(Summer re-run: first published July 2009)

This scary hand smashing through the wall to get you is the logo of last month’s Insead conference on social entrepreneurship. Its slogan was “Reaching For Impact”.

I’ve written critically here before about the assumptions that underly “design for development” - so I won’t repeat the whole argument.

And as I said here we are all emerging economies now.

So let’s just say that I’m troubled about the term “design for social impact” when the desired impact is on someone else’s turf, not on the designer’s own.

The language of Nesta’s new “Re-boot Britain” programme also strikes me as off-key. A complex society in transition is not best imagined as a faulty machine.

But both social impact, and rebooting, are thin-blooded when compared to the concept of “philanthrocapitalism” that’s celebrated in a new book.

The project of philanthrocapitalism is not incoherent, and the way they work is often transparent and well organized. The Gates Foundation, for example, seems to bevery professionally run. My doubts concern the assumptions that underly the philanthrocapitalists' key aim, which is to provide capital to the large number of informal micro-enterprises that account for nearly half of GDP in low income countries (compared to just 13 percent in rich countries). The propositon is that low-income countries typically suffer from a "missing middle" in which “poor access to inputs” leaves “a massive economic gap in small and medium-sized enterprises.”

The "missing middle" is a real enough problem - but it won't, for me, best be filled by the imposition of a capital-intensive and growth-oriented economy – the economy, in other words, that we have now.

A new publication from The Young Foundation in the UK, Social Venturing, describes a different kind of economy – a social economy – that is more socially and informationally intensive than capital intensive.

Social ventures have a huge gap to fill. In the UK - admittedly an extreme case - state spending on public services is likely to shrink by a staggering 20-40 percent in the coming years as the bill for the financial bailout comes due.

In the coming social economy, the role of national governments in countries like the UK will unavoidably change, and radically - away from the point-to-mass delivery of centrally-produced and paid-for services: hospital operations, kilowatts of electricity, or welfare payments to those qualifying for them.

For a whole range of problems, the Young Foundation authors argue, this mass delivery model is ill-suited. “It finds it difficult to deal adequately with difference and complexity, or with conditions or situations that are difficult to routinise”.

The study of living systems suggests models of how a social economy will work, they write. But a social economy will still depend on some technology. Distributed networks will be used intensively. Relationships will be sustained by the intensive use of broadband, mobile and other means of communication.

But a social economy will be radically less resource-intensive than the one we have now. There is an emphasis on collaboration and on repeated interactions, on care and maintenance - rather than one-off consumption, commodified transactions, or too much focus on fixed assets.

A key ingredient in a social economy is “relational capital”. This is both the knowledge and trust built up between a venture and its users and suppliers, and the relationships between a venture and its staff and circle of volunteers.

Conventional accounting takes little account of this intangible capital, yet in all social ventures it is the foundation of their strength and of their distinctiveness.

For social ventures, writes Robin Murray, “there is rarely a steady state, rather the shaping and reshaping of a cloud”.

I know from long experience that shaping clouds can be demanding, and is best not done alone. A key role in the social economy will therefore be played by new kinds of places, platforms and organisations that enable people to connect and coordinate with each other more easily and convivially than is possible now.

These places are already being prepared, as is shown by the enthralling growth of The Hub. This remarkable social enterprise - a global community of people from every profession, background and culture – is creating places on four continents that enable access to space, resources, connections, knowledge, experience and investment.

In addition to places and platforms like The Hub, time and trust are also core values of a social economy. Relational capital grows slowly. It takes time for people to know and trust each other. This process cannot be rushed.

The centrality of time in a social economy raises hard questions about philanthrocapitalism and its “big-business-style strategies”. Time is seldom allowed for, let alone paid for, in an efficiency-minded corporation. One has to question whether a rules-based approach to organisation, with its its “demand for results”, and accountability to the centre, is best-suited to social venturing.

As Robin Murray puts it, “The distributed systems of a social economy handle complexity not by standardisation and simplification imposed from the centre, but by distributing complexity to the margins – to households and service users and in the workplace to the local managers and workers.

“Those at the margins have what those at the centre can never have – a knowledge of detail, the specificity of time, of place, of particular events".

All this is exciting stuff. But the social economy, as described in these publications, has one crucial limitation: it’s too human-centric.

A social economy, by definition, is an economy by and for human beings. It does not embrace the idea that looking after natural ecosystems, and the biosphere as a whole, needs to become the starting point, the raison d’etre, of sustainable economic activity.

