Over half a trillion dollars has been in Africa over the past forty years, mostly on large infrastructure projects such as dams, schools, and roads, and while it has had a somewhat identifiable impact on poverty, the per capita growth rate of the continent over this period has stuck right around zero. Huge projects generating meager returns lead to massive debt cancellations in the 1980s and again in 2006. Over the years a simple but rather controversial idea has been building consensus that massive international give-aways cannot deliver progress the way grassroots, bottom-up enterprise can. In some sectors they actually end up doing more harm than good, killing fledgling markets and stifling home-grown entrepreneurial innovation.

Market-based development has been met with heavy resistance by well-meaning do-gooders the world over, and is often portrayed as the exploitative, manipulative force behind many problems in the developing world. The thing to remember about markets, though, is that Western capitalism certainly did not invent them. Markets are as old as our kind, and have long been a place where we peacefully leverage our strengths to best the constraints that otherwise challenge our very survival. (In our world the word "capitalism" seems to carry a lot of experiential political and social baggage that we'll have to deal with sooner or later.)

Polak identifies three three myths that have long skewed the conventional approach to eradicating poverty.

1. We can donate people out of poverty
2. National economic growth will end poverty
3. Big business will end poverty

If the first myth held any truth, then poverty should be long gone. We don't have to look far from home to see holes in the second myth: well over 10% of the United States population currently lives in poverty, and that number has grown much larger over the past few years. Big business certainly has the potential to make a decent dent in poverty, and while there are certainly great examples of good efforts, the majority have not yet RSVP'd and show no signs of doing so. The extremity of high-volume, low-margin market offerings that is required is well off most established businesses' radars.

So, what exactly causes poverty?

There are seemingly as many problem-definitions for poverty as there are well-meaning organizations to pursue them. Some say people live in poverty because they have no power, and that we must give them a voice so they can defend and promote their own needs and interests fairly along with everyone else. Others say (as have I) that education should be the primary focus, and that educating children can move entire populations out of poverty within a single generation. Another argument is to eradicate major illnesses that would derail the ambitions of newly-educated youth. Healthcare should be improved, as well as access to safe water, sanitation, transportation. It's quite easy to see how these issues are all interrelated, and so the solution shifts: solve all of them! It's complicated!

Polak suggests that when the complexities of a problem prove too snarled and unmanageable to handle piece-by-piece, it's best to look for simple points of high-leverage that help direct the system along a new trajectory. "The biggest reason most poor people are poor is because they don't have enough money." When poor people are able to increase their income, solutions to all of those other problems become attainable.

The majority of the world's poor are small-plot subsistence farmers occupying five or fewer acres of farmland. They grow common commodity goods during regional rainy seasons, producing just enough to feed their families for most of the year and hope for enough of a profit from (literally) saturated markets to cover planting costs for the next season. There has been much debate over whether or not the poor are inclined to entrepreneurial action, but Polak asserts that they are tough, entrepreneurial survivalists, ready to take carefully calculated risks to improve their situations.

Small-plot farms account for a staggering 85% of total farms in the world, and are home to around 2.2 billion people. 800 million of those people live on $1/day or less, and occupy smaller plots around 1/4 to 1/5 of an acre. The problem arises from the fact that the majority of modern agriculture technology is geared towards enhancing the production of large-scale farms that exceed 400 acres in size. As Polak argues, 90% of the world's designers design for 10% of the world's richest customers, because "that's where the money is."

Millions of tiny horses!

Polak shares a wonderful exercise in analogical thinking to demonstrate his approach to this problem. The following excerpt is from chapter four: "Design for the Other 99 Percent", in a section titled "How Many Ants Does It Take to Make a Horse?" (p.66-67)

Put yourself in the shoes of Peter Mukula, a poor farmer who lives along a dusty road twenty-five kilometers from Livingstone in southern Zambia. If he could afford to buy a packhorse, he could make an extra six hundred dollars a year hauling vegetables to the Livingstone market. Buy there's no way he can beg, borrow, or steal the five hundred dollars it would take to buy a horse today. Try this brainteaser- see if you can think of a practical solution to Peter's dilemma.

Let me throw out some crazy ideas. What if Peter could buy a quarter-horse? Not a purebred quarter horse, but a horse that's a quarter the size of a regular packhorse. Let's assume that he could buy such a miniature horse for one hundred and fifty dollars and that it could pack sixty kilograms. Peter would earn less money each trip, but he could gradually use his profits to buy more miniature horses. Once he owned four of them, they would be hauling the same two hundred and forty kilos as a full-size packhorse.

But even if a small packhorse were available, one hundred fifty dollars is still far more than what Peter could afford to pay. Perhaps he could find a pygmy horse one-twelfth the size of a standard horse that would cost fifty dollars and carry twenty kilos. After five years, Peter might be able to expand to a string of twelve pygmy horses and earn the six hundred dollars a year, the same as he would with a full-size packhorse. Interestingly enough, purebred miniature horses thirty-five inches high and weighing one hundred fifty to three hundred pounds are available. Unfortunately, they cost fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars!

Here's an even crazier idea. Suppose we could invent a way to harness the remarkable strength-to-weight ratio of the common forest ant? An engineering class in Germany designed tiny weights that could be attached to an ant's back and determined that forest ants can carry as much as thirty times their own weight. (A human can only carry about double.) How many ants would it take to carry the same load as a packhorse?

I did the numbers. It would take 1.25 million ants to carry Peter's two hundred forty-kilos. Now 1.25 million ants would come pretty cheap. But designing the harness would be a challenge.

The critical ingredients to Polak's formula are miniaturization and the "ruthless pursuit of affordability" of simple solutions that increase individuals' profitability, and can be quickly scaled up to reach millions of people. By developing realistically affordable technical solutions that address things like water lifting, irrigation, storage, and a hit-list of other value-chain optimizations, Polak and his group IDE (International Development Enterprises) have made it possible for millions of subsistence farmers to incrementally increase their income by growing high-value, labor-intensive off-season crops, enabling them to permanently move out of poverty and provide better lives for themselves and their families.

