Craig Venter, who led the charge to decypher human DNA, is now on the green hunt. According to Treehugger he's looking for a double-wammy: take CO2 in the atmosphere and convert it into fuel (rather than fuel creating CO2 as is mostly the case today).
As we've described before, Venter's overarching goal is to produce microorganisms that are able to "convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline," as he himself put it. These would constitute not only the fabled second- and third-generation biofuels we keep hearing about (like cellulosic ethanol and other plant biomass-derived fuels) but even so-called "fourth-generation" biofuels -- those produced directly from CO2.
Venter hopes his bugs will supplant the need for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies by making CO2 a commodity, instead of a byproduct to be disposed of. According to Venter, large, bacteria-processing fermenters, similar to those used to make beer and wine, would replace traditional refineries. He expects the first generation of his engineered bacteria to be commercially available within the next year or two years. He made it a point to stress that he and his colleagues were thinking "in terms of years, not decades."
There are some obvious concerns about releasing such organisms into the wild, nevertheless it's this kind of thinking we'll need to help move us away from the global warming brink.
"In the past two weeks, I had the opportunity to attend two very interesting conferences. The first one was Fortune's Brainstorm Green, followed by the Milken Institute's Global Conference. Both of these conferences attract the who's who in the financial and business world. What struck me at both events was the rallying cry that innovation is key in solving many of the world's problems. I continued to hear that change is needed for people to think and behave differently.
(Credit:
Time Inc.)
The Fortune conference featured the usual suspects who have championed the environment long before it became a cause célèbre. One surprise twist was the number of investors in attendance. I met more financiers who had funds to invest in sustainability-related areas than I thought possible. There were also a large number of CEOs in attendance. Their interest in sustainability largely stemmed from the pressures they felt from their employees and customers. Will there finally be new green products and services that will meet the increasing demand? Will they be adopted by a larger segment of the population? It's clear that there is enough money ready to be spent and corporations ready to commit to finally make a significant impact in green innovation.
From a personal perspective, the best part of the conference was a short speech delivered by a 16-year-old high school sophomore, Avery Hairston. Avery has started a foundation called ReLightNY that raises money from individuals and corporate sponsors. He uses the money to buy low wattage CFL light bulbs that he then distributes to those in need. Everyone is a winner. People use less power and it also saves them money. A double whammy winning strategy. The closing line of Avery's speech was poignant: "Most of you probably will not be here in 2060, but I will, and I need to do something now." Young people like Avery will not let complacency and comfort get in the way of solving problems.
(Credit:
Conferenzablog)
At the Milken conference, the message calling for innovative ideas to solve problems was much the same. Panel topics were diverse and covered the fate of the newspaper and music industries, the environment, world hunger, poverty, mobility and healthcare to name a few. It seems that a conference such as this one, filled with so many powerful people in the financial and business world, would easily embrace and fund innovation as a means of helping to solve many of the issues that were so hotly debated. I talked with several "idea" people and heard consistently that although there was no lack of enthusiasm for great ideas, it had been difficult to move forward and secure commitments.
This lack of definite progress is likely due to one familiar symptom related to innovation: it usually makes people sick to their stomachs. It is unfamiliar, unknown and untested. It is a risk. This thought was echoed in what I felt was the most enjoyable panel of the conference which featured the 2006 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Muhammad Yunus, currently Managing Director of Grameen Bank based in Bangladesh. He is recognized worldwide for his successful application for the concept of microcredit, the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. His hard work has lifted millions of families out of poverty. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for efforts to create economic and social development from below." His idea was so simple and so humble, yet when people initially heard it, they told him that it would never work. Muhammad used $27 of his own money to fund the first loan. Clearly the naysayers were wrong and his success has changed an entire country. My take-away from his speech was that innovation takes courage.
I hope that a year from now, I can return to both of these conferences and see how the changes that were proposed have been implemented. We need to give innovation a chance to be nurtured and to flourish. To make this happen, we all need to get over our fears and follow our heart."
In honor of Earth Day, let's look at a once-commonplace feature that has almost entirely disappeared from today's consumer electronics. To illustrate my point, here's a picture from my gadget archive, a perfectly ordinary Sony radio Walkman of mid-90's vintage:
(Credit:
Adam Richardson)
(Credit:
Adam Richardson)
(Credit:
Adam Richardson)
What does this have to do with Earth Day? A couple of things:
1. Screws facilitate repairability
Screws allow easy disassembly without potential for breaking housing parts. Without disassembly, easy repair or replacement of internal parts is more difficult, and pretty much impossible for the everyday user. What do you think that does to the likelihood the product will get repaired, or parts of it re-used for another product?
