Placebo Effect - Ancient Pain Reliever

For decades, scientists have tried to understand the mysterious power of what is called the "placebo effect."

A wide variety of studies have found when patients suffering from a wide variety of mental and physical disorders improve after being given placebos they believe are powerful and effective drugs.

If they truly believe - even when in reality the "drug" they are given is a mere sugar pill - they regularly report a significant reduction in symptoms.

I have suggested in the past that placebo studies prove how powerfully we are influenced - not just emotionally but physiologically - by how we percieve the world around us.

In my design practice - where I employ psychological techniques to help my clients achieve the emotional experience they desire in their homes - I have long noticed that my clients' emotional experience of their home environment is highly related to their views of reality.

Special artifacts and architectural conditions in their homes can have powerful and long-lasting psychological effects.

I have seen such conditions reduce - or stimulate - anxiety many times.

A new study published by Cell Press in the August 27th issue of the journal Neuron, provides fascinating insight into how and why simply expecting a treatment to reduce pain can produce the actual physical effect.

The placebo effect - it seems to me - offers a clue that points to how we might create therapeutic environments.

I have suggested that the placebo effect should be harnessed as a therapy - and pointed to the fact that believers in a wide variety of ancient "faith" systems also claim similar effects - as have modern scientists who study mind/body medicine.

This new study's finding is that the "placebo effect" involves pain control pathways in the human brainstem, the part of the brain that is continuous with the spinal cord.

In other words, it impacts an ancient part of our brain which we share with many other species.

So it may turn out that "having a positive attitude" proved to be adaptive long before human beings evolved.

"Placebo analgesia" if a phrase that refers to an individual's relief from pain following administration of a chemically inert substance (often a sugar pill) and is due to a person's belief that a potent pain medication was administered instead.

It is a direct test of the power of belief to impact what have previously been seen as chemical and physiological disorders. If those conditions are as "physical" as they appear - why are disorders as extreme as schizophrenia and chronic pain impacted by the mere perception of the patient?

Endogenous opioids, which are naturally produced by the brain in small amounts and play a key role in the relief of pain and anxiety, have been implicated in placebo analgesia.

"It has been hypothesized that placebo analgesia also recruits the opioidergic descending pain control system, which inhibits pain processing in the spinal cord and, therefore, subsequently reduces pain-related responses in the brain, leading to a decreased pain experience," explains lead study author Falk Eippert from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany.

Eippert and colleagues observed that, under placebo, cortical areas interacted with brain stem structures implicated in pain control and that these interactions were dependent on endogenous opioids and were related to the strength of experienced placebo effects.

So there you have it. Another powerful example that the percieve hard boundaries we assume exist between our bodies, our minds and our environment are much "fuzzier" than we might think.

So not just your home is in your head - so is your pain - and sometimes all we have to do to powerfully impact those experiences is to actually believe we can.

Sustainably Sufficient - Verse One

Exposing the Myth of Scarcity

Before we can create a sustainable, green and just global economy – we must first overcome an entrenched view of reality that persists in each of us.

True change is not prescribed by political leaders. It emerges from a grassroots awakening among individuals.

It is not enough to change policies and pass new laws. Every historical shift that has ever occurred in human society began first with a small group of people who were able to see the possibility of a deeper and more powerful view of life.

Human beings like to make sense of the world. It helps us feel in control of an overwhelmingly complex and uncertain existence to have strong opinions about what is real. We take these views of reality – real and imagined - for granted in our day to day lives.

Our beliefs originate from all kinds of sources - our cultural background, our upbringing, opinions we hear on TV or in our social group and to be frank, from entirely irrational sources in own personal psychological makeup.

The most reliable way we have to verity those views is by using the scientific method to understand nature. In that pursuit – scientists have uncovered general laws that determine what is possible for us.

Many of these laws are easy to understand. We know we can’t fly like the birds because our bodies aren’t built to defy the laws of gravity. We know can’t breathe underwater because we don’t have gills like fish.

We accept these facts because for most of human history, everyone who tried to fly or breathe water fell to their deaths or drowned. But “common sense” is not always a reliable measure of reality.

