Natalie_jeremijenko

Futurelab conference transcript
Why Don’t You…? Supporting innovative approaches in education
30-31 October 2007
INMARSAT, London
Can students build a space station, in 4,677 easy steps?
Natalie Jeremijenko, New York University

Natalie:
Thank you very much for staying for this talk. This is actually the title of the
workshop I gave yesterday. I‟m going to try and abbreviate a little bit for you but
just to read it for you – „How to build a space station in 4,677 easy steps, change the
most toxic practices in the manufacturing sector, design, build, and release a pack of
feral robots, social network with tadpoles and cows, plant fields of sunflowers to
[unclear] and decontaminate parks, and do the work to re-imagine urban energy
system‟s nutrient cycles in structures of participation‟. I want to show you these
projects in order to introduce you to my new lab at the Environmental Health Clinic.
And what has that to do with today? Well, let me start by saying I‟m here because I
need your help to develop and promote and promulgate some of the ideas that I‟ve
been working with the last 10 or 15 years. They are organised around the question –
how do we structure legitimate participation in the emerging environmental
movement? Let‟s say we are in the middle of an environmental crisis, a climate crisis
- what do we do? Does anybody know what to do about global warming? Or put it
another way, does anyone know how to re-imagine, re-work, our relationship to
natural resources and systems? I‟m guessing that everybody has a few ideas, but
how does any one of us go about developing these ideas, trying them out, testing,
developing, learning more? And how many people are interested in doing something
about a climate crisis? I don‟t know anyone who‟s not but I don‟t know anyone who
actually knows what to do. And somehow all these bombastic guides that you can
see in the „what you can do‟ section or at the end of rousing documentaries like „An
Inconvenient Truth‟, the eleventh-hour „what you can do‟ screen, those kind of
flaccid „what you can do‟s suddenly in every green issue or magazine, they don‟t
foster a social movement.
Signing a petition, writing letters to political representatives, doesn‟t make me feel
like I‟ve made any vital contributions. Using less gas, less paper, less energy, doesn‟t
make me feel more effective. It doesn‟t draw on my specific situation, expertise,
constraints, community. It all makes me feel tremendously impatient. But I get most
impatient with the certainty and the morally superior tone with which I‟m ordered –
these Green Orders – to change to compact fluorescents, ride a bike, recycle used
[unclear] or substitute another 100 ineffectual symbolic actions. Clearly these orders
don‟t come from people who have looked into recycling compact fluorescents and
then your toxic effects of the mercury released from this product. They haven‟t had
their students arrested for protesting in bike rides nor had them hit by cars, nor had
colleagues arrested and prosecuted as bio-terrorists or terrorists generally, for
environmental activism. And they haven‟t had to use the recycled glass or plastic or
delved into the strange and complex and just about useless waste industry, and
haven‟t measured the formaldehyde and other emissions from the bamboo fluorine
and certain other „green‟ materials.
