I received a well-traveled p!rated version of Paris, Je T'aime from a dear friend in India today. Note: he's not always in India, but he was when he sent me this postbox surprise. The movie is a lovely collection of vignettes by various directors that eventually come together at the end as you would want, but for me, it's not nearly soon enough. All in all, they are touching, funny, silly, and in love with love in the city thereof -- but the cliché is not even remotely sickening. Thankfully. Take a look at my blog entry on Paris if you want to know what I thought of the place.
I also got word of some new projects at Born magazine today - one is a Gatsby-inspired poem, The Smell of Roses at Night, that's put to the visual enhancement of transmutating roses powered by a finger-spun typewriter. When you read it, you won't regret the whimsical few minutes you spend. We can always use more than a single daily dose of beauty and poetry.
15.8.07
9.8.07
Small Design is Beautiful
Recently, I traveled to New York to visit some friends and to see an exhibit about the fruits of a movement to direct engineering, design, and architecture toward socially responsible, sustainable, humanitarian design. Design for the Other 90%, at the Cooper-Hewitt museum until September 23, 2007, is a small but important temporary exhibit at this branch of the Smithsonian museums. I enjoyed seeing the objects on display, but much more valuable are the ideologies spelled out and the stories behind the exhibits.
Again and again, the project leaders credit the concepts laid out in E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful; by designing on the more human scale of the intended customers (poor people included!), you eliminate waste and make the design enterprise more fail-proof. The kicker for me is that you can "design like you give a damn" and since you're operating on the level of the customer, which necessarily includes lots of feedback and hands-on, creative development, projects are almost guaranteed to have an observable beneficial impact.
Here are a few quotes from the second chapter, on peace and permanence (paraphrased from the writings of Prof. Leopold Kohr). They're rather long but they make some important points:
"Small-scale operations ... are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature. There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding. The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things."
"It is obvious that men organised in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry."
Some particularly demonstrative examples from Design for the Other 90% are the Fuel from the Fields project and IDE's Drip Irrigation system. Fuel from the Fields uses a variety of farming waste products specific to the intended customers to make cooking fuel that decreases damaging air pollutants and the demands on the females who usually have to go far afield to find wood, dung, or other burnable materials. The Drip irrigation system incorporates a way to store waters from monsoon season with a simple distribution system that is perfectly fitted to the quarter-acre size of the plots maintained by small farmers, allowing them to dramatically increase their output of high-priced produce in the dry season. Both of these projects incorporate equipment and technology that is low-priced and low-tech enough so it can be produced by entrepreneurs in the region. This means that such entrepreneurs can make a profit by enabling their fellow villagers a more healthy lifestyle and decreasing the harmful impact of deforestation in the case of the fuel, and by enabling an increase in profit and food supply for the case of drip irrigation.
Again and again, the project leaders credit the concepts laid out in E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful; by designing on the more human scale of the intended customers (poor people included!), you eliminate waste and make the design enterprise more fail-proof. The kicker for me is that you can "design like you give a damn" and since you're operating on the level of the customer, which necessarily includes lots of feedback and hands-on, creative development, projects are almost guaranteed to have an observable beneficial impact.
Here are a few quotes from the second chapter, on peace and permanence (paraphrased from the writings of Prof. Leopold Kohr). They're rather long but they make some important points:
"Small-scale operations ... are always less likely to be harmful to the natural environment than large-scale ones, simply because their individual force is small in relation to the recuperative forces of nature. There is wisdom in smallness if only on account of the smallness and patchiness of human knowledge, which relies on experiment far more than on understanding. The greatest danger invariably arises from the ruthless application, on a vast scale, of partial knowledge such as we are currently witnessing in the application of nuclear energy, of the new chemistry in agriculture, of transportation technology, and countless other things."
"It is obvious that men organised in small units will take better care of their bit of land or other natural resources than anonymous companies or megalomanic governments which pretend to themselves that the whole universe is their legitimate quarry."