The Process

IDE approaches every challenge by first immersing in the context and speaking with the people who they wish to help. Context is critical, as completely understanding the nature of a situation will make clear what technical solutions - existing or yet to be invented - will yield the greatest return. After establishing an affordable target price that can realistically be paid back within the first year, the team attacks costs by finding acceptable trade-offs. Poor small-acreage farmers may not have the full force of the world's pioneers in ag-science behind them, but they do have one economic advantage that no one else can touch: the world's lowest labor rates, averaging 5-10 cents per hour. Many of the farmers IDE has worked with would prefer to trade labor for capital, and prefer affordability over quality. Obsessive iteration, field-testing and locale-adaptation refine solutions down to a basic form that satisfies the primary constraints of affordability and effectiveness.

One example of this process in action is the NASWA MAD System ("Awsan Dam" spelled backwards). The NASWA MAD System collects and stores monsoon rainwater for use during the dry season. The device is affordable to farmers who pull in around $300 per year, and completely pays itself off from profits earned from its use within the first year. Treadle pumps, a $25 human-powered water pumping apparatus, are another highly affordable device that Polak advocates to increase income for dollar-a-day farmers. Treadle pumps are well-within the purchasing range of many low-income farmers, and promote a rich service ecosystem within the communities where they become available. Retail pump sales, well-digging, maintenance, and excess water sales all create new job opportunities that are proven to last.

There is also incredible market potential offering scaled-down, affordable solutions to dollar-a-day farmers, seeing as how there are around 800 million of them. Strangely, and quite unfortunately, market leaders in agricultural products don't consider small-acreage operations to be a viable market. In reality, the math is absolutely staggering.

If 100 million small-acreage farmers around the world each bought a quarter-acre drip system for 50 dollars - a total investment on their part of over 5 billion dollars - it would amount to more than ten times the current annual global sales of drip-irrigation equipment. These 100 million small-plot farmers could put 10 million additional hectares under drip irrigation and increase current global acreage under drip irrigation by a factor of five.

Wrap-up

The key concept that resonates through this book is that real liberation is about achieving the freedom and the means to choose. Poor farmers who are able to increase their income decide for themselves where to invest to continue improving their family's living situation and overall profitability. Designers are needed in the developing world now more than ever, and hopefully this quick overview offers enough of a taste of what's possible that you will grab a copy of Out of Poverty and soak up every single page. Enjoy!

Banner photo respectfully snatched from www.ashdenawards.org

The concept of a global consciousness and a new empathic generation have been widely discussed over the last few years, as news-worthy horror is streamed in real time around the globe 24/7, with very real impacts on emotional health. Our work requires that we essentially sign up for a dangerous dose of the despair. With more designers moving into the social/non-profit sector, I think we as a design community need to make a concerted effort to proactively identify and address the effects of empathic-overload. Our friends need to be ready for what it will do to them.

The web is littered with practical advice for managing the stress that can result from emotionally jarring experiences, and everything seems to boil down to staying physically active and communicating with the people around you, especially those who can relate to the nature of that stress. These two general guides roll of the tongue quite simply, but the habits of design in practice can make them nearly impossible. Our quarters last ten weeks, much like the business cycles we will soon be bound to, forcing us to maximize output in as little time as possible. When a project kicks off we bid farewell to our social lives and lock ourselves in for the long-haul. I've seen cars parked outside Gulfstream, unmoved, for days at a time, and have heard legends of insane Industrial Design students who work days at a time, occasionally catching some sleep on the shop floors. This pace does not lend itself to a physically active lifestyle. As the weeks grind on and deadlines loom, the primary thrusters burn out and the auxiliary generators kick on, lasting just long enough to do a zombie-shuffle over the finish line.

If there were ever a perfect demonstration of dissipative structures in social organization, it would be a class project at SCAD's Gulfstream building. We start with balance, new forces (eustress, distress, drama, challenge) energy the system, and we either collapse or grow to achieve new forms of order and stability. The series of (amazing) projects undertaken this quarter bring with them the potential for a level of emotional involvement that will certainly be new territory for some of our friends and teammates. I don't have solutions, I only have a concern and the encouragement to keep an eye on each other. Plan a little downtime into your schedules and get the hell out of the shop once in awhile.

I'm excited to see so many designers so eager to design with the developing world, and I want to get an open conversation rolling about your experiences. Learning is a social practice, and all of your insights into the ideas I've shared here will magnify the value of what we all stand to learn. Please share your thoughts~

SCAD's IDUS4Haiti project campaign is officially underway. Several graduate and undergraduate classes are actively immersing themselves in news reports, data, aid worker blogs, and current on-the-ground initiatives, trying to understand the moving parts of the Haitian pre- and post-quake situation so as to gain fresh insights into emerging opportunities for participation in a massive relief effort.

One undergrad class is leaning towards exploring localized, sustainable agriculture, another has committed to the development and production of amputee mobility devices for victims of the quake. My graduate class, DMGT 765, is currently developing a comprehensive evaluation of the uncontrollable forces at work in Haiti, or a "10 Forces Environmental Analysis." Specifically, technological, geographic (physical and environmental), socio-cultural, economic, financial, political, legal, labor, competitive (all industries), and distributive (asset flows).

One very interesting detail we discovered was how the Prime Minister of Haiti, recently featured in a Planet Money segment on NPR, is being very clear about the importance semantics play in his country's recovery. He feels that "opportunity" is a very distasteful word, but Haiti certainly can make good of the situation and bring forth a world that they didn't have the chance to create before. He says this is not a "Reconstruction" of what was before but rather a "Re-foundation" of Haiti; a fresh start. He also stressed that streams of aid money will fade if you don't nurture it and keep it alive.

Money, supplies and aid workers are certainly pouring into the country now, but we're already seeing some aid workers leave and national (US) attention being diverted to other issues. The rainy season has arrived, and hurricane season is only a few months away. The leading cause of death before the quake was bacterial infection, primarily caused by an unreal degree of water pollution and sanitation. 80% of the population lived below the poverty line, and 54% lived in abject poverty. 28% of Haiti's GDP was derived from agriculture (mostly subsidence farming), 20% from industry (light assembly manufacturing, textiles, cement, sugar refining), and 52% from services, but an unskilled labor force 3.6 million strong is a huge challenge obstructing economic development.

We certainly have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks, and are eager to hear any advice or recommendations for good sources of information or just ideas in general. Please comment with your thoughts on the matter and I'll pass it along to the appropriate project teams. This is looking to be a big quarter!