The point is that there is no certainty in complex socio-ecological systems, which doesn‟t mean that we can‟t do anything but it does mean we need to innovate, and it does mean we need higher standards of evidence. So the Green Orders that you get in these magazines do not raise the issue that we are more than consumers, that we can be consumers, responsible or otherwise, green or otherwise, but there are actions and interventions that uniquely the education sector is involved with. And so that‟s what I‟m concerned with, that‟s what I‟m going to elaborate, how we are going to structure participation in the environmental movement. In particular using those pedagogical strategies that we all know so well, fateful, engaging, disruptive strategies. So first of all let me introduce you to the Environmental Health Clinic, which is my lab and clinic. It treats health issues as they relate to the environment and environmental issues as they relate to health. And it may be an absurdly androgenic way to address the complex sociological systems of environmental problems. And you‟d be right to criticise this androgenic approach. Given the last 30 years of environmentalism, in so much as it‟s been successful has been to render environmental issues global enough to be newsworthy. Global climate change is not just climate change. Loss of biodiversity is not just losing a single species in your neighbourhood. These are issues that have been brought to the public imagination and attention by being rendered global. However that had the unfortunate consequence of not being local enough to be actionable. Taking it out of our hands. So the Environmental Health Clinic is about translating environmental health issues into local concerns. I just want to skip through to introduce you to some of the concrete projects involved in this. It means we‟re inhabiting, re-using and re-thinking our local system. OK. So if you‟re concerned for local water quality you‟re – well let me just say people who come to the clinic are impatient, that is people who are too impatient to wait for legislative, bureaucratic change to address local environmental issues. So a patient might come to the clinic concerned for local water quality and they might be prescribed an addition of tadpoles. Tadpoles, you might know, are uniquely sensitive bio-monitoring devices and the most sensitive bio-monitors we have for bio endocrine disruptors. The sort of industrial contaminors we have in the US, and I‟m sure the UK is similar, dropped the average age of puberty three years in young girls. A tremendous problem. But your prescription tadpole will actually be named after a local bureaucrat responsible for making decisions that affect your local water quality. And raising your tadpole bureaucrat in your local water sample with your students or other „impatients‟ allows you to observe the behavioural oddities of these exquisitely sensitive creatures, which you can upload to the Environmental Health Clinic social networking site. Does everybody here have a MySpace page? I thought that all teachers and educators would have to have a Facebook or MySpace page. Anyone has one? A few, OK. So the Environmental Health Clinic, health clinics are all about their record, has a not private information because health in this case is treated not as internal biological treated with pharmaceuticals, but shared, external, something that can be acted on and changed. And therefore the appropriate records are a social networking site with which each of the tadpoles has their own social networking page where you can upload the video and images of your tadpole bureaucrat. There are two local New York bureaucrats who are doing very well with some developments. You understand that tadpoles go through a tremendously traumatic adolescence, even worse than ours, right? This is why they are so incredibly behaviourally sensitive to the endocrine disruptors and really the most sensitive devices we have for understanding
how this affects biology. Moreover if you have a tadpole, if you learn to love and
understand a tadpole, you are better able to engage in these complex environmental
and sociological issues like what we do, what we understand and what evidence
there is for endocrine disruptors. There‟s actually a full range of cows on the social
networking site as well. So you can social network not only with a tadpole but with
your milk-producing cow whose health, of course, determines the health of your milk
and therefore whose health you might also depend on.
Instead of asking for a urine sample at the Health Clinic, we ask for a mouse sample.
Mice, if you‟re lucky enough to have a mouse in your house, does anybody have a
mouse in their house, in their school classrooms? Lucky people. These are some
experiments you can do to play with your mice. This is actually set up in my lab.
While and when you‟re catching your mouse you might like to test their… of course,
mice share your local environment with you so they are very affective model
organisms. Better than you are, that is, they represent your environmental health
better than you yourself do. Because with your body burden of industrial
contaminants we don‟t know whether you are exposed in childhood or occupationally
or on your last vacation or here. Your mouse is territorially limited and therefore the
body burden better represents this. Moreover they share your diet in addition to your
environmental stressors, asbestos, lead levels. And I‟ve been very interested in
how… these tests here, that‟s actually black jelly beans, Zoloft, Prozac and a muscle
relaxant. Is anybody here on anti-depressants? Actually they do, they do prefer
Zoloft to Prozac. And the other one is a solution of – there‟s water, vodka, gin, the
age-old question of do they like vodka or gin better? And a muscle relaxant. Anyone
speculate about whether your mice would like vodka or gin better?
Male 1:
Gin.
Natalie:
Well my mice like vodka. But they did like the muscle relaxant even better still,
which I didn‟t understand. So you‟re starting to get this idea of health as external
and biological. We‟ve just recently launched a prescription product for people who
are concerned about indoor air quality. And you should be concerned about indoor
air quality. We all should be. And increasingly with energy efficient buildings that are
better sealed, better insulated, our indoor air quality is getting worse. So how do we
improve indoor air quality without actually making worse air quality somewhere else
with the coal fired power plants that are powering our [unclear] filters and air
conditioners and HVSC systems, can we in fact improve locally our indoor air quality?
