Erika Harrison

Robert L. Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist and Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University. Trivers is most noted for proposing the theories of reciprocal altruism, parental investment, facultative sex ratiodetermination, and parent-offspring conflict. Other areas in which he has made influential contributions include an adaptive view of self-deception and intragenomic conflict.

Howard recounts some of his early work as an ‘Electronic Ethnologist’, dispels the myth of the digital native, and describes his latest experiments combining technology and pedagogy in participatory media. Drawing from master theorist of critical pedagogy, Paulo Friere, Howard speaks about scaling the banking model of education towards a new “Peeragogy”.

See more about Howard’s latest adventures at: http://www.rheingold.com/university

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“…Obama functioned as a brand in the same way that people of colour or HIV-positive models were used by Benetton and Calvin Klein — to associate their products with a risque lifestyle and progressive politics. But, as with a function of all brands, we confused a brand with an experience. Obama won Advertising Age’s top annual award “marketer of the year” because the professionals knew precisely what he’d done — he beat Nike, Apple, Zyppos. And that’s what he was — you know, to quote Cornel West, he became essentially a black mascot for Wall Street”.

Is Design Thinking Dead? Hell No

Bruce Nussbaum may have delivered his eulogy, but design thinking—in its best forms—still has a lot to offer.

Recently, Bruce Nussbaum rang the bell on design thinking and told us he is moving on. I was surprised at this. Nussbaum is one reason why design thinking exists in the first place. Following his lead, people staked their careers on design thinking. Corporations like Procter & Gamble have invested, hired, and re-organized to accommodate it. Yale created a course, Stanford a program, and the University of Toronto reshaped its B-school curriculum. IDEO and Jump nailed their colors to the mast.

Why the recantation? He says he’s got grounds. First, design thinking “has given the design profession and society at large all the benefits it has to offer.” Second, the corporation attempted to mechanize design thinking, diminishing it in the process.

Is Nussbaum right? Has design thinking delivered all the benefits it has to offer? Should we move on?

Design thinking empowered versatile problem solvers who worked well with messy data.

Design thinking brought something precious to the corporation: versatile problem solvers who worked well with messy data, complicated problem sets, and shifting business models. The corporation was beginning to grasp the immortal words of Van Morrison: “No guru, no method.” It was beginning to see that no simple orthodoxy (from McKinsey or elsewhere) was going to get the job done. Designers were good at mixing and matching perspectives and solutions. They were good at what Roger Martin called “opposable” analysis. They appeared to cross the hemispheric divide between left and right brains at will. They could “speak” the languages of “creativity” and “analysis” with something like equal fluency. As it stands, designers are the odds-on favorites for the Daniel Pink award in intellectual mobility.

This is not to say that design thinking is without fault. Take it from an anthropologist, some of the work it calls “ethnography” is fraudulently bad. The training is substandard, the practice is sloppy, and the true promise of ethnography—the nuanced understanding of how people think and feel—too often goes undelivered. Designers talk a good game about culture, but it is rare to see them address this critical deficit of the design-thinking model. As the Peter Arnell-Tropicana debacle shows, designers are sometimes still more interested in design culture than American culture. The designer can’t realistically talk about knowing culture unless this is made a systematic study, the object of a complete mapping. And I don’t ever hear the design community taking up this challenge. We can only imagine what design thinking could be if it put these things right.

The corporation is headed for open water and a perfect storm.

Still, this might be the wrong time to declare the design-thinking era over. The corporation, after all, is facing a new order of difficulty. It is headed for open water and a perfect storm, a great confusion filled with black swans and blindside hits. CEOs as accomplished as Andy Grove and thinkers as brilliant as Michael Raynor have declared the future inscrutable. Innovations once optional are now obligatory. New opportunities (a.k.a. blue oceans or white spaces) and constant self-transformation have become structural necessities. The business of management was once rule-bound, hierarchically organized, defined by precedent, governed by gurus. Now, it feels more like operating an aircraft carrier at night without the benefit of arc lights or radar. It’s scary out there.