Week 2

Fresh into Week 2, our team just had a great chat with our primary contact for our particular piece of the effort, Michael Murphy, Executive Director of MASS, based out of Cambridge, MA. MASS' mission is to deliver infrastructure for the under-served:

"We believe architecture needs to rewrite its social contract. At MASS we value the highest architectural design AND the role that architecture should play as an agent of positive social change. MASS uses the built environment to propose new models of social, economic, and environmental sustainability."

MASS is working with Partners in Health (PIH) to assist with the Haitian reconstruction effort, or, as the Prime Minister recently corrected, the "Re-foundation" of Haiti. Their effort in Haiti is rooted in the philosophy that vocational education programs focused on carpentry, masonry, metal-work, etc., need to be installed early on to create a strong foundation of skilled workers who can then go to work building a lasting infrastructure.

Our purpose in this effort will be to explore alternative business models that minimize 3rd-party donor aid and volunteerism in favor of a more self-sufficient approach. Donations and volunteerism will always have a place in helping populations recover from disaster, but it is simply not sustainable over the long term, and often ignores the social value that is created when people are empowered to realize solutions to their own problems through economic frameworks for social enterprise. Participation and the renegotiation of meaning are critical components of learning and identity. When solutions are imposed on a social group with no chance for constructing or renegotiating its meaning, the solution is either reinvented or abandoned altogether. "Design for the people" rarely works the way it's intended. "Design by the people" is where we need to be looking, and as designers we should focus our efforts on creating the conditions for learning and creativity.

Week 3

Our project's direction is finally being to take shape. Over the past few weeks we have met and spoken with some great individuals who are directly involved in a number of different initiatives on the ground in Haiti, and have also had a little time to digest our initial research findings. Overall it seems we are beginning to construct a tacit image of the situation. No amount of secondary research can ever compensate for being so removed from the target context (we are working on that as well), but we at least have identified several patterns that can now either be reinforced or reconfigured.

One particularly interesting pattern involves the sociocultural dynamics of government-managed education and the institutionalized "linguistic apartheid" that results. While most administrative functions operate in French, the majority of Haitians speak Creole. Education is taught primarily in French through rote memorization with two make-or-break exams that must be passed to continue to the next grade. I had a chance to speak with two Savannah-area missionaries who have spent the last 20 years working in Haiti, and learned that (by their account) only 40% of Haitian children attend school, of which only 15-30% pass each exam. This archaic view of front-loading education through rote memorization, not to mention in a non-native language, stifles creativity and assuredly guarantees the failure of a massive proportion of the nation's youth.

Another very important pattern that relates to our client's goals is the massive vacuum of vocational training and subsequent shortage of skilled laborers. Our client intends to provide that very thing through the construction of a trade school and various other projects in the healthcare sector. The missionaries who I spoke with are also involved in construction, primarily faith-related structures like churches and orphanages, and reinforced a major finding we identified in our initial research: construction code enforcement does not exist. Builders skimp on materials (over-diluting concrete when pouring support beams, for example) or simply don't have access to more insightful information, like using less rebar when pouring walls to allow a structure to flex rather than crumble. This leaves us with a bit of a dilemma. The government can't reliably enforce building codes and the majority of citizens lack the purchasing power to demand quality craftsmanship (which the market is ill-equipped to provide). Introducing skilled labor begins chipping away at part of the problem, but introducing and maintaining quality control over the long-haul will be an equally challenging task wherever this model is implemented. Our initial ideas were to explore the logic and values at work within trade guilds and apprenticeship systems, as well as to look for successful models from similar situations.

Our client is also trying to establish a common metric that can be used to calculate the impact of their efforts. All in all this looks to be a busy weekend!

Week 4

Heading into our fourth weekend! We are nearly halfway through this quarter and are still defining scope! Gotta love the pace of design :) Not only is this totally expected, but openly embraced as "the way it works" in projects like this. Collaboration is messy and idea synthesis happens in a logarithmic fashion rather than an additive, measurable march toward the solution. It's really quite easy to understand why it makes business folks' skin crawl.

We'll be spending the weekend researching and deconstructing half a dozen NGOs' business models to better understand the environment we wish to reconfigure. That sounded kind of cocky, but I have total confidence in our ability to make cool stuff happen on demand. More to follow!

Change of plans :)

Ok, so, nothing to follow! The quarter got crazy and I made a leap off the radar to stay on point. The final presentation will be available soon!

These five articles comprise the synthesis of a summer of heavy reading, heavier study and an awesome community development project. Enjoy!

1. Living Systems
2. We Need to Talk
3. Ecology of Collapse
4. Redesigning Well-being
5. Back to the Basics

Developing nations who want to participate in the global market retool their agricultural infrastructures to produce a single product through the practice of monoculture (Capra 147). Monoculture requires heavy chemical supplements to maintain crop integrity, which have a catastrophic effect on the soil and water ecology of the area (Capra 196). This puts everyone involved in the exchange at risk - even consumers oceans away. Transporting this produce all across the globe also generates a tremendous amount of CO2. According to Capra, "studies in Germany have shown that the contribution of nonlocal food production to global warming is between six and twelve times higher than that of local production, due to increased CO2 emissions" (147). Dramatic and unpredictable shifts in rainfall patterns, desertification, and the northward migration of nonnative species of insects, all due in large part to the unfolding dynamics of global warming, further pronounce the potential for disaster in these developing nations (Capra, 147) and raise concerns about the short-term security of our own food supply.

There is tremendous power in re-localizing the production of such a fundamental resource as food. This past summer I was involved in an intense project involving the local communities of Hudson Hill and Woodville, Harambee House, Healthy Savannah, the Chatham Environmental Forum (CEF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Atlanta, Savannah Urban Garden Association (SUGA), and several other local efforts to promote environmental and social renewal. After deconstructing the relationships between the many players in the situation we realized that everyone had a common interest in bringing community gardens to these neighborhoods We also realized that community gardens would impact these neighborhoods in more areas than just their stomachs. Communication makes it possible for an organization to re-establish and sustain its culture, and ultimately its identity. What we see in many of these disadvantaged neighborhoods is that they have slowly lost their ability to coordinate effectual change and are no longer able to act with purpose in a unified, creative way. A community garden brings back a forum for communication while reactivating the residents' agricultural heritage. It's quite possible that these communities won't follow through with the many strategies we introduced for transferring resource surplus into social enterprise, but that's really not important. What is important is that when the opportunity for expansion arrives the community will be able to respond creatively and effectively to do what is within the best interests of its members.

