ICIS NeWS
April 2004
in this issue:
Introduction
Short News
- Solar-Powered Cleaning
- Bio Car Wash
- Water Aid
- Cheap food costs!
Environmental
- Raf Manji: Sustainable Business – Costing the Earth?
- Niels Peter Flint: The Tomato Experience
Technology
- Sanjay Khanna: The Robots Are Coming
Educational
- Tad Mann: Symbol and Form - A New Vision of Design Education
Statistics
- If the world were a village with a hundred people...
Social Issues
- Karen Blincoe: Greenland, I apologize
ICIS 2004 master class programme + resources
Contact ICIS
ICIS CENTRE
Hornbækgaard
Hornbækgaardsvej 2
DK-3100 Hornbæk
Tel (+45) 49 70 43 64
NEW e-mail address: center@iciscenter.org
Introduction
Dear Reader
We thought that this enews should mainly be dedicated to contributions from supporters and colleagues around the world, who take an active interest in the issues we work with: creativity, innovation and sustainability.
We have contributions from Canada, New Zealand, US, and Denmark. Some of the articles are too long to include in the newsletter. We have included links to our Resource-pages for you to read in their entirety. We will bring their views in the ICIS NeWS from time to time.
The contributors for this issue are:
Sanjay Khanna, corporate publications writer from Vancouver Canada, Rafiq Manji, environmentalist, economist from New Zealand, Tad Mann, writer, architect, astrologist, from the US, Niels Peter Flint, experience designer from Denmark.
Kind regards
Karen
Director, ICIS
ICIS Short News - from Denmark and The World
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Solar-Powered Cleaning
Osprey Systems, a new company based in Southern Denmark is launching a new solar-powered product which can clean up to 16 litres of water daily.
Aimed at family use in developing countries the product is easy to use and can be produced at very low cost. ‘Aquasafe’ is the tradename and the product will be launched in India as well as Africa this year.
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Bio Car Wash
The car is an incredible burden on the environment. Not only in spending gasoline or through the energy, chemistry and materials involved in its production. Even when we decide not to wash it at home, chemistry hits hard. Danish Green Water Systems have done something about it and installed clean systems at a few Statoil and Shell stations in the Copenhagen area.
The company has installed its Hembi-Line industrial water cleaning system in several countries over the past few decades, and has now constructed its BioCar system. This system recycles 90% of the water used for car wash — and cleans the rest to meet the requirements of the Nordic Swan eco-label.
For your next Copenhagen car wash, look for ‘installations’ at:
www.greenwatersystems.com
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Water Aid
Click www.aquaplastics.org — every day — and 10 cents goes from the European plastics industry to water projects in Madagaskar and Malawi!
Why has the industry teamed up with the London-based organization WaterAid (http://www.wateraid.org) in its efforts to provide clean water in Africa and other poor countries? The plastics industry wants to improve the image of plastics as an environmental sinner, and wants to focus on the benefits of plastics in third world contexts where lightness and ease of platics facilitates local participation in water projects.
www.aquaplastics.org
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Cheap food costs!
The negative aspect of globalisation is especially clear when we talk about food products and in this context, supermarkets selling cheap goods.
Wal-Mart, the US group that is prevalent in England and have made an entry into the Danish market is the place for buying cheap food. It operates globally and the ‘economist’ phrase ‘economies of scale’ is seen fully operational here. Supermarkets’ bulk-buying of products from around the world gives them power to suppress prices from producers, undercut competition and they can therefore sell cheaply through retail stores. International television news some weeks ago showed the other negative aspect of Wal-Mart operations. The supermarket chain is accused of using illegal workers in the US at very cheap work rates. Both these aspects keep prices down.
Who benefits? The consumer, would the answer be. Cheap foods are what we want? We love Netto, Lidl, and other discount stores in order to buy low price goods and get discount rates!
Cheap foods, however, are very expensive. It is expensive on a local level for the people who earn very little working on the farms supplying the supermarkets, for the farmers farming the products. It is personally costly for you, because you get what you pay for, often bad bulk quality which you put in your mouth or on your body. It costs on a global level because farmers producing short run varieties or good quality products made with extra care cannot keep their prices as low as the supermarkets. So they lose out and stop production.
Source: The Guardian, Monday 19th Jan 2004
Environmental
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Sustainable Business – Costing the Earth ?
Rafiq Manji, New Zealand
reflects on the need for financial incentives:
‘Greens take us back to the Dark Ages’ screams the Business Round Table. ‘Business doesn’t care about anything apart from money’ whines the Green Party. Sound familiar? This is generally what passes for debate between the official representatives of the economy and the environment. It is reminiscent of a long running stand off between a teenager and parent. Will the environment and business ever resolve their disagreements live together in sustainable harmony?
To answer this question we need to explore how the economy and the environment interact. The word economics is derived from the Greek ‘Oikonomos’ meaning household steward or home economist in modern diction. In ancient times, the household was the central functioning unit of any economy and most economic activity took place within that framework. Now the household is a place where we live and sleep but rarely do we produce anything that is identified as part of the economy, reflected by GDP. Business is now the place where most economic activity takes place and it is now the steward of the environment.