In this world, designers can continue to create extraordinary value. They are the people who have, or could have, the laterality needed to solve problems, the sensing skills needed to hear what the world wants, and the databases required to build for the long haul and the big trajectories. Designers can be definers, making the world more intelligible, more habitable. But this won’t happen if, confronted by the inevitable difficulty of the early days, they take their balls and go home.

In sum, it is wrong to say that design thinking has given us “all the benefits it has to offer,” and it’s wrong to call it a “failed experiment.” I think we should be arguing that design thinking is just getting started. And a good thing, too; we need this approach more than we ever did.

[Image: Flickr user jcoterhals]

Grant McCracken

Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II, Plenitude, … Read more

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The lifting of a veil; that’s the true apocalypse

The original Mad Men

What can OWS learn from a defunct French avant-garde group?
BY GARY KAMIYA

Strange bedfellows don’t get any stranger than this. To the joy of a few dozen graduate students and culture jammers, and the utter bemusement of just about everybody else, the most significant American protest movement in years has been spending time under the sheets with an obscure French avant-garde movement whose ideas are so crazily millenarian they make Jacques Derrida look like Mitt Romney.

I’m referring to the peculiar liaison between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists – creators of one of those whacked-out intellectual commodities that have constituted France’s most lucrative cultural exports for more than a century.

The link between Occupy Wall Street and the Situationists is the Vancouver-based anti-consumerist magazine and organization Adbusters, whose call to occupy Wall Street kicked off the now-global protests. In a recent interview, Adbusters co-founder and editor Kalle Lassn told Salon’s Justin Elliott, “We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement.”

…

via salon.com

The Anthropocene

A man-made world

Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with

May 26th 2011 | from the print edition

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THE here and now are defined by astronomy and geology. Astronomy takes care of the here: a planet orbiting a yellow star embedded in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, a galaxy that is itself part of the Virgo supercluster, one of millions of similarly vast entities dotted through the sky. Geology deals with the now: the 10,000-year-old Holocene epoch, a peculiarly stable and clement part of the Quaternary period, a time distinguished by regular shifts into and out of ice ages. The Quaternary forms part of the 65m-year Cenozoic era, distinguished by the opening of the North Atlantic, the rise of the Himalayas, and the widespread presence of mammals and flowering plants. This era in turn marks the most recent part of the Phanerozoic aeon, the 540m-year chunk of the Earth’s history wherein rocks with fossils of complex organisms can be found. The regularity of celestial clockwork and the solid probity of rock give these co-ordinates a reassuring constancy.

Now there is a movement afoot to change humanity’s co-ordinates. In 2000 Paul Crutzen, an eminent atmospheric chemist, realised he no longer believed he was living in the Holocene. He was living in some other age, one shaped primarily by people. From their trawlers scraping the floors of the seas to their dams impounding sediment by the gigatonne, from their stripping of forests to their irrigation of farms, from their mile-deep mines to their melting of glaciers, humans were bringing about an age of planetary change. With a colleague, Eugene Stoermer, Dr Crutzen suggested this age be called the Anthropocene—“the recent age of man”.

The term has slowly picked up steam, both within the sciences (the International Commission on Stratigraphy, ultimate adjudicator of the geological time scale, is taking a formal interest) and beyond. This May statements on the environment by concerned Nobel laureates and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences both made prominent use of the term, capitalising on the way in which it dramatises the sheer scale of human activity.

The advent of the Anthropocene promises more, though, than a scientific nicety or a new way of grabbing the eco-jaded public’s attention. The term “paradigm shift” is bandied around with promiscuous ease. But for the natural sciences to make human activity central to its conception of the world, rather than a distraction, would mark such a shift for real. For centuries, science has progressed by making people peripheral. In the 16th century Nicolaus Copernicus moved the Earth from its privileged position at the centre of the universe. In the 18th James Hutton opened up depths of geological time that dwarf the narrow now. In the 19th Charles Darwin fitted humans onto a single twig of the evolving tree of life. As Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds, points out, embracing the Anthropocene as an idea means reversing this trend. It means treating humans not as insignificant observers of the natural world but as central to its workings, elemental in their force.

