Sheila Kennedy and Bruce Mau at A World Without Oil
A thought conference is, by definition, something an echo chamber. It's an occasion for very smart people to exchange important, undeniably useful ideas about how to improve the world in a comfortable rented room, usually with tasty catered food not far awayan occasion that everyone feels good about taking part in, but one whose connection to that world in such dire need of improvement can seem tenuous.
I felt particularly conscious of the problematic relationship between event and real world at A World Without Oil, a one-day symposium I hosted late last month that inaugurated a new sidebar of Toronto's Interior Design Show called Conversations in Design. The topic was so vastand so critical to the fate of the speciesthat it was difficult to imagine how it might be meaningfully addressed in a single day. And one could hardly overlook the irony of tackling the oil question by flying a bunch of people in from out of town, or of doing so in the context of a trade show designed to promote consumption of products that require oil to make and distribute. But once these ironies have been duly noted, the question becomes: What's the alternative? This is the only way we know how to do things, and that, of course, is the point of holding an event like A World Without Oil.
What was best about the day how much hope it offered. Bruce Mau was the only speaker who actually uttered the words "Yes, we can," but the sentiment was implicit in many of the talks. Though not all of the presenters were designers, all were people whose work requires them to be intimately familiar with the cycles of production and consumption, energy and climate, and their expertise gave them reasons for optimism. So although many began with scary infographics depicting global oil consumption relative to the size of the Eiffel Tower and tag clouds showing the countless petroleum-derived products we use in our everyday lives, most soon turned to some substantiveand often fascinatingsolutions.
For instance, architect Sheila Kennedy, a principal at the Boston-based Kennedy & Violich, detailed her firm's efforts through its material research MATx to develop advanced textiles, with applications in everything from clothing to building structures, that harvest solar energy to provide light and power. Ted Howes, the Energy Domain Global Lead at design and innovation juggernaut IDEO, spoke of the need to devise visualization techniques for energy to "make the invisible visible" and help consumers better understand their patterns of use"I'm supposed to be an expert and I don't have the slightest idea how electricity works, how much TV I can watch on a killowatt hour," he remarked. Multidisciplinary artist and Edible Estates author Fritz Haeg challenged our tendency to externalize nature by showing his gardening interventions in urban and suburban contexts, a means of subverting Western monoculture, promotoing biodiversity, and decreasing the laughable distances that American meals must travel before they land on your dinner table.
There were also a pair of contentious panel discussions. At one, industrial designer Tord Boontje and longtime collaborator Enrico Bressan of Artecnica defended their work training Guatemalen artisans in craft techniques against challenges that they were importing Western industrial practices. Later on, Tucker Viemeister, chief of the Lab at Rockwell Group, and David Quan, a senior product designer at Umbra, proved how hard easy answers are to come by as they attempted to fend off questions about industrial designers' thirst for plastic, including our failure to extract value from plastic waste and the viability of current bioplastics.
One of the biggest names on hand was Mau, who was greeted like a rock star by his hometown crowd and, true to his reputation as a congenital optimist, delivered a talk that felt more like a group therapy session. It was all about accentuating the positiveridding ourselves of our guilt about oil and changing the dominant mode of thinking about the environment from "no" to "yes." Because we are simply not going to be able to solve the problem of oil dependence in a meaningful timeframe, the project of the new century, Mau said, was to "imagine a beautiful future with oil." We'll get there thanks to Ray Kurtzweil's law of accelerating returns, which will lead to radical advances in computing technology that can help resolve our energy dilemma. If the details were sketchy, Mau's confidence in our ability to get where we need to go was welcome.
On the other hand, Dr. Dayna Baumeister, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild, asked the audience to imagine a future that looks more like the past. As she pointed out, human history since the industrial revolution amounts to less than a second in geological timethe story of the planet is, in fact, almost entirely the story of a world without oil. Since nature has proven a rather effective designer over the planet's 4-and-a-half-billion-year lifespan, she argued that we should borrow its recipes rather than plunder its resources. This is the essence of biomimicry, which she defined as "the conscious emulation of nature's genius." For examples, she showed everything from a shopping center in Zimbabwe that uses a passive cooling system based on termite mounds as an alternative to conventional air conditioning to a Mercedes concept car that gets 70 MPG thanks to with a bimorphic shape modeled after the tropical boxfish.
Several presenters invoked former Saudi oil minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani's memorable zinger, which first appeared in a 2005 New York Times Magazine article: "The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." It's a clever little construction that seems almost tailor-made for use at conferences with topics like "a world without oil," but also a reminder that human beings, despite our galling inefficiencies and apalling myopia about the future, are also capable of astonishing forms of creativity and innovation. It's an invitation to imagine the world we can still build together.
Of course you can't even really begin to discuss the idea of a world without oil in a single day, as Baumeister pointed out; the symposium was more like "the first breath" of a conversation. The challenge to everyone in the room was to go back out into the world and keep the conversation alive.
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