Through science, we can distinguish fact from fiction. But even science is a child of change. Time after time, the prevailing views of the scientific community have turned out to be utterly false.

And to be frank, most people don’t verify their “views of reality” through the filter of current science. Not only are new discoveries always revising the views of scientists – but we inherit all kinds of strange notions from our social environment that have great power in our minds.

All sorts of false views – untrue as a matter of fact - persist all over the planet. Some could be seen as beneficial. Others are dangerous to our wellbeing and limit our ability to create more workable and fulfilling lives.

Consider how damaging the views of racism, tribalism, sexism, predatory capitalism and out of control consumerism are to our planet and the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Similarly, most of us live as though “insufficiency” is an undeniable natural law. If you listen to the news, your neighbors or your internal dialogue, you can hear it everywhere.

There’s not enough money, not enough food, not enough peace, not enough freedom, not enough leadership, not enough vision, not enough integrity, compassion or forgiveness.

That is what the outside world looks like to most of us. We see the most valuable things in life as scarce and hard to find.

Scarcity as a point of view is also integral to how we see ourselves.

We aren’t rich enough, powerful enough, kind enough, attractive enough, effective enough or happy enough.

We are driven more by what we lack than what we have. We see the glass half empty. We focus more on what we are not than what we are.

Commonly held views become the accepted reality of a time. Enough people see a flat horizon in their own neighborhoods and soon the whole planet becomes flat. The “world is flat” view is passed down through the generations and becomes an unquestioned dogma in our shared reality.

Then, a miracle occurs. Some curious soul comes along and questions that prevailing view. New facts of nature are discovered that prove the old belief was a myth. The majority notions slowly fall by the wayside, often with a lot of “sound and fury.”

The old order is disrupted. A new balance is eventually restored. In a nutshell, that’s the history of all humanity and our accumulated knowledge.

Progress is directly related to our ability to distinguish fact from fiction in our communal views of reality.

Nothing has really changed in that process down through history – but almost everything has changed in the daily lives of people.

We found ways to fly to the moon and explore the darkest chasms of the oceans. Over and over, we have overcome false “realities” previously considered indisputable.

We have done that not by denying nature, but by learning more about it and creating new possibilities in the space of those discoveries. Despite our many frailties, human beings are very practiced at turning the impossible into the possible.

Go to Sustainably Sufficient - Verse Two

Information Wasteland

Is anyone out there as fed up as I am with the state of what is laughingly called "news" in broadcast media these days?

Is the public really so stupid that the majority of us really want to digest this biased, commercialized, over sensationalized pablum?

It's an information wasteland - and it seems to me people ought to be in rebellion.

My view is that economic incentives need to exist to stimulate deeper and more thoughtful coverage.

There's a market for it. PBS - though a bit fuddy duddy in it presentation - actually presents news in a deeper context and gets an audience. But where is a "hip" version of that outside of a few weekend news and analysis shows.

There is nothing for an intelligent audience on the 24 hour news channels - only cranks, partisans and feel good nonsense

The scary thing is that traditional sources for quality reporting and commentary about real issues like policy, culture and geopolitics are newspapers - and that industry is in disarray and failing.

The Internet and other media are disrupting the print business model and that is likely to continue. Though blogs and other new models certainly have their place - most don't have the resources and expertise of professional journalists.

There is no lack of people who can do a good job of providing information - just the unemployed professional journalists these days would be sufficient to the task.

The problem is in the marketplace and the lowest common denominator ethic that dominates the programming of the major networks. Money drives the bias and trivial coverage.

Broadcast news is about stimulating anxiety, promoting shallow positional thinking - the kind of news that ends up in National Inquirer.

It works as a business model...maybe because it's mind-numbing? Is that the secret? Is that why people watch TV with the automaticity of rats whose brains are wired to be overstimulated?

My guess is that many of the people who own and run broadcast media are up to exactly that. And even when they aren't, they're forced to play the same game because they will be unable to compete if they don't. Ethical news organizations lose market share and advertisers - so they adapt and we all lose.

