Stephanie Flanders
Well thanks Bill. We are running a little bit late, I think we are going to go through until 11.30 but moving quickly on to John Thackara who is director of Doors of Perception.
I suspect a few of you might need a little bit more introduction to Doors of Perception than Nokia so, possibly, I did anyway, it’s a social innovation network that was founded at a conference in 1993 and it is a practice inspired by the two questions we know what new technology can do but what is it for and how do we want to live? Now they figure prominently in a programme that John is the director for Designs of the Time in North East England and he is also preparing Doors of Perception Nine on the theme of food energy and design which is going to be in Delhi next February. He says he has rather innovatively interpreted his brief but he is supposed to be talking about innovation and emerging economies.
John Thackara
I have been asked to address two questions this morning. The first, is UK competitiveness imperilled by developing countries catching up and overtaking us? And question two, how best shall we use our creativity and innovation to stay ahead in the game? My answer to question one is that it's the wrong question, as I shall explain in a moment. But I will answer question two by telling you about a project in the North East of England called Designs of the Time or Dott and I will explain that Dott is a re-framing of competition as a race for energy and resource efficiency in our everyday lives and then I will conclude, and I am not going to go over time, with a couple of suggestions on how the lessons that we are learning in Dott might helpfully be reflected back into the national programmes on competitiveness that Sir George was telling us about at the beginning.
So question one, is our competitiveness imperilled by developing countries catching up with us? My answer is no. Because in so called developing or emerging countries, but also here in the north, the rules of competition are changing profoundly and irrevocably. We are all emerging economies now. We are in a transition from mindless development which has characterised most of our careers to design mindfulness as I shall explain.
The publication of the Stern Review on Climate Change Economics by a former world bank chief economist marks a radical change in the rules by which we compete. Before Stern, we measured our competitiveness against curious criteria. The country with the highest growth and productivity went to the top of the league, but the avocation of these curious criteria led to some bizarre results. High growth, for example, which is the popular measure of success and competition, as an abstract measure, meant that last year a new product or service was launched every 3.5 minutes, tick, tick, tick – a new product is launched. Companies all over the world innovated like crazy, they competed like mad to bring out some new thing at ever increasing rates. Did we need a new product every 3.5 minutes? I don’t think so.
On the contrary, survey after survey, not to mention our own lived experience and daily conversations demonstrated we citizens are in despair at the flood of often pointless trash that we are told will make us happy and fulfilled. This by the way is one of the reasons why so called developing countries say in kind and polite ways that we should more properly describe ourselves and wrongly developed than advanced. So what beckons us a 3.5 minutes goes to three minutes, to two minutes, to one minute. New product simultaneity, daily life that contains only new products, is this something to look forward to? Scoring competitiveness by productivity leads to other curious phenomena. You must know the old story that the highest degree of productivity in our world today is exhibited by a cancer patient going through a divorce. That’s a very wise way to measure competitiveness. But that’s kind of a joke, what is really mad about productivity as a measure is that so called external costs, that is to say energy, water, minerals, the biosphere as a whole, these are not properly counted as part of the game at all.
The theory of productivity is that we produce more than the next guy by using less. But we do not. We, all of us, use energy to exploit resources taken from somewhere at less than their full cost and we do not pay the full price either of the process we use to get them or the consequences when they manufactured used and disposed of. None of these costs are internalised in the way that we measure the success of our businesses. By excluding these external costs from the score sheet we completely ignore, blind ourselves to the impact of our game on the playing surface and guess what the playing surface has become worn and the ball has started to bounce in alarming ways.
If Cox alerted us to competitiveness as a key issue to be concerned about, what is important about Stern is that he paves the way for a new scoring system. New rules will be introduced progressively faster as cultural and political pressure for action builds. Yes the Chancellor’s statement yesterday was rather wimpish but this is one swallow in an impending flock of changes to the way that the fiscal regime controls the way we compete. I just promise you that. I may be wrong but I would be pretty surprised.
