Solutions Twin Cities Connects Ideas on "Future-Positive Creativity"

Halfway through installing a green roof on Wednesday night, May 2, Corrie Zoll stopped to take a slug from a bottle of Guinness. It wasn't that he was tired out. Just three minutes into the demonstration, he was illustrating for the near-sellout crowd at the Southern Theater how easy it is to install a green roof and how such technology can help the environment by cooling buildings through both shade and "evapotranspiration."

Which is where the beer comes in.

Because plants move vapor from their roots and release it through their leaves, a green roof on a two-car garage can "sweat" five gallons of water on a hot day -- enough to fill 57 bottles of Ireland's finest.

Zoll and RoofBloom's Chris Wegsheid were among 13 groups presenting ideas at the first edition of Solutions Twin Cities, a networking event/show-and-tell session/progressive social, organized by Colin Kloecker, a blogger at Worldchanging Twin Cities who works at Cermak Rhoades Architects, and Troy Gallas, a member of Architecture for Humanity - Minnesota. Intended to showcase change-oriented projects in design, ecology, community development, and culture, Solutions takes its format from pecha kucha, a presentation format developed in Japan in which each each speaker gets 20 seconds to discuss each of 20 slides. As Worldchanging's Eric Larson aptly wrote, it's "no guff, no fluff, just the essence of the ideas."

While Zoll and Wegscheid fabricated a 3 x 4-foot section of roof, others used their time to discuss "future-positive creativity" ideas ranging from alternative currency systems and sustainable communities in Kenya and Uganda to Urban Earth, a new flower shop in southwest Minneapolis that's one of the country's only non-food-based co-operatives. For example:

• John Dwyer and Tom Westbrook of Studio 4284 presented student humanitarian architecture projects plus Shelter Architecture's Clean Hub, a shipping container that includes water purifying system, a compositing toilet and solar panels that can be dropped into slums or disaster zones after emergencies like Hurricane Katrina to provide clean water and sound shelter.

• Jacqui Belleau and Christian Trifilio of product-design firm Worrell Inc. showed plans for a mobile film trailer they're designing for FilmAID International, an NGO that brings entertainment and educational films on STDs to residents of refugee camps in Africa.

• Cathy ten Broeke, Hennepin County's Coordinator on Homelessness, offered shocking local statistics -- 9200 people are homeless in Minnesota on any given night, one-third of them in Hennepin County, and 47 percent are children or young adults -- before outlining the goals of "Heading Home Hennepin," a plan that involves expanding housing assistance, access to housing, and day-and-night one-stop service delivery, from medical care to housing placement, to homeless and borderline families and individuals.

• Architecture for Humanity - Iowa members told of building an energy efficient bakery from straw bales and creating a recycling awareness campaign that hauled in thirty-five 50-pound bags of recyclables using a sculptural, floor-to-ceiling "sock" made of chicken wire and installed in a building on the Iowa State campus (the quirky project earned national attention from National Public Radio's SoundClips program).

• Scott Ervin of Alchemy Architects discussed his firm's acclaimed weeHouse prefab modernist homes and how designers, by utilizing techniques pioneered by car manufacturers and mobile home makers, can deliver on all three of the architect's pledges (of which, as the old saw goes, only two are usually on the table): Fast, Cheap, and Good.

• Stephanie Kinnunen of NEED magazine unveiled the humanitarian magazine's second issue, which features stories about an all-women de-mining team in Cambodia, Minneapolis homeless advocate Mary Jo Copeland's Caring and Sharing Hands, and communities in Colombia that are banding together to kick out paramilitary groups that have contributed to a frightening statistic the country now claims: only Darfur has a larger population of internally displaced people.

While the format took some getting used to -- the rapid-fire nature of the talks meant for rushed, sometimes jumbled presentations, and the technology wasn't without its glitches -- the energy of the 250 or more attendees was palpable. Cheers went out after each 6:40 talk, a few tears were spotted, and the din of excited conversation filled the theater afterwards, muffling the strains of the Cadillac Kolstad Band's music.

That energy — or, more accurately, sustaining it — was the spark behind Solutions. Gallas and Kloecker got their inspiration for the event in November after a book-launch party in Northeast Minneapolis for Worldchanging: A User's Guide to the 21st Century, which included a slide-show of some of the book's most interesting revelations about sustainable design, green memes, and activism. [Full disclosure: I'm a volunteer blogger for Worldchanging and offered advice as he and Gallas developed the Solutions program.] While Kloecker was excited to see "the breadth of what was going on" in the realms of humanitarian architecture and green design, he said he was disappointed that "afterwards there was sort of this fizzle. There was no infrastructure in place to let the connections made that night go on."