Most of us are so overwhelmed by the insane amount of information out there we don't really care about what is going on - only about the status of our own dogmatic positions in the marketplace of ideas.

Stoking anxiety has become an art form both in the media and in politics - and it works. Hell, it is the better part of the Republican't political strategy. Republican political operatives aren't stupid. In fact, they always seem to put the Democrats back on their heels with the technique.

Note the disinformation spread about the curent health care debate. Whose winning? I would say the disinformation is likely to come out on top with the mob - if not with the intelligensia.

Bill Maher just got crucified by saying publicly "this is such a stupid country." Tough words, but show me the behavior that makes it a false statement.

The level of education of the average American is no where near the top of the world anymore. We really are less informed and less educated that people in many other countries and the trend is increasing not decreasing.

That fact is not the result of a poor system of education. American universities are still the best in the world. It is because the media are now an omnipresent source of sound bite style information without context - and every day it is training us all to think such information has value.

We are being systemically trained to react - not the think. So new business models need to be created around quality information set in an intelligent context - but who has the power or the determination to do it?

We can complain all we want but nothing will change until enough of us get fed up that we come up with a really profitable way to target what has to be a growing market of people who are fed up.

Millions of us can see the doddering old fake behind the curtain of the media Wizards of Oz - but we don't know what to do about it.

I've been on this high horse a long time. But short term - like everyone else - all I can do is complain.

Like most of the coverage on TV - my dream of meaningful broadcast media remains both a pretense and a fantasy.

In the meantime - Rome burns.

Living the Good Life

I found this article on the Internet and decided to reprint it because what people are really looking for when they change their living space is a better experience of life. This article was originally published in Medicine & Health.

Unfortunately for us, there is no formula for fulfillment or guide to life satisfaction; however, humans have turned to philosophy, religion and science time and again for answers to our existential questions.

We may have come a long way since Confucius and Plato, and science continues to piece together some of the answers, but what have we learned so far?

Psychologists Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson from the University of Michigan turned to their own field to ask, "What is a good life and how can we achieve and sustain it?"

In their article recently published in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the authors explored the many ways psychology has contributed to, and continues to research, the science of living well.

So far we have learned from psychology that a good life includes experiencing more positive than negative feelings, feeling like your life has been lived well, continually using your talents and strengths, having close interpersonal relationships, being engaged at work and other activities, being a part of a social community, perceiving that life has a meaning, and feeling healthy and safe.

And while these conclusions may seem like common sense, we as humans fall short on knowing just how to obtain and maintain these qualities.

Psychology still has a ways to go until the perfect formula for a good life is found. As Park and Peterson put it, "At present, psychology knows more about people's problems and how to solve them than it does about what it means to live well and how to encourage and maintain such a life."

They suggest researchers across all disciplines of psychology come together and collaborate on their findings, perhaps pulling together a more complete picture of the human experience.

"In speaking about the psychological good life, we are fond of saying that other people matter," the authors concluded, "It appears that other people matter in science as well."

Source: Association for Psychological Science http://www.physorg.com/news167478071.html

Launching Sufficiency

On the heels of my last post about the Pachamama Alliance, I want to share another powerful initiative that is launching a global conversation for "sufficiency."

It is called the Global Sufficiency Network and I am honored to serve on the Advisory Committee for the organization along with some incredible people. They include Lynn Twist - who I talked about in my last post.

The group's Managing Director is a good friend - Marilyn Levin - whose vision for creating a powerful conversation for sufficiency is very inspiring.

If you think about it - a belief in scarcity lives under practically every persistent issue we face as human beings. We say their is not enough money, enough resources, enough jobs, enough opportunity, enough time, enough effective and responsible government, enough personal responsibility, enough love, enough freedom and enough quality programming on television.

Most of us turn this promotion of scarcity on ourselves. We are not good enough, smart enough, compassionate enough or sufficiently skilled to have the lives we want.

But this is just a position we share, an agreement in our world view - and it has almost no basis in fact. We face many challenges - and they are real - but if the history of our species and for that matter life on this planet - proves not only that nothing is impossible - but that life always finds a way.

