William Pearson: planets, 1813

A drawing of a machine to illustrate the orbits of the planets.  It appears to owe much to clock and watch mechanisms, cogs and wheels: the largest system illustrated by the smallest devices at the time.

Planetary Machines, Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, Vol 16. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1830

engineered cementitious composites

ECC incorporates super fine (100 microns in diameter) silica sand and tiny polyvinyl alcohol-fibres covered with a very thin (nanometer thick), slick coating. ECC has a strain capacity of 3%, regular concrete has a strain capacity of 0.1%.

ECC: a ductile concrete that does not use coarse aggregate and does include a coated network of fine polymer fibres within the cement that allow it to slide under stress, so no irreparable breaches, just thousands of fine cracks, dusted with cement, that self-repair with water.  

Engineered cement composites were developed at the University of Michigan by Victor Li in the early 1990s.  Although fibre reinforcement comes in many modes; the ECC uses micro-scale (10 micron) fibres that actually bond the cement within the concrete. They introduce a plasticity that allows the concrete to deform rather than break. In a paper by Victor Li, the abstract states: Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) is a material micromechanically designed with high ductility and toughness indicated by multiple micro-cracking behavior under uniaxial tension.

Neat.  Apparently ECC is of great use in bridge repairs where there is an incompatibility between old concrete under stress and new normal concrete patched in, which is both shrinking and calcifying at a different rate, introducing weakness at the old/new interface.  ECC's flexibility – its internal slipperiness – does not allow it to shrink and crack.  And in  2003 in Japan where most of the applications seem to be, it was sprayed in a 20mm layer over 600m2 of the aging, cracking, leaking and spalling Mitaka Dam.

To add to all of this wonderfulness is that its life cycle costs are lower than conventional concrete (tested on bridge deck systems: agency costs – material, construction, and end-of-life costs, plus social costs – emissions damage costs from agency activities, and vehicle congestion, user delay, vehicle crash and vehicle operating costs. These costs were estimated across all life-cycle stages (material production, construction, use, and end of life) over a 60-year analysis period.)

At 40 times lighter than conventional concrete, and with its bendiness, clearly it is headed towards earthquake zones, which perhaps is why it is well-deployed in Japan.  Life cycle costs can be misleading: although over a 60 year period it might be less expensive than ordinary concrete construction, I'll bet those little polyvinyl alcohol fibres with their slidey nano-coating cost a bundle, and are inaccessible to most of the people so devasted, and so regularly, by earthquakes.

weak systems

Massound Hassani. Mine Kafon, 2011

This is Massoud Hassani's Eindhoven graduation project, Mine Kafon, a lightweight bamboo and plastic large dandelion puff that is blown by the wind over mined fields, detonating the mine and destroying itself in the process.

It is interesting, that the detonater was not conceived of as a large, mechanical force of technology that rolls over mines, survives them, and rolls on to the next land mine.  Like children who mostly detonate land mines, this is a lightweight, expendable, one-time use detonator.  Each unit contains a GPS that maps where it has been, showing areas that are safe.
It was tested by the Ministry of Defence of the Netherlands, and a second version is being developed that moves less randomly and is not so reliant on the wind.  It is likely to be used to indicate a mined area, rather than clearing the area.  Thus in the development process it becomes more controllable, probably heavier.  

Hassani is from Kabul, smuggled out at 14, ending up in the Netherlands in 1998.  On his website he talks about flying kites as a child and making other small things that caught the wind, the genesis of this project.  The project has won a slew of awards so far, in its original bamboo form.  The International Campaign to Ban Landmines is cautious: 'What the ICBL and our members, many of whom are humanitarian mine clearance organisations, are focused on is not the financial cost of clearing landmines but the humanitarian and socio-economic cost of not clearing them.'  I'm not sure what that means. 

Neft daşları and soviet modernity

The Neft daşları project, in this video, indicates something of the heroic nature of this oilfield town built in the middle of a sea.  Somehow, socialist modernism, the invention of new urban forms in strange places such as the Azeri oilfields or Siberia, was always heroic, something that all through the Cold War we, on this side, were taught to ridicule – a legacy that still holds.