With the coming of the social economy, many positive developments, that have been brewing for decades, begin to converge. But it is only half the story…

Danger and opportunity: crisis and the new social economy, by Robin Murray

Social venturing, by Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice and Geoff Mulgan is published by The Young Foundation.

(Summer re-run)

I'm reading reading a moving and important book by Sharon Astyk called "Depletion and Abundance: Life On The New Home Front".

Uniquely among recent books on life after the Peaks - energy, protein, biodiversity etc - Astyk does not write to scare us all witless.

She does not write about elaborate ways to fix The Economy. She does not even furnish a shopping list of green tools and equipment that we can all buy as evidence that we are Doing Something.

(This latter prohibition is a particular disappointment to Kristi and me: we've been compiling a shopping list of high-end fruit dryers, choucroute kits, and grain grinders, that we were about to send to our friends before Christmas).

On the contrary, Astyk writes about the benefits that can come (and will come, for most of us) from being poor in material terms.

She proffers practical advice on how best to live comfortably with an uncertain energy supply; prepare children for a hotter, lower energy, less secure world; and generally how to survive and thrive in an economy in crisis.

This shocking approach clearly freaked out the the New York Times: they ran a patronising story in their Fashion and Style section about Astyk's work and life.

The Times even dug up a so-called "mental health professional" - a Dr. Jack Hirschowitz - who was happy to describe Astyk's "compulsion to live green in the extreme" as a kind of disorder.

"The critical factor in determining whether something has reached the level of a disorder is if dysfunction is involved,” he said. “Is it getting in the way of your ability to do a good job at work?".

Aaah:work. That would be the activity that makes tens of millions of people do depressed that they have to be medicated by people like Dr Hirschowitz just so they can carry on doing it?

And that would be the work whose trainees - ten per cent of all American school-age boys - are now doped up to the gills with psychoactive drugs by Dr H and his colleagues to make them pay attention?

Rather than fight The Economy, or try to fix it, Astyk seems to be suggesting that we simply ignore it - that we unplug. It's a very un-male, un-macho solution - which is why the book is subversive.

Astyk may have unplugged, but she's not the one who's unhinged.

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told the US Congress last year that Japan's debt path was 'out of control'.

Simon warned of "a real risk that Japan could end up in a major default". [The IMF expects Japan's gross public debt to reach 218pc of gross domestic product (GDP) this year, 227pc next year, and 246pc by 2014].

I really don't understand this scaremongering and negative thinking at all. Japan must be full of money, because there are so many beautiful things to spend it on.

Last year, for example, I visited a gorgeous shop in Tokyo called SunFruits. In it, one of these melons was on sale for only 21,000 Yen [euros 160, US$ 233].

Now to the farmer who grew the melon, $233 might seem a bit on the high side, compared to what he was paid for it.

But this is where the politics of envy so often gets it wrong. Because SunFruits don't just sell melons, they sell a *totally designed experience*.

The SunFruits shop, for example, which contained the melon, makes the average Prada store look like a charity shop.

And it can't be cheap paying for the security guard who's there to keep an eye on the $6 strawberries. (That's $6 each strawberry). (The guard is not in the picture because he was chasing someone who had stolen a grape).

I was reminded of all all this at our market here in France today. In it, I purchased the melon below for two euros. Mine is an upscale melon hereabouts; others were on sale for half that.

I doubt that my melon was 93 times less delicious than the melon I saw in Japan. In fact I'd bet (but cannot afford to pay for a definitive test) that my melon tastes as good or better than the SunFruits one.

The only difference? mine has not been enhanced by the magic touch of of Design.

(Summer re-run: first published 12 March 2009)

The criminal over-development of the Canary Islands – and the loss of biodiversity and social capital that followed - was financed by the same banks and speculators that our governments are now trying so desperately to save.

Given the desecration of these beautiful islands, the bankers who financed it all do not deserve to be saved. A more fitting fate would have them turned into biomass and returned as fertiliser to the land they have despoiled.

These uncharitable thoughts are prompted by my visit this week to the second Biennale of the Canary Islands Its theme is “Silencio” - but it took me a while to get into this spirit on arrival at Tenerife’s northern aiport: builders were cutting through marble using unmuffled saws, and a massively over-amplified PA system further jangled the nerves.

Away from the un-silent din of Arrivals, the scope of the biennial is impressive. A 200-page catalogue lists dozens of events to do with architecture, art and landscape design. Many excellent and charming projects have been developed as modest interventions.