So with those facts in mind - we are launching a movement for sufficiency - one that has actually been building for years - and we invite you to participate.

Coming soon, on Wednesday, July 29, the Global Sufficiency Network will host launching events all over the country. People from all over the world will gather to celebrate the message, the promise, and the possibility of a world working on behalf of all beings - a world grounded in sufficiency instead of scarcity, accumulation and never enough.

Here in Texas, we will be hosting an event in Austin. I invite everyone to join us in creating a powerful new conversation that has the power to change the world. To find out how you can support this work and become involved - RSVP here.

There will also be a live streaming video event at all locations featuring Lynne Twist. So join us in launching this powerful new conversation. The events are free, but bring your checkbook. Sufficiency begins within each of us - and becoming a founder of the Global Sufficiency Network is a powerful way to declare your own sufficiency.

In the meantime, take a look at this video explanation by Lynn Twist of what sufficiency as a conversation is - and learn how you can shift your own view of life in a powerful way by creating a conversation for abundance.

Here is another video by Miriam Hawley - CEO of Enlignment Inc. - sharing her own take on the "Power of Enough."

As a final resource - I offer my own series of posts about changing the conversation of scarcity associated with the global economy - Transformational Economics.

The Brain Rewires Itself Long Term

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen have succeeded in demonstrating for the first time that the activities of large parts of the brain can be altered in the long term.

The theoretical backdrop for our Truehome process has proposed this - as have many in neuropsychology - for over a decade. Psychologist Donald Olding Hebb posited it as early as 1949.

These days it seems like a new study comes up every day that offers more evidence that the brain is constantly rewiring itself in response to its environment. This study once again proves that "your home is in your head" and that by altering your environment and relationships you are actually altering your brain - and therefore - your experience of life. Here is an excerpt from the article.

"Using a combination of functional magnetic resonance tomography, microstimulation and electrophysiology, the scientists were able to trace how large populations of nerve cells in the forebrain reorganize. This area of the brain is active when we remember something or orient ourselves spatially.

The insights gained here represent the first experimental proof that large parts of the brain change when learning processes take place. (Current Biology, March 10, 2009).

"Scientists refer to the characteristic whereby synapses, nerve cells or entire areas of the brain change depending on their use as neuronal plasticity. It is a fundamental mechanism for learning and memory processes.

"...when a nerve cell A permanently and repeatedly stimulates another nerve cell B, the synapse is altered in such a way that the signal transmission becomes more efficient. The membrane potential in the recipient neuron increases as a result.

"This learning process, whose duration can range from a few minutes to an entire lifetime, was intensively researched in the hippocampus.

"A large number of studies have since shown that the hippocampus plays an important role in memory capacity and spatial orientation in animals and humans. Like the cortex, the hippocampus consists of millions of nerve cells that are linked via synapses.

"The nerve cells communicate with each other through so-called "action potentials": electrical impulses that are sent from the transmitter cells to the recipient cells. If these action potentials become more frequent, faster or better coordinated, the signal transmission between the cells may be strengthened, resulting in a process called long-term potentiatation (LTP), whereby the transmission of the signal is strengthened permanently. The mechanism behind this process is seen as the basis of learning.

"Although the effects of long-term potentiation within the hippocampus have long been known, up to now it was unclear how synaptic changes in this structure can influence the activities of entire neuronal networks outside the hippocampus, for example cortical networks.

"The scientists working with Nikos Logothetis, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, have researched this phenomenon systematically for the first time. 'We succeeded in demonstrating long-term reorganization in nerve networks based on altered activity in the synapses,' explains Dr. Santiago Canals.'

"The changes were reflected in better communication between the brain hemispheres and the strengthening of networks in the limbic system and cortex. While the cortex is responsible for, among other things, sensory perception and movement, the limbic system processes emotions and is partly responsible for the emergence of instinctive behavior."

Learn more about this at Physorg.com.

Designing a New World

Transformational Economics VI - Last post in a 4-part series that begins HERE.

I want to finish this series of posts with questions for designers.

I often wonder if we are using the incredible human capital and innovative powers of that group effectively.