(Nerd note: Most CE devices today are either snapped together (and snaps are purposefully hard to take apart without breaking), or are fastened with a process known as ultrasonic welding. Essentially the plastic parts are vibrated together at very high speed causing the plastic at the edges to melt and fuse together, making a very strong bond. This also makes them impossible to get into, kind of like that clear plastic "blister" packaging that a lot of small products come in where you have to take a chainsaw to get it open and you destroy it in the process.)
2. Shift from "fix it" to "junk it"
Looking beyond individual products, screws are symptomatic of a gradual but persistent shift away from the mentality of repairing products, both for manufacturers and consumers. Products just get thrown "away", but of course there really is no "away", it's just out of sight and out of mind.
On the Walkman shown here the screws are clearly illustrated with arrows that almost encourage one to get into the guts. Today the equivalent product -- the iPod -- is hermetically sealed and we are explicitly kept out of understanding how it works or from thinking that it can be repaired.
Companies only profit when we buy new things, not when we get them repaired. And the costs of repairing or servicing old CE devices have approached so close to the ever-reducing cost of new ones, thanks to Moore's Law, global supply chains, and constant price pressure from mega retailers. Many people, for example, buy a new inkjet printer whenever they need to replace the ink, since the cost of the printers themselves (often sold at or below cost since profits are made on the cartridges) is barely above the new cartridges. Therefore most consumer electronics are designed be disposable, not repairable.
This is an unsustainable system. We have to break ourselves (as consumers) from the disposable thinking, and manufacturers also have to find ways to facilitate and profit from repairs, not just new product sales.
I was part of a panel discussion at Western Washington University yesterday for Design Green Now, a series of talks about sustainable design taking place on the West Coast. Together with my fellow panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Marc Stoiber and Arunas Oslapas I think we covered a pretty good range of topics with our short presentations, but the real heart of it was Q&A with the 70 or so students attending and some questions submitted via a website. It was also good to see a presentation about the various sustainability efforts going on at the WWU campus.
As often seems to happen in these discussions the daunting complexity of the challenge became an over-arching theme. The moderator, Sean Schmidt (who did a great job) asked a question submitted on the website about what should a company's priorities be -- recycling, looking at materials usage, energy reduction, take-back schemes, etc. The answer? "All of the above" and "It depends." These are not the neat and tidy answers one would like to move things forward quickly, but unfortunately that's the way things are right now. As I seemed to keep saying at the talk, "it's complicated."
It was an enjoyable evening that brought out a lot of good discussion, many thanks to the crew at Ecoystems for inviting me and putting it on.
If you are in San Francisco, Portland or San Diego, check out the upcoming ones.
Another write up at Searching for Green
(Credit:
SXSW)
It's freezing in Austin (39 degrees last night....) but nonetheless SXSW Interactive is about to kick off today. There is no doubt that the conference is hitting the mainstream this year (with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg as keynote speaker and most of the big high-tech players participating). The program, which is notoriously hard to navigate, has grown even more in terms of depth and breadth.
SXSW has therefore teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub that facilitates real-time conversations around conference events while also providing an easy-to-us panel calendar. The Silverlight-based application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.
Check it out: http://pulse.sxsw.com
(Credit:
SXSW)
Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.
The Soul of the Machine
Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."
The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.
In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.
But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.
Searching for the Killer App
As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.
So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.
Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."
Links
We will report from SXSW Interactive on this blog, but in the meantime here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:
Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com
Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/
Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw
SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/
SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s
Unofficial Weblog: http://sxswbaby.com
(Credit:
New York Times)
Having just returned from New York City, I wonder whether I find it so intense because that's just how it is or because I tend to overbook my schedule, trying to squeeze in an ambitious number of meetings, rushing back and forth between midtown and downtown. In almost every cab ride I took on this trip, I noticed that many cabs now have a touch screen infotainment system that lets you pay with a credit card, watch TV, or access local city info (including a GPS tracker). I like the credit card option and the GPS but had mixed emotions about the rest. A colleague of mine sniffed: "This is sad. Of every place on earth NYC has the most eye candy anywhere. There's so much going on around you that the window is the best entertainment ever. Has our entire society caught the ADD virus? I think there should be an info card showing passengers how to play 'slug bug' or 'I spy.'" To be fair, every television has a clearly marked mute button, which "could become one of the most visited spots in the city," as the New York Times commented, assuming that cab TV may not be captivating for everyone.