Consider the Alberta oil sands – a project of capitalist modernity – which is always grooming its image, not pushing the workers to the fore as in soviet propaganda, but foregrounding economic benefits and, belatedly, environmental reclamation.  During the oil boom of the late 1970s, they were officially called the Tar Sands.  Athabascan canoes had been caulked with tar for centuries, not oil, but even the name of the product has been smoothly and cleanly re-branded.  What is real here?

Oil sands workers live in camps, fly in from all over the country for two and three week shifts, either send their money home, a real third world economic practice, or blow it out through the narco-economy.  The workers are not even foregrounded for propaganda purposes. 

mail

Royal Mail. series of 50, produced by the Royal Mail in conjuction with Wills Tobacco, circa 1930

When mail was in an envelope, with stamps, delivered by hand no matter where you were or what you were doing, mail delivery scheduled the day, the week, the month; time lags were sometimes great, pictures were rare and precious.  Yet, yet, society functioned, ideas were exchanged, romances grew, news was heard. 

Why must everything be instant now? Maybe that isn't the question.  Perhaps it is something about patience, and lack of it.  It isn't about technology, but something that drives technology.  That progress has always equalled speed: speed of change and literally going faster.  The underpinning of sustainability discussions is the interrogation of 'progress' and whether or not it can still be seen as a postitive, or is it just a pernicious aspect of modernism.  it is an old debate, as old as the enlightenment.  What is surprising is that it can still be made.  

surveillance 2

The Kooples advertising, France, 2011

The Kooples is a French ready to wear company, one of a number that use mass-marketing and manufacturing techniques (cheap off-shore labour for production, point of sale data collection) in combination with luxury market branding (good stores at good addresses, good design).  The image above is from a The Kooples advertisement.  It promotes couples shopping together, rather than shopping as an individual act.  Well fine, whatever.

What is striking about the photographs in this ad is that they are taken from the vantage point of a CCTV camera. And somehow this is made to seem okay.

Coincidently, I just finished reading The Dying Light by Henry Porter, written in 2009, about a very near future, maybe 2012 or so, in which security systems and the corporations that provide them are so embedded in government that they in fact run the government.  Since 9/11 so many civil liberties in so many western countries have been suspended because of anti-terrorist legislation that the right to privacy has been eroded to the point that there is none.  

This has long been Henry Porter's main theme.  After The Dying Light I quickly re-read Remembrance Day, written in 2000 before all this supposedly started. Cell phone technology was key to a complex plot to destabilise the Northern Ireland peace process.  As a document, this earlier book is very interesting: terrorism was still the purview of the IRA and Eastern Europe; Ireland could be understood in terms of retaliation and revenge, Eastern Europe in terms of greed for power.  Nine years later he writes The Dying LIght where terrorism is industrial, based on total surveillance of one's every action, and at the core of British government.  

My father, who was a great reader of a particularly addictive kind of action thriller where a captain (usually) in the British Army came up against all sorts of nefarious plots involving the abuse of power by the brass and/or the secret services, said that one reads novels to find out what is actually going on in the world, not history books, because novelists have a prescience gene; the act of writing is an act of gathering clues and thinking them into a future that the reader will recognise when they read it.  

So, as a reader, I look at The Kooples ad and see an acceptance of the state of surveillance. London has more CCTV cameras than all of Europe – a great help in the almost instantaneous arrest of 3000 people and the charging of a thousand in the August riots, which echoed similar riots in Paris in 2005.  A facebook group was set up to help the Metropolitan Police identify people caught on CCTV with 900,000 members.  Much was made of the tactics of the police, batons and water cannons, and of the causes of the unrest, little was made of how suspects were identified.

Charging anyone from the Vancouver riots is bogged down in too much surveillance footage, including voluntary surveillance from private cellphones.  The Canadian government has, for the first time, posted a most-wanted list on the web, inviting us as citizens to recognise and turn in these people, one of whom was apprehended almost immediately. We are being turned into informers.  And this role is being eased in to our society by images such as the one above, where being watched is normal, cool even.

hothouse sections

Joseph Paxton, original glass house at Chatsworth. In the foreground is the stove, also by Paxton, used for the growing of soft fruits, often pineapples. early 18th century.

