dark skies abuse
I walked past this building the other night - 90 Whitfield Street - it's called Qube. It's developed by Derwent London. It seemed rather flagrantly lit; all the lights on in an absolutely empty building. But there was a bloke on the corner with a tripod taking a picture so, wanting to think the best, I thought maybe they've just turned them on for him.
And then I walked past at about 3 o'clock this afternoon and all the lights were on then. During the day. With no-one, seemingly, there. Which is ironic since the website boasts that a "...presence detection system controls the lighting, both on the individual office floors and within the common parts, to ensure that lights are turned off when an area is not in use, to minimise the lighting energy consumption."
It would appear that there's an over-ride while the landlord's trying to flog the building. To give them the benefit of the doubt I guess there could have been someone in there looking around and that could have triggered all the lights. So I went back just now. 5.30 and it looked like this:
Maybe the presence detection system is detecting otherworldly presences.
I also noticed here that "Derwent London announces letting of 18,837 sq ft on 2nd floor to Aegis Media Ltd" and that if it's the same Aegis Media that's part of Aegis Group then their environmental policy says: "Energy efficiency, for example, is a key driver of our relocation and facilities policies."
Perhaps someone from Aegis could call someone at Derwent and ask them to turn the lights off on the second floor.
My first thought about all this is that there should be some way of naming and shaming companies who do this. Developers have long environmental policy papers but I can't find much discussion of this kind of issue. And it's not just empty buildings. But I always think naming and shaming is a bad thing (Let his who is wihout sin..etc) and I presume developers do it because it rather effectively draws attention to their properties. Which means they've got a lot of money vested in leaving the lights on. So they're not going to change easily.
So I wonder if there isn't more of a carrot to offer them as opposed to a stick to beat them with. Could you develop a low-energy alternative to just leaving all the lights on? Something that delivers lots of attention without much energy. That ought to be possible. And maybe it could be re-deployable from one development to another as a particular building fills up with tenants.
I dunno. Maybe that would be a good thing to think about before or at geekgreen.
UPDATE: I just walked past. 9pm on a Saturday. The only lights on were in the lobby. So that's something. And thanks for the comments below, helpful stuff.
wattson
So I bought a Wattson yesterday. Partly out of enthusiasm over the new Howies shop, partly out of genuine ambient eco-curiosity, but quite a lot so I'd have something to talk about at this tomorrow. It's a simple, clever thing that tells you how much electricity you're using. It tells you in £s, it tells you in watts, and it tells you with an ambient glow. And it's incredibly simple to set up. The video above is the Wattson in our kitchen (dig the crazy worksurface) with me turning the fluorescent light on and off. So the figures represent what our annual bill would be if we left it on the whole time, versus sitting in the dark for a year.
In some ways it's just a silly, indulgent, middle-class eco-worrier, gadget freak toy. It's been perfectly possible to sensibly manage your electricity consumption for years. It's just we never have.
And the Wattson makes it a playful, easy activity. So far we've sat and asked ourselves, how much is our annual bill? do we know? how many watts do we use? is that above or below average? how much are we actually paying for our electricity? (the machine defaults to a typical UK price but can be adjusted). This is stuff that a lot of people just don't think about that much.
And then immediately we started playing with it, because it's presence encourages you to think about your consumption. Arthur insisted that the first thing we did was see how low we can get it:
That's everything in the flat turned off, except for the fridge. And the Wattson itself, which is obviously, slightly ironic. It's made us all much more conscious about what we're leaving on and what we're using. And I don't think it's just a novelty, I think it might be like driving a hybrid car, where the interface gives you a different implied goal in the game of driving - maximum fuel efficiency.
The website says that there will soon be a community aspect to the Wattson, and it's got a USB hole which must be useful for something. I'm hoping it'll be a way to see how your consumption compares to others, which will also be useful, but, more importantly, it'll be competitive, like nike+. Then it'll really be fun.
