Session 2: Why speed matters: ecology and sustainability

With Wolfgang Sachs we entered the ecological session of the 1996 Doors conference, on Speed. He had five stops on his tour: Body and Code, Colliding Time, Colonising, Speed and the Good Life, Selective Slowness as a Design Virtue.
Body and Code -- witnessing the fiery dragon in front pulling the railway, the idea of tireless power (cf. horse) settled. It transcends organic nature, unhindered by landscape or fatigue. The consequence is infinite growth of speed culture. The 'mobilisation of carbon and oil' is a radical break giving way to the conflict of industrial versus biological time.
Colliding Time -- the body sustained by the metabolism of food and excretion of waste. Similarly society, except metabolism and waste are speeding up beyond sustainability. We're using fuel that took millions of years to be created each year. We force-feed factory animals to speed up their natural cycle. The result is turbulence. A clash of time scales.
Colonising -- the 'speed to spill' means colonising the future: like mines were used to gather precious minerals, they turned into landfills after their depletion. Increasing speed means acting out power: since power to man is power over man, the power to spill evokes the question of justice, while today's generation has power over future ones. How much 'nature' are we permitting ourselves to move (like in mining) to keep up with the needs and speeds of informational technological culture? IT industry hopes at no cost to nature from its activity. There's no smoke and fumes, true, but the electronic equipment is much more expensive than was assumed in terms of amount of nature needing transformation. A Wupperthal Institute study showed that one PC needs 15-19 tonnes of energy and material over its lifetime -- cf. the car, which uses 25 tonnes. Be wary of eco-optimism.
Speed and the Good Life -- the paradox of time saving machines is that we have less time. Cars save time, but drivers don't spend less time in traffic than non-drivers. Time gained is invested in consumption, so acceleration bears congestion -- as much as, or even more than that it enhances the good life, it undermines it. Life in the fast lane is socially and environmentally unsustainable. Acceleration drives growth, driving more acceleration -- it's epidemic.
Selective Slowness as a Design Virtue -- speed promised a bright future to a slow 19th century populace, now the opposite is needed. 'Unhurriedness' -- maybe design a maximum speed of 120 kph into cars? The same for high speed trains, thanks to the disproportionate use of fuel over 200 kph. Since the telephone, it's been recognised that online communication and the emergence of online community does not substitute for transportation needs. Some needs will be replaced by new ones, but we must slow our speed to avoid an avalanche caused by IT.

Juliet Schor, like Wolfgang Sachs before her, reminds her audience that time gained in the production, transportation and communication process generally is not used in leisure, but to acquire yet more goods. This is caused not by technology but a social effect, especially of changing work patterns. There's increased dual wage-earning households, more women working, esp. in US, UK and Japan, but increasingly mainland Europe. Meaning more stress, burnout, a demand for convenience in food, ATMs. The connection to ecology is that speed-intensive is nearly always more damaging than time-in
Future production gains will be translated into more leisure -- we will need to produce time and more time. Previously, since the war, all productivity gains have been translated into the purchase of more goods and services -- the work-and-spend cycle. As we now appreciate, this does not increase happiness or well-being, which is coming from relative standing in society. Happiness is poorly correlated with wealth. In the US, millions already are in the 'money for time' trade: calling themselves 'downshifters', who decrease their income, to gain quality time. Not motivated necessarily by eco considerations, but the excessive pace of life and loss of control. 28% of Americans in the period 1990-95 claimed to have made voluntary changes resulting in less income (especially among the 18-40s, and well-educated). Schor disagrees with Kern that we always choose speed.

How to connect these data to design? According to Schor, design could bring back the low end of the market, where simpler and more durable goods are to be produced in several ways: develop less expensive versions of existing products; stop upscaling; aim at durability instead of novelty; reposition function over symbolism (i.e. less ads).

Jacqueline Cramer leads R&D at the Philips 'Visions for the Future' program, experimenting in durable products. We know speed trends are wrong, so we must re-orientate a downward spiral, upwards. A factor-10 reduction needs change in the minds of consumers and manufacturers. Durability comes in many forms, among which she discussed optimization of the usage period, recycling, repair, modular upgrades, and 'timeless design' to reduce the vagaries of fashion.

