If you want to reconnoiter the edges of bright green design thinking, London's Live/Work offers a unique vantage point.
Live/Work designs systems, and processes, and visualizations of new possibilities, all of which are very much to the point when one is trying to imagine a new vision of urban life, one that is greener, more prosperous and more innovative.
We've discussed their work before -- particularly their evidencing and their efforts to develop ways of creating service envy, making product-service systems in which people participate as much a part of their status as the products they buy -- so it was particularly cool to have a chance to sit down with Live/Work's Chris Downs to talk about the future of services and sustainability.
We ate an excellent lunch of venison stew and sandwiches at The Duke of Cambridge pub in Angel (a great place which serves up sustainable food and organic beers and wines). Chris explained that Live/Work is involved in a variety of work for a number of clients-- "not all of them perfect," but one of the lodestars of their practice is the idea of rethinking the way public services are offered, and looking at designing and explaining shared services, like [streetcar], in ways that increase their audience and their effectiveness.
"You are what we do, not what we own," is one of the slogans they came up with for the car-sharing service Streetcar, and there the folks at Live/Work are very much on the cutting edge of sustainability thinking.
We all want to encourage efficiency and conservation, the new thinking goes, but it turns out there are sharp technical limits to the amount of efficiency we can economically squeeze out of our current systems (barring unexpectedly rapid progress in carbon nanotube research or something).
That means that if we want to achieve the kinds of reductions in our urban ecological footprints we need to stave off even more widespread, perhaps catastrophic ecological degradation and climate disruption, we need to think about design of those systems themselves.
Our systems do a bad job of delivering the things we really want. For most of us in the developed world, the essentials of life are not in doubt, and what we most want is experiences and relationships that give our lives meaning, make them enjoyable, and give us the ability to better prosper.
Too often, we've been sold products we don't actually really need -- or at very least, rarely need -- on the presumption that these products will bring us closer to the experiences and relationships we crave. Toolmakers, for instance, advertise power drills as tools for providing for our loved ones' comfort, and thus showing our love for them, winning their approval or having the glow of a job well done (think: any of a number of ads showing a manly guy doing work around the house to the great satisfaction of his beaming wife). But the reality is that most power tools are used for only minutes a year. And, when it comes right down to it, what most of us really want is not the tool itself but the thing we get by using the tool. As my brother puts it, "You want the hole, not the drill."
So, in reality, while being handy around the house may well be something we want, the drill is just a means to the larger end. If we had easy access to a drill owned by someone else, we'd be just as happy. The planet would certainly be better off, as it takes a lot of metal and oil and pollution to make all those drills we're not using, and store them, and schlepp them from home to home as we move and ultimately to dispose of them in some landfill.
But many of us guys have been taught (largely by advertising) that to be a man is to own tools, so there's something a bit sissifying about belonging to a tool library. That's where Live/Work comes in: they're trying to figure out ways of talking about, for example, sharing tools in such a way that it's obviously cooler and smarter to be a tool-sharer than a tool-owner, whether or not one cares about the environmental benefits.
That's good work. We need better visions of a bright green future, but we also need the language that will sell them.
Here's the real kicker: once one is willing to look at tools as a system which could be delivered differently, all sorts of things, from cars to washing machines to big kitchens to vacation homes, turn out to be things that might be better (and more cheaply) provided as services than products. A great amount of the stuff in our lives is unnecessary to lead the kind of lives most of us most want to lead, or at least fairly easily substitutable. And when ten households own ten cars instead of twenty (and share an extra one between them through a car-share -- or better yet don't own cars at all, but share five together) all those surplus cars vanish, along with all the embedded energy and pollution involved in their manufacture and operation. No car yet designed is efficient enough to match the energy and waste savings a redesigned system like this can create, and almost all the systems of a contemporary city are amenable to redesign these days, or soon will be.
If we can learn how to sell the riches of a dematerialized life, urban sustainability -- real, measurable, honest-to-goodness one-planet living -- becomes possible in the very near future.
(Image: "Boys and Power Tools..." CC TMJR)