I often ask how much we are accomplishing towards "real world" applications of the possibilities we theorize about in architecture, interior design, software and systems design, product design, graphic design, organizational design and other design disciplines.

Values and experiences may also be designed. Cultures and systems of relationships can be designed. After all, what were Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the philosophers of the East doing? They were offering breakthrough designs for living constructively in relationship.

Mostly, those of us who are interested in design theory talk about these issues, but do not apply them with any real power. While I enjoy intellectual ferment - I think it is important to face what is at stake in the world right now and turn possibility into action.

In my life, these are the questions I ask about myself and my role on this planet.

"What do I have to contribute?

How am I positioned to make a difference?

How am I 'being'?

How could I 'be' that would make a bigger difference?

What impact might that have on the world around me?

What difference does what I say make to others?

What is possible if we all joined together in creating a powerful conversation?"

With whom can I collaborate?

What can we do together that makes a difference?

The battle for the intellectual high ground and the next new big idea or technology has a place in our explorations, but I am more interested in applied ideas and collaborative action that can make a real difference in people's lives now.

To become useful, possibilities must turn into structured research, plans, projects, grass roots movements and concerted action. It must turn into new technologies and patterns of shared behavior. That is what is required before the possibility of transformation can be fulfilled.

Perhaps looking at the cost of inaction might add a sense of urgency to our conversations.

We are in the midst of a global economic conundrum no one really understands. It's roots are psychological and embedded in words, but it effects are catastrophic for the well-being of people across the globe. There is no question many are dying as a result of what is going on now.

Yet we act as thought we have no idea what to do about it.

The Automaticity of Being and Buying

The roots of this crisis are profoundly related to the automaticity of human behavior - particularly around the dialectic between "budget VS desire" or "sustainable economics VS the emotional buy."

No matter how you frame it, the issue we face is that we as human beings are not very good at managing money in the face of chemical secretions in our brains.

Part of that is the "being of being human" that results from our physiology - the “animal we are” outside our pretense of uniqueness. Our emotional architecture plays out in our complex societies in complex ways.

But part of that automatic behavior is created consciously when we or the people who hire us design purely to stoke our self-interests - and ignore a sustainable ethic. As designers, we need to become "evangelists for a sustainable planet" and enroll our clients for their own benefit. It is part of serving them.

We live in a world where perceived value is largely disconnected from the possibility of "holistic designedness.” Too often, we fail to adopt an ethic that values sustainability and sufficiency; one that lives in the day to day human experience of real people and empowers economic fairness. Drive down any street in any city or turn on your TV and you can see the result of placing short term gain over long term results.

Markets and marketers – many of whom are in the design community - have long been focused on manipulating the unconscious automaticity of our most primitive internal motivations - social attachment, reproductive needs and impulsive consumption. This dominant ethic preys on that automaticity. It has no commitment to the well being of those who we serve. We are facing the consequences of those choices in our economy and our daily lives right now.

Globally that ethic remains the primary focus of our professions, despite what it has meant for the planet, our communities, our families and our personal well being. The cost is an economy that has proved unsustainable and epidemic proportions of the stress-related diseases of slow attrition like diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

So the cost of that "conversation" is very high and it is institutionalized.

Buying the right beer does not really give you more friends and having a hot automobile does not guarantee you will get laid. (Though in a world where everyone buys that story, it might help.) Shallow values produce shallow and unsustainable lives. We are over medicated, over eating, over reacting, over spending and overly anxious...and we don't really know what to do about it.

Every advertisement we see plays to our insecurities, anxieties and urges. What underlies that approach is an implication that the buyer is inadequate, insufficient and lacks good judgement or self discipline. That is the history of marketing, sales and graphic design and the same view has informed the actions of the design and construction industries in which I play. Short term sales is prioritized over both community, beauty and nature. Our built environment is an expression of who we are and we are becoming less related to other living things at an alarming rate.

On the Internet, user experience is most often directed towards making it easy and intuitive to sell something to someone - whether they need it or not. Why can't those same tools be directed towards designing more productive and fulfilling lives?