This project was extremely complex and really dug down to the foundation of optimizing social organization and interaction. Both our goal and our strategy changed on a weekly basis, ever-simplifying as time went on. We began to see that in such a massive project the largest impact could be made by creating awareness of the many overlapping efforts and interests of different initiatives around town, then facilitating communication and partnerships between key players to make it all come together. Half of any conversation is to get folks to the table; the other half is to listen. The underlying theme that has resonated through these experiences is that people generally want to do the right thing but they may be constrained by social norms, uninformed assumptions, or their own misguided perceptions. At its very core this is a communication problem, and by focusing on amending breakdowns we create the conditions for people to unleash their own creative capacity and act with purpose, which, as we discovered earlier, is the foundation of experiencing true freedom.

Read more about our work in Hudson Hill & Woodville

References

1. Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections. New York: First Anchor Books Edition, January 2002.

What's worse is that these behavior patterns are grossly unsustainable. "If all the Third World countries were to reach the consumption level of the United States by the year 2060, the annual environmental damage from the resulting economic activities would be 220 times what it is today, which is not even remotely conceivable" (Edward Goldsmith, cited in Capra, 148). Basically, it would take five more planets to support this sort of demand (Boylston).

Hans Küng believes the lack of concern for our modern means of production and growth is due in large part to a philosophical gap in our reasoning. In his book Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic, Hans outlines an "ethics of responsibility" that addresses the consequential impact of action and creates balance with our existing appreciation of "idealistic virtues" (Margolin, 87).

Without a dispositional ethics, the ethics of responsibility would decline into an ethics of success regardless of disposition, for which the end justifies the means. Without an ethics of responsibility, dispositional ethics would decline into the fostering of self-righteous inwardness. (Küng)

As we have seen before, however, you cannot control a living organism's behavior; you can only influence it. In 1994, Ezio Manzini proposed that the design profession begin taking a hard line on consumer consumption, namely by developing products that "could survive as technical and cultural artifacts for a longer period of time than that demonstrated by the lifespan of previous products," encouraging consumers to "develop a different relationship to his or her products, foregoing novelty and change for attachment and care," shifting from product ownership to service-based business models, and encouraging "the engagement with fewer objects through decreased consumption" (Margolin, 83).

No one should feel pride in anything that is not his own. We praise a vine if it loads its branches with fruit and bends its very props to the ground with the weight it carries: would any one prefer the famous vine that had gold grapes and leaves hanging on it? Fruitfulness is the vine's peculiar virtue. So, too, in a man praise is due only to what is his very own. Suppose he has a beautiful home and a handsome collection of servants, a lot of land under cultivation and a lot of money out at interest; not one of these things can be said to be in him - they are just things around him. Praise in him what can neither be given nor snatched away, what is peculiarly a man's.

You ask what that is? It is his spirit, and the perfection of his reason in that spirit. For man is a rational animal. Man's ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he was born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy - that he live in accordance with his own nature. Yet this is turned into something difficult by the madness that is universal among men; we push one another into vices. And how can people be called back to spiritual well-being when no one is trying to hold them back and the crowd is urging them on? (Seneca, 88-89)

These words were written nearly 2000 years ago by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, iconic stoic philosopher and accomplished senator and political advisor in the Roman Empire, in one of one hundred twenty-four letters to his close friend Lucilius. Stoicism held that all people are united in a single community subject to the laws of their own nature or creative reason, and that it is man's purpose to live in sync with nature's laws and accept unconditionally, good or bad, whatever fortune may come his way (Seneca, 15)

Seneca, a master of rhetoric and remarked as the founder of the essay (Seneca, 20), was noted for spending extensive time crafting and refining his words so that they might last to aid future generations, however I doubt very much that he could have ever anticipated his teachings being directly applied to the environmental movement of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

The stoic ideal of living in agreement with one's own nature requires "shaking off" the inessential luxuries and conventions of modern life and discovering true freedom from want and suffering through self-reliance. More importantly this ideal is realized by pursuing the perfection of one's own reason, which is the key to defeating inhibiting perceptions such as fear or pain (Seneca, 15). While the stoics believed that our gift of reason is precisely what sets us apart from the animal world, this ability is in fact a fundamental component of cognition in all forms of life (Capra 61).

Recognizing the great minds of the Roman Empire did the best they could with what knowledge and means of discovery they had, and in keeping with the stoic ideal, this convention should simply be "shook off." I think it is acceptable to extend this concept of living in accordance with one's own nature by pursuing the development of reason for sake of being more completely interconnected with nature.

Realigning society-at-large with a new ideal or ethic of reduced consumption is no small task. In fact, it's not unreasonable to suggest a feat this massive would require educating and deploying an army of highly skilled, highly committed professionals trained in the ways of influencing consumer behavior through advanced methods of communication. Specifically, we would need a method of thinking that involves deconstructing problems of communication and reassembling systemic solutions to enable more effective strategies. Hmm... Well, we do have a relatively large and multifaceted design industry employing a significant number of creatives, but they're a little preoccupied at the moment.

As we discovered earlier, labor as a whole has become highly fragmented, as more companies are staffed with outsourced or independent contractors who have very little stake in shaping the guiding values of their clients' efforts (Capra, 142-143). The creative industry is no stranger to this scenario, as many independent creatives provide their services on a freelance or contracted basis. As Victor Margolin describes in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies, "designers have been locked into the aims and arguments of their business clients, believing themselves unable to take any initiatives of their own (96)." Similarly unhitched, employees can easily be enticed to commit long periods of their careers to a company through various hooks such as stock options and 401(k) vestments, allowing their employers to retain and preserve the working knowledge they contribute within the organization (Capra, 143). It's easy to see that, as a whole, "designers have not been able to imagine a professional practice outside mainstream consumer culture" (Margolin, 96).

