Photo from Gum Election via Wooster

The debate over the American Election has been fierce over the last few months. Obama has been running some negative ads, especially hammering home links between John McCain and the Bush/Cheney camp. For the most part though, his campaign has been more issues based. His 30 minute prime-time did not mention McCain or Palin at all.

McCain’s campaign, on the other hand, has seemingly consisted almost entirely of ads which attack or demean Obama in some way, linking him to William Ayers, claiming he’s a socialist, or what have you. I’m sure many of these ads are effective, but they all have one thing in common: they’re all about Obama. They don’t mention what McCain will do, only what he won’t.

The situation has thus pretty-much become a referendum on Obama. The two choices being Obama and not-Obama, instead of Obama vs. McCain.

Regardless of the outcome tomorrow, I think this has been a tragic flaw in the Republican campaign. From the outset they have been behind on the issues that matter. McCain has been catching-up in trying to embody change, encouraging economic regulation, reforming health care, and speaking to the middle and lower classes. Obama has been hammering these points from day one, and in too many cases that has allowed him to shape the debate that followed.

If McCain loses tomorrow, as I hope he does, I think this will be a big reason — He has purposely kept the eyes of the public on his opponent, not on himself.

This American Life has a good rundown on the financial crisis. For those of you like myself who are outside of the U.S. of A, the TAL podcast is a must-listen, but this episode in particular helped explain a lot of things which were otherwise a little opaque and complicated.

A frightening take on the economy. It’s hard to not be pessimistic right now, but it seems we should eschew a growth-based economy for something more resilient. My eyes are on the Resilience community (an offshoot of biological studies). I haven’t seen much from them in the wake of the current crisis.

THE INTRODUCTION

I think I need to come out and say that first of all, I don’t own a car. I use them from time to time, but I find something slightly off-putting about automotive culture in general, and something fundamentally wrong with the fabric of cities that come out of our exaggerated car-centric society. Still, I need to interact with cars every day, and couldn’t avoid them if I tried.

This concept was inspired by a situation I’m sure many of you have been in. I was in a rental car, stopped at a light on a dark night. I saw a friend on foot crossing the street right a little ways in front of me. I tried gently tapping the horn, in hopes of making a friendly little beep. Instead, the car spewed out an angry-sounding honk, and the friend of mine, not knowing who I was, promptly gave me the finger.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

Drivers, for the most part, are largely anonymous to the other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists they interact with. On foot, if you cut someone off or act rudely, you risk being in a direct confrontation. In a car, you’re not only usually shrouded from view, your only methods of communication are essentially your horn, flashing your lights, or revving your engine. All are ambiguous at best, aggressive at worst. I’m sure I’m not alone in asserting that driving does not bring out the best in people.

There are a lot of things you often can’t express while driving. You can’t say sorry for a mistake, you can’t say hello, and yes, sometimes you can’t express the anger you wish you could.

MY DESIGN

This concept takes the idea of the horn but multiplies it. In this case there are three horns which each make a different sound. The goal being to provide the driver with multiple ways of expressing themselves through series of short, musical tones.

Happy: Plays happy notes, useful for saying hello or “after you”.

Sad: Apologetic notes, useful for saying sorry.

Angry: Says what sometimes needs to be said.

As an alternate idea, I would try making the angry button much smaller than the other two, in hopes that people would only use it when they really had to.

The driver will likely never be able to express themselves as clearly as they would while walking or biking, but the goal is to provide them with better communication tools than they have.

CONCLUSION

In the end, this is more of an art piece than a true design concept. I have not looked into the legal or technical limitations, nor do I know if it would have any real impact if put in the real world.

Driving has come to be an awkward hybrid of a public and a private space. In many ways, it borrows some of the worst qualities from each one - you interact with many people, but in a way that’s anonymous and unpleasant. This is no magic bullet, but hopefully gets people thinking about the way that drivers interact with the world around them.

Giant Cow Heads Found in Abandoned Building

Maybe it’s a sign that my “real life” commitments getting the best of me since I keep linking to Walking Turcott Yards instead of writing my own stuff, but I really liked this post about some old advertising icons that were discovered somewhere unexpected.

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Redefining Waiting

A neat little story about how a landlord stopped complaints about elevator wait times by installing mirrors, which proved distracting enough to keep people occupied.

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A Year of Heavy Losses

The New York times has a little interactive chart showing which American financial companies have lost what over the last few days.