Just when you think that there is nothing left to mine in the Mitford archives, they find another 6,000 letters and another Mitford book comes along.  They were awful people, fascists to stalinists, privileged and offensive, they all wrote effusively and were very funny.  Deborah, the youngest of the Mitfords married the Earl of Devonshire in 1941.  I visited Chatsworth in 1986 or so, shortly after it had been made a charitable trust (I find) endowed by the sale of a zillion old masters.

Memorable was a hothouse – a long, double brick wall with fireplaces in it, fed from the back (above, in the foreground).  The front was, in profile, a glasshouse by Paxton with espaliered apricot trees pinned to the south facing brick wall.  It was elegant, quite minimal and full of beautiful fruiting plants.  

The visiting of these 17th and 18th century country houses is in a way a rite of passage for a certain kind of architect.  Chatsworth the house was not as memorable as Blenheim which had a most wonderful library – a tall long room, one side wire-fronted book cabinets, the other side windows, in between a universe of big chairs, a piano covered with silver framed photos, apricot and blue persian carpets, slightly unkempt parterres outside the windows.  It was a most perfect room for so many reasons.  I have no photo of it, for in those days as a student we carried notebooks not cameras.  And I think because of this, it remains so potent in my memory.  

Google images being what it is, there are plenty of photos of Blenheim and Chatsworth on the web, none I can recognise. It is interesting though that both the library and the stove (a curious term that refers to this long, one-sided, heated hothouse) are similar in section: a thick back wall and a glass front.   It is a profile familiar to any sort of energy-conserving house, but never as romantic as when it was done in the 18th century.

James Justice’s plan of the pineapple stove, 1721, published in The Scots Gardeners’ Directory, 1754.

the Wilton Diptych

The Wilton Diptych (c. 1395–99), tempera on wood, each section 57 cm × 29.2 cm. National Gallery, London

The Wilton Diptych has come up a few times recently, on tv and yesterday as I was reading Alan Bennett's Untold Stories.  It is a fairly mysterious small pair of paintings, just 12 x 11" each, hinged, a personal altarpiece for Richard II, painted near the end of his reign.  He was born in 1367 and became king at ten in 1377, deposed in 1399 and died at 33 in 1400 of starvation, the imprisoned last of the Plantagenets.  

Not sure why it keeps popping up in public view all of a sudden unless it is part of a general reclamation of the past that underpins European's problems with multiculturalism.  'They want to change our culture', or our way of life, or our laws, or whatever it is.  I'm sure the British don't mean the culture of binge drinking and football hooliganism, no, it is glorious culture, safely lodged in places such as the National Gallery.  Genius, the series on British scientists introduced by Stephen Hawking, Downton Abbey, the bloody History of Scotland — Britain is intent on reminding itself, on television, just what it was that made it Great.

The diptych is a lovely thing.  On the left panel, the boy king kneels, flanked by his patron saints Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr, both once kings of England, and John the Baptist carrying the lamb of God.  Richard kneels on stoney ground, not unlike Sudbury.  
On the right panel is a phalanx of angels, all wearing Richard's emblem, a white hart lying on the ground.  They, and Mary, stand on a carpet of flowers, their blue robes are Marian blue, the blue of heaven.  Their crowns are English roses, their powerful wings a fractal of feathers on a wing.

Richard's earthly life is being sanctioned by something on a completely different scale.  This is the power of faith, earthly life may be hell, but there's an end to it, and a field of flowers will be achieved.  This encourages endurance; a lack of faith perhaps encourages impatience with an unsatisfactory life in the here and now.
Our touching faith in technology as a solution to the energy crisis is cast as a kind of achievable heaven, but on such a different scale that there will be many generations whose lives are sacrificed while we plan for a future none of us will see.

building a forest

Colour-infrared image of Sudbury region using Landsat imagery from 1987. Vegetated areas appear in reddish in colour where urban/disturbed areas are green. The yellow boundary represents the study area for vegetation change detection and approximates the municipal boundary of the City of Greater Sudbury.

I heard this story on the news a while ago, but it took a while to figure out the keywords necessary to find it again.  In the lunar landscape that is the old Sudbury nickel mines and smelters there has, over the last 40 years, been a massive tree planting program, however because the soil is so acidic and toxic, there is no forest floor – that blanket of leaf mould, seeds, bugs, little animals, lilies and orchids, wild flowers, birds, from which new trees grow.  