Now one of the few things that a government can do is use fiscal measures to make these so called external costs, internal costs, payable by the producer and for me this is at the heart of what a high value, knowledge based economy means. A high value, knowledge based economy is what happens when matter and energy flowing through the economic system have to be paid for at full price rather than take it for granted as some kind of freebie. Under this regime who will be competitive? The most competitive are those who go for speed a-Stern. Now some commentators responded quickly to Stern and proclaimed lists of all sorts of actions that the government must take now. The government must do something about this thing. But as Sir George reminded us at the beginning of this morning, what governments can or must do top down from here outwards is a modest part of the story. There are severe limits to what any government can do in terms of telling us how to behave. This is especially true if the edicts issued by governments boil down to the command “consume less”.
This leads me to the second part of the second question. How best shall we use our creativity and innovation to stay ahead in the game?
So I have described and proposed to you that the game is changing, so I am applying the question that I was given to a slightly modified challenge and this leads me on to Designs of the Time or Dott07.
So if policy is about the supply of prescriptions about where things should be. Dott 07 is about creating demand for new and more sustainable ways to live. Dott is an initiative of the Design Council and the Regional Development Agency, One North East and throughout the North East of England next year different communities have been challenged to address the question “how do we want to live?” These communities are taking the lead in experiments to change the way they deal with daily life issues.
These issues range from energy use in the home, how we move around, how we look after older people, how we grow food in cities and several more. I will give you a couple of examples. One Dott project is called “Low Carb Lane”. More and more of us would like to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions especially at home, which is a big part of the problem as we all know to save money if not to save the planet.
But how to do it? Wind turbines, fuel cells, solar panels, nano-gel insulation, woodchip boilers? There are so many competing technologies which claim to be and offer the magic cure all solution. It is impossible even for experts to make sense of this cacophony of ideas. It is also hard for regular people to pay. Few of us can afford to shell out thousands of pounds just to be virtuous or in the hope of some future benefit.
Low Carb Lane tackles these problems head on in a real street, Castle Terrace in Ashington. In Castle Terrace the citizens with our teams will explore the potential to achieve warm and comfortable homes in practical ways that reduce their carbon footprint and also save them money. They will look at different ways to modify their daily life activities, how to choose and install more efficient appliances, how to add insulation where appropriate, how to generate their own power on a local basis, in a holistic way.
We are going to look at everything from energy saving light bulbs, high tech metering systems, off grid generation, all of these things will be looked at. We will look at personal energy passports to see if they would work for this street, these forty houses. We will explore the idea of a green concierge service to help us in that one street, make sense of all these different proposals about what we should do.
As well as Low Carb Lane, seventy five different schools around the North East of England are also tackling the energy issue head on. Year 8 students throughout the region have been given a tool developed by Dott to help them map the carbon footprint of their school. Once they have identified which aspects of their school’s energy and resource life are wasteful, they will propose re-designs to make their school more resource and energy efficient. The fifty best schools will progress these plans with the help of professional designer and the best designs will be put forward for awards at the Dott Festival next October, which I will tell you about.
Low Carb Lane and the schools project both respond to this big energy picture that I talked about at the beginning, but these are not “wouldn’t-it-be-nice” projects. It is a condition of these projects proceeding that they attempt to deliver tangible benefits to real people in a real place otherwise we don’t go ahead. But the key is that the small actions that we experimentally embark on may just have the potential to be big consequences when scaled up. That is the model.
Another project called “Move Me” tackles the need for mobility and access in a rural community. The question posed is this, “how can we improve people’s mobility and access to services without adding more cars or building new roads?”, otherwise stated “No Car No Problem”. Scremeston County First School in Northumberland is the focus of this project. The project will look at the community, the school community’s total mobility needs including unmet ones and explore how these needs can be better served by combining existing services in smarter ways. In policy language, we are looking at transport intensity, rural access and resource efficiency. In Dott terms, we are seeking practical ways to improve daily life for one community in one place by taking practical steps. The idea is that if we can improve things for real people in one school, the tools, methods and services that we develop for Scremeston could be scaled up and multiplied and that’s why we say that Dott is in the acorns business.
A third project is called “Urban Farming” or “I Grew it my Way”. Food is a huge part of the energy problem, enormous. From farm to plate, depending on the degree to which it has been processed a typical food item in Britain and most so called developed countries may have energy input which is four or several hundred times the energy that enters our bodies. As much fat from fast food outlets is clogging up the sewers of our cities as is clogging up the arteries of our bodies.
