This week has been full of exciting and inspiring energy news. I was first excited to see the 60 Minutes piece on the Bloom Box Bloom Energy Server, they publicly announced their product at a press conference earlier today. Bloom’s solution certainly seems like a viable part of the energy solution and already has major customers lending it credibility. Bloom is exciting and my plan was to write this post on them but then Bill Gates changed my mind.

The solutions wont come from ineffective legislation or meaningless UN conventions, it will come from someone’s garage. We are on our own.

Bill Gates recently spoke at TED 2010, and like his last appearance it was incredibly interesting (although sans mosquitos). His talk revolves around the above equation, making the point that to stop climate change the result of the equation has to be zero. This simple equation creates a painfully clear picture of what has to happen, assuming you can handle basic arithmetic. There is a bigger message in this formula though, and it has been in part illustrated by the setting, and audience of the speech as well as this week’s announcement by Bloom Energy. We no longer live in the time of the Manhattan Project or the Space Race. The days of the government getting together with intellectuals and intrepidly solving the great problems of our day are over. Solutions wont come from ineffective legislation or meaningless UN conventions, it will come from someone’s garage. For various reasons there is nothing the government can really do about any part of the equation. Sure we can regulate consumption or services or energy and pollution, even population has been regulated, but none of these factors can truly be controlled by a government. In fact Gate’s point is that the only truly controllable part of the equation is CO2 per energy unit and this takes a new innovation, something sadly our government nor any other seems capable of spurring.

go to Bloom Energy

From BLDG BLOG:

In the desert 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles is a suburb abandoned in advance of itself-the unfinished extension of a place called California City. Visible from above now are a series of badly paved streets carved into the dust and gravel, like some peculiarly American response to theNazca Lines (or even the labyrinth at Chartres cathedral).Bill & Ted meet Cerne Abbas Man.

Google Street View gives you a good view of this somewhat unfortunate art form. In light of the recent economic conditions you wonder how many more of these there are. The waste in terms of labor and money as well as the environment has to be staggering.

So the rules this time:

Just tweet anything (preferably design related) with the tag #PKFNC1 and you’re eligible.

EDIT: A little late, but better late than never. The winners are: MichaelStine and crussell6481. Thanks everyone for playing.

Design thinking is a frustrating topic for strangers to the subject. It is not a concrete process for creating innovation; there is no instruction manual for design. You can learn to rules for research or color theory and typography, but you really only learn design by doing it. Design thinking doesn’t just require you to do things a different way it requires a new way of thinking, this is what makes it so hard to grasp, it’s a fundamental shift from the traditional mode of business thinking. Tim Brown gets over this hurdle with a lot of case studies, to put you in the mindset of doing. IDEO comes up a lot in the book. This is a source of frustration for many people but the fact is not many people do it better than the fine folks at IDEO, and showing you the thought process behind their work gives you glimpse into how they were thinking.

This book is clearly a primer on design thinking, it has a lot of information in it but requires a close read to pick it up. It may be heavy on the IDEO promotion, but again I think there is a purpose to that, revealing many insights in to the way IDEO works and thinks. So bottom line, this may not be required reading for those versed in design thinking, but it is a nice refresher. It should be required for design students if only to show them a world outside of posters, something many programs don’t do well.

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation
by: Tim Brown
publisher: HarperBusiness (September 29, 2009)
ISBN-10: 0061766089
ISBN-13: 978-0061766084
hardcover: 272 pages

Hmmm contest you say? …

That’s right we have a unopened shiny new three-pack of the limited edition FIELD NOTES “COLORS” Grass Stain Green memo pads. If you haven’t heard about FIELD NOTES yet they are awesome 3″ x 5″ sketchpads, perfect for being handy when inspiration hits. The winner will be announced Friday 09/25 at noon CST, winner will be chosen at random. The winners will be announced here and contacted via direct message on Twitter.

So what do you have to do? All that is required is to re-tweet the following:

We can and should use design as a tool to change the world. http://bit.ly/3ApGmJ #PKcontest2

UPDATE 09/25/09:  Congrats to Eusebio Reyero, he won the Field Notes. For everyone else thanks for playing and better luck next time.