When new roads are hacked out of the wilderness, such as the twinning of the Trans-Canada highway through Banff National Park, first the forest is logged, then bulldozers come and shovel and grade the top metre of ground into road bed.  All the little seedlings and mice die instantly.  

What Sudbury is doing is removing mats of ground cover and top soil from nearby road construction sites and placing them in the reforested areas that lack that essential floor that sustains a biodiverse ecology.

Pictures show the depth of these mats as about 4".  Is that enough?  Is the soil still toxic underneath?  I'm sure someone has figured all this out otherwise the project wouldn't be so extensive, however it does make one realise how very thin the skin is that supports life.  It also questions the expectation that it will be technology that reconstructs the toxic landscape of the oil sands: cutting and laying turf is not high technology.  It hardly even low technology.  Plants and insects are perhaps more powerful agents in reconstruction than we realise.

Land Reclamation 1978-2008. City of Sudbury.

City of Sudbury Re-Greening Program

there is a short video on this CBC report of the programme: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/06/06/environment-sudbury-forest-floor-transplant.html

Rare earths mining

BBC. 16 June 2011.

This clip advertising BBC's power of Asia month, is not embedded here.  Click on it to go to the BBC site where it will open automatically. 

As our dependence on plastic supports oil extraction, so does our dependence on electronic devices support rare earth extraction.  Plastic and cell phones: they are everywhere in the world – no place too remote, too untouched, too undeveloped.

palm print identification

For those who could possibly understand how such things work: a System for Biometric Authorisation of Internet Users Based on Fusion of Face and Palmprint Features.

Kenya Field of Dreams

Watching the World Cup in Kilifi, KenyaDigital Planet had a thing on the Kenya Field Of Dreams project this morning.  This is an inflatable screen set up in Kilifi, a town north of Mombasa.  It is supported by UK Sport, Google and Moving the Goalposts, a charity that uses football to empower girls.   The BBC has given this project a lot of coverage, Digital Planet is the most recent. 

Where to start.  Nominally, in a town where hardly anyone has a tv, a large inflatable screen was set up to broadcast the FIFA World Cup games.  The screen came from Open Air Cinema, donated by Google.  Stuart Farmer of Open Air Cinema provided support and training.  The Open Air Cinema package is just one of many kinds of inflatable screens, usually advertised for showing movies on the beach or at pool parties.  The least horrible video I found of how they are set up is this one from Airscreen: 

They all follow the same principles: the inflatable screen and support structure are stuffed in a big bag accompanied by a small suitcase with a rear screen projector, a hammer, stakes, speakers and a fan: it's a tidy package.  Inflatable screens withstand the weather better than a fixed screen. They bounce around in the wind, but don't blow away. 
On the Kenya Field of Dreams blog Alix in Kilifi writes:  'Oddly, it's not the high-technology which struggles here — we have a satellite internet connection, 3G broadband dongles and excellent mobile coverage for organisation, and imminent arrival of WiMax – it's the low tech: Weather, sanitation, electricity.' 

The fan that inflates the screen is run off a generator and it inflates quickly, in a minute or so.  It is the girls of Moving the Goalposts who set it all up, make the connections and fix bugs.  The girl who was interviewed on Digital Planet said that after the World Cup they will show educational videos about health and education. 

Now, remember all you fellows who can't figure out how to work a digital camera and Photoshop, these are teenaged girls at risk in extreme poverty.   The Moving the Goalposts Kenya site describes its mandate:  'Girls and women in Kilifi District, Kenya are some of the world’s poorest and most disadvantaged people. Low retention in school, early and unintended pregnancies and vulnerability to HIV/AIDS trap them in a cycle of poverty. Moving the Goalposts Kilifi (MTG) uses football to empower girls and young women, helping them to fulfill their potential both on and off the football field.'

Moving the Goalposts Kenya, raising self-esteem through girls footballMoving the Goalposts Kenya started in 2001 with a small grant from the British Council and advice from Moving the Goalposts UK.  Football teams were formed, matches played, there are now over 3,000 players.  It has reproductive health rights programmes, HIV/AIDS programmes and a new economic empowerment project.  In 2008 MTG Kenya built a headquarters building with help from the British HIgh Commission and the Ford Foundation.  