Sous la plage, les pavés

The most common way of distinguishing periods of geological time is by means of the fossils they contain. On this basis picking out the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come will be pretty easy. Cities will make particularly distinctive fossils. A city on a fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking deltas, undermined by the pumping of groundwater and starved of sediment by dams upstream, are common Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through its crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it is unlike anything else in the geological record.

The fossils of living creatures will be distinctive, too. Geologists define periods through assemblages of fossil life reliably found together. One of the characteristic markers of the Anthropocene will be the widespread remains of organisms that humans use, or that have adapted to life in a human-dominated world. According to studies by Erle Ellis, an ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the vast majority of ecosystems on the planet now reflect the presence of people. There are, for instance, more trees on farms than in wild forests. And these anthropogenic biomes are spread about the planet in a way that the ecological arrangements of the prehuman world were not. The fossil record of the Anthropocene will thus show a planetary ecosystem homogenised through domestication.

More sinisterly, there are the fossils that will not be found. Although it is not yet inevitable, scientists warn that if current trends of habitat loss continue, exacerbated by the effects of climate change, there could be an imminent and dramatic number of extinctions before long.

All these things would show future geologists that humans had been present. But though they might be diagnostic of the time in which humans lived, they would not necessarily show that those humans shaped their time in the way that people pushing the idea of the Anthropocene want to argue. The strong claim of those announcing the recent dawning of the age of man is that humans are not just spreading over the planet, but are changing the way it works.

Such workings are the province of Earth-system science, which sees the planet not just as a set of places, or as the subject of a history, but also as a system of forces, flows and feedbacks that act upon each other. This system can behave in distinctive and counterintuitive ways, including sometimes flipping suddenly from one state to another. To an Earth-system scientist the difference between the Quaternary period (which includes the Holocene) and the Neogene, which came before it, is not just what was living where, or what the sea level was; it is that in the Neogene the climate stayed stable whereas in the Quaternary it swung in and out of a series of ice ages. The Earth worked differently in the two periods.

The clearest evidence for the system working differently in the Anthropocene comes from the recycling systems on which life depends for various crucial elements. In the past couple of centuries people have released quantities of fossil carbon that the planet took hundreds of millions of years to store away. This has given them a commanding role in the planet’s carbon cycle.

Although the natural fluxes of carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere are still more than ten times larger than the amount that humans put in every year by burning fossil fuels, the human addition matters disproportionately because it unbalances those natural flows. As Mr Micawber wisely pointed out, a small change in income can, in the absence of a compensating change in outlays, have a disastrous effect. The result of putting more carbon into the atmosphere than can be taken out of it is a warmer climate, a melting Arctic, higher sea levels, improvements in the photosynthetic efficiency of many plants, an intensification of the hydrologic cycle of evaporation and precipitation, and new ocean chemistry.

All of these have knock-on effects both on people and on the processes of the planet. More rain means more weathering of mountains. More efficient photosynthesis means less evaporation from croplands. And the changes in ocean chemistry are the sort of thing that can be expected to have a direct effect on the geological record if carbon levels rise far enough.

At a recent meeting of the Geological Society of London that was devoted to thinking about the Anthropocene and its geological record, Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton pointed out that pale carbonate sediments—limestones, chalks and the like—cannot be laid down below what is called a “carbonate compensation depth”. And changes in chemistry brought about by the fossil-fuel carbon now accumulating in the ocean will raise the carbonate compensation depth, rather as a warmer atmosphere raises the snowline on mountains. Some ocean floors which are shallow enough for carbonates to precipitate out as sediment in current conditions will be out of the game when the compensation depth has risen, like ski resorts too low on a warming alp. New carbonates will no longer be laid down. Old ones will dissolve. This change in patterns of deep-ocean sedimentation will result in a curious, dark band of carbonate-free rock—rather like that which is seen in sediments from the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, an episode of severe greenhouse warming brought on by the release of pent-up carbon 56m years ago.

