use your imagination

The future is fiction. In fact, the future is a story that each of us participates in writing every day. It is only when tomorrow transitions to yesterday that will we have the clarity of hindsight; only then, can we know what the future really was. While we cannot predict the future, the designers among us must consider the years to come, so that we are more prepared to prevent, anticipate and cope with that which may occur.

To this end, Arup Foresight in association with ICSID has put together a studio to take a look at what life on earth would look like if we decided to follow a trajectory towards “Life @ 1 Planet.”

THE DESIGN 2050 CHALLENGE

Through the course of six consecutive weeks participants will be asked to imagine not what will, but rather, what can our world be in 2050 and what would y[our] “Life @ 1 Planet" be in 2050?

Step one: beginning Monday 27 July 2009 visit www.thedesign2050challenge.com. If you decide to participate you can build a team (1-3 people) or you can choose to participate by yourself.

Step two: follow the directions on the website and develop a character that can live and breathe on your behalf on the journey to Life @ 1 Planet” in 2050.

Each Friday participants will be issued a new challenge and will need to submit their responses to the Design 2050 Challenge website. The project will run approximately from July 27th until the first week of September.

which heads are bashing against which brick wall?

The Free Market Foundation of Southern Africa seems to think that the media exaggerate climate change risks, and that there are plenty of scientists who can demonstrate that we don't have all that much to worry about, or at least that the evidence is inconclusive. They are regularly giving the impression that there is still a lot of debate around climate science, and that this is a reason to be cautious about trying to mitigate climate change. The media thrives on stirring controversy and bad news, some people say, and is therefore inherently biased. Not only that, but climatologists and others involved in researching the factors contributing to climate change are basing entire careers on studies and analysis that builds the case for climate change - while funding is in short supply for studies that question climate change. In effect, the UN is being hoodwinked by a conspiracy of monstrous proportions.

There are many counter arguments to this position, but consider this.

James Hansen is the 68-year-old director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). He also created one of the world's first climate models thirty years ago, which he used to predict much of what happened to the climate between then and now. Not everything he forecast happened exactly as anticipated - the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 caused an unexpected pause in the upward trend in temperatures. But he's been patiently building up the scientific facts surrounding climate change.

jobs, equity and dignity - lessons in sustainability

I have had a number of discussions with colleagues about the importance of addressing social equity and poverty wherever we are - in an industrialised country or a developing one - and about how important these are to sustainability. A post by Kaid Benfield earlier this week on the NRDC Switchboard drove home the point that every society has its vulnerable communities. He reviews a recent report titled Green Cities: How Urban Sustainability Efforts Can and Must Drive America's Climate Change Policies that points out that low-income areas in the US should not be ignored in sustainability strategies, both because there is real potential there for reducing emissions, and because there is an opportunity to improve social and economic conditions in these communities.

Having spent half my life in South Africa and the other half in Canada, I am familiar with conditions (and attitudes) on both sides of the industrial fence. South Africa happens to be a place where poverty and inequity are stark, so it draws people who want to do volunteer work in the "third world". My discussions on this tend to focus on pointing out that the everyday work we do (as planners, designers and engineers) can improve or worsen quality of life, and the implications for vulnerable communities are particularly significant. Just as I need to increase my awareness of how my work affects women, children, the elderly, the unemployed and those who face mobility challenges, so should my colleagues around the world.

The impacts might seem more extreme in South Africa, but one just needs to look at the battles that Jane Jacobs fought in Toronto, New York and elsewhere, over the divisive effect that road projects can have on local neighbourhoods, to see that social inequities can increase wherever planners don't consider the broader impacts of their decisions.

So before we consider providing aid as volunteers, let's make sure we understand what we are doing in our professional work. That's not easy in an era when our disciplines are so narrowly specialised, and integrated planning is more talked about than practised, but we need to try first where we understand the general context. Maybe then we can move out and empower people in other countries.

I would also venture to suggest that developing countries have a lot of knowledge to offer to others. Maybe it's from knowing that more livelihoods are at stake, or having a strong grasp of the value of community and indigenous knowledge - either way, many developing countries still have an edge that seems to have vanished from the industrialised world. Public sector priorities for community development projects in South Africa are often driven more by the recognition of human dignity than by the need for addressing individual human rights. There is even a programme for improving degraded public spaces, and it's called Dignified Open Spaces.

Picture: Old Mutual using dignity to sell financial services.