Yesterday I went into my local, family-owned, print shop to buy some office supplies. I didn’t have any cash on me, and I paid by debit card. As I was walking out of the store I saw something else I wanted which sold for $2. I turned around and went back to the cashier, but was told there was a $5 minimum on debit purchases. I turned around to look for something else I might need, so I could pad out my bill, but he stopped me and just said “it’s ok, pay next time”.

I was floored. It’s a small thing, yes, but it was the sort of human gesture which made all the difference and made me all the more loyal to their store. It cost them nothing in the end, since I went back the next day to pay them back (and do some printing I needed to do anyhow).

I contrast that with experiences I’ve had at national chains, where the clerk has zero autonomy and can’t make any decisions. It can range anywhere from “I can’t make change for you unless you make a purchase” to the blatant apathy shown by too many retail clerks these days.

I don’t mean to pick on large chains - some of them have good service. Conversely, many family-owned businesses have awful service. If you take the time to find the good ones though, it really pays off.

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On the theme of being nice - I was downtown this morning, and happened to be looking at some ugly cigarette butts someone had thrown on the sidewalk. Just then a city maintenance worker just happened to come by to sweep them up. I know this sounds cheesy, but I said “thank you.”

His smile made me realize it’s probably not the sort of thing he hears often enough, even though it is important work.

Note: This is the first post in what might become a regular series of posts from guest writers. Our first writer is Montréal-based Sylvan Lanken, who has been deeply concerned with environmental and social issues for as long as I can remember. His pieces, as currently planned, will center around information culled from the Canadian Census.

The table below was constructed using data from the 2001 Census of Canada. I chose to include the largest city in each of the ten provinces, and arranged these cities in alphabetical order. In each category, I highlighted the “best” and “worst” values, according to my own views on the environment and society. The exception to this was in the last column, the percentage of commuters traveling by car as passengers. While a higher value is arguably better than a lower one, the fact remains that these commuters are traveling by car as opposed to more sustainable methods.

Commuting Methods in Ten Canadian Cities

Source: 2001 Census of Canada

Statistics used are for the cities proper, as opposed to those for greater metropolitan areas

Inadequate public transit is a chronic problem in Canada, and there’s no single reason why this is the case. A lack of transportation planning and vision at all levels of government, unchecked suburban growth, and an entrenched car culture, among other factors, are to blame. Even so, I was surprised to find that, except for Montréal and Toronto, less than a fifth of commuters in these cities use public transit. And, alarmingly, more than half of all commuters drive to and from their place of work in all cities except Montréal.

NYC Bike Rack Design Competition

A jury including David Byrne is judging a competition to come up with a design for bike racks for New York City. The finalists are up and the winner is going to be announced in October.

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Smart Cookie

A cookie designed with a small indent for removing it from the package without breaking it. Pretty dang smart.

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Trading Places - The Demographic Inversion of the American City

This article from The New Republic examines what they call Demographic Inversion, a process allegedly occurring in some American Cities where affluent middle-classers from the suburbs are moving back into downtown urban environments, while poor inner-city minority populations are moving outside the city. I don’t think Houston is going to turn into Paris anytime soon, but the author cites Chicago as a prime example of a city where the process is already underway. I can definitely see signs of it here in my home of Montréal, where small urban condos are getting ever pricier, and formerly-working class inner-city neighborhoods are gentrifying like lightning.

Resilience Theory attempts to analyze what makes ecological systems resilient, and use that as guidelines for applying it to a huge variety of other fields. The goal is to make systems resilient to unknown future shocks which might disrupt the system. One of the central tenets of the idea is that we won’t necessarily know what those disruptions will be, but we know that certain conditions will be more resilient to shocks than others. It is an extremely cross-disciplinary approach that attempts to explain phenomena in a wide variety of areas.

For example, ecological systems are generally most resilient when they exhibit large amounts of biodiversity. If the environment changes suddenly, chances are higher in a widely diverse system that at least some members of that system will be able to adapt into new niches.

Monocultures can be extremely effective for a time, but failures in the system can often be catastrophic. The Irish, for example, thrived for a time almost exclusively on potatoes, until the potato blight destroyed a huge portion of the crop and led to the starvation of millions. Many businesses thrive doing one thing extremely well, only to suffer when the market changed (think Polaroid, for example, which is slowly collapsing because of their reliance on the instant film market, which is itself in rapid decline).

This concept could also apply to many other facets of society. Our utter reliance on oil might soon prove to be an excellent example, as our supply looks ever more depleted, and rising costs look to make oil and its byproducts more expensive. We are utterly dependent on cheap oil for transportation, heating, and agriculture, but we aren’t working as hard as we could to create viable alternatives. Resilience theory posits that moving away from our dependance on oil would be good not just for the environment, it would also make our society more resilient to unknown shocks. We should have known better than to be so utterly reliant on something as unstable as oil.

