Re-designing the game: John Thakara

There are two ways to compete:

Either we run faster and faster - under existing rules - wear out the pitch, and then, whilst looking backwards, run slap into a rock. The rock of climate change.

Or we re-design the rules of the game.

The old game was all about productivity, growth and continuous acceleration. We played it – and played it well in the UK - as if resources were limitless. As if carrying capacity of the planet didn’t matter.

In the new game, resource constraints, the carrying capacity of the biosphere, are all that matter.

Given that 80 per cent resource efficiency, or the lack of it, is determined at the design stage, the new scoring system presents design with a gigantic challenge. I’m not so starry-eyed that I expect humankind to get all lovey dovey and co-operate our way to sustainabliity.

Let’s face it: We humans are rapacious and competitive by nature.

But when new rules turn “external” costs into internal costs....
When matter and energy flowing through the economic system have to be paid for....

Well, we’ll just have to be rapacious and competitive in new ways.

Map Mashups and Memories

Wired article about neogeographics who create a new layer over maps, which can help preserve collective and personal memory and its relations to spaces and maps.

Comments and activity on such collaborative systems shed a light on the fact that people are increasingly looking for personal public spaces. The creation of a history, collective or personal is interlinked with the loss of identity (or the excess of them) and the sterilization of perception through media.

Social structures rising in the Internet are providing avenues for expression, creation and reflection. We can learn (and many are) from such models and I believe that creating situated devices or interfaces for such interactions will improve the state of public spaces and provide a more dynamic environment.

(from Wired)
A women named "Paiges" recalls hearing the band Portishead for the first time at a spot in New York's Upper West Side, while she was meeting a man with whom she was having a torrid affair. "I was in NYC, your wife was out of town," she writes. "We were in the bathroom and Portishead was playing. I remember being terrified that we would get caught." She bought the album on her way home, and 12 years later still associates it with seeing her lover in that place.

That intimate memory isn't locked in a diary or shared on a blog. It's pinned to a spot near the intersection of West End Avenue and 104th Street on a new and growing community site called Platial that's spreading a decidedly personal layer of geographic data atop the familiar terrain of online mapping.