McDonough virtually on Maui

From Monday 31 July through Wednesday 2 August, with two colleagues from HRCFS, I attended a conference entitled "Islands of the World", held by the International Small Islands Studies Association at Maui Community College, part of the University of Hawaii. The general theme was Sustainable Islands — Sustainable Strategies, with an emphasis on the interconnected topics of ho'ohanohano (social equity and heritage), po'okela (economy), and malama 'aina (ecology). These represent the three strands of the increasingly popular integrated "triple bottom line" (elements also known respectively as people, profits and planet).

Very well intentioned, and also well attended (35 countries were reportedly represented among the delegates), the bottom line of this event, from my point of view, was to remind me of why I believe that the concept of sustainability is simply not equal to the enormous task of inspiring genuinely progressive, practicable solutions to the great ecological and social challenges that it is increasingly being called upon to address.

The broader reason is that "sustainability" is not a sufficiently exciting motivator to power the profound changes it seems we're likely to need. In essence, it's simply the absence of systemically self destructive behaviour. The ubiquitous Brundtland Report definition of sustainable development: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Necessary, of course. Sufficient? I think not. Architect Bill McDonough (recently referred to in this posting as an exemplary advocate of design thinking in fixing current industrial practice) has written about how weak an idea it really is. Paraphrasing McDonough, if you asked someone how her marriage is, and the reply was "sustainable", you'd have to feel sorry for her. Sustainability is an earnest, but somehow heavy-hearted idea, too limp to bear its own pompous weight. If the planet is in as much trouble as the greatest exponents of sustainability evidently believe, I doubt there's enough passion in the idea of becoming "non-self-destructing" to turn things around.

A more specific reason is that sustainability appears to invite a backward-looking (excessively past oriented) ethos. Many of the speakers in plenary sessions referred directly or by implication to what they perceived as a need to "go back to go forward", and there was more than a smattering of romanticisation of the past, as if the answers to all questions that matter in this area could be found simply by somehow resurrecting ancient cultural practices. A plausible account of exactly how those practices revived from a premodern era could practically be accommodated in the overdeveloped urban landscape of Honolulu (for example), I eagerly await. In fact I'm highly sympathetic to the efforts of native Hawaiians and other groups to renew and reinvigorate a relationship with the land, and the cosmos, that has been weakened and damaged by the interventions of history, i.e. by European settlement, and the dispossession and dislocation that came with it. The Australian Aboriginal predicament bears some comparison here -- there too, extremely long-standing, traditional patterns of relating to, and living off, the fruits of land and sea (quintessentially sustainable patterns, you might say) were massively disrupted in a matter of years, beginning what appears to many from our current historical vantage point to have been a downward spiral of exploitation and disconnection; a litany of social and ecological results probably too catastrophic for words to bear. It is not just native or indigenous peoples that have experienced loss here. Indeed, the fact that the missing links between humanity and landscape are so readily identified by them in those terms highlights the relatively greater and older alienation of Western cultures from their own, non-exploitative, direct knowledge of ecology -- once upon a time.

And yet. I remain far from convinced that the key to the future is merely to imagine ourselves breathing new life into a dimly remembered, idealised past. There's no question that the recovery of a respectful understanding of how things used to work is a necessary step to moving forward successfully (which for my purposes here subsumes "sustainably"), but it seems to me to be an incomplete prescription at best. The wholly justifiable case for rediscovering and reasserting traditional identities and values in the political arena ought not to be mistaken for a comprehensive solution to massively complex problems, which will almost certainly have to be resolved cooperatively if they are to be resolved at all. Overlaying "the past" upon "the present" is, I'd wager, surely more complex than simply plonking down a layer of old-time farming or fishing on the modern substrate of habits, tastes and dependencies. Arguably, in fact, it's a deeply disingenuous argument that calls for a rediscovery of ostensibly simpler times gone by, because the shift of historical momentum required to "go back" could well be more tumultuous than the curve of accelerating change that describes how we got here to begin with.

I would be really interested to hear from people who have addressed some of the subtleties in this area of social change, but so far, arguments I've encountered to the effect that the key to a sustainable future lies in history have seemed largely empty to me.

So, on Tuesday, McDonough presented at this conference. However, he did so virtually, using a souped-up videophone called Teleportec, which lets audience members see the image of the presenter (who does their thing remotely) and enjoying the texture of the curtains on the stage behind their projected, ghostly image. McDonough did an absolutely excellent rendition of his standard address on Cradle to Cradle design principles, which notably did not include his doubts about "sustainability" oriented discourse. (Here's someone astute enough to know not to bite the hand that feeds him; or perhaps simply gives good intentions their due.)