Everything is packaged. Not just products, but lives. Everything is disposable...including people. (Note the unemployment rate.) It is not who people are that matters but how they are perceived as agents in the marketplace. We sell to demographics and stereotypes, not individual people. Personal values are subconscious motivators mined to target advertising or political agendas.

Historical spiritual and ethical values are now now openly aspects of identity. Being a good person has become a story designed to make us look good, not a committed place to stand. Being honest is a way we want to be perceived, not a way to be. Being brave is a narrative...not a course of action.

This is not new. It is the being of being human - but we have evolved to the point that the possibility of stepping outside that paradigm exists. What we must see is that we created this environment for our children. It is not working and we have the power to change it. And until we do, what we have built will build us back.

Our Not-So-Secret Identities

Almost every action we take is related to our identity. Core ethical values are enmeshed in a social identity we present to others that often undermines them. Identity drives business - product design, marketing, advertising, sales methods, human resources and even research. As if psychological identity - ego as Freud would have it - does not cause enough problems for us in our relationships with one another, we now create identity as an industry and it is very much in demand.

What is missing that we are so desperate for created identities? Is it that we do not know who we are? What is the cost of that?

Creating Constructive Designedness

Whether you are a creationist or a Darwinian - no honest person can avoid the fact that we behave like primates. Despite our illusions of grandeur, the deep internal motivators that drive our unconscious choices are not going anywhere any time soon. You can call it original sin or pray to the gods of evolutionary psychology, but the end result is the same. There is not a person on the planet that truly walks their talk.

But that does not have to limit us. Human primates uniquely have the tool of introspection and the gifts of language, socio-cultural values and cooperation. With effort - as individuals and communities - we can step beyond our automatic behaviors and learn new concepts. We can create wonderful, workable, sustainable things. We can break old habits.

We can grow and make the impossible, possible.

What we designers sometimes forget in our high-minded discussions and lust for new technology is that people out there are losing their jobs and homes right now - and worse - that the majority of people on our planet live day to day, week to week and have very little backup in times like this.

The truth is, children are dying as a result of our behavior and if we in the West keep it up, it will be our children dying, not just those in underdeveloped nations. As a species, we are overpopulating and despoiling our planet and we seem to have very little control over our behavior.

Will only catastrophe make us stop? That is our history. Must it be our future?

Design is what those of us who make our living designing things can do about that impending catastrophe. ANYTHING made by man can be better designed, including our overall experience of life. And even when not perfected, designedness is usually an improvement over decisions that result from automatic reactions cued willfully by self-interested people tweaking the chemistry within our brains.

If profound human change occurs bottom up – and I assert it does - what is the possibility of seeking a design for self-awareness?

What is the possibility of designing wellbeing and full self expression?

What can be accomplished by creating designedness around sustainability?

What can be accomplished by creating designedness around sufficiency?

What can be accomplished out of creating designedness in relationships?

What can be accomplished around creating designedness around money management?

What can be accomplished by expanding a conversation for designedness beyond our professions into our relationships and the experience of our everyday lives?

We need to play bigger, expand possibilities and focus as though our own lives and the lives of our children are at stake - because they are.

The Nature-Technology Disconnect

There is another powerful paradigm shift we are juggling that has terrifying implications. It involves the "game of life."

I watched a video today from UX Weekend 2008 featuring Jane McGonigal - a game designer who was making an argument that the next thing in game design is "games as the perfect UX design for real life."

Many of her comments are far thinking. She is clearly a brilliant woman and I totally get a lot of what she is saying about the "real world" possibilities of games...but in one way her talk disturbed me. She thinks we should make the real world act more like a game.

She points out that 92% of kids between 3 and 18 in the U.S. play games at least once a week in America. I know my grandson spends hours most nights doing exactly that, as do his friends and uncounted millions of young people.

World of Warcraft's wiki is the second largest wiki in the world. It has 134,000 total pages and 5 million people visit it monthly. McGonigal sees it as a giant project to document that alternate universe. Her position is that "games work better than life." Time spent in game worlds is more valuable to those people than time spent is "reality."