In the US the number one thing that paediatricians spend their time on treating is
respiratory illness and asthma and that sort of thing. So this is a very real health
issue. How do we take any small measurable actions to improve this? And so this is a
prescription product that we‟ve just launched and I‟m just about to write a grant,
which I need some volunteers for. So this is the green light system, which is a closed
energy system, a solar-powered high efficiency LED light that is uniquely tuned. It
doesn‟t of course plug in, it‟s powered by a solar awning and the high efficiency LEDs
are tuned so that they absorb or they produce a nice white light, but also covers
where chlorophyll absorbs to support photosynthesis because photosynthesis, well,
supporting plant growth we‟ll come back to.
The solar awning is a surgical insertion of a photovoltaic where you can see it. First
of all it‟s visible, it‟s not hidden on your roof, it‟s not somewhere else. It‟s set at an
angle that‟s optimal for your latitude and allows you to seasonally adjust it for optimum energy capture. Moreover photovoltaics are embedded in glass so you can – the sunlight moves through it producing an ambient information about the sun‟s movement. And a number of other advantages of producing a concrete system so that we can support plant growth. After all plant growth, soil microbes and an array of about 50 well-characterised plants are the best known technology and nano-technology we have for absorbing, for now, all the high benzene, tolurine, and all the common indoor air pollutants. This is one of the systems set up recently. There‟s those tadpoles. Any prescription product has known side effects. The known side effects of this system, lots of fine print of course, is producing a concrete demonstration of a closed and coupled system design. The major design strategy that we need to rapidly improve environmental performance fully available to us now, which needs no nanotechnology, carbon sequestering, or any technology, but is available to us now. It develops in people who use this an intuitive sense of how much energy you get out of a photovoltaic. I teach engineering students. They don‟t even know this. It develops an intuition about how to impedance match or couple energy source and the energy synch. That is high efficiency LEDs are much better to couple with solar than a car or a washing machine or other things. So introducing in a concrete way the new strategies for addressing and ameliorating indoor air quality issues. Moreover, one last thing. Departments of buildings will require that the side effect of cleaning indoor air quality or addressing indoor air quality locally, optimally, is that you don‟t have to expand building energy to circulate, flush indoor air with outdoor air. Because indoor air you have, of course, benzene, or indoor air you have benzene and tolurin and volatile organic compounds. Outdoors you‟ve got ozone particulates, mercury, and we expend about 40% of our building energy on flushing indoor air with outdoor air. But you might well be concerned about quality of outdoor air too. And well you should be. Particularly the phenomena as it affects children. As I said it‟s a tremendous environmental health issue, and the worst air quality in our urban centres is at the boundary layer we affectionately call „stroller height‟. If we wanted to expose the most vulnerable of our population to the worst air we possibly could we couldn‟t have designed our urban systems better because of the heavy molecules and unburnt carbons that settle in the first two feet. So how do we address that? A prescription product for a no-park is one example. A no-park takes up no parking space and removes the asphalt to replace it with a engineered micro-landscape that‟s designed; the sub-grade is designed to absorb the run-off from the local road system. This is planted with, again, plant materials that are very effective at the hyper-accumulation of that oily waste that accumulates so well on our impervious road surfaces. And recharges, replenishes the entire block in soil moisture. This is certainly the case with the infiltration rates in New York, and I think it‟s very similar here in London. But we can get in these no-park systems, with 12 foot of irises, which are very good at hyper-accumulating hydro-carbon waste and mosses which are very good at hyper-accumulating cadmium, that wonderful neuro-toxic that we have ubiquitously on our roads; with about 12 foot of iris we can actually remove the hydro-carbons from an entire block. So this produces some dangerous situations but nevertheless has a measurable and ongoing effect. Removes, pierces the public imagination of how we might use vegetation in our urban centres. You might be prescribed a pack of feral robots. Does anybody have a friendly
neighbourhood brown field? In the post-industrial age in the US to kind of motivate
this issue, I‟m not sure that it‟s that much – well, yes, it is worse. In the US there‟s
350 schools that are built on or within half a mile of Superfund sites. Superfund sites
are just the worst, the top, just the very worst industrial contaminated sites. And
it‟s, of course, not surprising given that schools, the education sector in general, is
poor. They‟re poor. And toxic waste dumps are a contaminated site, so cheap, right?