Partial map of the Internet based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org

Today FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is giving an address at the Brookings Institution where he is expected to ask the FCC in October to turn the controversial “net neutrality” principles into formal rules. Net Neutrality has simultaneously been hailed as essential for democracy and the killer of the internet. The fact remains the because of the increasing importance of the internet no matter what your stance, net neutrality is one of the most important issues no one knows about. In light of this here’s a quick primer on Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality revolves around a the core principal of a neutral broadband network, a “network that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed, as well as one where communication is not unreasonably degraded by other communication streams.” (Wikipedia: Network Neutrality) There are three proposed definitions or levels of Network neutrality:

• Absolute non-discrimination: No interference of any type for any reason.
• Limited discrimination without Quality of Service tiering: Mostly proposed by United States lawmakers this would allow interference as long as no special fee is charged for higher-quality service.
• Limited discrimination and tiering: This approach allows higher fees for higher-quality service as long as there is no exclusivity in service contracts.

So with that out of the way, why do we need it? The first and foremost concern is access and control of data. Advocates of Net Neutrality accuse cable and television companies of acting as Internet gatekeepers saying what sites will or wont run and how well. The implications of this are obvious the ability to control traffic allows these companies to filter out competitors, and presumably anything else they are told to. Opponents of Network Neutrality say that the cable providers have no plans to block content or degrade network performance making rules about it unnecessary. This of course conflicts somewhat with the facts that Comcast has intentionally slowed P2P communications and others actively employ deep packet inspection to discriminate not only P2P but FTP usage and online games as well.

The next issue is the hampering of competition and innovation, an issue both sides argue but in different ways. Proponents argue that those who provide access to the Internet can decide who gets traffic and who doesn’t by controlling access, and conversely where you can go on the Internet, worse they could charge the owner of a site fees to guarantee access to their site. Additionally the companies can stifle innovation by sidelining competing services by denying access and bundling competing technologies. The argument is that Net Neutrality will ensure an even playing field where sites make it or don’t based on their own merit. Opponents say that with the continuing increase in web traffic they need to filter or at least tier the types of traffic to ensure good quality of service to everyone, arguments along this line go to the very structure underpinning the Internet. Companies furthermore they argue that they have invested billions in the infrastructure and, Network Neutrality will make these investments less profitable and they will be less willing to ensure good access or promote innovation.

One of the last major issues has to do with the effects of government regulation. There are valid fears about the legislature actually understanding the issues and implications at stake. For examples depending on how the legislation is worded it could preclude the filtering of spam. Additionally it is questionable whether the government has the ability to actually enforce any potential legislation.

Until we reach a future where Internet access is wireless and provided by the government like roads, we’re stuck with Comcast and their ilk. We don’t know where exactly we stand here. There is certainly more to the issue that what is presented here, and valid arguments on both sides of the issue. But we do know providers need to make a profit if they are to stick around, and they certainly have a motivation to filter traffic to make this happen, so we are erring in favor of Net Neutrality exactly hat kind and level is still up for debate. More so it’s shameful that there hasn’t been more coverage of this debate (if only we could get Kanye to say something). Access to the Internet is going to prove to be one of the planets most decisive issues in the near future.

OTHER RESOURCES:

Wikipedia
Save the Internet
A Guide to Net Neutrality for Google Users

Crown Hall By Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Let me preface this by saying I want the next touchscreen phone, camera, video player, Swiss-army knife as much as the next guy (maybe more, I don’t like the one I have). But for the past I don’t know how long, simplicity has been a rallying cry expertly advocated by John Maeda in his book  The Laws of Simplicity. These rules are embodied in numerous web apps 37 Signals wonderful Basecamp, Twitter, Flickr, and thousands of others. They intentionally limit the offerings of the program, instead continually evolving and improving their chosen set of features. So far this ethos clearly hasn’t moved into the featuritis driven desktop software market, I’m looking at you Adobe.