My favourite example is if you go down the road to Harvey Nichols Food Store and buy an iceberg lettuce, for every calorie of that lettuce that enters your mouth, it takes 120 calories to grow it in New York State, pack it, fly it over the Atlantic and display it under bright flattering lights in an open fronted refrigerator.
So in Dott we decided to take some practical steps to see how we could slash the distance between what we eat and where it is grown. Our project is based in Middlesbrough and it is helping local citizens in different contexts grow their own food in small, medium and large urban growing spaces. These all range from window boxes to larger planters down the high street and larger skips that will be moved around different locations. A Meal Assembly Centre will be established where growers will be helped to prepare their produce for a weeks worth of meals and next September a Meal for Middlesbrough will take place where all these foods via the Meal Assembly Centre are eaten to see how the thing has gone.
A fourth Dott and the last example, is called “Alzheimer’s 100”. This project asks, what practical steps are needed to improve daily life for people with dementia and their carers? Now dementia affects 750,000 people in the UK at the moment, 800,000 or more by 2010 and for every person who has the condition there are three or four family members and friends directly affected. We are talking about millions of people needing to deal with this at the moment hidden story.
As with the other Dott projects we are going to investigate not the issue in abstract but the issue for particular people in particular places. We have teamed up with the Alzheimer’s Society’s thirteen regional branches and we are going to embark on a series of studies to make media diaries of the everyday life of people with dementia. We will make these “day in their life” diaries and they become an opportunity map of practical things that can or should be fixed in the daily life of these groups.
We don’t yet know what the outcomes of this project will be but our early meetings have considered concierge or porterage services, a time sharing system for volunteers, or maybe a buddy system for people with Alzheimer’s. We don’t know and we do not have a pre-cooked solution because the whole essence of this project and all the other projects is that we identify needs that this community regards as a priority and we work with them to deliver prototype solutions.
Finally some lessons, now the first of these public events does not take place until the middle of next year and the main results will be available next October but it is possible to draw one or two conclusions about what this region specific, people specific, place specific experiment can mean for the broader situation of competitiveness.
The first lesson we have learned in Dott is that creativity and innovation are all around us. Everywhere we have been in North East England we have found people dealing innovatively with daily life in all manner of creative ways. A friend of mine called Paul Hawkin reckons that somewhere in the world over one million organisations are engaged in grass roots activity designed to address climate and other environmental and social issues. One million now today are out there. Collectively Paul tells me that this is the biggest single innovation movement on the planet but it so happens to fly under the radar of normal systems therefore we tend not to take it seriously. But it means for Dott that our job is not to go around creating innovation in some desert, it is already there. On the contrary, our job is to discover and accelerate existing grass roots innovation by bringing in design skills, bringing in technology platforms, bringing in resources as and when they are needed.
A second lesson from Dott that we have learned so far is that networks connections and alliances are terrific things but they bring certain demands. Some of our public commissioned projects started with a list of twenty five or more possible organisations. We have ended up in most cases with between ten and fifteen partners in some of these projects. Public ones and private ones, big ones and small ones, academic ones and business ones. We have them in all of our projects.
The point is that we have come to the conclusion that in terms of stimulating responses to climate change and innovation, we do not need to start millions of more organisations and projects, please no more initiatives. On the contrary, let us focus on bringing together people and organisations and activities that are already there but to do those connections in innovative ways, to make unlikely partnerships. Let us look outside our tents for new ideas. The lesson being that all these things are do-able but it takes a lot of time and social energy to build on the shared and understanding and trust without which these alliances simply don’t work.
Innovation we conclude so far is as much a time issue as it is a money issue or a technology one. And finally, the third lesson we are learning in Dott concerns leadership and this overused word “vision”. We are finding in Dott that posing a question, “how do we want to live?” motivates people in ways that telling them how to live does not. We do not stand over people and demand “what sacrifices are you going to make to save the planet?” On the contrary, we are trying in a rather low key way to start conversations about how we might organise daily life in better ways and our ambition, and I think we are getting rather optimistic, is that out of these multiple and complex conversations at a local level, a shared vision of region wide renewal will emerge.
To conclude, I said at the start that there are two ways to compete. We can run faster and faster under existing rules, wear out the pitch and then whilst looking backwards run slap into a rock called climate change or we can redesign the rules of the game. I prefer the latter.
Thank you very much.