But taken in total, the attitude (in writing) of the professionals is dispiriting. There are endless riffs of the kind, “the vertiginous pace of development/consumption” – but no self-criticism by designers that their profession has played an important role in all this this ecocidal development. (I do not exclude myself from the guilty, having flown in-and-out in too short a time).

The biennial aspires to chart a new design course for the islands - but one would pay more respectful attention to these proposals if they were preceded by the occasional *mea culpa*.

Just as films don’t get made without a script, urban development doesn’t happen without a “design vision” to inflame the lust of investors.

[ The Canary Islands are not unique in this. During the now-dead boom decades, many illustrious names in design were iimplicated in awful projects. One Dubai property developer teamed up with Giorgio Armani, for example, to build a US$43 billion luxury development on two islands - Bhudal and Bhuddo, off Karachi – that government officials described as being 'deserted'. But the livelihoods of 500,000 fishermen and their families - indigenous people who have been living on the islands for centuries – will be destroyed if the development goes ahead ].

It would have been far better to say, “Mr Planner X was responsible for this awful highway” or “Madame Architect Y created this terrible hotel”.

But back to the many pluses. An Ecoclimatic Atlas of the Canaries is just one among several mapping projects that begin to document biodiversity assets that, until now, have been trampled over by development. La Palma has been designated a World Biosphere Reserve, and a series of observatories is to be established to keep an aye on sensitive sites in real-time.

I especially warmed to the idea of a “touring ecomuseum” whose objective is to help people get out of their offices, universities and design studios – not to mention biennial art galleries - to experience endangered nature first-hand.

A exciting project called Proceder (transl: “proceed”) - whose founder Alfonso Ruiz hosted my visit to the biennial – explores the use of ecodesign in sustainable local develpment.

Proceder’s coordinator, Carlos Jimenez, told me about an event called Guia Campus - see pic below - in which ninety designers from a variety of disciplines spend a fortnight each year in a small village Santa Maria de Guia each year. During the event, they develop new ways to enhance the human and natural resources of the territory - designing with, not for, local citizens.

SANTA MARIA DE GUIA

A moving story concludes the Biennial catalogue. It’s about an artist’s grandfather who, when he felt he was dying, went out into the garden and hugged each one of the trees there. He bids them farewell before returing to his bed in the house to die. Somehow I don’t see the next generation hugging the vast Calatrava auditorium when their turn comes to depart their beautiful island.

(Summer re-run: First published 13 April 2009)

This blog first proposed the replacement of trophy buildings with street art back in 2002.

In a piece called "Trophy buildings are over" we argued that because they are conceived as spectacles, so-called signature architecture would be subject to the law of diminishing returns: the novelty would wear off, and buildings conceived as tourist destinations would be hard to sustain.

The modest size of the adoring horde outside LA's $270 million Gehry (photographed above in February) would seem to confirm this prognosis.

The decline of architectural trophyism coincides with an interesting debate about the use of existing, but abandoned, industrial buildings. Until the bust, most large empty buildings would have been jumped on by developers and turned into egregious lofts. These days, the pressure is off and cities are considering more interesting uses.

Last weekend in Nice, for example, I learned that the city is contemplating what do do with 40,000 square metres (400,000 square feet) of disused abattoirs (below).

Sophie Duez, a celebrated actor, and municipal councillor, has been appointed president of a "Committee of Reflection" to stage a series of "debattoirs" during the year. A wide variety of cultural, social and community groups will participate.

Duez argued, in our conference at the weekend, that cultural spaces need to be "less sacred" if they are to "nourish the city", and that, for her, a priority in this "cultural eco neighbourhood" should be socially creative activity rather than the "cultivation of the self".

The conference, which was organised by Norbert Hillaire, had as its title "La côte d’azur: du bétonnage du littoral à l’urbanisme écologique" - "The côte d’azur: from concreting over the coast, to an ecological urbanism".

(It's probably a coincidence, but I choose to perceive the Nice project as evidence of a trend in France to transform disused abattoirs into arts centres. Chalon has already turned its ex-abattoir into one of nine national centres of street arts that have been established across France since 2005).

The Nice abattoirs, being closer to the northern edge of the city, than to the coast, are well-located to help rebalance the relationship between "city" and "nature" that a sustainable future will entail.

The question of grand architectural statements is raised by an even larger project along the coast: the transformation of the Var Valley into an Eco Valley

The valley (above), which spans over 25,000 acres from the Mediterranean coast to the Alpine foothills, is a vast project that will evolve over decades. The project's leader, Thierry Bahougne, wondered, in our discussion in Nice, whether the commission of a signifcant architectural...something...would attract potential stakeholders and give coherence to the enterprise through time.

