Dear all, here’s a late wrap up on our wonderful Urbanization project.
(One note from Jenna: There’s a phenomenon called “TED Magic” which really begins to emerge when you attend TEDActive. Crazy things happen when hundreds of people with crazy ideas get together.)
On Thursday we had the objective of progressing the great thinking and ideation from the ideation sessions of Wednesday, both to consolidate some early thoughts into opportunity areas for design, and if possible to make something tangible to demonstrate one of them.
After an early meeting at breakfast time with the most enthusiastic part of the team we reviewed the material from Wed and clustered the ideas into the areas in the following graph:
We eventually clustered the thoughts into three areas of opportunity
‘Energy pride’
While trying to save energy, one of the hurdles citizens find on their way is day to day life, both due to busy lifestyles that don’t help planning, and for simple pleasure. Against these very emotional reasons, the industry has mainly reacted with very rational solutions, quantifying savings with CO2. But when we asked of tho se who save and generated their own energy, beyond the money there was a deep sense of pride. We thought it was difficult to overcome the emotional hurdles of today only with rational arguments… New solutions that promote savings should take emotions as part of their design.
Evan designed this image to illustrate the thought:
Batteries and behaviour change
There was great attention to energy this TED, amongst the talks this one from Donald Sadoway spoke about cheap batteries.
Our conversation made us realize the importance batteries might have in the future for citizens. Batteries offer the possibility of changing the perception of energy from a ‘synchronous’ source of unlimited and commoditized energy, into an ‘asynchronous’ supply of energy, where conservation and generation are more visible, as will be the sources of the energy created.
Batteries represent another great opportunity for designing better energy management.
Building houses with embedded efficiency
This are was mainly developed on day 2
‘More revolutionary, the team discussed the idea of radical low impact-economic housing, that could be extremely interesting in cities in great expansion (as we have learned 60 million people move into cities each year in developing countries). By applying latest technology in house building and energy generation, we could develop communities that ensure quality standards of life with low impact of cost and carbon, making them accessible to newcomers with business models that include the house and its energy supply.’
These were the three areas we presented on the TED stage on Thursday afternoon.
As these areas were consolidated, the team decided to build on the idea of ‘energy pride’ to try and prototype a tangible model that brought to life the concept.
This was our first draft:
Bring together the amazing cardboard city Kiel Johnson was constructing with the TEDActive participants, and the idea of energy pride by having TEDActive participants to power the lighting of the city… with a bike. After some unsuccessful attempts to find a dynamo Beau Ambur located an American Red Cross radio powered by a hand crank in a Radio Shack in Palm Springs, a starting point. First stop Radio Shack to buy the radio, resistors, wire and LEDs.
As we were starting to build, the phenomenon previously referred as TED Magic kicks in: It just so happens that on Thursday, a company called Pavegen was scheduled to talk about it’s product. Laurence Kembell-Cook designed tiles which harness people’s footsteps and turn them into energy–an idea that was once referenced in our early discussions.
In the spirit of TED, the team realized we needed to use the resources around us to our advantage. We worked with Kiel, the artist, and Laurence, the inventor, to incorporate Pavegen to power the city. People will feel the joy of powering a city with their own two feet, and also give us a focus group to see whether they felt prideful of that accomplishment; an affect we believe to be the key to changing consumer behavior.
In a few hours we were all working together and progressing fast:
After a long day of work on Thursday, on Friday morning finally everything came together, just in time to show it to get TEDActive to power the lights.
It was a fantastic team effort from day 1 with a very tangible result on day 4. We will soon have much better media from Theo Jemison, who photographed and recorded the making of the city and its electrification.
I know Beau, Laurence, Kiel amongst others want to follow the conversation and bring elements of the experience to their work and perhaps to TED City 2.0. Please feel free to reach for any support.
Many thanks to the whole team who participated in the project from the visit to the wind farm on Monday to jumping on the tile on Friday.
best from your Active Urban project,
Evan, Jenna and Luis
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