So you want a new soccer field in your middle school, so where are you going to
build it? This is an ongoing issue but actually, we‟re faced with this unique
opportunity of, in the last seven or eight years the production of robot dog toys.
Has anybody got a robotic dog pet? No. You don‟t need the companionship of a robot
dog? I was given one when they first came out in 1999. And I thought, oh, what
does that mean for my – they don‟t trust me to take care of a real dog? They are a
phenomena; they are the attractive toys of our time. They do embody the playful
mass production of toys. And they pose a very interesting cultural question to us -
what are they for? What are these interactive toys for? Toys are about learning,
right? They‟re about playful learning exploration, like Monopoly. Construction toys,
you learn a bit about construction. Monopoly, you learn a little bit about
monopolisation, right, private property. But what do you learn with interactive toys?
Do we learn to interact? I mean, we learn to interact at about nine months old with
most of the turn-taking and fundamental logic of interaction. I think that these toys
pose a very interesting question to us. What might we learn, what do we need to
learn? And how do we learn it? If any of you do know anybody with a robotic dog
toy, these are by far the least expensive way to get your hands on robotics, a robotic
platform, the sensors, the actuation. They entertain kids for about – come on,
somebody has to know someone with a robotic dog toy. Guess, how long do they
entertain people for? How long do people use them for?
Male 2:
A couple of minutes. Even the ones that spin in the air.
Natalie:
Oh yes. I haven‟t seen those. Do you know what they are?
Male 2:
They make noises as well, yell things.
Natalie:
Yes, well typically they will beg for plastic bones, walk in circles, bark the national
anthem. But the feral robots website is in fact a product where we upgrade their
raison d‟etre, because they do entertain for about 15, 20 minutes, that‟s how long it
takes to exhaust their interactive scripts. So the upgrade involves typically, gently
amputating their legs, lowering their centre of gravity, widening their wheel base and
equipping them for all-terrain activity. This is the mega-bite 1 and the mega-bite 2
adaptation. They have some brain surgery and rhinoplasty I think. Nose surgery.
They‟re given a new nose and the new nose is an environmental toxin sensor. A new
brain now tells the dog in addition to jumping up and down, barking the national
anthem, to follow concentration gradients of the environmental toxins, they are
programmed. So I workshop these feral robotic dog packs with packs of kids and we
tune them for brownfields or sites of community interest, to release them as a pack
on these contaminated sites. And what happens when you release a pack of feral
robots on a contaminated site? I‟m just going to actually let this run in the
background. Well, what do you think happens? The press turn up. For some reason
news cameras like to film packs of feral robots roaming free.
In fact in the Santiago release we only had four working dogs with the students, and
we had five television stations turn up. Even Fox News came to cover the
contaminated site. And they have to talk about it. And what do they do? They ask
the kids, “What is your dog finding and what does that mean? And what does that
mean for your health? What should we do about that?” And these kids here, these 15
year-olds in this first workshop, actually in all of the ten releases I‟ve done, as all of
the kids have done, they‟ve risen to the occasion. In this case, because it‟s been four
years the remediation of Stanlite [?] Park has just begun a few weeks ago, and in
the interim these kids have been invited to every single public hearing, talk show,
radio, and television, and they are - because they have some evidence of what was
there - they are participating and interacting with the political processes around re-
imagining the use of that site. That is what the feral dog pack release does as a
workshop, as a challenging technical project. I mean, essentially these kids are
designing the Mars Rover, semi-autonomous robotic platforms to do data collection.
But because the dogs display the information with their movement, they appear to
be sniffing it out, a 2 year-old can understand what‟s going on, a 92 year-old can
understand what‟s going on. And I actually claim that even a television news
journalist can understand what is going on. So it provides an evidence-driven
mediagenic event in which we can talk about participating, restructure participation
between expert and lay communities in addressing, remediating this issue.
