Bottoms Up. The way to design for social impact.
By PopTech Board Chair and Fellows Faculty Cheryl Heller
When Janine Benyus’ Biomimicry was published in 1977 it was an awakening. Like Rachel Carson and Silent Spring over a decade earlier, one slim book changed the way we thought – in Janine’s case about design – and stunned us by uncovering what had been in plain sight all along – standards for manufacturing that made even our most refined efforts amateurish in comparison; elegant, beautiful, effective, and restorative.
We are creatures of making and acquiring; most of the lessons that have stuck from Biomimicry pertain to the manufacture of physical things. We remember the conch shell, made as strong as ceramic without heating the ocean. Spider silk tougher than nylon filament made without waste or petrochemicals. Or my favorite, the prairie, an emergent, diverse mix of plant species that are vulnerable alone but impervious to drought or disease when together. These examples and others have inspired designers and manufacturers to think differently.
As some of us cogitate about the challenge of creating more equitable life on earth, our focus is shifting; from artifacts to systems, from transactions to relationships, from design as craft to design as thinking, from habits of destruction to an awareness of the need for resilience.
As individuals, we devote abundant resources to changing ourselves, but are lost when faced with the challenge of instigating a shift in our collective behavior. Most of us can’t even move our own families to change their entrenched opinions let alone our cities, countries or the population at large. But here too, biomimicry has important wisdom to impart. Just like the conch shell and spider web, the social lessons of biomimicry have been hiding in plain sight all along.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel outlines plan to invest $1 billion in Chicago’s infrastructure over the next three years. Mayor Emanuel insightfully acknowledges that Chicago cannot remain a viable economy nor a welcoming community without repairing its roads and pipelines; developing its public spaces; and strengthening its freight and passenger transit options. Chicago is a great city and, by simply repairing its existing resources, it will continue to flourish.
CNU 20 Recap: The Importance of Mixed-Use Development and Employment-Oriented Transit
Jacky Grimshaw, Vice President of Policy at Chicago-based Center for New Technology, relays her adventures at CNU 20 and emphasizes the ever-present need for more mindful urban planning.
Science Center, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, 1963
(Benjamin Thompson, TAC)
![theatlantic:
In Praise of Single Mothers
A lot has been said about single mothers. Most of it has been less than flattering.
In a notable nugget former Sen. Rick Santorum said at a town hall meeting, “We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it’s falling apart because of single moms.” Not long after that, in a public appearance in Erie, Pennsylvania, he accused single mothers of “simply breeding more criminals.” This past fall, he argued that single mothers voted Democrat because their lives were so hard and urged Republicans to “build two parent families” in order to “eliminate that desire for government.”
This Mother’s Day I confess that I am very proud to be from what some would call a broken home. Not because it was easy watching a young woman struggle to be a mother on her own after ending a violent marriage, but precisely because it was so very hard. And “hard” seems to be a word we now avoid, disparage, and devalue in our insta-everything culture.
In other words, the very values that Santorum and so many others say these solo moms undermine are just the values I learned from mine — and the community of women like her I grew up with outside Washington, D.C. What did we learn from these women who worked one or more miserably paid jobs while battling domestic turbulence, hunting for child support, hustling to pay rent, and forcing us to do our homework all on their own? Everything.
Read more. [Image: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon]
Single moms are awesome.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3vd2oWM9W1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
A lot has been said about single mothers. Most of it has been less than flattering.
In a notable nugget former Sen. Rick Santorum said at a town hall meeting, “We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it’s falling apart because of single moms.” Not long after that, in a public appearance in Erie, Pennsylvania, he accused single mothers of “simply breeding more criminals.” This past fall, he argued that single mothers voted Democrat because their lives were so hard and urged Republicans to “build two parent families” in order to “eliminate that desire for government.”
This Mother’s Day I confess that I am very proud to be from what some would call a broken home. Not because it was easy watching a young woman struggle to be a mother on her own after ending a violent marriage, but precisely because it was so very hard. And “hard” seems to be a word we now avoid, disparage, and devalue in our insta-everything culture.