I'd be in favour of involving architects in Eco Valley - but not to make grand architectural statements. Given that Bahougne's priorities are to promote "best practices in sustainable governance" and to set "a global example for regional planning that responds totally to the challenges of sustainable development" - a large shiny building would not denote those qualities.

Rather than splash out $250 million on a signature building, a more exciting design challenge would be would be communicate the success of Eco Valley as a narrative about the restoration and nurture of its existing watersheds and biodiversity. The biologist E O Wilson writes about the need for an "land ethic" in development - and an idea like that is so powerful that no physical embodiment of it would be need to be built. The great national parks don't have signature buildings in them, so why Eco Valley?

My own contribution to the meeting involved dropping a heavy hint that the city's abattoirs looked like the perfect venue for an event like City Eco Lab (below) that we organised last year in St Etienne. I'm convinced that every city needs a market place in which people can present grassroots projects, exchange experiences, and involve fellow citizens in ever larger numbers as participants in these experiments. The ideal scenario, for me, would be to *combine* hands-on project stalls with the emergent art practices that the city seems to have in mind.

My plan to save the city of Nice $250 million

I’ve been re-reading "the internet and everyone" by john chris jones.

I’ve been astonished once again by the sensibility of an artist-writer-designer whose philosophy – indeed his whole life - first inspired me when I was a young magazine editor more than 30 years ago.

Like another muse of mine, Ivan Illich, John Chris Jones was decades ahead of his time. The time is ripe now for a wider readership.

He wrote about cities without traffic signals in the 1950s – sixty years before today’s avant garde urban design experiments.

In the 1960s, Jones was an advocate of what today is called call ‘design thinking’; (then, it was called design methods).

He advocated user-centered design well before the term was widely used. He began by designing aeroplanes – but soon felt compelled to make industrial products more human. This quest fuelled his search for design processes that would shape, rather than serve, industrial systems.

As a kind of industrial gamekeeper turned poacher, Jones went on to warn about the potential dangers of the digital revolution unleashed by Claude Shannon.

Computers were so damned good at the manipulation of symbols, he cautioned, that there would be immense pressure on scientists to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form.

Technology-driven innovation, Jones foresaw, would under-value the knowledge and experience that human beings have by virtue of having bodies, interacting with the physical world, and being trained into a culture.

In time Jones turned away from the search for systematic design methods. He realized that attempts to systematize design led, in practice, to the separation of reason from intuition and embodied experience with the design process.

After watching the rapid wing movements of a flying duck, Jones compared ‘the beautiful, unconscious and ever-changing complexity of natural control systems with the stiffness and self-conscious centrality of all forms of government, management or social control’.

Jones called for the re-introduction of personal judgement, imagination, and aesthetic sensibility into the design process.

He came to believe in ‘reversing the reversal’ – by which he means the Renaissance ‘and its antecedents in ancient Greece and at the end of Stone Age thinking when masculine gods and values displaced feminine ones, and notions of dominance replaced those of receptiveness’.

"the internet and everyone" is the opposite of a how-to textbook. But at one point, in a passage on contextual design, Jones lightly introduces a manifesto that calls on designers:

‘To begin with what can be imagined
To use both intuition and reason
To work it out in context
To model the contextual effects of what is imagined
To change the process to suit what is happening
To refuse what diminishes
To seek inspiration in what is
To choose what depends on everyone’

A character in the book (who I *think* is Jones) attributes this sensibility to being brought up in an old culture - in Wales - where ”the renaissance never happened” and “pre-Cartesian thinking is in the language”…

john chris jones’ real enthusiasm, throughout the years, has been for a kind of social designing that did not even have a name when he started writing and teaching about the subject.

He decided that he would not try and change the system from within. So, thirty six years ago, Jones resigned from institutional life – from having a job, material security, and a neat job label – for the life and economy of an independent writer, researcher and artist.

Since then Jones has written “design plays” and other fictions, many of which are included in "the internet and everyone".

‘I’ve been drawn to study ancient myths and traditional theatres for decades’ he writes; ‘unless we can rid modern culture of its realisms there is no getting out of the grim realities of commercial engineering and the way of life built on it’

With its multiple voices and formats, this is not a book that I would presume to ‘review’ in a linear way. The best I can do is tell you how much I have been inspired by its 560 pages- and urge you to explore the book for yourselves.

Jones writes: “there are two kinds of purposes. The purpose of having a result, something that exists after the process is stopped, and does not exist until it has stopped,…and there is the purpose of carrying on, of keeping the process going, just as one may breathe so as to continue breathing. The purpose is to carry on.