So just to show you, this map is currently touring in the Cooper-Hewitt Design
Triennial and it‟s a map of all the Superfund sites in the Silicon Valley area, which of
course has more toxic sites and Superfund sites than any comparable region in the
entire US. As you know, the information technology is not clean green technology,
it‟s the most toxic industry we‟ve yet produced. And these dogs are, if you will, at
these potential dog exploration sites, sniffing into their own butts in some sense.
So we‟re structuring participation as this theme that we‟re going on. I want to show
you another curricular project that I‟ve been working on for a number of years called
How Stuff is Made, which is a wiki encyclopaedia. So not all of you have Facebook
pages but you all use Wikipedia, we all know what wiki is. You all understand that it‟s
a technology that the How Stuff is Made encyclopaedia uses, it‟s based on a wiki
engine, but it‟s a visual encyclopaedia collaboratively produced with faculty and
students to document the production of contemporary goods. That is the
manufacturing processes, labour conditions and the environmental costs involved in
the production of these goods. And I want to kind of compare this to the green
consumer movement with our students. We‟ll just do a little diagnostic test here.
Does anybody here have something on them that they can give me an account of
how it was made or who made it? One thing on them, with them? Oh, you do.
Male 3:
A bank note.
Natalie:
A bank note. And you know how it was made, by who, where?
Male 3:
Yes, in the Bank of England in a printing press.
Natalie:
Have you been there?
Male 3:
I have been to the Bank of England but I haven‟t seen them being made.
Natalie:
Do you know if they‟re recycled, those bills?
Male 3:
I don‟t think they are. I think they‟re made of special paper stock.
Natalie:
That‟s interesting, so we have one thing that someone knows something about how
it was made. Anything else?
Female 1:
I have a ring that was made from another ring that was melted down in order to
make this one. So I don‟t know where the original material came from.
Natalie:
Wow. That‟s nice. And surprising. To have two in a classroom, two things, is unusual.
To have some account, have some knowledge about it. Which I think is interesting in
the information age where we‟re talking about gluttony of information, excess
information, too much information. And we have a profound ignorance; let‟s say
stupidity, a veil between production and consumption, of which we know hardly
anything about the things that we use every day, live with. So what do we do about
that? Given that the manufacturing sector is the most toxic of global human
activities, what do we do? So this is one small attempt at structuring participation in
which students are instructed to take a product and do a visual essay on how
something is made. This was one of the first, from a Yale graduate student of mine
in engineering, who came from a little village in China where most of the American
flags are made. You can see, at 45 cents per hour. The Chinese fortune cookie, by
contrast, is made largely in Chicago by Hispanics. Some other interesting stories
about the Columbian flora culture industry that‟s built up with internal refugees
fleeing the drug war that is really a model of labour practices. These are the flowers
that you get at your local deli, what do they call them here, not delis, corner stores
anyway. They‟re largely from Columbia; they‟re the biggest exporters of flowers. And
speaking of biggest exporters, this is a visual essay on the US, now the largest
exporter of coal in the world and the scale of this… So these are visual essays,
I‟ve been teaching this for four years now, three universities have incorporated it
into their curricula and students have to document this product that they choose with
a view to providing an innovation. They‟re doing it not as a journalistic exposé but
because they have to offer a viable innovation with respect to the production,
manufacturing, labour conditions, or environmental costs of this thing. So that
changes the student from being a consumer that might demonise that corporation
and sweat shop labour into someone who has to actively try and solve the problem.
