RAFT :: being held hostage in gallery

Conceived as a floating structure, built mostly of salvaged materials, the project component of my thesis (RAFT) is used as a way to test and work through the creative possibilities that surround slow design. I use RAFT as a research tool – a conceptual and physical sounding board to uncover and develop a template for practicing slow design. The method was conceived primarily for industrial designers, and therefore more often than not includes a physical product output. It has the ability to transfer to other forms of sustainable design and production.

conversation with my dad

Look back to look ahead.

Oh okay. It wasn’t that different. We thought about things differently. Different worries.

170 000 years. Long time to the individual. Geological time. Blip.

British islands. 20 000 years at the most. Our kind of tribe.

20 building permits / year. Stable. That’s what its been. That’s what

Ever expanding growth in buildings. 70 years. Technology will upgrade. Computers. Tvs. Radios. Sit around living room radios. Still doing the same stuff.

Average growth over the last 70 years. We better be even more careful. Building up. Smart growth. Likely to keep growing. all the more important to think strategically. Needs to be managed. Start now. Economist we must have growth. Let’s not pretend it’s a big surprise. Its going to cost us a fortune. National policy encourages immigration. Average 2 children / family. Economic purposes. Immigration. Keeps labour costs down. Why? Policies that set limits to growth. Cost of labour goes up? Private sectors program. public private sustain this rate of growth. Why are we subsidizing labour by immigration policies that we can’t

Setting limits.

Nobody knows anything b/c there isn’t another model.

Suburbs are in place over time. Trees! Gardens! Subdivide suburbs. Densifying.

Policies to intensify existing.

Diversity. Density.

Cities used to be terrible filthy places.

Land use planning. Workers close to factories. Trucks noise ventilation.

Suberbs emerged as heaven. Away from work. Communiting was a luxury.

Dina shore. See the usa in your chevrolet.

Oh shit.

Terrorism.

Financing terrorism for our greed of gas.

Less then 70 years. House appliances, safe neighborhood, model was much modest house, smaller lots. Today over housed. 4 bedrooms for 2 kids. Cheap mortgage created urban sprawl. Subsidizing it as a nation. Sustainable community planning. Guarenteed mortgage.

Stability.

Maslows.

Human needs source of food. California gets taken over by mexico?

Certainly we don’t want to destabilize the future.

Let’s not do anything to jepordize this. Do not dig up the railroad tracks.

It’s a story. Its such a good story. Compelling concept. Native is glamorous.

HOOK.

Eat sleep poop mate breathe transportation cars eco efficient clothes

Technology will change

Longtitdude ? accurate clocks > 1700s. made all the difference in the world.

Latitude angles from the sun, horizon

Travelling around oceans 2-4000 years ago.

Austrailians had

50 000 years ago. Brave brave monkeys.

Roots of altruisms and ethics in chimpanzees and apes

Females will collect the rocks.

We are obviously More developed.

Rationalized it. ethical impulses

Rules of law, religion, communities, clubs, innate nature

Sophisticated monkeys.

God gene. Wants to understand sense of larger cosmos.

If we have it.. then likely other animals have it too.

Spiritual. Quite possible. And what’s wrong with that?

Non human.

Greater developed god gene.

Applied practical.

What are the implications of long term thinking

Not surprised as much.

Test concepts

Propose how It could be tested

Examples of

Develop criteria

Will this work in this scenario

Stable healthy sustainable communities

Long term planning

Tool to start using

You don’t believe in 7 generations ahead?

Go back to the first of those 7

What could they have done then that would have made a difference today

Communities

Homes

Lives

Things

Or NOT?

Doesn’t have to be rigid.

Understand your history in order to know your future

How did we get here?

Cultural disconnect.

Just holding on to these ideas.

Successful tribe, adopted agroculture, up to 2000 – 3000 people

Organized to come up with these ideas

Pretty spectacular

Not uncivilized

Died of disease

Now we’re here

moon rise

beauty in fragility

Most living things work on some kind of clock: day and night, passing seasons, lunar cycles, rising tides, cosmic alignments, life and death. For the most part, humans experience time and space relative to the Earth, to life experience and span. Fuad-Luke, in his slow design manifesto, outlines six time scales and six units of survival that are useful in understanding the various scales at work.

• Year <> Individual
• Decade <> Family
• Century <> Tribe
• Millennia <> Culture
• 10s millennia <> Species
• Eons <> Web of life

In reading this, one could assume that the survival of a tribe or a culture lies in the ability or capacity to expand the time frame of the modus operandi. Clearly, embracing a long term strategy is inevitably a more sustainable one. Bringing it up to the surface in order to see how this magnificent place unfolds? There is beauty in our fragility.

Age, gender, culture all play a role in influencing temporal perception. Jones describes cultures as having a "future time perspective" (a high value placed on distal or future goals) and a "present time perspective" (a high value placed on proximal goals) and argues that the specific demands of the culture one lives in create environments that demand a particular temporal perspective (Jones 1988). Further research on the perceived flow of time finds that perceptions of time have been linked to changes in well-being. Under pressure, the sense that time for an activity is scarce, has been associated with stress, fatigue and diminished physical and mental health (Larson, 2006). Conversely, that pressure is lifted when we carve out space for unstructured or leisure time, though not always an easy task. The Time-Pressure Illustion: Discretionary Time vs. Free Time was an Austrailian research study (2004) that explored whether the ‘time pressure’ that people feel they are under is real or imagined – or, more precisely, whether it is a matter of choice or of necessity. The study finds that those who feel most overworked – those who have least ‘free time’ – largely do it to themselves.