Just back from a fabulous weekend getaway to Vancouver.
We love Canada and Canadians. This is based on minimal data--we've only ever been to British Columbia--but I'll stand by the statement until I experience evidence to the contrary. Canadians are just nice. Yes, a gross generalization, but they're so nice. Maybe if you live north of a global hegemon it makes you nice. I don't know.
The weekend involved walking, eating, being massaged, some light shopping, drinking, eating some more, sleeping for 20+ hours, and enjoying the Heavenly Bed(TM). Thank you Starwoods points for making this mini-vacation possible.
The highlight of the weekend was spending this afternoon enjoying Bruce Mau's Massive Change exhibit. It's billed as "The Future of Global Design" with the slogan "It's not about the world of design, it's about the design of the world." I was intrigued, had read a piece about it in the NYT, but also had red flags awaving . . . was this going to be an incredibly pretentious design exhibit wrapped in the flag of globalism? Thankfully, no.
The two floor exhibit, the biggest staged by the Vancouver Art Gallery, artfully riffed on global trends like urbanism (weak), transportation (OK), earth simulation (excellent), efficient power generation (superb), innovations in textiles and materials (excellent again), the symbiotic relationship between military and consumer innovation (good), and so on.
We both left feeling hopeful about the world, which is no small feat these days. A core theme of the exhibit was that we humans, more connected than ever before and possessing amazing scientific and technological tools can design a better world--and in fact there is lots of this work underway. There was a time when I probably would have adopted a more critical pose and sought to "undermine the utopian rhetorical structure implicit in the reification of technology" or something, but from where I sit today that just amounts to carping from a position of incredible comfort. Instead, I was inspired by the Canadian designer of a bicycle ambluance being used in Africa, stunned at the color coded satellite image showing light created by cities (white), fires (red), oil/gas burnoff (green), and just loved the exhibit on biomass stoves showing how the application of straightforward technology with simple materials can radically improve the well being of people. Let's hear it for the Rocket Stove!
I learned a lot and it added fuel to the fire of my current introspection. Did you know that the average speed of automobiles is 8.1 MPH? Suddenly the Segway doesn't seem so silly and a bicycle rickshaw built with lighter, more durable materials that ends up increasing the earning power and reducing the costs of a rickshaw driver in Mumbai seems positively genius.
I think a great acheivement of this exhibit is in the way that it embraces moderization. Not a "be like us" moderization but a vigorous diffusion of appropriate technology as with the aforementioned Rocket Stove and Bicycle Rickshaw. As a device to stoke enthusiam for a world that is possible, the exhibit gets an A+. Where the exhibit falls short is in articulating the arrangements of power--the structures of markets, regulations, incentives, etc--that promote or inhibit these possibilities. But maybe this has to be, and has been cleverly constructed, as a two-part conversation.. First, you articulate what's in our grasp, then you have the conversation about how to make it happen. Starting with "how to make it happen" in the absence of the inspiring insight that a better designed, more humane world is possible ensures that the conversation veers immediately into the realm of "sacrifice," "higher taxes," and "less freedom" even though that is a complete non sequitar.
If you're heading to Vancouver you have until the end off the year to catch this great exhibit.
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