Design gives the impression of being in a state of stagnation in terms of both ideology and activities. One gets the impression that design has drawn apart to simply keep watch while the world grapples with numerous serious problems including the environment, welfare, natural disasters and traffic. ... In order to make a commitment to the main flow of the times and succeed in playing an important role, it appears that the necessity has arisen for design to redefine its purposes and devise a new organizational structure for itself. (Kenji Ekuan, cited in Margolin, 97)

Some criticism for our current global calamity has been directed at the entire design profession as an enabling agent. Victor Papanek, renowned architect and designer during the mid-20th century and author of Design for the Real World in 1972, was extremely vocal in criticizing the failings of the industrial design profession:

Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis ... by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed. (Margolin, 93)

While I understand the animosity some hold towards the design profession as a whole, I think it's important to distinguish the fact that a profession is far too general and disconnected to be considered a community of practice, and therefore cannot be expected to take action with the same degree of cohesive creativity and collective intelligence that true communities of practice exhibit. However, that creativity is exactly what this situation calls for.

I believe the major challenge of our time is to realize new methods for engaging and coordinating decentralized, scattered communities of practice within the design industry to formulate and execute initiatives aimed at promoting new ideals and values within the current framework of our networked society. From a facilitative standpoint, this will require embedding designers within active projects of many different professions, such as the natural and social sciences, environmental justice initiatives, business and community development forums, and educational institutions; not as decorative-service providers, but as strategic partners who can apply a method of thinking that involves deconstructing problems of communication and reassembling systemic solutions to enable more effective strategies. In essence, if we want to effectuate change on a global scale, we must enable the enablers within our own ranks.

Continue to Part 5: Back to the Basics

References

1. Boylston, Scott. "Industrial Ecology." Sustainable Practices in Design. Savannah College of Art & Design, July. 2009.
2. Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections. New York: First Anchor Books Edition, January 2002.
3. Margolin, Victor. "Design for a Sustainable World." The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Ed. Victor Margolin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 93-105.
4. ---. "Expansion or Sustainability: Two Models of Development." The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Ed. Victor Margolin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 79-91.

"If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes finding the solution." Albert Einstein

The most important part of solving a problem is to first define it. Parts 1 and 2 touched on the self-destructive tendencies of unnaturally designed systems, so let's shift gears a bit and try to extend this new perspective to the big nasty problems we are faced with today.

Today, capital flows throughout global financial networks in a never-ending search for investment opportunities. Global currency markets move around two trillion dollars every day, making it nearly impossible for many governments to control their own economic policies (Capra 139). Large economies can generally handle volatile investment swings, but smaller developing economies are at the mercy of an automated system that no one is truly capable of controlling or even understanding. Desperate for greater inclusion in global arena, developing countries eagerly scrub away decades of hard-fought social, economic and environmental regulation to entice multinational corporations to come in and set up shop.

According to the new rules of the World Trade Organization's free-trade model of global capitalism, a developing nation should specialize in one particular niche commodity (typically agricultural) to exchange on the open market. With the earned revenue it will be able to import everything that its people require (Capra 147). If everything goes as planned, demand for that niche commodity will remain stable and the nation will enjoy unprecedented prosperity. Taking the bet, the nation solicits heaps of foreign investment capital and begins retrofitting its interior to support vast, specialized farming operations, known as monoculture, by scraping away the indigenous ecological systems that have until now supported the inhabitants of the region, and investing heavily in herbicides, pesticides, and herbicide- and pesticide-resistant bioengineered seeds. (Capra 187)

Soon the nation's new crops are being hauled away to market and the people are actually enjoying an influx of wealth that they never could have imagined. But before long pesticides begin showing up in drinking water, livestock and even women's breast milk. Cancer rates explode. Heavy chemical application has so far done a fine job of keeping crop-eating bugs at bay but eventually a few particularly hardy pests survive, reproduce and explode upon the countryside, now unfazed by anything the farmers can spray at them (not that the farmers don't give it their best effort, of course). Analysts spook, and investments disappear overnight. The nation is now chin-deep in economic crisis and is forced to increase interest rates to regain investor confidence, plunging its people into a decades-long recession (Capra, 139-140).

Unfortunately, the nation is no longer capable of satisfying its own population's food demands since it has overhauled its infrastructure to produce only one type of crop. Even if they had the means to reestablish a diverse agricultural program, the landscape is thoroughly ravaged by the agrochemical supplements that made monoculture possible in the first place (Capra 196). Tough luck. Put this example in context of the entire developing world. Speculative investments and volatile currency swings have created a predictable trend of wealth flowing north and pollution flowing south (Capra 148). At the same time, all regions of the globe that offer no extractable financial value are considered "economically irrelevant" and are deprived access to the basic amenities of modern life or opportunities for advancement (Capra 144-145).

The nature of our global financial networks has profoundly impacted life here in our corner of the world as well. The transformation of capital into a virtual, intangible perception of value has entirely disconnected it from labor, which is still very much a local, tangible element (Capra 142). Labor has become increasingly fragmented and disempowered as more companies shift jobs overseas and connect with subcontracted individuals who carry virtually zero bargaining power (Capra 143). This makes our own communities extremely vulnerable to the whims of a global automation piloted by the singular objective of exploiting resources to make money for the sake of making money (Capra 141).

While the objective of our economic model does not have an end, our resources certainly do. On a fundamental level, there is simply no such thing as "enough." Yogendra Shastri, research engineer at the Vishwamitra Research Institute in Westmont, Illinois, along with several colleagues, has developed a computer model demonstrating the causal relationships that exist between plants, herbivores, carnivores, industries, and humans, with the hope of extrapolating trends in current data to project future scenarios of resource availability. Based on current consumption rates, all trends remaining constant, the human race will face extinction in approximately one hundred and five years (Shastri et al.). However, the scenarios put forth by the project cannot possibly account for future technological innovations, sociopolitical intervention, or the cascading effects of global warming (Shastri et al.). The model simply calculates the long-term availability of the planet's natural resources and projects the impact of variations within the system (Shastri et al.).

Over-extraction of resources from any ecosystem severely cripples the system's ability to renew itself. Thus, what we call "resources" are actually just "sources" (Boylston). When we shut down a living system's ability to regenerate itself, as we mentioned earlier regarding communication, the entire system begins to collapse. The ecological impacts of our heroine-addict economy are greatly compounded by gross inefficiencies within the system itself. For example, the average piece of food in the United States travels approximately 1,500 miles before it is consumed, exponentially magnifying the carbon output of food production and distribution (Boylston). To put this in context, 75% of the apples eaten in New York City come from the west coast or overseas, even though New York state produces ten times more apples than its own residents eat (Boylston).

