Design

John Thackara ‘s In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World , a brief for more human, and more eco-friendly, technology and economy, is full of insights that challenge much of the conventional wisdom about the “information age.” A sampling:

We do not live in “the ‘weightless’ new economy we were told the Internet would bring. Rather than the displacement of matter by mind, ife seems to have become heavier – physically and psychologically – than ever . . . . thanks to all the design we do, man-made flows of matter and energy all around us are growing in volume volume. We buy more hardwear than ever. We print more paper. We package more goods. We move more stuff, and ourselves, around at ever-increasing rates . . . . We supposed that an information society would replace industrial society, whereas the information society has in fact been added to the industrial one and increased its intensity.”

A case in point: Citing a book entitled Natural Capitalism , Thackara says that “the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives . . . . every gram of material that goes into the production and consumtion of a computer ends up rather quickly as either an emission or as solid waste.” Electronic communications have increased paper use: “Every single employee of the European Commission, which is a digital-savvy organization, prints out 247 pages of hard copy a day” – yet another reason to shut it down, I would think. Pluse, “Internet computing will soon consume as much power as the entire U.S. economy did in 2001 – some three trillion kilowatt hours.”

In analyzing “speed” in the contemporary world, he gives a brief review of the history of time-keeping in the Western world, citing Lewis Mumford’s claim that the clock rather than the steam engine was “the key machine of the industrial age.” This was particularly telling: “The clash between personal time flow (getting food, getting home) and the public time flow (standing in a queue) is experienced as disturbing. People have to continuously adjust their personal time . . . to the public time . . . . Public time flows are based on other people, services, or processes that have their own timing. Excessive speed degrades social quality. The religious calendar, interestingly, incorporated long periods of slowness, of waiting, such as Advent and Lent.”

Music has kept pace with changing views of time: “Ragtime, the English writer Charles Leadbeater reminds us, marked the start of the acceleration of music to match the acceleration of industry: ‘jazz was followed by boogie-woogie, rock and roll, disco, punk, techno and house – the latter racing along at 200 beats a minute.” Mechanical control of musical time (through metronomes and the like) is a fairly recent innovation: “A young colleageu of Ivan Illich, Matthias Rieger, discovered that in preindustrial times, musical tempo was provoked by the setting – a special event, a place, a type of work or action. Work songs were related to the rhythm of the work; the tempo of dance music to the acoustic of the place, and, of course, to the mood of the dancers and musicians. Tempo indication began to be used in the early years of the seventeenth century . . . . Although the metronome became common in the early nineteenth century, other nontechnical ways to give hints for the right tempo persisted: One was the use of the musicians pulse as a measure.” After trying out the metronome, Beethoven “‘came to the conclusion that the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music’” (quoting from Rieger).

On the importance of logistical management: “At Ford’s Toronto plant, which produces fifteen hundred Windstar minivans a day, logistics company TPG orchestrates eight hundred deliveries a day from three hundred different parts makers. Parts are loaded onto trucks at the point of supply in prearranged sequences in order to speed unloading at the assembly line. Loads arrive at twelve different points along the assembly line without every being more than ten minutes late. It takes two hundred computer-wielding operations planners to orchestrate the ballet.”

Tele-communications technologies have not lived up to its promise, for good reason: “Hirochi Ishii at MIT’s Media Lab is a leading critic of ‘being there’-ness as a strategic aim of telcos. Ishii points out that the human eye has something like forty million receptors in it. Many millions more receptors are to be found in our ears, up our noses, in our skin, and on our tongues . . . . Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitize them, and send them down a wire, you’d still never get near the sensation of ‘being there.’ Why? Because we humans are not so dumb. Our minds and bodies are one intelligence.” Danish science writer Tor Norretranders says that “the conscious part of us receives much less information than the unconscious part of us. We experience millions of bits [of information] a second but can tell each other about only a few dozen.” This cannot be communicated electronically, and Norretranders concludes that “There is far too little information . . . in the so-called information age.” Telecommunications technologies, for all their sleek contemporariness, assume a gnostic/Cartesian self.

The most entertaining thing in the book so far was the German word for “materials flow analysis”: Stoffflusanalyse – that third “f” is not a typo – though the Italian dolce farniente – “sweet doing nothing” – was a close second.