I think it’s safe to say that the old Mies Van Der Rohe truism “less is more” has never really applied to technology products. Much like in software the common competitive strategy has been adding more features to an existing product to one-up your competitors. But if you look around there seems to be some hints at change in places like the netbook world. For the unacquainted netbooks are less powerful smaller laptops, not because they are the low-end cheap versions of their more powerful cousins, but because they have a different utility. The mode of thought that produced the netbook said that the majority of laptop users only need a word processor/spreadsheet application, a browser for the internet and sometimes an email client. So what is important is internet access, portability and battery life, not processor power. The major front runners compete on these basic attributes. Simple. Along the same lines is the the Kindle (although is a back light too much to ask) and other book readers which focus on doing a better job of allowing you to read. Most recently is the Canon PowerShot G11 which unlike competitors, forgoes megapixel count for improving image quality.

Of course it makes sense for some products to do everything ion the world I like my phone being an Mp3 player and a camera it’s less to carry around with me. Then again perhaps a phone is no longer a phone, but a completely new device with a new feature set? I think the take away is, do what you do well and don’t offer additional features unless they are in themselves a full solution. I know that at the end of the day I prefer my eReader to be a better book, and I prefer my software to do a good job of what I purchased it for. I wouldn’t use a hammer instead of a saw to cut a piece of wood even though it’s capable.

Not to get too political but most recently I have been pondering the Cash for Clunkers program. While I applaud attempts at lowering emissions and oil consumption I can’t help but have some serious reservations. It’s the prefect example for this I want to know more than how much is being spent by the government. I want to know how much overall mileage has been reduced and what the energy and resource use is for disposing of the old cars, also are there any resulting changes in the production of new cars? I want to know how many of the clunkers were serviceable, how old were they on average, has this worked elsewhere? I want to know what we think of the program as a country. In summary I want all this data and more available for me to decide whether or not it was worth it and if we should renew it, say, for a third time.

Such a platform could be applied to any issue you could think of Detention of Guantanamo Detainees to your bowling team’s uniform. This could help us to make better decisions as a society (or bowling team), preventing us from repeating mistakes (or someone else)by clearly aggregating the decisions and their effects. It just needs to be built.

This is not a book about environmentalism. It will not tell you to use soy ink and CFLs to make your studio green. This is a book about sustainability, a distinction of utmost importance.

This distinction takes us down the road of environmentalism but also brings along it’s siblings social and financial change. These tag-alongs are necessary because if real solutions are to take hold it’s not good enough to find the “most green” alternative. The questions of product life cycle, usability/adaptability and marketability have to be asked. Is an alternative really better if it contributes to another problem by virtue of its source materials, or no one can use it, or if no one will buy it? These questions are addressed in this book, alongside how to sell them to the people writing the checks. This gives this book the distinction of advocating practicality and sustainability (even if they are one and the same).

Nathan Shedroff, is chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. So it is no surprise that this is one of the most practical books on implementing sustainability into business practices out there. It focuses on making your existing processes, products and services more sustainable, certainly there is a encyclopedic gathering of environmental frameworks, but the real genius of this book is the focus on integrating these with what already exists.

If I have any complaints it’s one of the complaints I have about a many of the books from Rosenfeld Media. The pasion that marks the introduction and conclusion of the book seems to be missing from much of what is in-between. I’m not sure why, but this seems to be a characteristic from this publisher. The exhaustive amount information may have something to do with it as well as the separation of real-world examples from the main text through the use of side bars. But this does leave you with a feeling of wanting more, and not in a good way.

It’s hard to accept any thing other than the ideal solution, but experience tells us the opportunities to completely throw something out and start from scratch are rare. One of the real takeaways from this book is not only that design has helped to create the problem, but by actively railing against producers design has not helped the problem. William McDonough and Michael Braungart say we shouldn’t settle for the least harmful alternative, and they are right. But we still need to work with producers to make change, Design is the Problem gets this.

Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable
by Nathan Shedroff
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; 1ST edition (2009)
ISBN-10: 1933820004
ISBN-13: 978-1933820002
Pages: 352