Judging from the near sell-out crowd and its enthused response Wednesday night, Kloecker and Gallas have created a successful model for connecting like minds and, going Worldchanging one better, they've created an online hub to keep the energy going between editions: a Solutions mailing list, website (where all 13 presentations will be saved as YouTube videos), blog, Flickr group, and mySpace and Facebook pages.

Campaign 2.0: Obama's Social Network

According to the Federal Elections Commission, 109 people had filed to run for president before the end of 2006. Of those, how many have a clue about Web-based campaigning?

Over the next weeks, I'll be looking at the Web sites of major-party candidates who are considering running for president. I'll look at the trends and technology, design and branding. I'll track puns (Mrs. Clinton calls her faithful "Hillraisers," while Chris Dodd commands "The Dodd Squad.") and patriots (Tommy Thompson and Mitt Romney appear in heroic relief against the flapping furls of the flag), the ominous (Tom Vilsack's flying V logo) and the oblivious (Tom Tancredo goes all Ted Stevens on us, confusing a Web page for an e-mail: "Dear Friend, I am writing to you as a fellow believer in the cause of securing America's borders.")

First up, Barack Obama's site...

If you don't believe Barack Obama is a contender, check out his Web site. It's million-dollar look (and, I'm guessing, development budget), is crisp and clear, filled with some of Web 2.0's best doodads, but thankfully without the telltale Web 2.0 design cues (i.e., his name isn't Obamr^TM and the word Beta appears nowhere). The logo is all heartland chic: patriotic, rural and optimistic without wrapping itself in the flag; it conjures a "morning in America" feel as Obama's "O" rises over plow furrows that double as flag stripes. The look is restrained and tasteful — in sharp contrast to the man he hopes to succeed, whose tough-guy design has mimicked an interstate highway sign, NASCAR motifs, the colors of local NFL teams (at a Wisconsin rally, Bush's campaign signs took on Packer green and gold, while here in Minnesota they shifted to VikPublishings purple), and a bold flying W.

But what's most impressive is the site's technology. The Obama campaign appears to be using custom-designed, proprietary social-networking software that falls under that favorite Web 2.0 prefix, My.BarackObama.com (interestingly, while Obama has a mySpace account, there seems to be no link to the Rupert Murdoch-owned networking site anywhere on his home page: coincidence?). After users create a free account, they can start a blog, invite friends, publicize events, and — get this — do "personal fundraising" for the candidate. That is, you can customize a page, complete with a fundraising thermometer and room for a photo you can upload (my test-page, entitled "Let's Go Sledding!," features my frantic dog chasing my wife and I down a winter hill), and invite people to pitch in for Barack.

Users can create groups, and according to the site's blog, more than 1,000 groups already exist, from the Pasadena-based Macs for Barack (for Apple users) to the local Minnesotans for Obama. With a nod to hipsters and open-sourcers, there's a Creative Commons bug at the bottom; for the youngsters, a link to Obama's Facebook and Flickr sites. For the deeply interactive, there's YouTube; for the literary, speech transcripts; for the non-voter, a link to a registration site. Truly, whatever way you want to access information, this rich site has it: XML syndication; a store, where one can buy union-made T-shirts for the cutesy price of $20.08 apiece; and a campaign blog that gets both updated and comments, lots of 'em.

Conclusion: Obama's site is excellent, aesthetically and tactically. For a young candidate early in his political career, it's filled with rich content, from his political platform (available in mulitiple formats) to videos where voters can get a feel for less content-based factors like his demeanor and body language. For voters turned off by the Bush Republicans' machismo, it offer a stark distinction, nodding to national pride without veering into flag-waving, lapel-pin patriotism. And, while it uses the tools of pop culture, it doesn't dumb down politics. Best of all, it leverages the social networking phenomenon (and relationship marketing practices) Obama's campaign has already benefitted from: his fans have created numerous Wikis for him, he's got nearly 50,000 MySpace friends, and supporters have created several Draft Obama sites. That last group needn't waste its energy: the site makes it clear, this isn't an exploratory committee site, it's an online campaign hub.

[Cross-posted at Minnesota Monitor.]

Woofer.