Long may john chris jones carry on.

* * *

"the internet and everyone" is beautifully designed and made. The author will supply copies for £10 (half the original price) plus postage. Details are here

The atmosphere at last week's Megacities conference in Delft was subdued. I don't suppose my own talk, which ploughed a similar path to the Debt, Diesel and Dämmerung narrative I mentioned yesterday, helped lighten the mood very much.

Spirits were low because it is becoming clear that mega solutions of any kind - whether or not they are desirable - will be extremely hard to sell, let alone launch, for the forseeable future. Given that our host venue, TU Delft, is Europe's degree zero for mega-solutions, glum faces were to be expected.

So it was especially cheering when, the next day, Martien de Vletter (its Dutch co-publisher) gave me the brand new catalogue of an inspiring exhibition has just opened at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Actions: What You Can Do With the City.

The show features 99 actions that have the potential to trigger positive change in contemporary cities. The seemingly common activities, that feature walking, playing, recycling, and gardening, show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city - and challenge fellow residents to participate.

The project website includes projects by a diverse group of "human motors of change". They include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, root eaters, pedestrians, municipal employees.

The 99 actions touch on the production of food, and possibilities of urban agriculture; the creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the use of the urban fabric as a terrain for play such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; alternate uses of roads for walking, or of rail lines as park space.

Actions is curated by Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, with Lev Bratishenko, Meredith Carruthers, Daria Der Kaloustian, and Peter Sealy. The catalogue, which I warmly commend, contains case studies and short texts on most of the featured interventions.

(Summer re-run: first published 4 August 2008)

Every day 1.5 billion cups of coffee are drunk somewhere in the world – quite a few of them in this house - but few of us in the North know much about the 25 million families that grow and produce this valuable bean.

After reading a new book called Confronting The Coffee Crisis I feel better informed not just about the negative aspects of the story - but also motivated to explore practically the potential of emerging alternative trade networks to change the bigger picture in profound ways.

In a system that can involve as many as eight transactions to bring the coffee to market, coffee farmers receive less than two percent of the price of a cup of coffee sold in a coffee bar, or roughly six per cent of the value of a standard pack of ground coffee sold in a grocery store.

So far, so outrageous. Less well-known are the damaging effects of these unequal power relations embedded in global coffee networks: threatened livelihoods, greater poverty, malnutrition, deforestation, and out-migration.

A “bigger, faster, cheaper” mentality has created a dynamic that exploits the most vulnerable at the bottom of the supply chain.

Awareness in the North of these problems fuelled the rise of fair trade systems - but their proliferation has now become a problem on its own. It's easy to be overwhelmed buy a choice of options that can include “organic”, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance Certified, Utz certified, shade-grown, Bird Friendly, and so on.

Producers have a host of new practical problems to deal with. When Fair Trade adopted a certification-based model, they introduced more coffee-industry actors into what is now a billion dollar global market. At least 200 certifying agencies now audit farmsteads and post-harvest processing, storage, and transport across a global span.

Certification has enhanced the livlihood of certified coffee farmers – but the financial and bureaucratic costs are substantial. Certification services are arrayed along a transnational “chain of custody” and documented by an audit trail. Producers feel the effects as they are asked to jump through more and more hoops in order to access high value markets.

Although certified markets create consumer awareness of the inequities of coffee production, they often operate within the traditional coffee commodity systems which continue to be controlled mainly by large scale roasters and retailers.

The saddest development documented in the book is that Fair Trade is losing its social-movement identity in a bewildering welter of competing labels, brand names, product logos, and other marketing messages. "Direct producer-consumer solidarity ties are giving way to an individualistic consumer politics of choice as the FT labeling system becomes institutionalized," say the authors.

But the book ends on a positive note, and emphasizes that it's not a simple matter of ‘traditonal’ vs ‘modern’ farming. Interactions between local livelihoods and global actors do not automatically have to be negative

Traditional 'shade-tree' coffee systems, with their diverse shade tree species and multiple use strategies, are sophisticated examples of the application of ecological knowledge and can serve as the basis of sustainable agroecosystems of the future.

