Nach meiner 365-Tage-Textilkauf-Abstinenz (die ich inzwischen dem Trend zur "Apparell Diet" zuordnen kann) stellte sich - nein, kein Jojo-Effekt - sondern bewußteres Einkaufen ein. Katalog-Ware und Ladenketten, nee, das kommt mir inzwischen wie Kantinenessen vor: Aus zu billigen Zutaten für den Standardgeschmack gekocht. So habe ich dawanda für mich entdeckt. Hier gibts nicht nur originelle Teile und Unikate, ich unterstütze ausserdem kreative Köpfe darin, von ihren Schöpfungen leben oder sich damit etwas dazuverdienen zu können. Toll finde ich zum Beispiel die upcyclingmanufaktur, in der aus gebrauchten Textilien neue, ausgefallene Stücke entstehen.
Zu einem Lieblingsladen ist ausserdem auch manomama aus Augsburg geworden: Hier wird nicht nur faire und ökogerechte Mode gemacht, Gründerin Sina Trinkwalder beeindruckt auch mit ihrer offen-ehrlichen Art und ihrem Einfallsreichtum. Und wer was über den Umgang von Firmen mit "Sozialen Medien" lernen will, kann sich von ihr abschauen, wie man's richtig macht.
Im dawanda-Shop von karlita hab ich übrigens den Kettenanhänger aus der Umschalt-Taste einer alten Schreibmaschine entdeckt. Shift happens. Ich hab den Umschalter dabei.
While on a rational level, most people agree that a fundamental shift in society and culture is necessary to tackle the problems of today, it seems very hard to make that leap on a personal level, leave alone a community or institutional level. I was reminded of that when I watched the speech that UK prime minister Gordon Brown recently gave at the TED conference. He states that we are at a unique historic moment where we are more interconnected than ever before and we are also developing a global ethic, both promising preconditions for solving global problems - poverty, climate change, economic crisis - in a global way.The solution he proposed remained vague but he clearly saw a need for a central institution which would have the means to globally enforce agreements or regulations. While this may certainly be part of the solution, I missed concepts of co-creation, empowerment, collaboration and individual responsibility in his vision. Being inside a politician's story maybe did not allow him to see that new forms of governance would be central to such a solution, if it is not just to repeat the patterns of administrative institutions stricken by political power-struggles.
Another example for a solution that repeats past patterns is the idea of a British company to put RFID barcodes on trees so that controlling the sustainability of forests becomes more transparent. They even assume that tagging trees could play a role in fighting deforestation, and therefore, could be seen as a measure to stop global warming. But the underlying concept is still that we can care only for things that we can control and that nature has to be properly put into our warehousing system for us to see its value. An alternative to applying technical control mechanisms could be to bring forests and communities together, something that Roald Gundersen and Amelia Baxter are trying to do with their Community Supported Forests. Members will get a specific part of the forest where they "can camp, hunt and garden on the land. They can forage for mushrooms, garlic mustard and wild ginger. They can get firewood, sustainably milled lumber, landscaping stone or fresh spring water." And in doing that, they will have a chance to get to know the forest as a friend and not just as a distant resource. That's a very different story, right?
Recently I heard of the Dark Mountain Project, a literary movement to rewrite the stories that we base our assumptions on. "We aim to question the stories that underpin our failing civilisation, to craft new ones for the age ahead and to write clearly and honestly about our true place in the world."
Becoming aware of the narratives that we live by and re-inventing them is very much what we need, in my view, to have a new context for transformation - on a personal, community or even institutional level.
"Recognizing pattern is one of humanity's greatest abilities. It is the basis of conscious awareness that brings cohesion to a chaotic world by allowing us to see contrast as well as similarity." -Maggie Macnab in "Decoding Design"
Talk to company representatives about Corporate Social Responsibility - CSR - and they are likely to see it as an important thing to integrate into their business practices, if that has not already been done. Talk to your neighbours or colleagues, i.e. to "normal" people about CSR, and they are likely to mistrust the whole concept as just another empty promise.
Mistrust is responsible for the seemingly fragile or sometimes nonexisting relationship of companies, brands, institutions or authorities towards their users, consumers, or citizens. Yet, without trust, communities cannot bring about change. We cannot even speak about communities, if there is no trust that knits the players (in CSR terminology: "stakeholders") together.
In terms of sustainability, Michael Braungart, a key proponent of the Cradle-to-Cradle-concept, puts his finger on the shortcomings of sustainability: Sustainability, as it is practiced today, has the empty promise, that people suspect to be there, often built into it. All the talk about reducing carbon footprint or using less toxic material or reducing waste still is about being a little less bad, it is just "guilt management and celebrating mediocrity", as Braungart puts it. More radical approaches are needed: Having a big footprint, but a positive one (like ants). Using no toxic material at all. Eliminating the concept of waste - what we call waste today should be (technical) nutrients. Design that follows these principles is no longer eco design or sustainable design or green design in Braungart's view, but Total Beauty Design ("If it's toxic it is not beautiful.")
Also among designers I noted that Beauty (without quotation marks!) is being charged with new meaning: Beauty stands for natural, unobtrusive design, it is timeless and functional, often biomimetic, it makes you feel connected to the Earth and to your fellow beings.
The great thing is that Total Beauty is a lot easier to communicate than CSR, as it is does not even need words. Beauty can be recognized through the eyes, through touching, tasting and smelling. When people stop trusting glossy PR brochures, they still trust their senses.
Stumbled across a really cool mobile tagging project in Edinburgh called Spellbinder:.
"Spellbinder is a new interactive digital medium based on camera phones and image matching. Using Spellbinder, digital content can be embedded in the real world by taking a photograph of an object or place. The digital content can be released by another user by taking another photograph of the same location. Spellbinder does not require special markers or barcodes to be placed in the world and works indoors or outdoors. Unlike tracking technologies such as global positioning systems, the focus is onwhat specifically is being looked at rather than where the user is. "
Currently, the system is used for an Edinburgh Invisible Art project (see picture from the interesting BBC article about this, but, as Dr Mark Wright of the Division of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh told the BBC, not just locations but practically everything could be linked to the virtual world. "With Spellbinder, the real world becomes a computational resource."
Fascinating: Take a picture of a real life object and get information, pictures, sounds, comments from your community,... in return. Lots of applications possible. But what really entices me is that mobile tagging based on real objects instead of code is one more step towards living in a world where virtual and real are no longer distinguishable. Yep, I fell for the Simulation Argument which says that if mankind is at some point able to build a simulation of the real world (and it looks like we're getting there), then chances are we are already living in one. And I think that is a consolation :-)