This destructive economic system is built upon what Victor Margolin calls "the expansion model." Quite simply, "the world consists of markets in which products function first and foremost as tokens of economic exchange, attracting capital which is either recycled back into more production or becomes part of the accumulation of private or corporate wealth." (Margolin, "Expansion or Sustainability" 82). Consequently, the success of our markets is achieved through product development, innovation, and promotion geared towards inflating consumers' sense of urgency to upgrade and replace existing products, while institutionalizing the empty promises of limitless satisfaction that define consumer culture (Margolin, "Expansion or Sustainability" 83-84). Value is not derived from efficiency or even practicality, but by the strategic manipulation of perception and price. Since supply is meaningless without demand, the root of this problem lies within our own culture of consumption and the social values that are exchanged to inform and preserve our sense of well-being.

Continue to Part 4: Redesign Well-being

References

1. Boylston, Scott. "Industrial Ecology." Sustainable Practices in Design. Savannah College of Art & Design, July. 2009.
2. Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections. New York: First Anchor Books Edition, January 2002.
3. Margolin, Victor. "Design for a Sustainable World." The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Ed. Victor Margolin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 93-105.
4. ---. "Expansion or Sustainability: Two Models of Development." The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Ed. Victor Margolin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 79-91.
5. Shastri, Yogendra, et al. "Is Sustainability Achievable? Exploring the Limits of Sustainability with Model Systems," Environmental Science & Technology. 2008: 42; cited in Conner, Alana. "The End of the World is Nigh (Maybe)." Stanford Social Innovation Review Jan. 2009: 14.

Through repeated communication, the many associations we form as individuals and as networks within networks converge to shape the cultural norms, shared values and rules of conduct that society is based upon. Laws are constructed to optimize the efficiency of decision-making relative to these shared values and rules of conduct (Capra 88). However, simply creating a law is not an effective way to constrain behavior. Legislative artifacts are designed to preserve a record of meaning for future generations, but without communication meaning and action are lost.

Not long ago, I was driving down Montgomery avenue, heading back to the lab to work on a project. As I was approaching an intersection I observed a gutted out old Chrysler minivan blowing through a red light to make a u-turn. This certainly isn't a rare occurrence in Savannah, so I didn't give it too much of a reaction. It did lead me into questioning if I could make a u-turn, though. In my home state of Nebraska a driver is allowed to make u-turn at an intersection, but in Colorado a u-turn can only be made when there is a median structure of some kind. I have no idea what the law states here in Georgia. I suppose I could go online and spend an hour searching through exhaustingly unusable local government websites. Or I could just ask around. I learned about the difference between laws in Nebraska and Colorado through casual conversation with a couple of my roommates. In fact, I wonder if I've ever learned of a single written law by reading an official document. Have you? I've learned through communicating within the various networks that constitute my place in society, and I suspect I'm not alone in that regard.

When communication within a network begins to break down, cultural norms and rules of conduct immediately go right out the window. Just as fostering greater communication and transparency empowers a social system, closing off means of communication effectively shuts down a social organization's ability to sustain its culture, and ultimately its identity. For better or for worse, this concept is the founding principle of the information age that has defined our era. If you are in the conversation, you automatically have unprecedented access to a wealth of information and opportunity. If you're outside the conversation, you're on your own.

As more of our interpersonal relationships move into the virtual realm and individuals become more physically isolated from their respective social networks, we run the risk of becoming overwhelmingly fragmented and disempowered. As our society continues on its adventure into digital dematerialization I believe we will see far greater cultural and environmental disintegration within our local communities.

Perhaps the most obvious sign that we need better methods of designing and planning is the existence, in industrial countries, of massive unsolved problems that have been created by the use of man-made things, e.g., traffic congestion, parking problems, road accidents, airport congestion, airport noise, urban decay and chronic shortages of such services as medical treatment, mass education and crime detection. (Jones)

Let's apply our new perspective to one of these very familiar systemic breakdowns: traffic congestion. Many people believe that traffic congestion is the result of a logistical, mathematical breakdown, or simply a lack of insight and planning around projected population density or commuting patterns. I disagree. Cars are operated by people. When two strangers meet in a tight hallway they engage one another through a complex choreography of facial, bodily, gestural and spoken communication to coordinate their behavior and navigate past each other. Put those same two people in separate, enclosed two-ton automobiles and we have a different situation altogether. Communication is reduced to a horn, blinkers, and a pair of middle fingers. Transparency into each other's intentions is virtually nonexistent, greatly inhibiting their ability to organize, respond and adapt as a singular, creative entity. Traffic congestion is very much a social problem, compounded by our blind faith in a technological solution.

I believe that most of the catastrophic problems we face today are based upon and/or magnified by fundamental communication failures being addressed with technological solutions.

Continue to Part 3: The Ecology of Collapse

References

1. Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections. New York: First Anchor Books Edition, January 2002.
2. Jones, John Chris. "Design Methods, 2nd ed.," cited in C. Thomas Mitchell, Redefining Designing: From Form to Experience. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993, 39-40; cited in Margolin, Victor, "Expansion or Sustainability: Two Models of Development." The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies. Ed. Victor Margolin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 79-91.

This system is known as a dissipative structure: an open system that maintains stability far from equilibrium. As the incoming flow of energy increases, the system becomes unstable and may branch off into a new state of being where new structures and new forms of order may emerge (Capra 13-14). Incoming energy could mean food, heat, light, stress or external stimuli. The emergence of new order can also be addressed as the inherent creativity in all living systems, and is the "dynamic origin of development, learning and evolution" (Capra 14). When a cell replicates, this system splits seamlessly and continues on. "Thus, life has unfolded for over three billion years in an uninterrupted process, without ever breaking the basic pattern of its self-generating networks." (Capra 12).

This simple model for a living system can be applied at all levels of complexity. We started in terms of a cell, but it can just as easily be applied to a bacteria, a goldfish, my dog, myself, or even my group of friends on Facebook. A living system is a creative, learning system that couples to its environment by altering its internal structure in response to external forces, which then determines future behavior (Capra 35). This is cognition at its most fundamental level. While an organism's behavior is influenced by environmental disturbances, it does have the autonomy to choose which disturbances it will respond to (Capra 35). This is a critical point, as you cannot control a living system, you can only influence it. Therefore, meaningful impulses will always be far more influential than precise instructions (Capra 112).

