29 Oct SXSW Eco ’12: The Positive
My last post here was rather cynical, as much of what I write is. I try to look at it as a way to push forward and demand greatness. However, I know that it doesn't usually work like that. Regardless, I was planning on writting at least two posts about SXSW Eco so here goes the second.
When I wasn't scoffing at all the business talk surrounding "clean tech", including the numerous people who thought my attempt at connection and conversation was an invitation for a pitch from them (this isn't Sillicon Valley y'all & I'm in NO way an investor), I was letting my heart guide me to sessions about creativity, fashion, and biomimicry. I was blown away by the panelists honesty and passion, possibly because my heart was racing along with theirs.
To start with, the editors of Origin Magazine were there for the entire event and their session on the creation of their magazine was phenominal. They are both given the creative freedom to explore issues that matter to them and the world, while giving the issues and the people who work on them a wider audience, in a beautiful format. Their design is simple and their messaging is always engaging because they allow themselves and those they interview the freedom to be passionate. As an aspiring writer Origin proves to me that magazines aren't yet dead and are still a beautiful way to give someone a stage.
Origin teamed up with Dwell Magazine to put on a very aweinspiring popup event. Dwell provided the container house demos and lighting while Origin Editor DJ Spooky filled the space with beats that everyone was dancing too. Even me, sort of. I am incredibly shy about dancing though. One of the best parts of this event was that, for me at least, I got to get close to really visually interesting product designs that I had only seen online or in magazine before that. My brain was challenged and it was hard to not immediately go home and figure out how to make those lamps myself.
The last day of the conference I went to two panels focused on biomimicry and one on ecofashion. The first panel on biomimicry drew me in because it wasn't focused on product design based on forms found in nature, it was focused on organizational systems design. Figuring out how a company or organization can run smoother by looking to nature. To me, this was groundbreaking in the field of biomimicry. If you look online anywhere that claims to have biomimicry news and research, you will find an onslaught of products that are based on forms found in nature. It looks at the function of a form. This panal was doing research that got deeper than that by looking at the process that form was created with. They were asking, "Is there a model in nature that has to deal with the same problem or strategy [that my biz/org is facing]"? Common insights were in regards to the resiliency and information sharing present in nature, often at an ecosystem level but also at a cellular level. What is the key to effective biomimicry design? As Kathy Zarsky put it most eloquently, "quiet our cleaverness" in order to truely listen.
The second biomimicry panel featured many of the same people but this time instead of looking to nature to find solutions to organizational problems or structures, they wanted to pose the challenge on a city scale. While this session wasn't the most engaging, many people were exhausted from the weekend behind them, it was still very insightful in it's mistakes. This was even newer territory than applying nature's models to organizational systems. There weren't really any concrete solutions to point people to that had been tested, and much of what was mentioned was very theorhetical. The audience wanted something a bit more concrete it seemed like from the questions. A bit more digestable and less high level, academic type thinking. One of the many positives of this panel was that it called out urban planners on their compartmentalization of issues, spaces, and pieces of the urban whole, without much thought of how things will effect one another. It challenged the audience, which was full of city officials, designers, planners, etc, to think about the city differently which I found a bit ironic. To me, the panel itself was still thinking about the city as something only the city planners and officials had any control or effect on. It failed to equalize the players in this ecosystem all as organisms of the ecosystem. Somehow, it was still very much city rhetoric to me. Looking at a city as an ecosystem is still extremely new territory for everyone and not being able to fully articulate what that means was one of the things that sort of excited me about this panel. It means there is a lot of work to be done. I thought it tied into the keynote earlier that day about taking back our citizen power quite well. What better way to do that than to start looking at cities less as a municipality and more as an ecosystem made up of thousands of different players, each with their own power to effect the whole?
Though the session on cities was the last for SXSW Eco '12, "the positives" article wouldn't be complete without at least mentioning the EcoFashion pannel. The pannelists ranged from a woman who started a non-profit organization that was investigating the ethics of fashion down to the seed the fiber is grown from, and publishing it broadly to push for transparency, to a woman working on highlighting the postives that are coming from the fashion industry already on the red carpet. All panelists recognized the importance of the steps already being taken, while most didn't shy away from highlighting the long road ahead. Many were pushing for greater transparancy in the industry as a way for consumers to be more educated about the purchases they are making and letting the market put the necessary pressure on the industry. In such an international industry the market is really one of the only things that will adequetly put on that kind of pressure for producers to change.
Resources from the highlights above:
Origin: http://www.originmagazine.com/
Biomimicry:
http://www.togethergreen.org/fellows/fellow/emily-sadigh
http://biomimicry.net/about/biomimicry/lifes-principles/
Fasion:
http://redcarpetgreendress.com/home/
Dawnielle is a writer at DawnielleCastledine.com, administrative genious, newsletter crackerjack, and blogger at the Austin EcoNetwork, and a hobby designer/creative with a new passion for biomimicry.
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