Human rights are important, of course, but if we focus on dignity we will almost automatically make planning decisions that establish a healthy balance between the needs of the community and the individual, between equity and rights. We may even start to see how to deal better with some of the other trade-offs that are made daily in public planning processes.

hydrogen storage takes wing

Monday's post mentioned the Open Source Green Vehicle that allows any form of energy storage to be used. And storage is one of the big challenges for using renewable energy in transport. Hydrogen has been proposed as a storage medium to replace batteries, but the problem is how to stuff enough of the gas into a conveniently sized space in a car.

You can compress it, but that carries risks. Another way is to use some material to increase the surface area to which hydrogen molecules can cling. Nanotubes could do it, but they are too expensive. Along comes Richard Wool, a chemical engineer at the University of Delaware, who thinks he can do the job with chicken feathers.

The fibres in feathers are almost entirely composed of keratin, a protein also found in hair and nails. When heated in the absence of oxygen (a process called pyrolysis), keratin forms hollow tubular structures six millionths of a metre across and riddled with microscopic pores, much like carbon nanotubes.

The researchers have some way to go to make this a practical solution, but they think they can increase the feathers' porosity to develop a practical hydrogen system that costs $4 per kilowatt hour stored and less than $700 for installing it - meeting a target set by America’s Department of Energy.

[Thanks, Paul]

open source vehicle design

Software like the Linux operating system is developed by opening it up for anyone to tweak and add features and generally make it do what they want. Its inner workings are non-proprietary and completely public so that the power of crowdsourcing can be harnessed to continually fine-tune and improve the product. I've been wondering why nobody has thought of applying the same open source principle to vehicle manufacture. Well, it turns out it is being done, right now.

Jeff Jarvis, in his new book What Would Google Do?, writes about the concept of allowing purchasers to request exactly what features they want in their car, ordering direct from the manufacturer. Ford, GM and the like aren't in the business of manufacturing anyway - they just assemble parts that have been manufactured to their specifications - so why don't they go all the way and focus on transportation as a service rather than a mass-produced vehicle that forces buyers to pay for features they don't want?

The brand would become what you want it to be, and by allowing customisation the manufacturer would discover what we really want, not guess what they think we want. Just the way Google learns from our searches what information we want to see, and focuses on designing the information systems to make that possible, auto manufacturers could focus on making customisation possible. It doesn't suit their current business model, but that's not to say it can't be done. The big-name auto manufacturers have clearly failed to make a success of their businesses anyway.

We're not quite at the stage that Jeff Jarvis is proposing, but there is a nonprofit company working on an open source car that is a contender for the automotive X Prize. The Society for Sustainable Transportation calls it the Open Source Green Vehicle, and it's being designed through a collaborative international effort. All design data and test data will be shared and accessible from the internet.

Open source software needs to work within agreed standards so that anyone who designs a module to run in an operating system like Linux can know how to get the components to communicate with each other. The operating system is a platform that other software can "plug in to", but it doesn't dictate how that other software works. A key concept of the OSGV (known as the Kernel™) is that any fuel source can be used by plugging it in to the vehicle - a physical version of a software module. As with software development, the OSGV needs specifications so that if someone wants to develop a new energy source for the vehicle, they can design the interface between the energy module and the car in accordance with those standards - but the inner workings of the energy module can be designed without constraint.

This breaks down the barrier to entry for alternative fuels because Kernel™ owners don’t have to buy a new car when they want to use a different fuel. Each power source module is self-contained. Simply swap out the original power source module with a different one. Onboard computers will automatically adapt to the new power source module. And, it’s that easy; A qualified facility can complete the conversion in merely hours.

I like it. But that's just a start.

age-old wisdom applied to modern challenges

I don't advocate sending us back to pre-industrial times as a solution to modern society's environmental impacts. Moving towards a sustainable lifestyle requires incremental steps - we can't instantly do away with cars and other technologies that rely on fossil fuels. But efforts to wean ourselves off environmentally damaging practices can certainly benefit from technologies that were developed thousands of years ago, like provencal wells, solar chimneys, passive solar designs for buildings, and underground clay pots for irrigation. Another example is using nets to collect water from fog, as in Peru, where a net can collect hundreds of litres a day.

As far back as 2,000 years ago, desert villages and other rain-starved communities around the world may have started harvesting fog that collected as water and dripped from trees, said Robert Schemenauer, executive director of FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit organization that helps communities set up simple collection devices.

This is a great demonstration of adaptation to climate change. Lima gets rainfall of only 1.5 cm a year, and relies for water on meltwaters from glaciers in the Andes - and those glaciers are shrinking, causing scientists to caution that this water supply one day will be no more. What better replacement than fog harvesting, which taps a resource that otherwise goes to waste, and benefits those who need it most: communities on the hills surrounding Lima, where it would be expensive to bring piped municipal water.