I question whether most hard-core gamers have any experience of what "real life" really is from a biological or ecological point of view, at least non-domesticated life. We in the developed world are now so insulated by our technologies and our built environment - especially our young people - that most of us have little experience of free living ecosystems.

Very recently – for the first time in the history of our species - it became possible to live a virtual life and that experience is altering human physiology. We are no longer consistently impacted by the natural environment in which we evolved and that is having a profound impact on the "being of being human." We are losing a sense of the natural rhythms and flow of our planet.

I assert we have no concept of the long term consequences of such a change in who we are.

That transformation was not designed. It emerged bottom up and a new kind of humanity is arising out of it for better or worse.

Do we know what we are becoming? If we lose our connection to our home planet...how will be ever "be at home" with one another? Is there a developing schism between minds buried in machines and those still nested in the natural world?

If designers and design theorists cannot identify answers to those profound questions and find ways to implement the answers that arise in constructive ways, then who can?

If the design community cannot find them, then my last question is…who do we have to enroll in our conversations so that we can?

My commitment as a designer is to design a world that works for everyone.

What is yours?

Sustainability Posters from Davos Summit

It is fashionable to paint all corporate leaders as anti-environment, greedy and insensitive to the impact of their operations of their enterprises on environmental and sustainability issues.

But as I pointed out in my series of posts entitled Transforming the Global Economy, "we the people" need to stop painting all corporate and government leaders with the same cynical brush. The truth is that there are many champions of the environment, of economic fairness and sustainable technologies in the top tiers of the global economy and world governments.

Those of us who support these issues must separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to corporate and government leaders if our vision is to be fulfilled - and take action ourselves.

The concept maps shown on this post were presented at the Davos World Economic Forum to the CEOs of some fifty global corporations on January 29th, 2009. They were created by Professor M. P. Ranjan and collaborators at India's National Institute of Design and will soon be available for download on his blog - Design for India - in a printable format. Computer readable versions are on the blog now.

The top leaders of the Coca-Cola Company, Unilever, Land O'Lakes Inc., Nestlé SA, Monsanto Company, Young & Rubicam Inc., METRO Group, Best Buy Co. Inc., Yara International ASA, IDEO Inc., The Olayan Group, nGenera, The Reitan Group, S. C. Johnson & Son Inc., Kraft Foods Inc., General Mills Inc. and Dow Jones & Company Inc., amongst others saw the presentation.

Here is what Marcello Mastioni. the Associate Director, Head or Retail and Consumer Goods Industries and a Global Leadership Fellow of the World Economic Forum had to say about the quality of these concept maps.

"Everybody here expressed wonder and admiration on the work done. You have been very courageous to tackle such a complex systemic issue as Sustainability with an open universal approach, and then go through the immense task of distilling the discussions into meaningful conclusions and relevant visuals. You had success at your mission and you can proud of that. "

The visionary posters are entitled to illustrate the initiatives they propose:

Rethink Core Business Models (Essence Making)

Collaborate Along the Value Chain (Innovating Value Chains)

Meaningfully Engage Consumers (Co-Creation)

Innovate Out of Stuff Into Value (Dematerialize the Economy)

Explore Emergent Technology (Emergent Technology)

I strongly recommend anyone interested in these subjects review these concept maps as they represent some of the best thinking on the subject of transforming the global economy I have seen.

And after all, why leave all the fun (and the co-creation) to corporate leaders. We all need to re-create the economy by starting that revitalization in our conversations, homes and businesses.

Forget the Planet - Six: But Seriously Folks

(Sixth of seven related posts)

If you have made it this far in this article without leaving to writing a flaming post (…sure, kill the messenger), then perhaps you are starting to get my little tongue and cheek point here.

It is politically correct in this day and age to profess an interest in “saving the planet.”

Almost everyone thinks that is a good idea as long as they don’t have to alter their choice of automobiles, pay higher prices for gasoline, sort their trash more effectively, give up on plastic bags at the supermarket or go to any extra trouble in their day to day lives.

There were concerts all over the planet in the last couple of months hosting millions of young people jumping up and down with righteous glee at the prospect of forcing the evil capitalists and blind governments of the world to take global warming seriously.