And they have to first of all negotiate their way into these manufacturing facilities,
which is very difficult. They do that by understanding that, well if we wanted to
change our manufacturing practices, innovate them towards sustainable practises,
would we choose to make it a closed information realm characterised by trade
secrets, non-disclosures, closed doors, the sort of vision Trevor was presenting
yesterday? Or would we choose an information realm in which there was open sharing of best practices, new materials, good ideas, an open information realm? Of course the students generally agree that the latter would promote more innovation towards sustainability. And then they have to convince their local manufacturing sector of that, which is hard. Moreover after they‟ve done the assignment and after we‟ve publicly posted it on the website, they have to hand it in by cc-ing the faculty involved on an e-mail to the manufacturers, workers, designers that they‟ve interviewed, saying this is the public encyclopaedia entry that I‟ve put up here on this wiki-based encyclopaedia, and here is how you add to improve or change. They get their quotes right when they know they‟re handing it in to the people they‟re quoting. Interesting. Moreover as their first visual essay - without exception this has been the first visual essay that all my students have ever had to write - so to take a photograph or develop a visual argument is… How many essays have students written in their high school careers? And in the PowerPoint age none of my university graduate students have ever written a visual essay before. Interesting set of practices and skills. But moreover the structural accountability, who are they accountable to, who are they handing this in to is what the innovation is here. And what works for me is that after the class is finished and done I give the kids the option of going off the order alert list. Like any wiki page with the order alert list you get e-mailed every time someone changes or improves or adds to your independent academic analysis. And the e-mail goes directly to the student and the faculty involved. Who wants more e-mail? Every single student, without exception, has opted to or has asked to stay on that order alert list. Suggesting that they feel responsible for producing this independent academic analysis. This critical analysis. It has to be critical - otherwise they can‟t innovate - of the manufacturing sector. It suggests that they feel responsible for producing this information for the information comments. And statistically the chance that those innovations that they‟ve suggested or tried to develop, a new material substitution or a new labour practice or a new ownership structure or something might develop, of course, increases with every year that passes. I‟d invite you to consider this as a curriculum that can be collectively produced and incorporated into many different realms, many different curricula. And I would argue that - just think of the scaling of this - if every student once in their high school, graduate or under-graduate career, had to do a product analysis of how something is made, how that might change the sense of participation in who is responsible for producing innovations in the manufacturing sector. And imagine the scale of not having just advertising or marketing or interesting information if we had to do that. So let‟s talk about structuring participation a little bit more. I may or may not get to the space station but those of you who are interested in building a space station can talk to me later. I did want to show you the prescription for Ooz projects. And Ooz is another set of interfaces that I‟ve been developing for a number of years to re-script, re-imagine our interaction with our natural systems. In particular with the non-humans that we cohabit with, the more we share our urban environments, the more that we produce green spaces, liveable conditions. A phenomenon that‟s happened all over the world is non-humans moving in. The more parks we produce the more non-humans feel invited. You had a whale in the Thames recently. We had a whale in the Guanos Canal in New York. A whale. We had coyote in Central Park, three types of seals have moved into the Hudson River, there‟s more striped bass and short nosed sturgeon there than have been recorded in 50 years. And we see this phenomena happening all over urban centre where urban migration, which used to describe the movement of rural poor into urban centres, now describes the movement of non humans into urban centres and force us to re-think how and why
we organise that interaction. How and if we might re-imagine cohabiting with those
animals, those organisms.
Of course there is the Victorian institution of the zoo, and Ooz projects are „zoo‟
backwards and without cages. Because zoos actually represent a, well,
fundamentally impoverished view of the complex eco-systems on which we depend.
Categorical boxes, giraffe next to the bears, they don‟t show the resource sharing or
the interspecies interaction. They don‟t show any of the complex interdependencies,
let alone our own. So here‟s a couple of interfaces that kind of materialise a different
relationship, and I want to again underscore the idea that we can structure
participation so the small interactions that we can script with interactive technologies
can amount to something. In this case this is from the Whitney Museum recently;
this is communication technology for birds. You have cell phone urban birds needing
communication technology too. So these perches were in fact in the Whitney
Museum in the birdlist architecture there. And when the bird lands on these perches,
which conveniently have a public toilet for pigeons placed underneath them, they
trigger a sound file and that sound file actually translates bird concerns into a human
dialect. It might trigger a sound file like this, which is…
[sound clip]
Here‟s what you need to do, go down there and buy some of those health food bars,
the ones you call bird food, and bring it here and scatter it around, there‟s a good
person!