Also the use of products can add to their durability, when leased and/or shared (e.g. car or washing machine). This is becoming even more important when we know that most new products use far less energy than the old models. The standard 26-inch TV consumed 360 watts in the early 70s, only 90 watts today. This is a decreased burden, but had the TV sets of the 70s been more durable, would we have had the innovations? Design needs government support at a societal level for the pioneers of durable, eco-efficiency.

'Chinese architects are the most important in the world,' said Koolhaas. But there's only 1/30,000 people -- c.f. US 1/3,000, UK 1/1,800. They do ten times as much, there are ten times fewer and they're paid ten times less: a productivity factor of 1,000. They build in shamelessly baroque glamour. Many buildings are already being adapted while they are being built (bowling alleys in office blocks, etc.). It causes new urban phenomena, ones we have no relation with. Golf courses and theme parks are integral. A 120 km highway on a raised viaduct is being built -- the most extreme construction of the 20th century. An intersection planned for the middle-of-nowhere virtually dictates that a new city will arise here. 'Potemkin Corridors' are being built -- from and to nowhere (at present), not even sure where they will end.
The tabula rasa of this bay's shores creates a new poetry of flatness, where mountains are blown away to fill valleys with their gravel. The fever of building is not necessary provoked by a fever of inhabitation. There's competition for people. Cities remaining largely empty are aggressively advertised, try to outcheap other cities, thematically focus themselves on 24hr golf courses or the history of Europe, and generally aim at competitive maximum difference.
Koolhaas calls his study 'Cities of Exacerbated Difference': new urban entities competing not co-operating, but somehow making a strategic whole. A state of permanent instability -- not as brutal as it seems -- in fact, quite a sensitive and adaptive system.

Presentation of the Virtual Airport project
Four teams in London, Tokyo, NYC and Amsterdam commissioned by Japanese Airlines. The project was presented by four contributors, who each spoke in the name of their teams and gave a short demo of their program for a virtual airport.
Conny Bakker (Amsterdam, the Netherlands Design Institute) -- Schiphol the personal airport, can be accessed at multiple levels using an electronic diary which allows both to book fast forward de-mystified, of the shelf travel or go slow and ecologically correct by airship transport -- the latter's slowness being compensated for by pumping up the on board connectivity volume and new services offered.

Tadanori Nagasawa (Tokyo) -- an agent-based 'personal purser' provides a comforting sense of crossing borders when it goes out to chase relevant and 'grounded' information along your trip, negotiating with the agents of passing locales, overcoming language and cultural differences, smoothing your dislocational abandon.
Gillian Crampton-Smith (London's RCA) -- aim to heal psychological dislocation of air travel: worry, delay, being separated from natural (lived) time, becoming a package to be processed. The Net allows parallel journey to be made, enabling re-localisation, informing on travel, preparing for arrival. A Virtual Museum of technology, nature, culture.
Tom Klinkowstein (NYC, Pratt) -- left the physical airport altogether by 'super branding' JFK Airport in the realm of the World Wide Web. Air travel has gone from exotic, stylish and desirable to tedious and common in a few decades. jfk.com was thrown into competition with Nike and the likes for world domination as a lifestyle, celebrating 'the difference between where you are and where you want to be'. 'Lagged and loving it'. The airport as university of the future (McLuhan). Fashion, people-tracking (a la Fedex), VR walkthru's... For the children of the super nerds.

High speed (300-500 kph) trains shrink Europe's distances. Rens Holslag and his team designed a new interface for the collaboration of European rail companies (they're very idiosyncratic; 27 companies with 14 navigation systems, mostly mechanical and incompatible), as a contribution by Dutch Rail to the improvement of the international traffic system, managed by the European Traffic Management Centre, established in 1991.
Starting from the drivers' perspective, a cockpit simulator sported computer take-over when the driver would fail to reduce speed in time, electronic distance vision to respect the train's 8 km (16 if headlong towards other) braking distance (at 350 kph), and various information from outside and inside the train on display. More trains on the tracks means more intelligence on board. Longer trips are planned with the same driver, with less knowledge of routes.
The project developed new principles, such as a braking curve, and the ideal driver, electronically 'projected' in front of the actual train. The team built a 1:1 scale simulator and went on the road around Europe showing it.