Like many other strategies, this cannot be applied on a large scale, but that shouldn't stop us finding local solutions to big challenges. And clean water supply is a huge one.

making the best of a bad job

Given the opportunity, how would you re-vision, retrofit and reinvigorate suburbia? The ReBurbia competition is just that opportunity for you to submit your design proposals for reinventing suburban sprawl, turning it into something a tad more useful than a decaying remnant of the cheap oil era.

[image: BLDGBLOG]

the pencil exposed

The essay I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read (1898-1983) is a celebration of the power of Adam Smith's "invisible hand" and of Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that “will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.” Personally, I am not a free market fundamentalist, but this piece is a beautifully written illustration of all that is involved in the process of creating something as simple as a graphite pencil.

And why does that interest me? Because it makes absolutely clear that energy and other resources (not to mention human sweat) are embodied in everything we use. Nothing, however small, should escape attention in our efforts to understand the environmental, social, economic and resource impacts of all that we do. There is no better illustration than this. [via kottke.org]

And they are not only for writing and drawing. Pencil art from dornob.

Kraftwerk: "We are liberated from holidays."

As we wait in anticipation (or not) to see if Lance Armstrong can pull off another win, it's time for a little trivia. Ever wondered what Lance has in common with South African author JM Coetzee and German band Kraftwerk? Read Mahala to find out. You won't learn a whole lot from this particular article, but you will read this:

“The Ventoux, thrusting abundantly skywards, is a god of Evil to whom sacrifice must be paid. A true Moloch, a despot of cyclists, it never pardons the weak and exacts an unjust tribute of suffering.”

Yes? And you will also discover, if you haven't already, a wonderfully irreverant, independent magazine on music, culture and reality, "picking at the frayed edges of the South African psyche." For free.

the value of wind

Renewable energy might never be cheap, but that's not really the objective. The idea is to get it to where it's competitive with fossil fuels, and there are many ways to do that, financially speaking. But competitiveness also depends on technical issues like reliability. What do you do when the wind dies - or even when it blows too hard? Sudden bursts of renewable energy can be just as much of a challenge for the grid, and for the other suppliers feeding it. As renewables gain ground, this is starting to be a serious question. You can't just power down a nuclear or coal power station whenever there's a strong gust of wind.

New research published last week by analysts Poyry suggests that the issues around peaking of renewable energy could be adequately dealt with by the network, as long as the market adapts to highly variable systems. It has occasionally been suggested that combining wind, solar, landfill gas and wave energy, or any othe source one cares to suggest, would help to even out the peaks and troughs in supply. This may be true, but it doesn't eliminate the risks.

The answer could lie in in the economics of scarcity, the research suggests. The way to harness the market, so to speak, is by pricing wind energy according to how hard the wind blows. Pricing should be based not only on demand (like charging consumers more for using electricity during peak periods) but also on supply variables. When the wind is howling, wind energy would be cheap enough that other suppliers couldn't compete, and would reduce their output.

Of course, this approach might not go down too well with suppliers who are just starting to win the North American battle over feed-in tariffs (FITs). Proponents have pointed to Germany as a success story that shows how stable FITs are needed to establish the confidence needed for heavy investment in renewable energy projects, and this idea is gaining traction in Canada and the US.

Feed-in tariffs guarantee long-term payments at pre-established rates for the electricity generated from renewable sources. The production-based payments are often higher than market rates, but are on the verge of becoming competitive in specific locations for certain technologies such as wind power.

NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) analysts have identified a shopping list of factors needed for a FIT policy that successfully stimulates investment and achieves the desired spinoff benefits. They recommend stability, long-term contracts, adequate energy prices, incrementally decreasing tariffs, differentiation according to technology, incorporating FIT into the rate base, and reducing bureaucracy. But they also caution that there needs to be careful consideration of local conditions and policy objectives.

The NREL reports examine a wide range of FIT programs. For example, Gainesville's tariff is limited to photovoltaic projects with a total city-wide cap of 4 megawatts (MW). Under Washington state's FIT policy, solar PV, solar thermal, wind, and anaerobic digesters are offered a payment that differs by technology and that increases if system components are manufactured in-state.

This spring, the Canadian province of Ontario revised its three-year old program to include a 20-year fixed price of as much as US $0.69 for every kilowatt-hour of solar power generated. In response, SunEdison, First Solar, Everbrite Solar and Nanosolar are developing both solar energy farms and manufacturing facilities near Ottawa, Kingston and other cities.