(Credit:
Inhabitat)
On Wednesday my employer, frog design, hosted a little bar night for friends and media, and it was great to catch up with everyone. Among our guests was Emily Pilloton, the hyper-energetic incarnation of the "slash" entrepreneur. Emily is the managing editor of Inhabitat / a contributor to Good Magazine / and runs Project H, a nonprofit that facilitates social projects between corporations, design firms, and charities. And if all that was not enough, she helped organize the Greener Gadgets conference that took place at the McGraw Hill headquarters in midtown on Friday. What sounds like an oxymoron at first (the greenest gadget is the non-gadget, no? The comparative -- "greener" instead of "green" -- is thus carefully chosen...), was in fact a clever design competition to promote green innovations. The competition engaged established design firms, emerging designers, and design students to come up with new solutions to address the issues of energy, carbon footprint, health and toxicity, new materials, product life cycle, and social development. The top entries were judged by a panel and the audience, and awards were given out at the end of the night. Here's more about the winners.
While the green design movement, recently propelled by the Designers Accord, an industry-wide coalition of design and innovation firms to promote sustainability, is on a roll, the financial industry is deeply worried about the sustainability of economic wealth. "It's going to be very nasty," as a friend of mine who works at Morgan Stanley said about the looming economic downturn. However, the investors and entrepreneurs who convened on the 36th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel during the OnMedia conference seemed more or less untouched by such woes. Content is king (again), and I met quite a few folks whose ostentatious confidence was reminiscent of 1999. The attitude was not the only deja vu -- the program also appeared to cling to the same old themes ("it's a distribution game now," "the perfect storm of amateur content," etc.) that the industry has been pondering for years now. Most panel sessions consequently occurred in half-filled rooms, as many attendees opted to gather at the buffet to network instead. Many of the start-ups presented in the CEO showcases mirrored the traits of the first dot-com bubble: optimism in abundance, a strong belief in the self-regulatory power of the Internet, and monetization models that are not fully vetted. In some conversations I had, VCs conceded that a consolidation of the "new media typhoon" was inevitable. I, for my part, heard the lines "money follows eyeballs" and "we will initially focus on building a community" far too often. The whole event was also a bubble of its own kind. When I asked someone why he had spent the money to attend, he replied: "to see friends."
(Credit:
Flickr)
En route to JFK on my last day, I met with a correspondent of the German daily FAZ at Le Pain Quotidien, the neatly designed bakery/cafe chain. We talked about the demise of the American empire (the typical topic when European expats meet in the US) and discussed the recent re-design of FAZ (see this story in Monocle) over thick-crusted European bread. There's nothing better than a quality experience.
Oh, and I had one last designer moment on the way home: I flew Virgin America, and after a week of moving and shaking it was appropriate that it felt like a ride on a disco ball.
(Credit:
SF Gate)
Last weekend I spoke at the first University of Texas at Austin Sustainable Business Summit. It was an interesting and stimulating event that brought together a diverse group of speakers and audience members to think about different aspects of environmental sustainability, social responsibility, and business. It was put on by the McCombs School of Business and largely organized by students, who did a great job.
One of the first panels had to do with computers, waste reduction, and energy usage. It had a bit of tension to it as one of the panelists was from Dell, and another was an environmental activist who has been pressuring Dell for several years on energy reduction, take-back schemes, and overall sustainability issues. They handled it professionally, but you could tell there was some history there!
The other panelists were from IBM, which is working on low power CPUs for servers, and from a company called Verdiem, which makes software to centrally manage large, installed bases of PCs in corporate environments. Such installations use massive amounts of electricity for prolonged unnecessary periods (such as at night), creating part of the big draw of "phantom" or "vampire" energy. The software allows central control of shutting down unnecessary machines while still allowing maintenance upgrades.
There was discussion of options for renewable energy sources for large data centers, and in fact an article in Wednesday's USA Today illustrates the attention being paid to this issue:
Intel is now the largest corporate user of renewable energy in the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency said this week. The chip giant plans to purchase more than 1.3 million kilowatt hours in wind, solar and other types of green power each year. That's enough energy to power about 133,000 households.
Intel won't say how much extra the green power costs. But the company considers the purchase an "investment in the renewable energy market," spokesman Bill Calder says.
This article also highlights one of the other themes that came up in the panel: business will be an earlier large adopter of green technologies than consumers, because the business case is easier to make and corporations are more familiar with thinking about total cost of ownership rather than up-front costs, which dominate in a consumer retail world. Companies are comfortable with the concept of amortizing capital costs over several years and can easily roll that into their tax calculations. Consumers, not so much.
The other theme that came up was that so goes Europe, so goes the rest of the world. Europe, and in particular Scandinavia, is really driving the legislation on curbing energy, forcing take-back schemes, and in general prodding industry to be more responsible. (The U.S. laws are very weak in most regards in this area, California being a common exception.) But since manufacturers like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM have global supply chains and distribution channels, it doesn't make economic sense to make different models for different markets. So they go with the high bar set by Europe and the U.S. benefits.