Moving the Goalposts Headquarters, Kilifi, KenyaThere is something about this story that makes me feel as if I am the one living in an impoverished society. 

Sudeepas

The Safe Bottle LampThe BBC and Shell World Challenge is calling for nominations for 2010.  This is the most interesting annual project, where small projects from all over the world are sent in, ten are chosen and explained, and then you can vote for the one you think ought to win.  The projects make life better, safer, easier; they employ local people, they are hugely innovative, they have already started up without a lot of cash and now are asking for the World Challenge prize to take their project a step further. 

Last year's winner was Dr Godakumbura of Sri Lanka who designed a safe kerosene lamp in response to the unsafe use of ordinary bottles full of kerosene with a wick.  These look remarkably like Molotov cocktails, with similar results.
 
The Safe Bottle lamp is still a bottle, full of kerosene, with a wick.  The bottles however, are locally blown with thick glass, cooled slowly so they are unbreakable and have flattened sides so they don't roll if they are knocked over.  They have a screw-on metal lid that fixes the wick securely.  They are made for about a quarter. 
Money goes a long way in some parts of the world. 

Redesigning something that is already in use, just making it safer, more efficient, more ecologically aware, more local seems to be an intelligent use of design skills.   It is less about invention that it is about refinement.  There is both a humility and an anger in redesigning a lamp made from easily found discarded drinks bottles that works after a fashion, is free, and which sets people on fire.

I hope it is different now, but when I was at school we were taught to invent, from scratch, everything, then refine one's own precious idea to aesthetic perfection and then dream about imposing it on the world.    This is not useful.   The safe bottle lamp is. 

Philip Beesley

programming Hylozoic Soil: Méduse Field, 2010. studio d’Essai of the Coopérative Méduse

Philip Beesley's Hylozoic Ground is at studio d’Essai of the Coopérative Méduse in Québec City as part of Mois Multi, a multidisciplinary and electronic arts festival that runs until February 28.

Hylozoic Soil: Méduse Field, a biomimetic installation, includes a first generation of protocell chemistry systems developed with the University of Southern Denmark and integrated sound and light devices developed with Quebec’s Productions Recto-Verso. Dense arrays of sensors, mechanisms and digitally fabricated elements shiver  when someone walks by and then generates movement of geo-textile structures which withdraw, release and open up again.

This project has been developed by Philip Beesley Architect with Waterloo's School of Architecture.  It was chosen for the 2010 Venice Biennale next fall, and then it will tour around after.  The Canada Council and the RAIC are collaborating in the presentation of Hylozoic Soil in Venice as, they say in their press release, 'part of a larger project to investigate developing support for the advancement of the presentation and appreciation of contemporary Canadian architectural excellence in Canada and abroad.'

small things: Josh Silver's adjustable glasses

Michael Lewis. Adjustable Glasses, The Guardian December 22, 2008Josh Silver is an atomic physicist at Oxford who invented adjustable liquid-filled lenses for eyeglasses.  Given the lack of eye doctors in Africa especially, such glasses allow the wearer to adjust the lenses themselves.  A clever little syringe on the frame fills flexible sacs, sandwiched between two durable plastic shields, with liquid and when the sac is the right thickness to correct the vision problem, the lens is sealed with a screw.  Silver is the archetypal rumpled and brilliant inventor, seen demonstrating his glasses in a TED lecture here.  There is a fairly complete description from 2008 in the Guardian here.  There is, of course, the website asking for help in this project here.

I would say this is a small thing, with huge consequences.  Esther Addley in the Guardian article points out that having glasses improves literacy rates and extends the working life of people who use their eyes to read, sew, embroider, mend nets – any kind of fine work.  A large scheme would train thousands of eye doctors to work in remote regions without much infrastructure or services – a large task indeed.  The small scheme is to put into production simple, self-adjusting glasses and to produce millions of them. 

Issue 23 (call for articles) wants to look at how small moves, small projects, small things can make large changes.  It is important to look at this for many, many reasons, not least of which is that western society is cut off from fine scale detail.  We can't fix our own cars, make our own clothes, cut our own hair or fix our own glasses; we seem incapable of invention. 

I would like a pair of these adjustable glasses – I'm wearing +1.25 readers bought from Nanaimo's Midland Liquidators in 1996 for $10 and they could use a bit of tuning.