Some particularly demonstrative examples from Design for the Other 90% are the Fuel from the Fields project and IDE's Drip Irrigation system. Fuel from the Fields uses a variety of farming waste products specific to the intended customers to make cooking fuel that decreases damaging air pollutants and the demands on the females who usually have to go far afield to find wood, dung, or other burnable materials. The Drip irrigation system incorporates a way to store waters from monsoon season with a simple distribution system that is perfectly fitted to the quarter-acre size of the plots maintained by small farmers, allowing them to dramatically increase their output of high-priced produce in the dry season. Both of these projects incorporate equipment and technology that is low-priced and low-tech enough so it can be produced by entrepreneurs in the region. This means that such entrepreneurs can make a profit by enabling their fellow villagers a more healthy lifestyle and decreasing the harmful impact of deforestation in the case of the fuel, and by enabling an increase in profit and food supply for the case of drip irrigation.
7.8.07
Done with School, Snapshot of China
Every time I think of it, I can't help but marvel at how it is to be finished with the school system after 19 years of going to class, long hours with textbooks, taking notes, dealing with new teachers, and meeting classmates for work and play. After being in such a stiff and well-defined system, I feel a bit floaty out here in this world where there are a huge variety of possible choices one could make. It's great to be free enough to reconnect with friends in the area, though - and soon, I'll be across the country to see the California side of the family for a kiddie birthday party!
After such a preamble, I'm posting an excerpt from one of my PC essays, for entertainment and for show. This is one ingredient in one such possibility for the future. I write about my two weeks in China, which I visited five years ago.
"I learned to bring toilet paper with me, to tolerate trash on the streets and to remain (relatively) calm on chaotic highways teeming with bikes and rickshaws operating independent of any apparent traffic laws. It wasn’t a freewheeling kind of integration that my friend and I eased ourselves into, but more of a cautious one; awareness for my own safety seemed suddenly closely linked to my decisions. At the same time, I felt sympathetic toward the people who lived there—the old huotong neighborhoods seemed a tragic place to live if lung-crippling coal was the most widely-used fuel for cooking and heating available, and the ugly practice of land-reclamation continued to leave its mark on the local mountains, all in the name of low-cost capital development. The smog coloring the sunset gray was the suspect in the case of my own respiratory ailment that developed after only 4 or 5 days. Water was also a huge problem, as every bottle-toting tourist knows, but 300 million residents will never be truly adapted to a water table contaminated by human waste. Chinese behaviors were discouraging, but what I took away was this: there probably weren’t better options readily available, and my ability to recognize such inequities could be a means to help. In China, health risks and environmental deterioration have a real, tangible meaning in a way that’s more often talked about than experienced in the US."
After such a preamble, I'm posting an excerpt from one of my PC essays, for entertainment and for show. This is one ingredient in one such possibility for the future. I write about my two weeks in China, which I visited five years ago.
"I learned to bring toilet paper with me, to tolerate trash on the streets and to remain (relatively) calm on chaotic highways teeming with bikes and rickshaws operating independent of any apparent traffic laws. It wasn’t a freewheeling kind of integration that my friend and I eased ourselves into, but more of a cautious one; awareness for my own safety seemed suddenly closely linked to my decisions. At the same time, I felt sympathetic toward the people who lived there—the old huotong neighborhoods seemed a tragic place to live if lung-crippling coal was the most widely-used fuel for cooking and heating available, and the ugly practice of land-reclamation continued to leave its mark on the local mountains, all in the name of low-cost capital development. The smog coloring the sunset gray was the suspect in the case of my own respiratory ailment that developed after only 4 or 5 days. Water was also a huge problem, as every bottle-toting tourist knows, but 300 million residents will never be truly adapted to a water table contaminated by human waste. Chinese behaviors were discouraging, but what I took away was this: there probably weren’t better options readily available, and my ability to recognize such inequities could be a means to help. In China, health risks and environmental deterioration have a real, tangible meaning in a way that’s more often talked about than experienced in the US."
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