The potential is there, but the challenges are significant. Scaling up traditional-progressive systems confronts the a daunting array of quality hurdles. The most fascinating section of the book for me is the following quotation from the the Mexican agronomist Eduardo Martinez Torres, as he explains that quality control only begins with the growing:

“Next comes choosing the right time for harvesting; harvesting only mature berries; not allowing harvested berries to heat up; sorting berries on intake; making sure the beans don’t crack during the depulping process; double sorting after depulping; making sure fermentation lasts the right length of time, ie between 24 and 48 hours, depending on the altitude and average temperature; thoroughly washing the berries; grading; properly drying, preferably both in the sun, as well as in the drier to avoid mildewing; the drying temperature should be moderate. The temperature should never be turned up to speed the process and save time, since an uneven drying process can significantly damage bean quality. When drying is done on patios, layers should not be too thick and beans should be constantly stirred. Never mix together beans of different grade of quality, beans at different stages of dryness, or beans from different altitudes. Selection, patience and care are the operative words during processing, since all these things make for the best bean quality and, consequently, the best price for the product”.

Hmm: so coffee is a complex business. But the book is filled with examples of growers groups that have been able to achieve remarkable progress by pooling expertise and resources that deliver a lot of the value currently added (if at all) by layers of intermediaries.

Of particular importance are alternative trade networks and the nascent Community Agroecology Network (CAN). Alternative trade networks emerging in the coffee system are based on lessons learned from farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture, and attempts in other markets to connect producers and consumers in more direct relationships that are socially just and ecologically restorative, and promote mutual learning and positive change.

Alternative trade networks redistribute value through the network against the logic of bulk commodity production, reconvene trust between food producers and consumers during the direct exchange of goods.

In Agua Buena, Costa Rica, the farmers’ cooperative has developed the capacity to ship roasted coffee directly to North American consumers’ doors. Coffee delivery depends on the postal service, and direct exchange is difficulty; however email and Internet chatrooms facilitate these interactions.

Two other projects also deal with alternative trade networks.

The first, Feral Trade, created by the artist Kate Rich, has been trading goods along social networks since 2003; their first transaction was the import of 30kg of coffee direct from El Salvador to a cultural centre in Bristol, UK. The import was negotiated using only social contacts, and was conducted via email, bank transfer and SMS.

Then there is the Fair Tracing project whose aim is to to support ethical trade by implementing Tracking and Tracing Technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information.

The idea is to It will give producers a better overview of the value chain and price structures along it, and to empower consumers to trace a product’s origin and value chain.

(Summer re-run: first published 26 July 2008)

Bamboo scaffolding, knotted aerial lines, hand painted signs or converted plastic bags: German photographer Thomas Kalak has published a book called “Thailand - Same same, but different!” that celebrates the Thais’ exceptionally gifted art of improvisation.

The strange objects and arrangements remind Kalak of art world “ready-mades” from the beginning of the 20th century.

They remind *me* that salvage society is not a future prospect that will happen when peak-everything hits home: untold millions of people subsist on the detritus of industrial society right now.

You can order the book here.

Out-of-control buzzwords are like locusts: you can swat handfuls of them down with a bat, but more will come to take their place.

I've been swatting away for ages in this blog at all things Conceptual, Cultural, Clustered and (especially) Creative.

But now we're suffering a massive counter-attack by the word Innovation - 137 million uses of which are known to Google alone.

A good proportion of these mentions probably belong to the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in the UK.

Nesta's mission is to "make innovation flourish," and one way it does this is by using the world innovation in every second or third sentence of the emails it sends me.

Now Nesta is staffed by smart and well-connected people. And most of my clients think innovation is the very elixir of life itself. So I probably shouldn't say this. But I have to, because it's important:

INNOVATION IS NOT GOOD IN ITSELF - IN FACT, MORE INNOVATION DOES HARM, THAN DOES GOOD.

My evidence for this statement is contained in a breathless announcement from Mintel, the market research company, that a "Record-Breaking Number of New Products Flood Global CPG Shelves" and that (the numbers are for 2006) "close to 182,000 new products were introduced globally, with key booming areas focusing on mind, body, and general good health".

Well over half of these of these innovations - 105,000, to be precise - were food and drink products.

This flood of innovations enable us to profit from such trends as "brainpower foods, age-defying treatments, increases in portion control, and "just for you" customised products”.

Now I may have misunderstood something here, but surely the Mintel numbers mean that more than half the innovations that reach the market all over the world - 300 innovations, every single day of the year - decrease the resource efficiency and hence sustainability of global food systems?

Good, so that's Innovation dealt with. Bring on the next killer word!

A marketing whiz I know in New York asked me to do her a favour: answer some questions about the future of tv.

At least, that's what I thought she asked. But when, a couple of days later, a FedEx package arrived, it contained a tiny digital voice recorder and the instruction: "tell us your views about the future of the television" - ie, the product, not its content.

