated 1995 |