He generously allowed time to answer questions (from unamplified audience members, whose inquiries were relayed to the speaker by an on-stage MC, in an abridged and garbled form -- not the best Q&A system I've ever seen). I was fortunate to have the chance to inquire about whether McDonough knew of anyone who was pursuing design thinking in relation to political design. Being a former Dean of the University of Virginia's School of Architecture, who used to live in Thomas Jefferson's house Monticello, he frequently refers to Jefferson's achievements as an accomplished designer of both buildings and society. Maybe there was something lost in the valiant MC's translation of my question, but McDonough's reply surprised me. He didn't answer "no" directly (though that was the upshot of his response), but rambled a bit about staying as far away from politics as possible. To be fair, there was more to the answer than that, but it struck out on a tangent and never came back.

Now, if politics is so contagiously distasteful an occupation as all that -- and I'd heartily agree that presently, in virtually all places I know about, it probably is -- we might usefully understand its vagaries as an invitation to design a better system, not to avoid it. (For a sample of the view of the political process as beyond redemption, even in a country generally considered relatively prosperous and democratic, try the devastating article "Ten reasons you shouldn't go into politics", by Mark Latham, former leader of the Australian Labor Party.)

Why is it, I wonder, that people who can readily perceive the systemic flaws of political practice seem so reluctant, or are unable, to bring themselves to address those flaws with constructive conversation about possible solutions? I had a similar feeling after the distinguished futurist consultant Joe Coates presented a devastatingly comprehensive critique of the United States Constitution at the World Future Society conference in Chicago in 02005, but he declined to offer any outline for possible solutions, suggesting that to do so would only invite kneejerk critique. (He also asserted that to deign to vote only encourages politicians; not an uncommon view, I guess, but one I see as rather glib and unsatisfactory, feeding as it does the vicious circle of political disengagement.)

A young man approached me after McDonough's presentation (which, I hasten to reiterate, was in all other respects sterling) and provided two references he felt related to my question on political design, but I have not yet had time to pursue them. They were:
- Steven Shalom on ParPolity
- Glenn Paige on Global Nonviolence

As always, I'd be interested to hear from readers with something to add on this topic. Meanwhile, I ponder the untouchability of politics, and the growing need to get to work on rethinking it all from the ground up -- inventing and designing a politics to inspire engagement, whose success we can measure (to appropriate another McDonough line) by the number of children's eyes that light up; rather than one that pushes away, as if by magnetic repulsion, the best people, and contaminates anyone who gets too close.

Why the language of design must enter law and politics (part one)

I'm a designer and I want to talk briefly about the concept of design itself. Design is the first signal of human intention. As we look around at the tragedies that we see in the making, we realize that we have to ask: Did we really intend for this to happen? Is this something we designed?
. . .
Once you realize that our culture has adopted strategies of tragedy, perhaps it's time to have strategies of change.

First we have to start with great humility. We don't know what to do. We have indigenous traditions we can draw from, but we don't know what to do. If anybody has any problem with the concept of design humility, reflect on the fact that it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage.

So as an assignment, let's design an industrial system for world culture that treats nature as an enemy to be evaded or controlled; that measures prosperity by how much natural capital you can cut down, dig up, bury, burn, or otherwise destroy; that measures productivity by how few people are working; that measures progress by the number of smokestacks (if you're especially proud, put your names on them). It is a system that destroys biological and cultural diversity at every turn with one-size-fits-all solutions, requires thousands of complex regulations to keep us from killing each other too quickly, and while you're at it, produces a few things so highly toxic that it will require thousands of generations to maintain constant vigilance while living in terror. Can you do this for me? Welcome to the first Industrial Revolution.

It's time for a new design assignment.

Extract from William McDonough, " Designing the Next Industrial Revolution", Timeline #58, July/August 02001.

Futures and design are, it seems to me, natural bedfellows.

1. Design is predicated on deliberate choice between options available. If there's only one way for something to be, there's no scope for design. Designs can be -- are made to be -- adapted, improved.

2. Consequently, a design approach to anything encourages the taking of responsibility for what we can change.

3. Good design has creative, imaginative elements. It has aesthetic (what pleases) as well as a functional (what works) dimension.

We'll come back to these.

So, McDonough's central insight here is that unintended outcomes, once their tragic nature is acknowledged and understood, are as good as intentional -- not retrospectively, of course, but from that point on. Failure to respond to the consequences of bad design makes it a case of negligence by omission. Another way to put it is that if unforeseen negative consequences emerge, the fact that they were unforeseen is no good as a defence for sticking with the original strategy.