The big problem with it at the moment is the unit price, it's a lot, £150. That makes it mostly a bourgeois indulgence. But hopefully that's just the effect of it being a fringe-ish device not expecting to sell a lot of units. Once this idea kind of idea is embedded into every fusebox or fridge as a low-cost, component then it might start to make a difference to the way we play with and use electricity. Because it obviously be ideal if we didn't try and solve every consumption problem by buying new, powered gadgets.
switching
Thinking more about this and that I'm even more convinced that the way to encourage responsible energy use is not through one huge centralised campaign but through a bundle of little things with different actions and motivations. Gavin calls them microcampaigns - like his simple and brilliantly obvious Iveswitched. And there are things like walkit. And the small steps that Jon talks about.
And it strikes me that the best thing that marketingland can do here is swing in behind these things and start donating imagination and cash to try and make some of them 'tip'. We need to support the people with the passion and the ideas.
(Picture from Gavin's flickrstream)
making do
Iain recently wrote a post about the Bonfire Of The Brands book, which I wrote a little bit for, ages ago, and am now slightly afraid of. But a more interesting thing popped up in the comments - a link to Robert Llewellyn's Making Do project on YouTube. Mr Llewellyn's a hero in our house, because of Scrapheap Challenge, and this project is great. He's trying to go for a year without buying anything - making do - it's even more of a challenge because he's clearly a bit of a technophile. Fascinating, funny, honest stuff.
looking for darkness
We climbed up Primrose Hill late last Sunday night, hoping to see the Perseids. We did everything wrong; early rather than late, the centre of London, and only hung around for a while (hard to keep a very tired 7-year old interested for long) but we still glimpsed a few. And it was rather magical.
And then, today, I read a brilliant article in the New Yorker about light pollution (abstract here, no full text online apparently). And it struck me that this might be one of those issues you could get people interested in. There'll have to be a huge bundle of ideas, actions and activities if we're going to get more responsible in our energy use - not one huge idea - and this might be one which catches people's imagination, because it seems to have everything going for it. Lighting the ground and not the sky saves money, increases safety and gives us back the stars.
Some points from the article:
Someone looking at the night sky over New York sees less than one percent of the stars that Galileo would have seen.
Installing 'full cutoff' lighting (ie lighting that shines where you want it, not up at the sky and not straight in your eyes) in public spaces can save huge amounts of money in energy bills because you can reduce the wattage per light.
And I really liked the fact that you can often increase visibility by decreasing the amount of lighting.
Because our eyes adapt to the brightest light present, if you've got a huge 'glare bomb' - an unshielded light - all it really does is create more darkness, because our eyes can't adapt to see anywhere other than the immediately illuminated area. (Doesn't there seem to a big juicy metaphor in there for something?) This often means that lights installed in the name of safety just end up creating huge pools of darkness for criminals to plot their dastardliness.
And there's a huge emotional pay-off - we'd be able to see the stars again. As opposed to the interior of Top Shop - which looks like this at night:
How is that amount of lighting necessary all night?
You can find out more at The International Dark-Sky Association, who have a splendid motto - Carpe Noctem.
boost the sample
John is stuck. Can't decide on what to call his new book. So if you're doing nothing he requests that you go here and express yourself on the matter.
And with that, I'm of on hols for a week. Again, with all the comment spam floating around I'll have to turn on comment moderation while away. Sorry about that. Lots of Interesting2007 news when I get back.
work avoidance II
I was at a conference the other day, and we were talking about consumer research and pre-testing. And someone trotted out that old thing Henry Ford said: "If I'd have asked my customers what they'd wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse".
I'd normally agree with that sentiment, but it occurred to me that, based on what we know now about the internal combustion engine, a faster horse might have been a better answer.
more ideas, less stuff
I've slightly foolishly agreed to participate in the D&AD President's Lecture 'Branding And Environmental Issues Forum'. As is normal with these things they've not given me any clue about what they'd like me to talk about but I thought I'd better start thinking about it.
I signed up for this, not because I'm a huge expert in Branding And Environmental Issues but because I think I should be. I think we all should be. And this seemed to be the kind of kick up the arse I'd need. So I'm going to try and spend some time thinking and writing about these things and hopefully we'll do some thinking about it together.
Given this is such a contentious, highly emotive issue maybe I should lay out some of my starting beliefs, though I'm sure they'll change once I actually learn something.