When we apply Capra's framework to social organization, the self-generating process of the system is no longer metabolism, but communication. Contrary to common belief, communication is not simply the exchange of information. Communication is the coordination of behavior, and emerged through the evolutionary advantage of creating and exchanging meaning to evoke action (Capra 83). This shared context of meaning creates a sense of identity, forming the abstract boundary between individuals of a network and the outside world (Capra 91).

Culture emerges as sustained networks of communication coordinate rules of behavior, social norms, beliefs, and abstract concepts (Capra 73-74). And as with living organisms, this framework applies to social organizations at all levels of complexity - within or between departments comprising multinational corporations, little league baseball teams, or your own family members. An increased influx of meaning, in the form of new ideas, threats, stress, etc., pushes the dissipative structure of the system to a point of instability where emergent creativity can lead to new forms of order (Capra 13-14). Meaning lets us act with intention and purpose, which is the foundation of experiencing human freedom (Capra 73-74).

Traditional models of organization (business, government, etc.) neglect the inherently human capacity to create and by reserving the conceptual thought process for those in positions of power and delegating the execution of those concepts to the remaining members of the organization (Capra 113). Formal channels of communication are designed to establish responsibility and distribute power, but there are infinitely more fluid, informal networks of communication that exist between employees, known as communities of practice (Capra, 108).

According to organizational theorist Etienne Wenger,

"As people pursue any shared enterprise over time, they develop a common practice, that is, shared ways of doing things and relating to one another that allow them to achieve their joint purpose. Over time, the resulting practice becomes a recognizable bond among those involved." (Capra 108).

Embracing these communities of practice is critical. By creating the conditions for emergent innovation and using the power of authority to empower others, formal organizations can unleash the inherent creativity of every individual within the organization towards a common purpose (Capra 113). This not only has revolutionary implications for employees' sense of purpose within the enterprise, but allows the entire system to respond quickly and flexibly to dramatic changes in the organization's environment (Capra 113).

To enable emergence within an organization, leaders need to be intimately familiar with the requirements of a living system. Communication is vital to the autopoietic processes within a living system, and so multiple feedback loops and transparency need to be established within the organization so that people can measure the impact of their actions (Capra 122). A living system must also remain open to new ideas and new knowledge. Continual questioning and experimentation should be encouraged and rewarded (Capra 123). Now that we have established the fundamental principles of this model we can dive a little deeper into the root causes of larger, cascading system failures.

Continue to Part 2: We Need to Talk

Reference

1. Capra, Fritjof. The Hidden Connections. New York: First Anchor Books Edition, January 2002.

This project was extremely complex and really dug down to the foundation of optimizing social organization and interaction. Both our goal and our strategy changed on a weekly basis, ever-simplifying as time went on. We began to see that in such a massive project the largest impact could be made by creating awareness of the many overlapping efforts and interests of different initiatives around town, then facilitating communication and partnerships between key players to make it all come together.

Concept map by Audrey Tan

Our goal was to create self-sustaining community gardens behind the community centers of these two neighborhoods. We demonstrated that after the gardens satisfied local demand for a fresh, accessible food supply the surplus could be moved into a number of different entrepreneurial ventures, such as community kitchens and mobile food trucks. However, as we eventually realized, imposing solutions (change) on any community is guaranteed to fall apart in flight and has the potential to repel would-be collaborators (including the communities themselves). As long as we focused on facilitating open, positive communication between the communities and the partners, the emergent creativity within this new network would respond appropriately to the opportunity to create positive change. Half of any conversation is to get folks to the table; the other half is to listen.

The most important part of the collaboration that occurred within our team and with other actors in the network was the opportunity to do something meaningful. All action is driven by meaning. Set a dozen students loose on an assignment and you'll get about as much effort as is required to get a passing grade. Set those same students loose on a project geared towards finding innovative ways to improve the lives of people in two disadvantaged, environmentally and economically exploited communities on the wrong side of the tracks, and you'll get the kind of personal investment from each of them that really makes good things happen.

Slick rendering by Ben Decherd

Download the project process book

Condor is an exciting program developed under Peter Gloor at MIT that allows us to troll the vast ocean of content that is the active conversation of the web and then aggregate, analyze and visualize the massive amount of information that is pulled back. As we learned during our week in Cambridge, the best way to understand this software is to see it in action. And so, I will attempt to demonstrate a quick application of Condor in a market very near and dear to my heart.

Exploring the Mobile Applications Market

In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race." Al Ries & Jack Trout. authors of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

In June of 2007 Apple released a revolutionary new device that forever changed both the mobile telecommunications and digital media download industries. While the the device itself has become the focus of much salivating and shameless imitation, the real success of the artifact can be largely attributed to the explosion of applications brought forth by enterprising young developers the world over. A whole new frontier was opened up, and naturally many of the best-suited competitors scrambled to grab what little scraps of market-share Apple left available. Behind the iPhone platform we find Google Android, BlackBerry, and the Palm Pre. If it is true that "every market becomes a two-horse race," then perhaps we can catch a glimpse of the tone of the web to see how this market will play.

Condor in Action

Step 1: First I want to see the relative scale of activity of the terms "iPhone App," "Android App," "BlackBerry App" and "Palm Pre App" on the web. CoolTrend.ch is designed to do just that. CoolTrend.ch lets visually maps out the relationship between results of search queries, allowing me to very quickly see the most central hubs of information within the network. This alone could turn the world of web advertising appraisals on its head, but let's bench that discussion for another time.

Figure 1a shows the output from this process. Surprisingly, iPhone - the untouchable market leader - owns just 31% of the web buzz-share, trailing Google's 33%. BlackBerry App follows with 25%, and Palm Pre App with only 11%. The iPhone is certainly not going anywhere, having recently announced its one-billionth app download from its App Store, but removing it from the analysis yields another interesting perspective.

p. Figure 1a. CoolTrend output for "iPhone App" "BlackBerry App" "Palm Pre App" & "Google Android App"

Figure 1b shows the aggregate web buzz of "Google Android App," "BlackBerry App," and "Palm Pre App." Google weighs in with 44%, BlackBerry takes 39%, and Palm picks up the last 17%. One could now argue that Google is shaping up to be a pretty solid "second horse," but BlackBerry is keeping a fairly close margin.

