Categories
heritage museum

Heritage: place, past and future

Neil Cossons (University of Liverpool - with permission)

Many of the best things have happened because of lunatics with fire in their bellies – I like to think I’ve been an animator of lunatics

Sir Neil Cossons is a leading authority on heritage and industrial archaeology. During his career he has led major museums – from 1983 to 1986 Neil Cossons was the Director of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and for fourteen years Director of the Science Museum, London. He has served as a non-executive director of British Waterways Board. From 2000 until 2007 he was Chairman of English Heritage, the United Kingdom Government’s principal adviser on the historic environment of England.

Sir Neil was Director of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum from 1971 to 1983. Sir Neil has published several books. He was knighted in 1994 for his work in museums and heritage.

Sir Neil was in Dunedin to help celebrate the 150th Celebration of the Dunedin Gasworks Museum.

Talking points:

All history is a form of myth, but accepting the inadequacies of the process you can get something back from the process

The real job is stimulating people to use their imagination

I regret not having been enough of a lunatic

I think the best thing I could do was support activists.

The role (of government heritage organisations) is in recognising the energy, intellect, knowledge and activist capacity of communities to do good things

One of the aspects that appeals to me, rather perversely, is where you see groups (as is here in Dunedin with the Gasworks) taking on what for most people would be either a lost cause or something where people say ‘why on earth would you bother – Gasworks – horrible places’ and really bringing them to life

Trainspotting:
Ironbridge
Science Museum, London
Elgin marbles
Trent Lock
SS Great Britain
British Waterways
Bletchley Park
Beamish
Preston Bus Station
Skansen Museum (Stockholm)
Plimouth Plantation
Queen St Mill, Burnley

Categories
business marketing

Sustainable entrepreneurship

Brendan Gray

My heart is not in a place that is focussed solely on making money, business has to be about more than that.

Prof Brendan Gray specialises in marketing, strategy and entrepreneurship with a focus on sustainable entrepreneurship, particularly in the Pacific. Recently he hosted the Climate Smart Entrepreneurship symposium.

Pacific Island communities are among the first to feel the effects of anthropogenic climate change, with increasingly severe storms, high tides, rising sea levels and salination of fresh water supplies negatively affecting their lives. These impacts, plus other ecological problems and natural disasters, make it difficult for at-risk communities to become economically and socially resilient.

For years we’ve been told to buy more, more frequently, and for less. It’s not surprising that “don’t buy stuff” is such a challenge.

Note: We apologise for the somewhat strained sound in parts of this interview. Sam got it wrong. Geoff had to rescue it. Thanks Geoff.

Categories
business food

Sustainability at scale

Mike Sammons

A good thing from a sustainability perspective is that there’s always one of our stores somewhere in NZ doing exactly the right thing, before I even think what the right thing should be.

New Zealand spends over 15 billion dollars a year on groceries and about 60% goes through Foodstuffs supermarkets. With these sort of numbers, the person responsible for improving the sustainability of our shopping arguably has the most important role in ensuring the sustainability of our country.

Mike Sammons is a UK trained planner with a Masters in environmental management. Foodstuffs NZ is the national cooperative body of the locally owned and operated supermarkets New World, Pak’nSave, and Four Square. In this conversation we talk about how Mike came to be Mike Sammons, Sustainability Manager for Foodstuffs NZ. We talk about what is going right already, what isn’t, how changes are being made, and how that can be communicated.

Talking points:

we can make a massive difference – the programmes we’re implementing potentially affect millions of people within New Zealand.

I’m very aware of the of the responsibility I have – how good the research has to be, how tight the business case has to be, we’re potentially affecting 700 different businesses and millions of people.

When we evaluate products, and we ask for certification, it has to be really tight.

We’re championing stores that are doing the right thing

I strongly believe that sustainability makes a really good business case for itself.

Sometimes we have to get people to recognise the intangible

The next challenge is waste minimisation plans in every store

This is a slightly extended version of the show that aired on 12th September.

See other food related shows here.

Categories
computing visualisation

Seeing ecosystem services

Barbara Hock

Beyond clumsy scientific interfaces lies the opportunity to produce visualisations that link knowledge to values

Barbara Hock from Scion Research specialises in environmental spatial analysis and modelling. Her current research involves visualisations for sustainable forest management.

Barbara is interested in making science more accessible in ways that relate to people’s values. The ability to see models of ecosystem services and to do so in a way that includes people, is one of the goals of Sam’s Sustainable Lens research agenda. How awesome does he think that is? Very.

Talking points:

If we could take data and make it relevant in the settings where people are, how they interact with the land

People starting to value ecosystem services – we can help with that

People expect quick results, with the speed of data, and annual reports, but sustainability is a long term deal.

(Am I an activist?). No. I consider I’m more like leading from behind. These are the things that are very useful for people, to know about and to able to access. I have skills in technical areas, and knowledge in social areas, so I can combine them to create this space that provides a better overall understanding. And that can help people in whichever forum. In the end we work towards better life and lifestyle – that’s a good driver. Things that facilitate that, that’s great.

If you enjoyed this, you might like:
Beth Karlin transformational media and commuication research

Olaf Schroth participatory collaborative planning through visualisation.

Categories
communication science

The story and the science

Jean Fleming

The good story will always win – even over facts, so we need to make sure science has both the story and the facts right

Jean Fleming is a Professor of Science Communication in the University of Otago’s Centre for Science Communication, where she convenes the Popularising Science MSciComm. She is also a reproductive biologist in the Department of Anatomy, with research interests in the molecular and cellular origins of ovarian cancer.

Talking points:

information is easy, but there are no easy answers for attitudes and wisdom. Emotional connections through stories.

not everyone can look at the bigger picture, science communication can help with that

Science communication is jolly good fun

You can’t stop people believing the wrong information, we’ve got masses of information out there – information not wisdom, and people will believe what they feel comfortable with

With that masses of scientific information emerging, perhaps too much for people to digest – we need to help tell the stories

rise and rise of market and corporate idea that science must make a buck

Somehow we have to step down from growth

Despite all evidence, great denial about Climate Change, (mostly engineered by vested interests).

People do need to know what is happening to contribute to societal debate

(Am I an activist ?). Not quite yet, I’ve got to retire first next year. (Alan Mark said he was an activist, a requirement of an academic), actually yes, I’ve been an activist all my life. When I went to the royal commission on GM I had to suddenly wear a bra, and be like a judge, and so that really put the kibosh on me being a real activist for quite a while – I’m just beginning to come out the other end now. I was a great feminist in the 70s and 80s. And that got knocked out of me but the dark is rising.

Shane’s number of the week: 10. Ten years of Pacific cooling. In the last 10 years there has been a slowing in the increase in temperature across the globe from that predicted by the increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So since about 1970 the increase in global temperature has tracked the increase in CO2 levels very closely until about 10 years ago when the correlation started to diverge. Climate change deniers have made much of this and it has been a bit of a mystery – until now. There is a cooling effect on the atmosphere – one of the many long term climate altering cycles… so Waters in the eastern tropical regions of the Pacific have been notably cooler in recent years, owing to the effects of one of the world’s biggest ocean circulatory systems, the Pacific decadal oscillation. Here in the pacific we are used to El Nino and El Nina affecting our weather and climate patterns but this is a longer cycle which brings cooler weather and can last decades. The last time this oscillation was in its cooling phase was back from the 1940s to the 1970s (Scripps Institution of Oceanography and supported by the US government’s National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration NOAA, and was published in the journal Nature).

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: The Audacious Student Business Challenge has expanded this year to encourage business for good with a social enterprise category. It has also moved to encourage wider participation with a new crowd-sourcing platform Skulksource. You can encourage the development of sustainable start-ups by voting for the fledgling businesses such as:

    • Spread the Help: Spread your donation across multiple charities, and Spread your Help to your community, by giving.
    • Resource Locus: Resource Locus proposes to foster farmers’ market culture by providing an online meeting place.
    • Flowbot: An innovative, reusable drink bottle to help fight obesity in kids through interactive design.
    • Ecoplug: EcoPlug is a simple way of bringing homes and offices into the 21st century
    • Dunedin Street Bikes: Using on-street fleets of bikes to improve social mobility, the environmental image of Dunedin & its economic development
    • Fur Retreival: Ethical Possum eradication to ensure the sustainability of the eco-system through natural methods
    • Humblebee: Taking the toxic out of protective textiles and staying dry in a deluge using nature’s ancient tech
    • Farmscape: An educational game that teaches people about sustainable agriculture. #farmerfromwayback
    • Eureka Energy: Eureka energy provides small energy solution to create a more sustainible future
    • Fixing Faults: Fixing Faults gives you the space, skills and resources to turn your boring junk into funk!
    • HandiConnect: HandiConnect – Connect handicaps to the world and help them live a life with no difference.
Categories
business food permaculture

Growing change

Jon Foote

Private property, trespassers will be given apples

Jon Foote has ten year’s banking and business development experience in Sydney. He has permaculture qualifications and busy permaculture design business ReScape. Jon is well underway with development of the Resilience Education Centre.

we are not separate from nature, whether we get it or not

Jon’s moment of realisation: you know this is what the world needs

nothing will change without action

Permaculture is not an invention, it’s a repackaging of everything done before

(Am I an activist?). I guess so, I wouldn’t paint myself with a full activist brush. I’m passionate about the belief that we have a way out of the current situation and that we need to act on it. Nothing will change without action, and action in a positive direction is great. I’m not a big protester or create…what most activists do, and chain themselves to trees…I did a bit of that in Sydney and realised, you know I’m not achieving a lot – I’d rather go out and teach everyone how to grow food. The activist part of me says ‘you know if we grew our own food, and we had organic farmers, and lots of local systems going on, that in itself will bring down the industrial food system’. So in a way I may be an activist, but I want to do it in a way that is positive so that people can work towards something that is actually beneficial – its not just grumping about things that are wrong. So let’s do the things that are right.

Categories
communication science

Story. Story. Story.

Lloyd Davis

If you’ve got bad news, don’t hit them over the head with a hammer – give them hope

Lloyd Spencer Davis is the Stuart Professor of Science Communication and Director of the The Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. He is a leading authority on penguins and sociobiology – behavioural ecology from an evolutionary perspective. He is also an award winning author and filmmaker. In his Looking for Darwin he manages to squeeze the science of evolution into a rollicking yarn of travel and personal discovery. We explore the relationship between science and communication. Putting him on the spot, we ask for the top three things a budding science communicator must do. “Story” he says. Three times.

Focus on the story, and use whatever device you can to get that story told. Jeopardy, tension, star presenters. The package must be exciting.

People are turned off by stories of doom – they want hope. The story must empower them, even if the news is bad you can do something about it.

Categories
environmental entrepreneur

Driving structural change

 

Nick Gerritsen

I’m only interested in things that drive structural change – that’s what motivates me.

Nick Gerristen describes himself as a “catalyst and social entrepreneur”.  He is a lawyer with a significant portfolio in green-technology:

Talking points

We’ve lost sight of the inputs and outputs that make community operate.

It was a surprise to me that people could be in business not wanting to do good.

You make decisions, they may prove to be wrong but they provide a framework for learning.

There is no magic out there, you just do the best you can do.

There are smart markets and dumb markets.

Anything we can do to substitute fuel has a multiplier effect as we can keep capital on-shore, in addition to climate effects.

We are a mining company but we are operating above the ground – making coal without having to dig holes.

NZ is selective about the good news stories we’re prepared to back.

Great opportunity for NZ is  to repopulate small places – this is NZ’s future rather than super cities.

Craft will get a boost as retail collapses.

Accept some things will trend to ubiquity.  And first rule in business is not to be in that space. Everything not in that space will have special value.

Embrace constraint.  Appreciate benefits and limitations.

I’m worried but also an optimist.

A simple step that I take may have the potential to trigger a super recovery scenario.

Community develops strength and capability to look after itself – that’s what resilience is.

200 years later, we’re learning that industrial revolution is a model that isn’t working.

Sustainability comes from embracing constraint, looking at inputs and outputs and enabling people to make real decisions for communities that they are part of.

Am I an activist?

If it is being silly enough to have an idea and to be able to dedicate a part of your life to it, and be responsible for it, and back yourself on it, then yes.  All I’m trying to do is do the best that I can with the resources of time and energy that I have.  It’s exciting, stressful and enlightening all at once.

Society is putting a lot of pressure on the next generation without clear identification of the doorways and opportunities for them to work through.

It’s not about money, it’s about creating a dimension of change.

On how to get more entrepreneurs:

We need more artists – people prepared to try and  test ideas with different materials and create some sort of  harmony that someone like and  might buy, that’s a direct metaphor for developing  technology, and new businesses.

Go out and try stuff.  If you don’t know what you’re doing – absolutely embrace it.  I’m an expert at not knowing what I’m doing.   If you are interested and excited about something then you will learn it.

 

Categories
agriculture conservation biology

Sustainability of production landscapes

HenrikMoller

We need conservation for sustainable use as much as need preservation for intrinsic value… an “And” not an “Or”

It’s time we focussed on environmental care in production landscapes.

Henrik Moller is Professor at the Centre for Sustainability, and the principal investigator at Ecosystems Consultants.

Henrik describes the conservation estate as a “triumph”, but “now we need to turn our attention to the restoration of the wider environment”.     This is a consequence of the

Paradigm shift accepting people as part of nature, and part of the contract, and not isolating environment as something outside us.

In other words:

We need to find ways of valuing conservation on production landscapes – a land sharing approach, but who pays?

This is, he says, a paradigm shift in how we think about conservation.  We need to expand our focus from the conservation estate to the whole environment.    Henrik applauds the “fantastic legacy from preservation (but) it’s a bit of prison if we ignore the ecology of our production landscapes” .   This proposal has several implications for the scale of  governance and responsibility.  It is “time we had a conversation about who pays for environmental good”.

Henrik asks if we could move to a position of paying farmers for environmental protection. This will be a challenge to neo-liberal abhorrence of subsidies, but Henrik points to how much we are distorting biological and physical systems and asks why the market system is so special it cannot be manipulated. The question remains as to why we should be paying people for not doing bad? What is really needed, says Henrik is conversation, we need to recognise that we are all in this together, “we need to stop the war talk and alienation – move beyond a battle to informed conversation and debate”.

On the 8th August, at CSAFE in Dunedin, Henrik will present  Enhancing our Heritage: Paradigm shifts for maximising conservation in New Zealand on behalf of the Tahi group.

 

Talking points:

We’ve known what to do to live sustainably for 100s of years, we just don’t seem to be able to do it

Wedded to the belief that we’ll heal the planet by the mass actions of lots of small scale local initiatives and people taking responsibility

We have to have just solutions with group agreement that emerges from dialogue with more listening than talking

We need to go beyond forums of conflict

Some marching on the street is needed, but the main action has to be through consensus about shared future

Simplifying those production landscapes – both structurally and diversity – we’ve led to degradation

There’s got to be a middle ground where NZ society agrees to pay for environmental goods

Resilience is accepting that we’re journeying without a roadmap

Power over people from same sour well as power over the environment

About how we interact with each other and how share a space and our love of a space and each other

Feel part of a club by looking after our shared environment

Sustainable use is harder to achieve than a reserve over the hill somewhere – day to day sustainable living is much harder, it involves so many other dimensions

(Am I an activist?). (you said you were an activist when you were younger, are you an activist now?) I hope I’m not dead yet. What is an activist? In the past I used to strut my stuff – yell my opinions, I had no shadow of a doubt that the system didn’t have the solution, everything from racist tours to environmental defense society – I was instrumental for taking 300 farmers in breach of discharges into a legal process – so I was very much interested in that forcing, amnesty, homosexual law reform. At the root of this I’m a humanist, it’s about respect for people, because in the end that will lead to the big reciprocity of looking after plants and animals. I was so puzzled then as an activist, I had a favourite Amnesty Poster – a typewriter with barbed wire – and I gave it to a friend and went round to his place a few months later and there was my beautiful poster scrawled over the top ‘but what about the environment?’. And I thought that’s really weird, I had seen the whole thing as a power – power over people, power over environment. They come from the same sour well, where very few lasting solutions will emerge. So now I hope I hope I’m an activist but working in a more subtle and inclusive way, some might even say a more cunning way. But this comes from a changed belief that the solutions are very much more about a patience and slow resolution and dialogue.

The central paradigm shift is accepting people as part of nature, as part of the contract.

We need to avoid a shootout between different constituents. We could call it pluralism, let’s go for “and” rather than “or”.

We’re failing conservation-wise, you could point to a lot of things…species declining…but worse we’ve created this idea that to be a greenie is to be a leftie, radical and not very practical, and not embracing economics. We’ve created a bit of a prison, the ideal would be if we could all see, not matter what we vote, that we’re all seeing the importance of environmental sustainability as sustaining us all, the platform on which we all stand.
We need to abandon war talk…if we carry on with fences between ourselves – saying that person is a conservationist and that person isn’t, we’ll be divided and fall….We’re all in this together.

Trainspotting:

Arun Agrawal Environmentality decentralization of environmental governance

We hope that this is the first in a series discussing the work of the Tahi group.

This is an extended version of the interview broadcast on OAR on the 1st August 2013.

Categories
maths

Mathematics of the planet

MickRoberts_sq

Mathematical literacy means we can think logically and clearly to solve problems our world is facing

Mick Roberts is Professor in Mathematical Biology at Massey University’s Albany campus. He is an internationally-recognised expert on the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases. Using modern methods of mathematical analysis, he aspires to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases and to develop models that explain why pathogens have evolved to have their present characteristics and how the human population can avoid epidemic outbreaks.

He was in Dunedin to give a 10 x 10 lecture for the Royal Society as part of the Year of Mathematics of Planet Earth.

Categories
economics Inequality

Inequality costs

Robert Wade

It is profoundly stupid to ignore society-wide costs of inequality

Professor Robert Wade is from The London School of Economics. He has recently written Inequality and the West, published as Chapter 3 in Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis, edited by Max Rashbrooke (Bridget Williams Books 2013).

Seeing himself as an analyst rather than an activist, Prof Wade has helped shape debate on the inequality. GDP, he says is a flawed measure of performance and while not opposed to growth – we have certainly seen benefits from material progress – he says we “we need to ‘green’ GDP – we need to decouple growth from emissions”.

Policy made for the top 1% by the top 1%

Categories
computing

An activist agenda

Ben Shneiderman by  John Consoli University Maryland

If someone is not speaking up then we should be worried

Ben Shneiderman has had a huge impact on everything we do. A father of the field of Human Computer Interaction, Ben is Professor for Computer Science at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Ben pioneered the highlighted textual link in 1983, and it became part of Hyperties, a precursor to the web. Ben is the author of Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems (1980) and Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed., 2010, with C. Plaisant) and Leonardo’s Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (MIT Press), won the IEEE Award for Distinguished Literary Contribution in 2004.

What you probably didn’t know is that Ben has strong views about the role of activism within Human Computer Interaction, “we have”, he says “an enormous opportunity to make a difference…the very nature of Human Computer Interaction is an activist agenda”.

We should expect as mature adults and professionals to be engaged in making a better world

If someone is not speaking up then we should be worried

This conversation was recorded after we spoke at a panel on activism at CHI 2013 “CHI at the barricades: an activist agenda?“. Ben highlights some challenges for us to continue to go beyond the technical, and to build sciences around social processes:

We need to shift towards human centred sets of metrics that looks at the number of megacontribs, terracollabs, and petathank-yous.

How do we create a language and metric of the human experience of technology that goes beyond bits and bytes and looks at human questions of trust, empathy, responsibility and privacy?

The problems we face …require technical solutions to be informed by a sensitivity to the social

Thinking with new language is the way we transform ourselves.

How can we enable marginalised individuals and communities to have a voice?

How can we build in leadership structures?

Changing the language we use and the way we engage with people could make a difference

Categories
communication documentary television

Activist storyteller

Peter Hayden

I am a storyteller.  I am an activist, I have to be – there’s a hell of a lot to be activist about.

Peter Hayden describes himself as a storyteller, an actor, a film-maker and a naturalist. A generation of Kiwi kids describe him as an inspiration – they are now our scientists, decision makers and environmental activists. Peter has presented and voiced hundreds of nature documentaries on television including Wild South, Journeys Across Latitude 45, and directing series such as Moa’s Ark. And now he has a new book “An Extraordinary Land: Discoveries and Mysteries From Wild New Zealand” (publisher, review).

bringing the drama element to natural history

Trainspotting: This guy on a bike wasn’t Sam, but it might have been:

This guy on a bike nearly ran me over crossing university campus and shouted out “I am here because of you”.

Categories
architecture design

Architectural games: designing complex emergent systems

Ann Pendleton-Jullian

It is not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?

Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator whose work explores the interchange between culture, environment, and technology. She brings to sustainability her experience in architecture – but it’s not all about buildings. She says it is “not about how you necessarily design a finished object, but how do you design the conditions for that object to emerge?”.  In her studio she goes “beyond a complex juggling act of all the conditions” to adopt a ludic design process.

games by nature…are the way by which we push boundaries of the conditions that reality gives us, and in pushing boundaries – identity boundaries, physical boundaries – we test out alternative possibilities and they are very constructive for moving society forward.

it’s trickery, they’re designing complex adaptive systems without knowing they’re doing it at first

The four themes she consistently publishes on are:

  • emergent forms of architecture and urbanism
  • game design as a way to tool the mind to work with and design complex emergent systems
  • design and education innovation
  • architectural analysis and theory about anything that has to do with the intersection of culture, technology and the natural and built environment within a global ecology.
  • Until we have shifted from a narrative of guilt and fear to a narrative of desire it’s going to be a real hard thing to win

Ann Pendleton-Jullian was in New Zealand to give a keynote speech at HERDSA13.  The title of her talk was Upside Down and Inside Out. The Future of the University as a Design Problem.

Some of the works referenced in our conversation:

 

Categories
education systems

Systematic activist educator

Liam Phelan

Connections between education, social justice and sustainability are of key interest for me. This is why I teach.

Dr Liam Phelan‘s biographical note at the University of Newcastle starts with “My primary research interest is sustainability and how to achieve it”. We talk about that.

Liam works at the nexus of climate change, finance, human rights and ecological sustainability. His recent research interests have focussed on governance of the Earth system as a complex adaptive system comprising human-social and ecological elements, and its key characteristics, including thresholds, non-linear change, and capacity for surprise. We talk about education, perverse resilience and much more.

We face a sustainability paradox: maintaining the desirable familiar stability of the Earth System requires a radical change in the human-social systems nested within it.

We have a pressing ecological need for radical social change to ensure the ongoing viability of human society’s ecological foundations

How many concerned citizens does it take to change a light bulb? Probably just one. But the magic really comes from a community approach.

Transformation is essential.

When did we last have an argument about gravity?

Think about how you want your world to be, and make it so.

From a systems perspective, the idea that something on planet earth is not part of planet earth is plainly nonsense.

Some realism is important, but we also need the idealism so we know where we are going.

(Am I an activist?). Yes. Absolutely. I feel that university is a place you can do activism. You could also work at Greeenpeace, go to parliament, wherever you like. There are real places you can do activism. Activism is an activity, it is an active approach. (That doesn’t conflict with the objective, critical thinking role of the academic?) Activism requires critical thinking – that’s how I came to be teaching at the university. The privilege of being required to do critical thinking in the cause of activism…with civil society organisations…exposed all the time to cutting edge thinking, but sometimes without the time to spend thinking more deeply – theorising – these things are possible in academia. (You’re OK with wearing your heart on your sleeve?). Yeah, (Stanley Fish, critical thinking and nothing else). That worked for a while, but those days are past. The idea that scientific research, critical thinking can exist without some explicit normative basis is silly.

Trainspotting: Liam references Rebecca Solnit’s work but the title eludes him. Here are two of the likely suspects: Hope in the dark (2004) and Storming the Gates of Paradise (2007).

Categories
education language peace

Peace and poetry

Alison Phipps

It is time to acknowledge that the seeds of violence are within all of us and if we become what we hate, we lose.

Alison Phipps is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow.
Her research interests focus on languages and intercultural studies, with a particular critical concern for the different ways in which people learn to live and communicate together by stepping outside comfortable or familiar contexts. She was in New Zealand as keynote speaker at the higher education conference – HERDSA, where she gave a talk entitled “When Learning is placed under Siege: Conflict, Creativity and Compassion in Higher Education”.

The more I try to do, the more I have no to do

We have to learn to live confessional lives, lives that still honour beauty, diversity, goodness and truth

How do we live when we have created the conditions of our own destruction? And what is the role of the university with that? To teach dispositions to live with that knowledge.

The place of learning is people

We have never been so educated as to be released our need to be dependent on the material. I’m inspired by the work of
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: we must reflect on the fact that the material conditions of our educational systems in Western Universities are based on the fact that we are not required to grow our own food and make our own clothes. And that led me to ask the question, and what would they look like if we were? And how might we grow and spin a university if it were. … the university is opening out from the days that it was theoretically an ivory tower – I’m not sure it ever has been an ivory tower but it certainly has been a place of the elite. We are now seeing universities setting up communities and projects (community gardens etc) and it is being changed by that – new knowledges are coming onto campus. This is very exciting as the university has to move its thinking around as people go to work in different communities.

(how much personal responsibility do we need to take). The critic and conscience of society applies to the university and the people with in it. The mantra ‘but there’s no alternative’ is far too easy. …invading Iraq…supermarkets…but actually there are alternatives being worked out all over the world by creative and courageous people., but often beginning in very small ways. I draw real hope from that. It’s important for me as an academic to try to live as an alternative, and to let people draw their own conclusions, and to decide for themselves to decide whether it is for them to live that alternative. I cannot live otherwise. But this was never a revolutionary action, yes I’ve been engaged in action all my life, but this wasn’t one huge enormous change, these were small steps. I wonder what life would be like if I didn’t have a car…? What would life be like if I filled by home with people who would otherwise be destitute…? There are no answers to these, but with anthropological training I know what can be learned from experience. So in a sense it is a new adventure to try and live in these ways and find out what can be learned. What I’m learning, perhaps is the beginnings of an art of forgiveness, compassion, and possibly humility.

(Am I an activist?). It’s a hard word, I’ve used it of myself, but I’ve always been a little shy of it. Maybe it is because I’m a bit of a poet – maybe there’s too many consonants in the word. I do. But I believe profoundly in solitude and rest and quiet. And the more I try and do, the more I know I have to not do. And those are very contradictory dynamics. But I think I discover when I have been very active and moving very much, but it is important to sit and stop and think – watch and take stock and be restored by what is around me. So yes I do and yes I don’t consider myself to be an activist.

(would your students describe you as an activist? Stanley Fish, critical thinking and nothing else). Critical thinking is not enough. If we really are going to create the conditions for action in whatever the world presents us, and we are going to do it with a degree of dignity, and in a way that we acknowledge that we are bound together, and that we are wholly dependent one on the other, then it is about more than thought – it is about action. I would profoundly come back to the work of Paulo Freire and the work of bell hooks – it’s about love.
When anger can become all consuming, it is time for me to take some time out, to go to the garden to sit on a rock.

Categories
art computing

Experiencing changing trajectories

Steve Benford

Deliberately and systematically creating uncomfortable interactions as part of powerful cultural experiences

Prof Steve Benford is Professor of Collaborative Computing at The University of Nottingham’s Horizon Digital Economy Research Hub. He is the first ever academic to take part in the new ‘Dream Fellowship’ at the BBC. Steve’s work on understanding trajectories through experiences provides us with insights into understanding and behaviour change. Working at the interaction of art and science, Steve focusses on pushing boundaries and engineering compelling experiences. His work into uncomfortable interaction may lead us to better ways of supporting societal change.

In partnership with artists group Blast Theory, Steve and his team have worked on Desert Rain, a combination of virtual reality, installation and performance to problematise the boundary between the real and the virtual. Similarly, Uncle Roy all arround you explored social changes and ubiquity in the city.

In recent work, Steve has been involved in Conversation with Trees. This has brought together art and science around issues of climate change, providing compelling experiences and provoking responses through sometimes deliberate ambiguity.

Recorded at CHI13. Photo on this image cc Frank Boyd.

Categories
computing education

Levelling up: sustainability is the epic challenge

Daniel Pargman

As the lines between games and reality become blurred, sustainability is the epic challenge

Dr Daniel Pargman is from Stockholm’s KTH where he holds several roles in the School of Computer Science and Communication, the Department of Media Technology and Interaction, and is associated with the Centre for Sustainable Communication. He teaches courses on the Future of Media, and on Social Media Technologies.

A specialist in virtual communities, particularly those in games, Daniel has another side, a deeply sustainable side that until recently he kept hidden in the manner of Clark Kent. We explore how these two personas and professional lives are increasingly becoming integrated.

This is the last in a series of four on  the interplay of gaming and sustainability.