So. In an ideal world I think a benevolent race of super-beings should arrive from behind the moon and make us do the kinds of stuff we actually need to do to avoid environmental catastrophe - specifically start consuming vastly less energy. But, in the absence of benevolent aliens, we're going to be limited to what we can persuade people to do themselves or to vote for. And given what people are like that's a bit more constrained. Obviously as climate change gets worse people will do more and will need less persuading but, right now, our best chances for mitigating climate change are by substantially re-adjusting the priorities of our consumer economy not by trying to make people revolt against cars and fridges.
That will probably strike some people as horribly cynical and insufficient but it's what seems do-able to me now.
Here are some things that seem like interesting starting points:
John's been thinking about this for a while, and he obviously knows his brand onions, so he's well worth listening to. His speculation that our consumption mania will suddenly just disappear in the way 'Victorian values' disappeared in the 50s and 60s would be nice to believe. It's possible. I can imagine it in bits of Western Europe. There is a sort of logic that we'll all pop out of the top of Maslow's Heirarchy Of Needs and return to simplicity, but I suspect unfettered capitalism is cannier than to allow that. And I'm also reminded that a slice of the affluent middle-class has always longed for a return to a simpler, less materialistic lifestyle. As long as they don't have to go without fine cheese. So if this anything new? I'm not sure we can combat climate change by dragging the whole world up through Maslow in a kind of accelerated lifestyle gentrification, but there might be something in it. And John's much smarter than me so if he says it's happening I'll just capitulate and agree.
There's also a big pile of should-be-read conversation here.
Innocent talk about Fast Moving Sustainable Goods. And I think their combination of ambition and conscience is probably the most effective route for your average consumer brand at the moment. You can't achieve a lot if no-one's heard of you or no-one buys your product. (Assuming all the reality caveats above.) Quite a few brands are doing the same thing - trying to create new products without consuming irresponsible amounts of energy.
But I've been wondering if there's a way of satisfying that nagging consumer impulse merely through the supply of ideas, not through the supply of new stuff.
Our fundamental issue, I guess, is that people are consuming too much. By which we mean too much stuff. Physical stuff. Stuff that requires energy to be made and un-made. So we wouldn't mind people consuming per se, if they consumed less actual stuff and consumed more that was made only of ideas. Which, of course, is what a lot of branding tries to do - and is often criticised for - we try and add value to a product by adding abstract, non-physical stuff; ideas, associations, images, memories. And the transmission of these things involves some energy, but less than creating a lot of physical stuff.
So I'm wondering whether we can persuade people to consume more branded ideas and less branded stuff, in the same way we might sometimes be able to substitute connected technology for cars.
Think about packaging as an example. At the moment we try and sell stuff by wrapping it in an expensive, wasteful but desirable bit of packaging. What if the packaging could be kept to a minimum but the sales imperative could be served through a desirable idea embedded in the product, with a minimum of physical stuff? (And yes I know the ideal solution here is not to encourage the consumption of more products but see reality caveats above.)
Perhaps the next stage is to wonder whether all those base consumer habits can be served just through the exchange of ideas. Can an old product be made to feel new through some kind of brand mechanism - so that no energy is consumed but someone still buys something and someone sells something. Does that make sense?
A t-shirt might be a good example. How do we make this work with a t-shirt? How can a t-shirt company satisfy your consumer need for a new t-shirt without having to actually make a new t-shirt, package a new t-shirt or transport it to you? Can we persuade you to be happy with your old t-shirt or somehow refresh your old t-shirt so it feels new? And can we make money doing so? Can there be some exchange of value?
Can we create a brand world built with more ideas and less stuff? Can we stop using ideas to sell more stuff and use ideas as a substitute for stuff?
I'm probably being hopelessly naive, but it's a thought
(And, while we're at it I should also point at two bits of essential reading; World Changing and Bruce Sterling's Viridian Design Movement which I think is offering the most persuasive thinking in this whole area - 'Creating Irresistible Demand For A Global Atmosphere Upgrade'.
Like I say I'm just thinking outloud, but I'm hoping to learn.