Figure 1b. CoolTrend output for "BlackBerry App" "Palm Pre App" & "Google Android App"

Step 2: I want to see what key terms are being used within the blogosphere regarding "iPhone App," "Google Android App," "BlackBerry App" and "Palm Pre App." I could probably sit down and write out a nice long list of what I think are key terms within the industry, but there's no way to ensure I'll catch every single relevant word. I fire up MySQL, launch Condor, create a new database, and set the "One Degree Collector" loose on Google blog search. Condor hits Google up for the returned snippets of 20 results for each query and creates a new data-set for each term. Next I run "Content Process" to calculate and extract the most frequently used terms for each data-set. Those terms are then compiled together to create a pretty accurate snapshot of the key terminology used in reference to my original four queries.

I want to visualize the relative association of these terms, so merge my four data-sets together (after making a backup, of course) and run the Content Process again against the new single data-set. This time I also import my list of industry terms. Figure 2 shows the resultant Static View of Terms output for my merged data-set. Terms appear as nodes within a network, connected by edges (blue lines) and spatially arranged to demonstrate how frequently they occur together.

Figure 2. Static View of Terms for Industry Terminology

Device names and related terms cluster together in different regions of the map - Palm Pre appears far left, Google Android appears top just left of center, Apple appears far top right, and BlackBerry below and just right of center - all orbiting around the golden item of the day: the word "app."

Something very interesting is already visible in the area of Palm Pre. Notice the other terms clustering around Palm's related terms. "itunes" is the big anomaly, as well as "syncing," "upgrade," "coming," "pre owners," etc. Palm and Apple have recently been locked in a "Sync War" as Palm attempts to allow the Pre to sync with iTunes. Apple responded by pushing updated versions of iTunes to disallow this behavior. Apparently they have been going back and forth for awhile now and we can clearly see this info resonating through the blogosphere. It's possible this contributed to Palm's 11-17% of web buzz-share from earlier.

Another interesting detail from the Palm cluster is that a few outlier terms such as "delayed," "waiting," "Lonely" connect with terms like "application" and "app catalog." I run a quick google search with those terms plus "Palm Pre App" and find a plethora of articles citing serious development problems when authoring apps.

Step 3: I need to get a little deeper into these devices so I create a new database and run the "Blog Collector" tool. This is essentially the same component as the One Degree Collector, except it submits an addition query for each result for each additional degree you request. For example, if I request 20 results at a degree of 2 I could potentially pull back 400 articles for each of my four queries: "iPhone App," "Google Android App," "BlackBerry App" and "Palm Pre App." I also opt to include the full content of the results, which takes a considerable amount of time but will give me the depth of information that I need.

My results are first returned as four individual data-sets, so I can analyze each dataset individually. I want to better understand the negative sentiments behind the Palm Pre, so I open text pad and start assembling a list of negative experience terms such as "problems, issues, headache, annoying, terrible, hacking, confusing, errors, crashes, breaks, fails, tired, frustrated" in various forms. I manually merge this with the term list from my previous One Degree Collection of Palm Pre App terms. I add a few phrases that build off of those previous outlier terms and contextualize the situation a little more, such as "tired of waiting" or "can't wait for," as well as "development" and "sdk" (software development kit). I save this list, return to Condor, select the "Palm Pre App" data-set and run a Content Process, importing the new term list. If my hypothetical phrases do actually exist in the content with any real frequency it will be demonstrated in the Static Term View rendering.

Figure 3 shows the rendered output, and demonstrates exactly what I had suspected. There is a strong clustering of terms like "waiting, can't wait for, app, more apps, apps, store" with nearby terms such as "development, developer, fails, failing, problems, crash, not enough, sdk." What we can see here is that the nature of the collective conversation about regarding "Palm Pre App" is that there are big problems with the SDK which are inhibiting developers from pushing out any respectable number of apps. Users are getting tired of waiting for something that may honestly never come. Upon further research I found that the Palm Pre App Catalog currently features 40 apps with total downloads at around 1 million. I think it's safe to say Palm needs to start thinking about finding its own category.

Figure 3. Static View of Terms for "Palm Pre App" terminology plus negative experience terms

Google's Android Marketplace features 4,900 apps with total downloads around 40 million. Additionally, the service has direct ties to leverage the incredible might of the Google infrastructure, which will be hard for anyone to compete with. BlackBerry, on the other hand, features only 1,100 apps and has not yet disclosed total downloads. BlackBerry Apps can be acquired any one of a number of ways, including direct-from-web download, 3rd party app stores, and network operators such as Verizon, T-Mobile, and Verizon, making it nearly impossible for the folks at Research in Motion to measure the adoption of this feature. If the old adage "what gets measured gets managed (Peter Drucker)" holds true, I think we can see where this one is heading.

There are also some serious UX snags standing in RIM's way of pushing respectable adoption by its user base. I own a BlackBerry Pearl (8100) and recently partook in the full experience. Since my phone is serviced by AT&T, BlackBerry "App World" did not come preloaded. Instead I had to go online and request that a web link containing the downloadable program be sent to my phone. I was attempting this step on the phone itself but unfortunately I was using the Opera Mini browser, which would not work with the BlackBerry website. I had to close Opera Mini and start over using BlackBerry's wretched default browser. Twenty minutes later I had successfully downloaded the "App World" app and was required to reboot to install the program. The reboot process took a lifetime of its own but soon I was in the store and ready to download my first app. I had no intention of buying an app so I looked for the highest rated freebie apps to download. My first app was Pandora. I loved Pandora for iPhone but the BlackBerry lacks the basic capabilities to maintain a stream of music, let alone play it at any enjoyable volume or clarity. Bust. I also downloaded BattleShip. It's no longer on my phone either.

The Wrap-Up

As I demonstrated earlier, Condor is an incredible tool that allows us to aggregate, analyze and visualize the vastly complex exchange of information and ideas within the web. However, like any great technological innovation, it is only as effective as the operators' interpretation of what it yields. There is an immense amount of noise resonating through the web, so the real trick is to figure out which signals to listen for to assemble any sort of reliable image of what is happening out there in the expanse.

In a moment of vigilante sarcasm, I asked "wouldn't it be nice if there was a device that would shock the ever-livin' shit out of whoever was trying to steal your bike?" The Yellow-Jacket Bike Lock System was born.

Download the final project documents