But this is just a cop-out on the part of U.S. government. In fact, according to one of the summit panelists, the U.S. is one of only three countries not to sign the Basel treaty on international hazardous waste trafficking (where toxic waste is just dumped on another country's shore). Who are the other two? Haiti and Afghanistan.
We should be matching the European legislation to show commitment and to avoid things falling through the cracks. If we match it (as opposed to creating slightly different rules as we do with car crash tests for example), it will make everything easier and do more to encourage sustainable practices.
The topic of sustainable or green design is of increasing urgency to companies involved in product development. Last year, it reached a tipping point in public interest and concern over global climate change, fueled by massive media interest.
Companies that fail to address it risk legislative punishment, as well as negative brand and sales consequences. But green also provides a huge market opportunity: recent surveys have indicated that key customer segments are willing to pay more for greener products.
Lots of companies at this year's Consumer Electronics Show were touting green design and environmental thinking, though as my colleague Adam Richardson observed, "in some cases, it seemed more sloganeering than anything very deep."
Not surprisingly, the backlash is rampant. Because green has become a forceful business imperative, it is getting harder these days to tell green design from "greenwashing" and to tell those who jump on the bandwagon from the ones driving it.
Consumers are harder to please too: increased demand for green products and services is contrasted by growing skepticism about moral free riders who take advantage of the public's goodwill for all things green.
Designers, and in particular industrial designers, who are uniquely positioned at the intersection of business, technology, and culture, may bring some clarity into the many shades of green. Since their work covers both the beginning and the end of the product development chain, they not only obtain privileged insights into user behavior, materials, and manufacturing, but they also possess a unique environmental responsibility, as well as the conceptual and practical power to actually make a difference.
As such interdisciplinary, enlightened vanguards of the new green conscience, they can drive an industrywide conversation and establish universal standards: "Sustainability promises to be one of the defining issues of our time, one with profound effects on our personal and professional lives," states the Web site of the Compostmodern conference on sustainable design. "For designers, it represents unique challenges as well as tremendous potential--nothing less than an opportunity to redesign how the world works."
Designers are hearing this call and beginning to institutionalize and externalize the knowledge that had previously been tacit and dispersed. Several leading design consultancies, including Design Continuum, Frog Design (full disclosure: my employer), Ideo, and Smart Design, have entered "The Designers Accord," an industrywide coalition to promote positive environmental and social impact.
The call to arms, which was first introduced in Frog's Design Mind magazine last summer, has since been endorsed by the influential design blog Core77, and it is growing as more firms pledge their involvement. In the coming months, the initiative will expand to include an open-source Web site in which member firms may share resources and ideas.
Cynics may say signing the agreement requires not much more than lip service, as most adopters will already practice many of the not-so-demanding principles outlined: "Undertake a program to educate your teams about designing sustainably; initiate a dialogue about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with each and every client; measure the carbon, or greenhouse gas, footprint of your firm, and pledge to significantly reduce that footprint annually," and so on.
Fair enough, but that's not the point. What is more remarkable about the agreement is its open, "coopetitive" nature: for the first time, and disregarding their traditional competition, design firms (and also the two leading professional organizations, Industrial Designers Society of America and AIGA) commit to sharing their experience and pooling their resources for a greater cause.
That's a real paradigm shift, and it may indeed provide the lever that the Accord adopters are hoping for: "Our rationale is that, by collectively committing to having this conversation, our client base--the world's manufacturers, distributors, and services providers--will be compelled to evaluate sustainability as a key vector in decision making around the products and services they create for their base, the global consuming audience."
LAS VEGAS--Lots of companies here are touting green design and environmental thinking, though in some cases it seemed more sloganeering than anything very deep. Here are just a few samples from the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show:
Among other things, Nokia was showing off their reduced packaging (50 percent smaller; most of their phones now shipping in it; have saved them $150 million to boot)
HP had a large area of their booth dedicated to their environmental efforts, and like Nokia had several people on hand who could talk knowledgeably about it.
There's still a long way to go on this issue, though, as can plainly be seen by looking at the sheer quantity of stuff at the show. And those massive plasma TVs look fantastic, but they sure gobble energy like there's no tomorrow. Not to mention the fact that most of what's being shown here will be obsolete (and non-upgradable) this time next year, if not sooner.
Here are just a fraction of the shipping crates stacked outside one of the convention halls that were used to bring everything to the middle of the desert. Remember that closing scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark? It's like that.