Marketed as "functional kitsch," the Woofer speakers by Sander Mulder of the Netherlands-based design house Buro Vormkrijgers. Of the 600 Euro speaker set, he says, "If you’re a true design lover, you wouldn’t be caught dead with such a statue.” Inspired by a flea market stall selling ceramic animals and a question no one could answer--why bass speakers are called woofers and treble speakers tweeters, he began sketching. The result: two speakers, each with a woofer and a tweeter in the same oval, inside a polyester resin dog body. He assures, "No animals were harmed in the making of these speakers."

Open-source branding

Architecture for Humanity, the world's first and biggest humanitarian design organization, is making news for its development of an open-source architecture network, a way for architects to share, develop and license plans that can be used and modified anywhere in the world.

Maybe it's fitting, then, that the development of their new logo has an open-source feel. AfH asked designers around the world to submit logos. After publishing criteria for the logo, AfH asked interested designers to submit logos to a Flickr site, and more than 800 people did. Visitors to the site could vote on their favorites using the comments field (and it seems jurors also made selections), and now the original pool of entries is down to 12. By the end of January, they'll select the finalist and start using the new brand. While it's not quite open-source, it is brilliant: a cash-strapped NGO gets a slew of logo designs to choose from (for free), they generate publicity and plenty of goodwill, and underscore their brand identity as an open, collaborative, and community-focused organization.

[Cross-posted at Off-Center.]

The Noose or the Suit?

Newsdesigner, sure to be one of my frequently trafficked sites of '07, has an interesting comparison of front-page coverage of Saddam Hussein's exeution in the US and around the world. Needless to say, American papers seem to focus on the personality of Saddam (he's often shown in his gray suit and white shirt without a tie), while elsewhere cover stories showed the noose going around his neck.

NRA comic book...

While the NRA calls the comic book (below) a hoax, Raw Story says it's not. Meanwhile, Boingboing and the Raw Story offer the full deal as a pdf.

NRA graphic novel revealed

Just in time for the holidays! Wonkette publishes illustrations allegedly from the NRA's forthcoming graphic novel/recruitment tool, Freedom In Peril: Guarding the 2nd Amendment in the 21st Century. Rightwing fear mongering at its finest, this artfully drawn bit of propaganda hits every hysterical high note of the radical right, from a gas can-carrying, hairy-legged eco-terrorist to a warty-faced George Soros (above) and obese Michael Moore. Of course, the hero of this tale--who boldly protects his family against "illegal alien gangs" and the like--is the white homeowner, keeping watch from a rooftop as the city around him crumbles. Ironically, it's the media that's to blame for inciting fear--not the organization that shows a white cop gagged with a gang member's bandana.

The Decider.

Big changes in Iraq? (Via SpeakUp.)

New warnings.

A new generation of warning signs, via Fallon.

Rotary Reader

From Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society comes this wonder, a rotary desk that allows a person to keep up with multiple books at once. Designed in 1588 by Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli, "with this sort of machine a man can see and read a great quantity of books, without moving his place: besides, it has this fine convenience, which is, of occupying a little space in the place where it is set."

Build-a-Bert

Using a computer-modeled wireframe head from a previous project, artist Bert Simons "cloned" himself, making a cut-out replica of his noggin to keep around the house. He even provides a pdf so you can build your own. Final version above, beta version below.

Via PlaceboKatz.

Pragmatic Experimentation: An interview with Cameron Sinclair

Nearly drowned out by the strains of Dookie-era Green Day and the Barenaked Ladies, three of us were at the table trying to talk: me; my brother Peter, a green designer and founder of Vivus Architecture; and the British-born founder of Architecture for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair. Designer of the Year nominee at the Design Museum in London, author of the new book Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises, and winner of prestigious $100K TED Prize, Sinclair met us at a sports bar near his Minneapolis hotel in the University of Minnesota's Dinkytown. "We’re in a college dive bar, music blaring in the background," he says. "You could say you’re recording from Scranton, Pennsylvania." No disrespect to Scranton, but our sub-high-brow meeting place ended up fitting, because Sinclair's work as one of humanitarian architecture's foremost proponents combines the high-minded with, well, the real. His work as fundraiser, designer, and relief organizer has taken him to Ghana, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and Biloxi, Mississippi, where he and other architects working under AFH's aegis have created collaborative designs for communities rebuilding after natural disasters. And, yes, many of those meetings, like ours, occurred in the evenings over beer.

Following are excerpts from our interview, which appears in the book, Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Cornerhouse, December 2006), published this winter by the Royal Society of Arts' Arts & Ecology program. Also, an account of our get-together appeared in The Rake.