[sound clip ends]
Natalie:
In this case there were six perches up so they were allowing the birds to experiment
on people. Which of these perches elicited better resource sharing. And this was the
most popular argument, or the most persuasive argument.
[sound clip]
Tick, tick, tick, that‟s the sound of genetic mutations, of the avian flu becoming a
deadly human flu. Do you know what slows it down? Healthy sub-populations of
birds increasing biodiversity generally. It is in your interests that I am healthy,
happy, hence you could share some of your nutritional [dove cooing] instead of
monopolising them. That is – share your lunch!
[sound clip ends]
Natalie:
That was the most popular. Let me just show you a couple more quick examples of
this because I really want to demonstrate that we can script substantial interaction.
At the Swish [?] interface, which is a series of buoys that floats on the Hudson River,
it‟s approved to go in but not yet gone in, little sonar sensors that – buoys that
project three foot into and out of the water and they turn a little LED light on every
time a fish goes underneath, displaying or signalling the presence of these
cohabitants. That means that fish learn that when the lights go on food is likely to be
there and people learn that when the lights go on fish are likely to be there. And
what happens in that case is what always happens where there‟s urban animals, and
it‟s signified by the sign, „do not feed the animals‟. Why not feed the animals? Every park, Yellowstone National Park has a sign, „do not feed the animals‟. Like the aquariums, „do not tap on the glass‟. That desire to interact is at least as ubiquitous as signs. And why not feed the animals? Because human food might be bad for them? Well, it is actually. The sparrow collapse in London, like in New York, is probably do to the high levels of LDL cholesterol from their androgenic diet. Human food is not good for animals but it‟s not good for us either. We‟re sharing the same lifestyle disease. The other idea is that we might interfere with animals, particularly in National Parks; we can‟t feed them because we might interfere with them. We don‟t want to make them dependent on us. Although we didn‟t talk about that interference as we built the highway that cuts off the migration route. And we‟re in a time when we‟re changing the entire global climate and we‟re worried about interfering – yes, we‟re interfering with the animals! Of course we‟re interfering with them. So the whole model of conservation or environmentalism that‟s built around preservation is a delusion. There‟s nothing untouched to preserve. And so I think the challenge for us is to create script interactions, small individual interactions, where it‟s not about do not touch, tread lightly, do not feed the animals, but do something – and make it good. So just one example of that; what you might do is at the fish restaurant the food that you might feed the fish – a fish restaurant in this case is a place where you feed fish, not eat them – and the fish food designed with the wonderful gourmet artist Deborah Solomon, actually not only is delicious food, this is one of the chapters from the Cross-Species Cookbook, delicious, nutritious, for humans and non-humans, this fish food actually has a chelating agent in it, that is similar to the chelating agents that are used in medical contexts on humans. When the fish ingests this food, which looks like lures but there‟s no hooks on it and it is edible I promise, it binds to the bio-accumulated heavy metals, mercury, PCBs and allows them to pass them out as a harmless salt, where it settles down into the silt and becomes effectively removed from bio-availability in the food whip. So you can see that the collective effect of those small interactions, instead of the collective effect of feeding urban fish stale white bread or old bagels, the collective effect of scripting this interaction with the fish food, fish fingers, might be substantive environmental remediation. It might even augment the population of fish. And it‟s radically different from the traditional approaches to environmental remediation because it builds on the small actions of many people that can accumulate to something substantial, something like what we would call collective action. So just let me say in conclusion, I‟m going to tease you with a brand new project that was just launched last week for the first time, the Design of the Times festival. John Thacker has been running a new [unclear] was first publicly presented and this is the second time the space station - I‟ve just got to show you one picture, I‟m sorry. But I‟ll put that up there and conclude. Social movements are not built on consumption. They are not built on consumers; green consumers are not buying packaged solutions. Trevor yesterday produced a vision of everyone innovating and hiring lawyers to patent their ideas and get rich, to guard against the baddies that are out to steal them. That‟s not a vision that I share at all. I think there are many different visions and an alternate one might be, well, a traditional environmental movement has painted a terrifying vision of the future catastrophes that we are facing. And I have to give you an American example, that Martin Luther King did not give, and I have a nightmare dream, and I have a nightmare talk, I have a nightmare presentation, in the way that the traditional environmental movement has built concern for our environmental situation. This might be necessary but it‟s not sufficient. Martin Luther King actually did try to give the „I have a nightmare‟ talk
