Saul Griffith is always worth paying attention to – and his recent work at Rewiring America is no exception.
The way he breaks down the climate challenge into daunting-but-doable tasks is inspiring.
Making water heaters and kitchen appliances as appealing as Teslas is going to be hard-but-rewarding work for designers and engineers over the next decade.
As he says on his site:
I think our failure on fixing climate change is just a rhetorical failure of imagination.
We haven’t been able to convince ourselves that it’s going to be great.
The sketched graph above is taken from Saul’s recent keynote for the Verge Electrify conference, which is on youtube, takes 12mins to watch, and is well worth it.
From Ravensbourne’s excellent archive of BBC motion graphics:
A series of ten programmes about improving your thinking skills. Dr Edward de Bono showed that thinking, rather like cooking, was a skill which could be improved by attention and practice. The idea was to symbolically represent the scrambled brain, which then unscrambled and revealed the name of the programme. The artwork was done by hand without the aid of a computer, as this was created in the pre-digital era. The artwork was produced as black on white drawings pegged together in register. These were then copied photographically and printed in negative on Kodalith films and shot on a 35mm rostrum camera with red cinemoid gel behind the liths to add colour. The artwork had to be exceptionally precise, as if computer generated, in order not to shimmer and wobble. The glow was achieved by using a filter in the lens of the camera.
Take all your hate and all your fear with you And blast them into the blue
Building your walls to keep them out Building your stash to wipe them out You staked your claim on planets new You built your ship and up you flew Looking back on the world below Safe from the damage and woe But you cannot play golf in space
Take all your hate and all your fear Take all your hate and all your fear Take all your hate and all your fear with you And blast them into the blue
Platinum club for psychopaths Draining the tank with dirty maths Plundering all to gild the few You built your ships and up you flew Infinity pool on Ganymede You took so much more than you need But you cannot play golf in space
Take all your hatе and all your fear Take all your hate and all your fеar Take all your hate and all your fear with you And blast them into the blue
I’m in love with the track for a number of reasons – it sounds as if Steeleye Span had been born on a Generation Ship.
It could have only been written in these times.
The punch of some of those couplets. Oof.
Perhaps it will survive the new dark ages and be sung acapella – a ‘Gaudete‘ for the 24th Century – by our descendents in Jupiter space.
I wish Mr Bezos well, and hope that perhaps he gives the track a listen.
Platinum club for psychopaths Draining the tank with dirty maths Plundering all to gild the few You built your ships and up you flew Infinity pool on Ganymede You took so much more than you need But you cannot play golf in space.
As I spotted them, the Jump bikes resonated with this – a fleet of physical objects in the city that had moved from one distant company to another beneath the API, probably re-branded and maintained by humans beneath another…
Transformation of the Cellular Landscape through a Eukaryotic Cell, by Evan Ingersoll / Gael McGill & Digizyme’s Custom Maya Molecular Software / Biología Al Instante
Nature, she’s not so simple as she looks to the nekkid eye, but lots of folks still like to understand her on the basis of the nekkid eye. Flat earth, masks do nothing, etc.
The first thing I would do is hire a team of DOE artists in residence. We need ideas and creativity. These artists would fulfill a role similar to the NASA art program that began in 1962 which was critical to filling the American imagination with the possibilities of space travel, the adventure, the future, the wonder. In the 50 years since Earth Day, an enormous number of column-inches have been written about our deteriorating environment (and more recently deteriorating climate) but not enough about visions for what success looks like for humanity. The DOE artists-in-residence would go to work showing us what the future of cleaner electrified building stock would look like, how much cleaner our streets and air will be with electric cars and new electric transit modes, including electric flight. We’d see verdant pictures of the future of regenerative agriculture and an even more productive carbon sequestering food system that also makes more space for wildness and national park and recreation areas. You might find it odd that the first thing I’d do at DOE is make art, but this is critical, we need a shared vision of where we are going, one of abundance and success and of the U.S. winning, if we are to get the popular buy-in and acceptance we need to address climate change in earnest and at scale.
It imagines a counterfactual history of the 1980s where Jimmy Carter beats Reagan – and the USA embarks on an Apollo/Manhattan Project scale of investment in renewable energy independence.
Sascha is remembered this weekend by friends and collaborators at this event “Pohflepp in Practice”.
I’m sure he would have brought the curiosity and vision that Saul is searching for – with a twist of humor and criticality.
Injecting humanity and humility into the technological hubris of a possible future, while maintaining an essential central optimism – which for me was his trademark.
My unedited responses to Theo’s questions for the article in full are below.
Paul was an incredible artist, activist and a wonderful friend to my dad – I’m so glad he’s getting this recognition now.
How did you know Paul Peter Piech?
He was a good friend of my father – who ran a small picture framers in Porthcawl, where Peter had settled. Peter came in most weeks – initially to get things framed, but also after a while to sit and chat with my dad while he worked. This was the late 80s I think, as I was still in comprehensive school. I also worked after school and weekends in a local printers, and Peter would occasionally come in there for photocopying.
What we he like when you knew him?
Well – at one level he was this very friendly, curious obviously intelligent old man. A bit of a Yoda figure in a way! He was also probably the first American I’d ever met! He spoke like the movies! He was very indulgent of my questions and didn’t ever talk down to me. He knew I aspired to work in graphic design at the time and was studying art, working at a printer’s after school etc. and he was very encouraging. It was also one of those things where for the first time I saw my dad talk to another grown-up and have proper debate. They’d argue (good naturedly) for hours about anyting – politics, religion, philosophy, science, art – and often Paul would get the better of my father!
Were you aware of his background working in advertising and did he ever talk about it?
No not at all – I only really knew of that through my Dad. Paul was more interested in talking about human rights, philosophers or art – which I think he saw as central to his ‘second career’. I only later really learned about that side of his career, unfortunately mainly in obituaries.
What do you remember most about him?
I remember an incredible energy and restlessness alongside huge curiosity and kindness. I was very lucky to have met him in such a formative time in my life – and his influence on me was enormous. I don’t know if it’s down to him that I ended up living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan twenty years later but I like to think he set me on my way.
Petafloptimism 