In other words, the very values that Santorum and so many others say these solo moms undermine are just the values I learned from mine — and the community of women like her I grew up with outside Washington, D.C. What did we learn from these women who worked one or more miserably paid jobs while battling domestic turbulence, hunting for child support, hustling to pay rent, and forcing us to do our homework all on their own?
Everything.Read more. [Image: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon]
Single moms are awesome.
100,000 solar-powered LED “fireflies” in Tokyo’s Sumida River
Absolutely mesmerizing. I hope this becomes an international trend and shows up in a city near me (I’m looking at you, Chicago).
Okay, I think I’m dreaming. Picasso + Light drawings = two of my favorite things. So glad I found these.
SO. COOL. See the photos on LIFE’s website here.
Wondrous.
![theatlantic:
Schoolyard on Fire: Coming of Age During the L.A. Riots
On Wednesday, April 29, 1992, I left Emerson Junior High School in West L.A. and took the RTD bus — colloquially, the Rough, Tough, and Dangerous — to Fairfax and Wilshire. I walked the two blocks north to the barracks-style community Park La Brea where I lived with my single mother, and, once inside the gates of what I’d begun calling the White Man’s Projects, plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV.
Angelenos are used to the odd car chase, mudslide, earthquake, or fire disrupting regularly scheduled broadcasting, so it was with something like ennui that I flipped through the live footage of urban infernos on every channel — fire, fire, DuckTales, fire, guh. I stared at the helicopter shots in a trance until something slipped the bolt of my attention and I realized I was looking down on the roof my apartment.
I jumped up off the couch shouting with pride, and then with confusion. How disorienting to see the city, the neighborhood I knew down to a molecular level, from this new vantage point. That landscape I’d prowled so often that I would have noticed a new cigarette butt, a different blob of gum, a new tag or sticker, was here somehow changed, shrunken in scale but magnified in importance through the looking glass of the tube.
For the next five hours I watched the stores, malls, and streets where I’d grown up burn to the ground — and with them the protective walls around my adolescent idyll: the corners where we’d joined Hands Across America were now homicide crime scenes; the area of Koreatown where my mom worked now looked, in the aerial shots from news choppers, like the neighborhoods in Baghdad we’d gotten to know so well the year before. But none of this footage felt far off, abstract, as the Gulf War had. It was personal, the topographic map of my own memories. It was also right around the corner, and the fear came knocking.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m35nf1y2s11qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Schoolyard on Fire: Coming of Age During the L.A. Riots
On Wednesday, April 29, 1992, I left Emerson Junior High School in West L.A. and took the RTD bus — colloquially, the Rough, Tough, and Dangerous — to Fairfax and Wilshire. I walked the two blocks north to the barracks-style community Park La Brea where I lived with my single mother, and, once inside the gates of what I’d begun calling the White Man’s Projects, plopped down on the couch and turned on the TV.
Angelenos are used to the odd car chase, mudslide, earthquake, or fire disrupting regularly scheduled broadcasting, so it was with something like ennui that I flipped through the live footage of urban infernos on every channel — fire, fire, DuckTales, fire, guh. I stared at the helicopter shots in a trance until something slipped the bolt of my attention and I realized I was looking down on the roof my apartment.
I jumped up off the couch shouting with pride, and then with confusion. How disorienting to see the city, the neighborhood I knew down to a molecular level, from this new vantage point. That landscape I’d prowled so often that I would have noticed a new cigarette butt, a different blob of gum, a new tag or sticker, was here somehow changed, shrunken in scale but magnified in importance through the looking glass of the tube.
For the next five hours I watched the stores, malls, and streets where I’d grown up burn to the ground — and with them the protective walls around my adolescent idyll: the corners where we’d joined Hands Across America were now homicide crime scenes; the area of Koreatown where my mom worked now looked, in the aerial shots from news choppers, like the neighborhoods in Baghdad we’d gotten to know so well the year before. But none of this footage felt far off, abstract, as the Gulf War had. It was personal, the topographic map of my own memories. It was also right around the corner, and the fear came knocking.
Read more. [Image: Reuters]