The fix is in

No Dickensian insights are necessary to appreciate the scale of human intervention in the nitrogen cycle. One crucial part of this cycle—the fixing of pure nitrogen from the atmosphere into useful nitrogen-containing chemicals—depends more or less entirely on living things (lightning helps a bit). And the living things doing most of that work are now people (see chart). By adding industrial clout to the efforts of the microbes that used to do the job single-handed, humans have increased the annual amount of nitrogen fixed on land by more than 150%. Some of this is accidental. Burning fossil fuels tends to oxidise nitrogen at the same time. The majority is done on purpose, mostly to make fertilisers. This has a variety of unwholesome consequences, most importantly the increasing number of coastal “dead zones” caused by algal blooms feeding on fertiliser-rich run-off waters.

Dreams of a smart planet

That is an extreme example, though. No new ice age is due for some millennia to come. Nevertheless, to see the Anthropocene as a blip that can be minimised, and from which the planet, and its people, can simply revert to the status quo, may be to underestimate the sheer scale of what is going on.

Take energy. At the moment the amount of energy people use is part of what makes the Anthropocene problematic, because of the carbon dioxide given off. That problem will not be solved soon enough to avert significant climate change unless the Earth system is a lot less prone to climate change than most scientists think. But that does not mean it will not be solved at all. And some of the zero-carbon energy systems that solve it—continent- scale electric grids distributing solar energy collected in deserts, perhaps, or advanced nuclear power of some sort—could, in time, be scaled up to provide much more energy than today’s power systems do. As much as 100 clean terawatts, compared to today’s dirty 15TW, is not inconceivable for the 22nd century. That would mean humanity was producing roughly as much useful energy as all the world’s photosynthesis combined.

In a fascinating recent book, “Revolutions that Made the Earth”, Timothy Lenton and Andrew Watson, Earth-system scientists at the universities of Exeter and East Anglia respectively, argue that large changes in the amount of energy available to the biosphere have, in the past, always marked large transitions in the way the world works. They have a particular interest in the jumps in the level of atmospheric oxygen seen about 2.4 billion years ago and 600m years ago. Because oxygen is a particularly good way of getting energy out of organic matter (if it weren’t, there would be no point in breathing) these shifts increased sharply the amount of energy available to the Earth’s living things. That may well be why both of those jumps seem to be associated with subsequent evolutionary leaps—the advent of complex cells, in the first place, and of large animals, in the second. Though the details of those links are hazy, there is no doubt that in their aftermath the rules by which the Earth system operated had changed.

The growing availability of solar or nuclear energy over the coming centuries could mark the greatest new energy resource since the second of those planetary oxidations, 600m years ago—a change in the same class as the greatest the Earth system has ever seen. Dr Lenton (who is also one of the creators of the planetary-boundaries concept) and Dr Watson suggest that energy might be used to change the hydrologic cycle with massive desalination equipment, or to speed up the carbon cycle by drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide, or to drive new recycling systems devoted to tin and copper and the many other metals as vital to industrial life as carbon and nitrogen are to living tissue. Better to embrace the Anthropocene’s potential as a revolution in the way the Earth system works, they argue, than to try to retreat onto a low-impact path that runs the risk of global immiseration.

Such a choice is possible because of the most fundamental change in Earth history that the Anthropocene marks: the emergence of a form of intelligence that allows new ways of being to be imagined and, through co-operation and innovation, to be achieved. The lessons of science, from Copernicus to Darwin, encourage people to dismiss such special pleading. So do all manner of cultural warnings, from the hubris around which Greek tragedies are built to the lamentation of King David’s preacher: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…the Earth abideth for ever…and there is no new thing under the sun.” But the lamentation of vanity can be false modesty. On a planetary scale, intelligence is something genuinely new and powerful. Through the domestication of plants and animals intelligence has remade the living environment. Through industry it has disrupted the key biogeochemical cycles. For good or ill, it will do yet more.

It may seem nonsense to think of the (probably sceptical) intelligence with which you interpret these words as something on a par with plate tectonics or photosynthesis. But dam by dam, mine by mine, farm by farm and city by city it is remaking the Earth before your eyes.

from the print edition | Briefing

In this RSA Animate, Steven Pinker shows us how the mind turns the finite building blocks of language into infinite meanings. View the full lecture at the RSA.