and a gospel singer yelled out twice in the recording saying, “Tell them about the
dream, Martin, tell them about the dream!” And so I think that there is a positive
and hopeful future that restructures participation in the environmental movement;
that seizes our new interactive technologies and the opportunity that they present to
restructure participation. Not just in the knowledge production, not just in learning
the complex socio-economic systems that we inhabit, but as Slaboyjujeck [?] said,
ideologies linger longer in our actions than in our knowing. We had that project
called the Enlightenment that was going on for a few hundred years, right. The idea
that knowing would lead to action. It hasn‟t worked so well. We haven‟t abandoned
our cars; we haven‟t significantly changed our lifestyles in the face of environmental
crisis. So how do we build a social movement to address the radical environmental,
sociological inhibition that we need? I think we have students, we have the education
sector, and we have the capacity to re-script small interactions to large collective
effect. Thank you very much.
Chair:
We have time for one or maybe two questions, anybody got anything they‟d like to
ask?
Male 4:
Can you show us the space ship?
Natalie:
OK. I‟m sorry I went on too long but I did want to introduce this project. The space
station, just very quickly, is a space station that exploits the closed system
engineering of traditional space station design. Something that I worked on in my
PhD in engineering. And urban space is the new frontier, is the final frontier. If we
don‟t radically improve the environmental performance of our built environment -
80% of our city carbon footprint is produced by our built environment. Existing built
environment. We can‟t pull down all those buildings and change them but we can
make small improvements in the environmental performance of buildings, that would
be good. So there‟s been a green movement to green the roofs, to increase the
environmental performance, insulation and perhaps even urban agriculture. Certainly
in the US and here. But green roofs aren‟t effective agriculture resources. You can‟t
actually grow much in one to three inches of soil. So the space station is actually a
green house that is geometrically optimised to go on a roof, a roof of a school, where
you can couple, remember that indoor equality, couple the CO2-enriched air from
commercial and residential buildings into a system that needs CO2-enriched air.
Commercial greenhouses cycle through CO2-enriched air once a minute. And then
the oxygen-enriched air from the greenhouse back down into the building. So it‟s a
mutual parasitic relationship that is a trust system. It‟s built as a barn-raising.
I think that when people came to the workshop yesterday they thought I was going
to talk about building a little scale model space station. No. I‟m talking about
building one, a real space station at a real level. It looks like this because it‟s
geometrically optimised for solar radiation capture and because you don‟t have much
span loading on a rooftop. But you do have loading excess on the masonry walls and
the columns where you can focus additional load. And as something that can be built
as a barn-raising this was the first piece of the space station, it‟s a truss structure.
So child labour is a very, as this country knows only too well, useful resource. But
scripting this large jigsaw puzzle where it‟s assembled on the ground and then lifted
quite spectacularly to land on a dense urban environment, urban building, has the
wonderful advantage of, if you‟ve built something, if you‟ve been involved in its
construction, in making it, you actually are intimate with how it works and can and
do own it in a way that you can rebuild it, imagine it, improve it, maintain it and
rethink it. And again, it provides a concrete demonstration of closed and coupled
systems engineering that can really radically improve the environmental
performance of the existing environment. So that‟s a quick introduction to the space
station.
Male 4:
One more. Where can I get one?
Natalie:
Come and talk to me. Well, yes. This project is just launched last week and I‟m
hoping to work with you here and Futurelab to see if there might be opportunity to
find a landing site somewhere here.

Source: http://archive.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/event_presentations/why_dont_you/natalie_jeremijenko_transcript.pdf