Although deprived of the opportunity to pontificate about the evils of reality television and Fox News, I nonetheless narrated the following into the little machine and FedExed it (at my friend's insistence) back.

For some reason, I never heard from her again.

[Transcript]

"For me, big televisions are like gas-guzzling SUVs: fat, wasteful, and paid for with debt.

These fat objects don’t just waste energy – they’re toxic, too. The big old ones, the Cathode Ray Tube ones, were bad enough: each one contained as much as four pounds of lead.

But the new flat ones are also full of heavy metals. When improperly dismantled – which is most of the time – they release dioxins and poison the air and water systems.

Adding insult to injury, the biggest screens aren’t even used for anything useful. Most of them are used for push advertising.

The outdoor ad industry seems to be worried about an imminent backash: I saw one of their lawyers demanding “freedom of commercial speech”. Lucky for him he was on tv or I'd have reached for my pitchfork.

My first advice, Mr TV company, is to fess up now to the material and energy costs of the products you make - before someone else does it for you.

I'd publish detailed numbers about the environmental impact and energy use involved in manufacturing the boxes and network infrastructure, and running the networks.

In fact I'd look at the whole system. I'd publish numbers for transporting people and physical parts to maintain the system numbers for constructing and running all those offices and retail stores; numbers for running call centres. I'd come clean about all of it. The lot.

I'd publish the real numbers and then I’d say: “guess what: we’re not going to innovate the Prius of televisions".

I'd commit to zero waste, and closed loop processes from cradle to cradle. I'd announce that we would remain the owner of all our products from here on in - people would just lease them.

Being transparent about the facts, and taking full responsibility for the impact of your products on the biosphere, would kill your competitors stone dead.

This would buy you time to transform your business totally.

You and I both know that televisons can never be emission-free as products. So why not get out of hardware altogether? It's feasible. IBM make more money out of consulting than of selling machines these days.

My advice is to set your sights on a vast new market, and my ideal future experience: "being there, but not".

Sustainabiity demands that we all - and me especially - must radically reduce our flights. The biosphere simply cannot support the perpetually growing movement of goods and bodies around the world.

What stops peope like me moving less, and tele-communicating more, is simple: videoconferencing sucks.

But I can't get it our of my head that we pay theme park operators a dollar a minute to experience sophisticated simulations. And the computer games industry is now bigger than Hollywood.

The lesson I learn from them is that if you get the experience right, people will do it. Even me.

Getting the experience right is not a technology issue. It's not about brute bandwidth, or brute screen size.

In fact- and herein lies your salvation as a green business - the experience can best be improved by artful and indirect means using minimal amounts of tech - most of which already exists.

The secret is to think about icons, not about high-tech boxes.

In the Roman Cathollc tradition, icons are aids to devotion. In their business, icons are there to help people feel closer to God.

But why only God? Surely different kinds of icon might help us imagine another person to be close?

I'm not talking gold goblets representing my mother here. (Sorry, Mum). More prosaic objects can do the job.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a celebrated essay about "Kissing the picture of one's beloved". He said: "When we kiss a photograph, we do not expect to conjour up a spectacular manifestation of the person in the picture represents - but the action is nonetheless satisfying".

An icon. A photo. The hardware requirement here is very modest.

A professor called Andy Clarke wrote a book that I commend to you: "Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again". I learned from Prof Clarke that the biological brain is populated by a vast number of what he calls 'zombie processes' that seem to play a critical role in the ways we experience the world, and each other.

Another writer, the English philosopher, John Gray, puts it more starkly: "Being embodied is our nature as earth-born creatures... but our child-like fascination with technology and digital communication blinds us to this fact".

Bottom line, Mr TV company: get out of hardware, and into embodied communication.

Clear?

(Summer re-run: first published 5 February 2008)

Ever since learning about water mapping from Georg Bertsch and about watershed-based planning in Toronto from Chris Hardwick at Doors 9 on Juice last year, I've been aware that we talked a lot about energy but not enough about water.

This prompted me in a fit of guilt to buy a bunch of books about greywater harvesting; these now sit in a dispiriting and unread pile next to my bath.

Then, bingo: I found this wonderful book called Dam Nation: Dispatches From the Water Underground which I commend to you all.

Its essays, drawings, and photographs span a wondrous range of topics: off-grid water concepts; the politics of dams and water infrastructure; watersheds as a way of understanding and living in the world.

The essays explain the often destructive relationship between human settlements and nature, but these gloomy reflections are more than counter-balanced by stories about successful resistance to dams - including advanced plans to dismantle some of them - and practical ideas on how to restore wastersheds.