Our technological capabilities have also moved on giving us DVD recorders, microwaves, mobile phones and other similar gadgets but they are still all built from materials taken from the same source as thousands of years ago. As, John Muir, the founder of the modern ecology movement, said “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything in the universe”. In simple terms, the economy is simply a subset of the environment, and economics a framework for understanding our transactions with the environment. They are one and the same, not distinct and separate entities as often portrayed in the media.
Whole text here
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The Tomato Experience
Niels Peter Flint, Denmark
tells the story of our poor little tomato:
The world is full of people and tomatoes. And the people all want tomato ketchup and concentrated tomato and tomato sauces and peeled tomatoes in cans and sun dried tomatoes and a few fresh watery red tomatoes to put on top of their burger or salad covered in tomato
dressing.
Tomatoes are produced mainly in Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain) and the US (Florida, California). Huge land areas are covered in plastics and tons of pesticides and other agro chemicals are used to satisfy this lust for the red watery veggie. The pluckers are mostly severely underpaid, in fact, paid below the minimum level of existence. Most often they are illegal immigrants, who cannot complain since they have no official papers and they live under horrible conditions - almost like slaves, surely worse than pigs in modern pig farms. And tomatoes are dirt-cheap. The total world production of fresh tomatoes is not more than one billion USD. The total world value of tomato sauces on the other hand is ca. 50 billion USD. So the processing is creating the value, which the consumers evidently are willing to pay.
Right now the between 1 and 2 billion "haves" can enjoy a material superiority. Often a lousy life quality some would say, but we get our tomato ketchup cheap.
The currently 4 billion "have-nots" want tomato ketchup and cars and fridges and automatic pet feeders and electric toothbrushes too. Can they have this? Just like so many other things that we take for granted in today’s world tomatoes have become a modern commodity, using vast amounts of resources in order to be available for the consumers, everywhere, at any time - at extremely low and totally unrealistic prices based on slave labour and a completely exaggerated agricultural economic support from various governmental structures.
Tomatoes are fragile and have long been packaged in all sorts of ways mostly in order to be protected and kept fresh as long as possible. Approximately 10-30% of tomatoes in underdeveloped countries decay during transport, due to rot, rats etc. You can easily genetically engineer the long-lasting tomato.
Whole text here
Technology Issues
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The Robots Are Coming: Robots, Computer Technology and You
Sanjay Khanna, Canada
gave a lecture in our series of educational modules for Danish designers, which began early April, a summary of which we will publish in the summer ICIS NeWS:
“The Robots Are Coming” is an exploration of robots, their implications for human society, and some ways we might consider the robot’s place, and our own, in the natural world. Robots are moving powerfully into modern life, not simply as ideas, images or the fantastic dreams of Hollywood movie directors and special effects masters, but as real products.
Why? A few hints: The human desire to invent, plus spiritual, ethical and social confusion, big research budgets and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, good intentions (and bad ones), useful ideas (and damaging ones), and people determined to build new industries and markets. And the manufacturing of key electronic components such as computer chips and vision sensors in robotics design and development has become such a high-volume, low cost activity that robots for home use (such as autonomous vacuum cleaners), industrial use (such as factory robots) and military use (such as bomb disposal and counterinsurgency) are starting to represent a brave new wave of advanced product development.
What are the some of the implications of robots in the home, industry and the military? Where will we see benefits? Threats? How can we help inventors be creative and ethical at the same time?
Sanjay Khanna recently published a text in Communication Arts on ICIS-related issues.
Educational
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Symbol and Form: A New Vision of Design Education
Tad Mann, USA
writes about:
It is valuable, if not essential, to explore psychological, meditative and interactive feedback techniques of working which are quite new to designers and students, but common to psychotherapeutic work. This bridges the gap between what happens within and what we create in our design work. We can correlate the way our body works with the way our designs evolve. Too often what we design has nothing to do with what is going on with us inside – when there is a link, and then later an intimate connection, the designed objects cease to be disposable, but rather carry meaning that encourages us and the owners or stewards of such objects to nurture them, to care for them and to pass them on as containers of our own personal being’
We use symbolic relationships to understand what our designs mean to us and to others. The symbols express our feelings, our resistances, ideas we cannot grasp, and potentially open up inner areas we cannot enter. We don’t need to know where our design process is going as long as it comes from within. We can discover whether our designs correspond to what we feel, or not. We discover whether they are spiritually satisfying, or not. We discover whether they carry any meaning other then their existence as designed objects.
We use our mental logical, rational skills to evaluate what arises from symbolic work. By talking and communicating about how we feel, think, and what we expect as we design, we link deeper meanings to what we do outside of ourselves. Can we reflect the inside outside?
Whole text here
Tad is teaching on the ICIS ‘Sacred Symbols and Design’ masterclass (MC 406), as well as on MC 407: ‘Sacred Architecture’ (programme and signup: see below)
Statistics
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If the world were a village with a hundred people...
We often receive chainletters. They used to be about how to make money fast!
Now they are mostly about how to feel better.
This one was interesting and different. It was sent to us through Mary Aver, London. These figures put things into an interesting perspective.
‘If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely
100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it
would look something like the following:
There would be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 from Africa
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be classified non-white
30 would be classified white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6
would be from the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death;
1 would be near birth
1 would have a college education
1 would own a computer
When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.
The following is also something to ponder...
If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation ...you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.
If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.
If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep...you are richer than 70% of this world.
If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace ... you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
If your parents are still alive and still married ... you are very rare.’
Social Issues
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Greenland, I apologize
On Wednesday evening, the 11th February 2004, Danish television showed a documentary about the displacement of families in Greenland in 1953. The Danish and the American governments had made an agreement to place an American airbase in Greenland following the end of 2nd world war and the start of the ‘cold war’.
The victims of this agreement were 30 families who with only 3 days warning were moved from their ancestral place and village to the middle of nowhere without any form of compensation. We heard their stories and saw their distress even now 40 years later.
To make matters worse the land around the airbase is polluted and no longer fit for habitation. The presence of nuclear material in the area begs the question of how much radioactivity is embedded in the land as a result of the activities of the airbase. Missile systems were erected to defend the Thule radar which the US government built and now wants to use as an integral part of its ‘star wars’ missile defense system.
In March this year the Danish courts decided that the families had no right to reclaim their land at Thule — a loss that was only compensated with a symbolic amount in 1999. The Greenlanders have now take their case to the courts in The Hague.
One wonders when the Danish government will apologize to Greenland for the way our ignorance and arrogance have damaged its people’s way of life, traditions and livelihood — and even endangering the way of life in certain areas of Greenland. We have a tendency to put our heads in the bush and pretend we did no wrong.
There are many further distressing aspects in this. The Danes have always seemed or pretended to be socially conscious, having integrity and believed in equity — Denmark was the first country to ban slavery in the beg. of the last century and the first to incur sanctions against apartheid in South Africa.
However, today we have become increasingly introverted, racist and narcissistic. This is apparent from the current liberal government’s treatment of refugees and immigrants to Denmark, introducing apartheidlike measures creating a ‘them and us’ situation.
Ignorance and arrogance mixed with fear is a lethal cocktail. It destroys tolerance, creates wars and undermines the foundation on which true democracy is built. Leads to nothing but extremism, anarchy and furthering of terrorism.
Sincerely,
Karen Blincoe
ICIS 2004 Programme
Master Class Programme 2004
MC 401
19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd August 2004
Ethnic and Sacred Architecture
MC 402
3rd and 4th September
Nicholas Grimshaw Partnership
The extraordinary Eden Project in Cornwall, UK
MC 403
13th,14th,15th September
Environmental Planning: theory and practice
MC 404
11th,14th,13th October
Working with Sustainable Architecture
(Facts, tools and how-to)
MC 405
4th November
Future Systems
‘Inspired by both nature and technologies
transferred from other industries’
MC 406
5th, 6th November
Bioclimatic Skyscrapers
Architect and Professor Ken Yeang, Malaysia
MC 407
November (dates not confirmed)
The Richard Rogers Partnership, UK
‘Buildings are responsible for 50% of the world's generation of
carbon dioxide.’
MC 408
26th, 27th, 28th, 29th November
A mini-retreat:
Intuition, Sustainability and Spirituality
Further course description: click here.
All modules cost 750 Euro plus VAT (can be refunded)
(apart from MC 403 which is more expensive due to excursions).
This covers lectures, materials, food and accommodation.
ICIS is a non-profit organisation.
For more information - and for signup - please contact:
Helle Kongsted, ICIS Center, Hornbækgårdsvej 2,
3100 Hornbæk, Denmark
Tel: 0045 49 70 43 64
Fax: 0045 49 70 43 73
Email: center@iciscenter.org
Project for Young Design Professionals
Educational modules (course is full)
Module 1: 31st March to 4th April
Professional development and internationalisation
Module 2: 23th to 27th June
The changing role of design
Module 3: 1st to 4th August
Personal development
Module 4: 1st to 5th October
Networking
Module 5: 6th-10th January 2005
What’s next: future plans, summary, evaluation
Resources
Steven W. Smith’s book The Inner Light Theory of Consciousness provides an interesting view of the mind and how the brain works. Moreover, it can be downloaded for free in pdf-format from: http://innerlighttheory.com
A hard copy can be ordered from California Technical Publishing, 2001 (ISBN 0-9660176-1-7).
SASS Magazine – Style and Sustainability Seasonal – is a source of new inspiration for interfaces between style and sustainability. You will find it only on the web:
www.sustainablestyle.org/sassmagazine
Contact ICIS
ICIS NeWS:
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Sign up for short ICIS NeWS regularly (by e-mail)
ICIS news editors:
Karen Blincoe & Henning Wettendorff