This is just the very tip of the iceberg - the field looks at different states of equilibrium and attempts to show how and why systems balance themselves in different states, and how systems can often tip very quickly from one self-organized state to another. If global warming increases temperatures much more than 2 degrees centigrade, it’s worried that a bevy of further events - evaporating methane reserves under the arctic, desertification of the Amazon rainforest, and changes in reflective albedo could usher in a sort of quick flip to an even hotter state of equilibrium in a very short time. By all accounts it is extremely important to avoid hitting that point. The closer we move to it, the greater our risk.

A diagram showing two hypothetical steady states as balls lying on a curved surface. If the ball is pushed beyond a certain point, it might be pushed past a peak, at which point it could fall into a different trough.

An important aspect of Resilience theory is to study how and why these sudden shifts, or regime changes, take place. A standard maximization approach on a system (let’s say fisheries) may, in an attempt to get the highest possible yields, come closer to a threshold of regime change than they otherwise should. Resilience theory makes a point of studying how this works, and urges caution in such areas.

“Our focus should not be on constancy,” says father of resilience study Buzz Holling, “but on variability. Not on single equilibrium, but on events far from equilibria at the stability boundaries. That’s where the action was, that’s where evolution took place. That’s where the turbulence of nature occured upon which adaptive changes created new species, or new policies . . . these systems have multi-stable states, and they can flip from one to another. And if you don’t attend to the boundaries of stability, you’re losing the game. Variability is extremely important . . .”

Holling also cites a somewhat predictable cycle of boom, bust, and renewal which can be applied to everything from businesses, to forests, to ocean fisheries, to politics. Holling describes a business becoming very effective at one thing, specializing, becoming dependent on than one thing, becoming too rigid and resistant to change, going bust and then rebuilding itself with a new board and new direction as being rather similar to a forest maturing from a diverse polycultural grassland, into an old growth forest before being gutted by a forest fire and reverting back to small and diverse growth.

When something goes catastrophically wrong, it can be easy to blame the people immediately involved. They get lazy, tired, bored, distracted, jealous, or into any number of other possible mental states which can cloud judgement and lead to mistakes. When inevitable disasters occur, the short-term approach is to blame human error, but in many cases the longer-term approach is to blame the system and correct it instead. That isn’t to say that humans are never at fault - they are often grossly incompetent, but sometimes they receive blame which should rightly be aimed higher, at the system they work within.

David Sanborn Scott, explained the title of his book, Smelling Land , with this classic legend of a fleet of ships in a fog:

It is told that when the fleet was still some distance off the islands, a cabin boy came to the admiralâ??s stateroom to say, â??Sir, I smell land. I think we should heave-to until the fog clears.â?? Advice from a cabin boy to an admiral of the Royal Navy was neither expected nor welcome-especially not in 1707, and especially not to Admiral Cloudesley Shovell. The boy was reprimanded and sent away. Yet he must have gone on deck for another whiff, because soon he was back at the admiralâ??s door, no doubt apprehensive, but not enough to stop him repeating his warning: â??Sir, I smell land. I think we should put about.â?? And that is why he was swinging from the yardarm when the fleet crunched ashore on the land he had been smelling.

The easy response to the story is to blame the Admiral - blame he deserves - but it is also important to call into question the overly hierarchical navy structure of the time. While the truth of the story can’t be verified, as the fleet was largely lost (and roughly 1400 men with it) the story is a good parable for many organizations. Had the culture been a little more bottom-up, rather than top-down, maybe it wouldn’t have happened.

James Reason, in his article for the British Medical Journal, asserts that the role of culture in an organization plays a large role in how reliable, safe, and mistake-prone they are. Open, bottom-up, and “just” organizations are more likely to be less mistake-prone. He uses the example of the Chernobyl disaster, a disaster in which bad policies, faulty design, and lack of education turned a test of operations into a literal meltdown. The lack of a reporting culture in the USSR was the underlying cause, which itself was caused by a lack of trust between the top and bottom of the hierarchy. Nobody was willing to speak up about their lack of education on what they were doing, or on the faulty design of the control mechanisms in place. They didn’t want to be the cabin boy who smelled land.

Fixing cultures and other such larger systems is much more difficult than blaming whoever was at the instrument panel when things took a turn for the worst. As James Reason puts it “Blaming individuals is emotionally more satisfying than targeting institutions.”