Dam Nation's editors are a reassuringly edgy and non-wet group of activists, tattooists and 'dishwasher deviants'. They've done a great job: the collection is extremely well-written. Buy two copies now: one for you, and one for an architect or urban planner who also needs to read it.

I was critical last week of commentators who describe the financial crisis as "psychological".

Those who blame a "lack of transparency" are on stronger ground - although ignorance of the facts or the law is not a valid excuse in other domains of life.

The process chart above describes something called a Financial Products Markup Language which is said (on its website) to be "the business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial derivatives instruments". The idea is to "streamline the process supporting trading activities in the financial derivatives domain".

The chart looks neat and orderly - hygienic, even, with all that blue - but reflect a moment: The system has been programmed for deranged individuals who, as we now know, believe that exponential growth to eternity is a right and proper basis for the design of the world's financial system.

GIGO - or Garbage In, Garbage Out - is a phrase used by computer programmers to remind laypeople that computers "will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and spew out mountains of erroneous information in a short time".

Where we're at now is that systems designed to "streamline" the market have been spewing out financial derivatives which, insofar as anyone can count them, now amount to eight hundred times global GDP.

This mass of red stuff (the red wedge on the inverted pyramid above, also known in financial circles as "toxic sludge") has now started to leak out of the balloon. And that's why this crisis is not psychological.

For Dan Roberts in The Telegraph "the real mystery is how the negative feedback loop in the financial markets became so devastating. How could this domino effect happen so quickly? How could we lose control of something we designed to serve us?".

It's not a mystery. Think back to Three Mile island . (The photo above is of its mis-named control room.)

During that calamity, within a few seconds after the physical accident at the nuclear reactor began, more than a hundred warning lights were flashing in the control room.

"I would have liked to have thrown away the alarm panel," one of the duty operators, Craig Faust (sic) said later. "It wasn't giving us any useful information." Water pumps, the turbine and the reactor had all unexpectedly shut down. But none of the blinking lights told the operators what they needed to know.

Or wanted to know.

In today's financial discontinuity, the complexity of the information available (think of all those screens)

has been compounded by two further factors: a lot of the trading is driven by powerful semi-automated systems ; and a lot of people clearly have not wanted to know what the screens were telling them.

The chaos at Heathrow's Terminal 5 is an excellent example of what happens when the logic of finance interacts with the logic of large complex systems.

As Will Hutton wrote at the weekend, shareholders in British Airways (its sole tenant) and BAA (which runs the airport) demand perpetually growing dividends. Financial returns on this scale can only be achieved by cutting people out of the system: This is because big shiny buildings, although expensive, are capital costs that can be written off through time; people, on the other hand, appear in a company's accounts as recurrent costs that directly reduce profits.

Willy Walsh, the cost-cutting hard man put in to run BA, has duly cut people costs to the bone. As a result of his ministrations morale has crashed, many experienced midde managers took early retirement before T5 opened, and a recent survey reported that nearly 30 per cent of staff claim they had been bullied.

Once in post as junior Willy Washes, these WaffenMBAs are an easy mark for the IT industry: it peddles dysfunctional systems on the back of absurd promises that they will work without intensive participation by trained and motivated people. The tech industry grows, despite its long history of peddling porkies, because its cost-cutting clients are pre-programmed to believe the lies.

Moving bags, moving people, moving goods: Logistics are life-critical for us all. I was therefore alarmed to read in Supply Chain Standard about logistics in the supermarket industry.

On checking the software descriptors of 14,000 product lines, one analyst found that information lines for every single item contained one or more errors. A standard description has 200 attributes, but industry customers typically add up to 1,500 extra items of information on their own account - so the possibility for error is mind-boggling.

All retailers - and all airport operators - rely totally on logistics technology. But according to the industry's own in-house magazine, many supermarkets admit to at least 35 percent data inaccuracy in their product files.

Things sound even grimmer when you realise that millions of lines of dodgy data are being fed into patched-up legacy systems that few people understand - and are therefore hard to maintain. "It's little surprise", concludes the writer, that "retailers end up with little idea of what is in store, in transit, on order or at the warehouse". Supply Chain Standard January 2008 page 9 Penelope Ody

Now connect in your mind, as an exercise, the bags chaos at Heathrow with that thirty five per cent inaccuracy in the data used by supermarkets.

Next, consider that supermarkets only have three days supply of food in stock at any one time...or so they think. I don't know about you, but I'm reminded that this is planting season at my home in France: I need to get back and start digging.