All of them were dressed in trendy clothes sold by those capitalists, drove to the event in cars sold by those capitalists, drank soft drinks and alcohol hawked by those capitalists, and counted on the policemen herding them into the stadiums to keep them safe while they watch capitalistic entertainers give a “free concert.” That is, free except for the global publicity.

Those same kids feed the greenhouse gas spewing machine that our over-packaged disposable culture has created - and so do their parents – who are better known as “those capitalists”.

The bottom line is that the way we talk about the environment is a lie.

The environment is not out there. The environment is you.

The environment is everyone you know. The environment is your house, what’s in your shopping cart and in your body. The environment is how you live and how those around you live.

You and everyone you love is 100% made up of the environment. There is nothing in you, nothing you eat, nothing you do, nothing you think, nothing you feel, nothing you ever will do or eat or think or feel that is not an aspect of the environment.

The environment is all there is. You and I are just tiny, insignificant, and not particularly intelligent parts of it.

So if the environment is in trouble, you are in trouble. In fact, you are more at risk than most of the animals on the planet because you belong to a highly complex interdependent society that is quite fragile…much more fragile than the vast majority of the organisms on earth.

Because the vast majority of organisms on this planet are micro-organisms who have existed here for eons.

All it would take to throw human civilization into a terminal downspin is a chain reaction of bad things happening all in a row. And there are plenty of smart people with good science saying that is exactly what we are doing right now.

That means you and everyone you love is in trouble. That means if you want to survive yourself, you will take it seriously yourself.

And that is not going to be easy. It is not about wearing the right kind of T-shirt with the right kind of message on it. It is not even about recycling. It is not about buying a Toyota Prius (though that might help).

It’s about deciding that your life matters and facing the fact that you are connected to, and dependent upon, everyone else.

It is about admitting that we do not really know what we are doing here on this planet. It is about recognizing that we are acting like selfish impulsive children playing with fire.

Ultimately, it is about taming our animal urges…those automatic impulsive behaviors that religious people call sin. It is about taking responsibility for the lives of our children and grandchildren… not just the ones we breed ourselves, but the children and grandchildren of all our sisters and brothers across this tiny, remote planet.

It is about adopting a spirit of humility and facing the grave limitations inherent in being human, our lack of awareness of our automatic behaviors, and our penchant for putting off serious problems until we have no other choice but to face them.

It is about finding some way we can act together to create profound change in how we live as individuals in societies before it is too late…because we are not very good at that.

ACTION VS REACTION

Remember 9-11?

That sure launched us into action didn’t it?

Americans jumped into action right after Pearl Harbor.

We reacted to the needs of New Orleans…after Katrina.

We reacted with the flurry of bridge inspections across the nation…after the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

We reacted after the rise of Moslem fundamentalism.

We reacted after Rwanda and Cambodia and Darfur.

We reacted after the holocaust.

There were plenty of warnings before all those events and yet we did nothing until each horror became a reality.

Even today, we still do not act in Darfur, because they are not us. We do not see those folks as part of our environment. They are just strange looking black people on a parched continent far removed from our lives.

But what if America was Darfur?

What if 9-11 happened on a global scale?

What if the holocaust happened everywhere all at once?

I don’t mean to be a fatalist. I believe in being positive. There is still a chance people will begin to see how tiny and vulnerable we are here on this planet and cooperate for the common good.

But our automatic behaviors are driving us towards an environmental holocaust. Anyone who views the issue objectively can see that easily. Our overpopulation alone will lead to massive die offs, just as it does in any other species in every eco-system on the planet that overpopulates.

Either we will create our own destruction, or new predators – most likely micro-organisms – will arise, or we will simply out grow or poison the carrying capacity of our planet…and the system will collapse. That is what happens every time in nature, and always has down through the eons.

Are we really going to wait until that happens before we act?

Mother has her rules and we now know a lot about what they are. We just have to accept reality as reality.

But if the past is any indicator of what we will do in the future…then I am sorry to say we probably will keep going until we have used up all our chances.

Forget the Planet Seven is here: