In the Bubble Quotes

“It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up.
A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.”
― John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

“Researchers at the University of British Columbia have translated various categories of human consumption into
areas of productive land needed to support them. They discovered that the ecological footprint of one Canadian is 4.8 hectares (an area 220 meters long by 220 meters wide-roughly comparable to three city blocks). This statistic means that if everyone on Earth lived like the average Canadian, we would need at least three Earths to provide all the material and energy essentials we currently use." The World Wildlife Fund calculates that mankind's ecological footprint is already 1.2 Earths.”
― John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

“To do things differently, we need to perceive things differently. In discussing where we want to be, breakthrough ideas often come when people look at the world through a fresh lens. One of the most important design challenges I pose in this book is to make the processes and systems that surround us intelligible and knowable. We need to design microscopes, as well as microscopes, to help us understand where things come from and why: the life story of a hamburger, or time pressure, or urban sprawl. Equipped with a fresh understanding of why our present situations are as they are, we can better describe where we want to be. With alternative situations evocatively in mind, we can design our way from here to there.
Macroscopes can help us understand complex systems, but our own eyes, unaided, are just as important. All over the world, alternative models of organizing daily life are being tried and tested right now. We just need to look for them. When Ezio Manzini ran design workshops in Brazil, China, and India to develop new design ideas for an exhibition about daily life, he encountered dozens of examples of new services for daily life he had never thought of before-and also new attitudes. In many different cultures, he discovered, "an obsession with things is being replaced by a fascination with events." Both young and old people are designing activities and environments in which energy and material consumption is modest and more people are used, not fewer, in the ways we take care of people, work, study, move around, find food, eat, and share equipment.12
In a less-stuff-more-people world, we still”
― John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

“Thank haven, literally, for the moon," says the economist Susan George. "If it weren't there, supplying the gravity to slow down the earth's rotation, our days would last only about four hours, with constant gale-force winds. Nature doesn't work on the principle that faster is better". Industrial society, unfortunately, does work on that principle. As a consequence, it weighs heavily upon nature.”
― John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

“We've built a technology-focused society that is remarkable on means, but hazy about ends. It's no longer clear to which question all this stuff - tech - is an answer, or what value it adds to our lives.”
― John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

“Copernicus took us out of the centre of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the centre of the biosphere."52”
― John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World

“Service design is about arranging things so that people who need things done are connected to other people and equipment that get things done-on an as- and when-needed basis. The technical term, which comes from the logistics industry, is "dynamic resource allocation in real time.”
― John Thackara, In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World