On art and the media:

Paul: In addition to architecture you’ve done some art interventions, and I’m wondering if you think the designs you’re doing now have an interventionist dual purpose, both housing people and making a point about how we need to house people?

CS: I’ve been teaching at the university here in Minneapolis, and I always try to make my students do agitprop projects. Actually, the role of the architect is a political one. You make a conscious choice whether you’re going to do a project or not do a project. You can say, “It’s really a shame what happened down in the Gulf Coast, but I don’t really want to get involved in that.” I actually do an art project once a year, an art project for myself, just to keep my creative juices going… Just as I was coming out of college, I did a project dealing with homelessness in New York. I had located the housing to block the Statue of Liberty, and the idea that when the city took responsibility of its homeless, it’d get it’s view of Liberty back, because there was this idea of “bring us your huddled masses yearning to be free.” And here we are in New York and there were 60,000 people on the streets. So I think you as a designer have the opportunity to come up with a pragmatic and innovative sustainable response, but at the same time there’s kind of an air of tongue-in-cheek about it, that you can make this cultural criticism...

"There’s no room for utopian dreamers,
but there’s definitely room for pragmatic experimenters."

I just did an art piece in LA. A group of artists were given clocks. You had to change a clock, and I actually took out the clock and plugged in a security camera, and hidden in the face was a camera. On the face, I replaced it with some imagery of housing a year after the tsunami. And when you’re looking at this imagery you actually see yourself in the TV camera. Part of the point was about 24-hour news, and in the news cycle, a disaster is only there for the first couple of weeks. And until a new disaster comes along, it’s like the flavor of the month. Then suddenly there’s a new disaster and people forget about those who are affected by the tsunami or Katrina or Kashmir. The media is treating disasters as entertainment. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had media outlets asking, how bad have the families suffered. They’ve suffered enough for us to film them? Would it make good television?

On global warming:

CS: I’ve talked to a couple of people who live in cities and they were saying, “Just imagine the economic losses that’s going to happen in cities like Vancouver and Seattle and all these waterfront properties that’ll go under water.” And then you take cities in China and India where you’re going to have 100,000,000 people who are going to lose their houses in the next 30 years, and where are they going? How are we dealing with them? So you’ve got that happening as well, you’ve got systemic issues of global warming. But you’ve also got population boom. In developing countries, currently there are very few people that are making a lot of money. And as you have this separation between the rich and the poor, as you have this much larger, poorer community growing and the wealth of a country held by very few people, that creates civil unrest. So what you’ll find over the next 30 years, because of lack of access to basic sanitation, healthcare, schooling, and even shelter, we’re going to end up in situations of war. Security is going to be threatened based on things we’ve never even conceived. Forget oil—

Peter: Water.

CS: Yeah, water is going to be a big thing. Darfur, a lot of that has to do with access to water. Darfur used to have a huge lake, a huge resource. And in 15 years, it’s completely dried up. So that means that farmers have had to move away from the arid areas to try and find areas where they can grow their crops, so now you have warring factions pushed into one area, one region. It’s happening all over the place. There are nomadic tribes that are being pushed off desert areas just because there’s been a temperature increase by one or two degrees. We don’t feel it here. If anything, we’re like, “Oh great, it’s going to be nice and warm!’

On practical dreaming:

Peter: Is there any room for architectural experimentation in Architecture for Humanity, or does everything have to be tried and true? How do you justify experimentation on someone’s life style?

CS: It depends what you’re experimenting. Because we’re working with communities where we’re like a team--we’re not designing for them; there’s a partnership. We discuss options, and occasionally you get people who are actually very creative, who want you to experiment. They’ve just been in a concrete block house that was completely destroyed by the tsunami and it killed half their family. And you come along and say, “We can do what you had before, or we can design this new house which looks at doing a core system,” which is a project that was done in Sri Lanka, “which will wash water through and won’t cause a loss of life and the structure will remain up.” If you’re experimenting in a way that improves their lives and also will have a level of disaster mitigation--it’s not experimentation like, “I want to do this inflatable city and if a wave comes along, we just let the balloon go and we all escape up into the air.” There’s no room for utopian dreamers, but there’s definitely room for pragmatic experimenters.

For more information, visit AFH's Minnesota chapter. For pictures, check out AFH's Flickr site. Sinclair is also the keynote speaker at PUSH 2006 on June 13. I'll be live-blogging the conference at Off Center.

Thanks to Land, Art editor Max Andrews for permission to excerpt the interview here.