What does all that have to do with law and politics (advertised in the title)?

Well, McDonough implies that there's a systemic problem with industry which leads to the destruction (substitute "compromised integrity" if "destruction" seems too shrill) of the environment, among other ills. I think that's a sound argument. But as a student of political science, and a reformed (and repentant) one of law, these two domains are foregrounded in my thinking as a locus of individual and collective action. Design is the first signal of human intention, says McDonough. But industry, as he uses the term, does not denote a strictly designed structure, so much as an emergent set of practices, many of them accidentally pernicious. In contrast, as I see it, at a macro-social level human intention is nowhere more clearly signalled than in the effort to shape society directly through these mechanisms: legal and political processes. They are the principal method by which we collectively design our world.

What this means is that, to whatever extent our systems of law and politics are failing us, we have not just the potential, but also the obligation to redesign them. Lest I should be misunderstood to suppose too much, I should clarify that it also means there's a concomitant responsibility to try to ascertain the extent, and the nature, of that failure, which is naturally a big and contentious debate.

Returning to the three points above, then.

1. Design is predicated on deliberate choice between options available.

Politics is also about choice. I mean this not as a shallow "three cheers for choice", but as an observation that its fundamental function is the process of negotiating what's important, who gets what, who's in charge and so on, from among competing possible outcomes.

2. A design approach to anything encourages the taking of responsibility for what we can change.

Jumping up one layer from choice within the political process, to choice about the shape of political process itself: this too can change. Cast as a design issue, it's not an ineluctable given, but a system that can be ignored, repaired or replaced at will. This mindshift is sorely needed when "politics" appears to be disparagingly thought of as simply the nasty way things are and ever will be -- as in the realist school of political philosophy, which designates the nation state as the natural unit of governance.

3. Good design has creative, imaginative elements.

The language of design helps frame political discussion in a way that appears useful for accommodating both affective and practical aspects. It is in that sense congenial to the discussion of values, which are one of the primary bases of political difference, but which somehow strike me as wearyingly dull when addressed in those terms (Let's talk about values! Yawn. Enter stage left pretension and absolutism. Let's talk instead about what you want, what you respond to, what you love. What your community can do for you, and what you can do for your community. How your ideal would look, and how we could approach it.) At any rate, what politics as such seems to lack almost entirely, in the main, is creativity and imagination. Bring in the designers. Bring on the artists. McDonough's right: it's time for a new design assigment. Any takers?

/To be continued.../

Product to service: a cultural shift?

A few months back, when the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies did a small project for the South Korean government on construction and transportation, I was put in mind of a service I'd heard about in London, involving pay-as-you-go access to cars scattered around the city (sort of halfway between a taxi service and car rental, but automated). I didn't know the business name then, and couldn't locate a reference, but today I stumbled across a neat link on it. Arguably, this exemplifies a trend from ownership to access (or products-->services). Why own something outright if a more limited arrangement will suffice?

Another, deeper way this trend manifests, I'd say, is in the Bill McDonough-Michael Braungart (Cradle to Cradle, c.f. sustainability) concept of "products of service", whereby non-consumable, hard-wearing products like TVs, cars and carpets are seen as "rented" rather than bought from the manufacturer, which takes responsibility for the fate of those molecules when the product reaches the end of its life cycle. (Consider the European Union directives which apply this notion of producer reponsibility to products including vehicles and electronic goods.)

If this represents a taking of greater responsibility for, or internalisation of, what economists used to be pleased to call "externalities", could it, in turn, be seen to speak of a gradual deepening in our understanding of time? (The "longer now"; a tendency toward what we could call "temporal holism" -- and applaud.)

Let's see: there may be interesting higher-order implications here... On realising that physical products, and the consequences of manufacturing them, outlast their human "owners" by many, many generations, the traditional conception of ownership comes to seem a rather absurd conceit. Life's short! A quote from the film Crocodile Dundee (01986, dir. Peter Faiman): "See those rocks sitting up there? Been standing there for six hundred years. Still be there when you and I are gone. So arguing over who owns 'em is like a couple of fleas arguing over who owns the dog they're living on." (See also this post about The Rocks video which makes more or less the same point.)

Optimistically, then, perhaps our callow Western civilisation is edging towards recognition of the wisdom of what I understand to be the Australian Aboriginal relationship to land -- that people belong to it, not the other way around. Granted, this kind of radical inversion of current "common sense" may seem a far cry from D.I.Y. car rental -- but in light of the above, we could venture to say that they may be not so far apart after all.