FORTY

Image © Jose & MidJourney

I consider myself a very lucky guy, I continue to work at what I was trained to do, I continue to love what I do, and I have been paid to do what I love most of my life. With the typical ups & downs, and if you add to it that I consider myself pretty healthy, I’m a very lucky guy. Above all, I am still curious, and I am still learning, every day.

One of the things I love doing most is to be invited to mentor and judge in different institutions connected to design and/ or innovation. I make time to be a part of this, I do it pro-bono and I consider myself lucky to be invited, right now I am involved with Mass Challenge as a mentor and jury member (always impressed by the quality of mentors they can bring to the room to support start-up’s), CoDesign Collaborative as a Council member (love their focus, the energy and intent behind everything they do). I have a side gig at MassArt where I teach a semester on design leadership to their MDES (such a great institution in the intersection of art & design).

Sporadically I am invited to participate as a jury in design competitions, I have done that for many years with several international ones, and the other week I was going through the work of students submitting their work to Arts Thread. This type of work is always challenging, for years I was on the other side of these competitions, submitting to them and hoping I’d get some awards. I got my fair share, but from very early I understood the probabilities and had some idea of the complexity of judging these competitions. But now that I am on this side, I can tell you that it is always a moment where you really need to trust your experience and gut, the time allocated to do these exercises is hardly ever enough for more, so it comes down to the quantity and quality of the jury. For me, the best is always when we sit around and discuss our choices, especially the extreme ones.

While going through the work of the students, I came across a submission by Dawoon Yim from the Royal College of Art, a project called Habitide. The project is focused on a section of the Thames, and in the description, it states that “In the 1990s, over 480 shopping trolleys were removed from the riverbed. This led to an unexpected 50% decline in Deptford Creek’s fish population, as the lattice structures of the trolleys served as refuges for young fish against bigger predators during tides, while also creating a stable internal structure protected from the strong currents.” It hit me. I understand, it is almost obvious that something so obviously out-of-place as shopping trolleys in a river would be the source of a long, arduous process of extracting them from that environment, and something tells me some science folks might have warned about the unintended consequences but I can see how the majority of folks thought his was a great idea, and were probably shocked when the data started flowing in. Dawoon proposed a lattice structure made by “…recycling salmon bones from local fisheries, repurposing clay from construction sites, and modifying sodium alginate from brown algae. It enhances water quality by absorbing and immobilizing pollutants like lead, cadmium, and copper. With its solid adsorbents like clay and its capacity to capture substances such as phosphates, HabiTide can absorb up to 2.57 kg of heavy metals, effectively purifying the water.” Clever, right? Nonetheless, a man-made solution to make up for a man-made decision to clean up a man-made mess, and someone may ask if it wasn’t a better idea to let the shopping trolleys inside the river, better yet, if we should not start throwing all the used and broken shopping trolleys into rivers (bad idea for a number of reasons, but you get my point…).

My mind drifted into two separate directions. One towards Amsterdam and their problem with bicycles that end up in the bottom of the canals, it’s estimated that between 12,000 and 20,000 bikes are pulled from the city’s 165 canals annually. From my understanding, along with the boats that travel the canals, the aquatic life might be limited, and the fish that might exist in these canals might not be the best choice for human consumption. I assume if these bicycles were not dredged out, the boats could not circulate, so decisions tied to tourism revenue are also tied to that. Complicated.

The other toward something that fascinated me the first time I went to Florence and, while visiting a church noticed the dark watermark halfway up the walls. We were told that there was a flood disaster caused by the collapse of a dam in 1996. The streets of Florence were under water and mud, up to >20 feet, and triggered a massive international response. Folks arrived from everywhere to help clean up, but there was a big debate on restoring everything to its original condition, or to leave visible reminders of the disaster, symbolizing the event as a historical marker.

What connects these things, at least in my head, is the impact and limits of human actions, weather by causing damage, or by attempting to fix it. I agree that it might be hard to consider all the systemic unintended consequences of complex decision making tied to any human action, I wonder if Artificial Intelligence may help us crunch all the data that exists from past learnings and help us make better decisions. This might already be happening as we speak, will those that have an agenda contrary to the AI recommendation manipulate the answers or ‘kill the messenger’ if they don’t like the message? Hope not.