![A great video on the life cycle of material goods (click the image to view)…Any time I hear product design-related sustainability ideas I think of Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. In visualizing a sustainable society, Sterling goes far beyond the mundanity of life cycle design.To me, his most interesting meme concerns a human-designed “metahistory”; a sea of information that increases in size with every passing second which we can mine for patterns and data that will help us solve our increasingly complex problems.Before he gets to that, he sets it up by meditating on how to redirect the current march towards oblivion:What is needed is the energy for effective intervention without the grim mania of totalitarianism. We need to take action without any suffocating pretense of eternal certainty. So we need a new concept of futurity whose image is not the static, dated tintype of the past’s future. We need a dynamic, interactive medium—we need to invent a general-purpose cultural interface for time.Metahistories to date have had the static character of a scred oracular text. What we need to invent is something rather more like a search engine. We need a designed metahistory.[If this comes to pass, h]istory is never a deterministic certainty—understood effectively, history is a basic resource…Because history is information—information about the people and objects transiting time…Combine the computational power of an information society with the stark interventionist need for a sustainable society. The one is happening anyway; the other one has to happen…For a society of this sort—we might call it a synchronic society—history is not “a nightmare from which we are struggling to awake.” History is the means by which we wake up. We wake up, and we go about our daily affairs, free of shadows of imminent apocalypse and secure in the objective knowledge that our activities as civilized beings are expanding our future options and improving our current situation. This is how we would interact with time if we human beings were really on top of our game.[pp. 42-44]There’s much more concrete detail (and much more high-level futurity) where that came from.(original link via Brian Haven)](http://26.media.tumblr.com/MvemLzUYv5nwdnsbAmOc1yy4_250.jpg)
A great video on the life cycle of material goods (click the image to view)…
Any time I hear product design-related sustainability ideas I think of Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things. In visualizing a sustainable society, Sterling goes far beyond the mundanity of life cycle design.
To me, his most interesting meme concerns a human-designed “metahistory”; a sea of information that increases in size with every passing second which we can mine for patterns and data that will help us solve our increasingly complex problems.
Before he gets to that, he sets it up by meditating on how to redirect the current march towards oblivion:
What is needed is the energy for effective intervention without the grim mania of totalitarianism. We need to take action without any suffocating pretense of eternal certainty. So we need a new concept of futurity whose image is not the static, dated tintype of the past’s future. We need a dynamic, interactive medium—we need to invent a general-purpose cultural interface for time.
Metahistories to date have had the static character of a scred oracular text. What we need to invent is something rather more like a search engine. We need a designed metahistory.
[If this comes to pass, h]istory is never a deterministic certainty—understood effectively, history is a basic resource…Because history is information—information about the people and objects transiting time…
Combine the computational power of an information society with the stark interventionist need for a sustainable society. The one is happening anyway; the other one has to happen…
For a society of this sort—we might call it a synchronic society—history is not “a nightmare from which we are struggling to awake.” History is the means by which we wake up. We wake up, and we go about our daily affairs, free of shadows of imminent apocalypse and secure in the objective knowledge that our activities as civilized beings are expanding our future options and improving our current situation. This is how we would interact with time if we human beings were really on top of our game.
[pp. 42-44]
There’s much more concrete detail (and much more high-level futurity) where that came from.
(original link via Brian Haven)
