I’ll credit Zach Hale for first making me wonder why the hell Twitter was really even worth thinking about (though I can’t appear to locate my original comment on his blog to that effect).
After much resistance, I’ve finally set up my Twitter account (you can find it on my Profiles menu on this site’s navigation bar). Why? This series of articles had a lot to do with it, but I also decided that I’d take a page from the book of one of my co-workers, Martin Criminale, and at least try throwing my hat in the ring. And, of course, Zach had a bit to do with it.
Now if they only had an import option that allowed me to upload contacts without sending out invitations (the Gmail contact import doesn’t appear to be working for me at this point). I’m also curious about whether it might be possible to integrate my blog posts and my Twitter posts in such a way that they all appear in a continuous stream on this page (without necessarily being an entry in my WordPress RSS feed). It’s probably doable, just a question of figuring out how. Tweets, as they call Twitter entries, would have to be indicated, but that’s not overly hard. Perhaps a combination of SimplePie and my standard WordPress template code?
My résumé has been updated. I’m starting to wonder whether I need to trim the damned thing, since it does seem like there’s a lot on there, and some of it may stop being entirely relevant after a certain period of time. I’m still very proud of being Eastside Journal’s Most Inspirational Graduate of 2001, but how long does a high school graduation award actually matter? This is a bit of a trickier question, since I’m still in school. I’ve had people look at that document and think it way too long, while others think it proves that I have a vast array of experience (let’s ignore my personal reaction to that last opinion for the moment).
Something quite interesting popped into my head, and thus prompted this post. As most know, I do a lot of reading as a part of my masters studies, and have done a lot of reading in the past regarding a host of different topics, particularly during my undergraduate work at Evergreen. Oddly, when I’m doing academic work, I almost never like to read anything else, since my energies tend to get a bit drained from having to keep up with the academic stuff in the first place — there’s residual effect as well in that I seem to not like reading much for time periods after the academic year has ended. Regardless, I find myself in a bit of a quandary; I’ve done a lot of reading on the subjects of sustainability and information management, but I really have no method as it stands of referencing all of that information or even recalling where something in particular cropped up.
This is a big problem, and spans a lot of different resources: textbooks, class notes, handouts, technical articles, magazine articles, programming code snippets, old web site designs, even in-line notations on whatever I’m reading. I come up with ideas for projects that (no pun intended) peter out (cough) after a while, either for lack of motivation or for lack of appropriate reference material – in general, it tends to be more the former than the latter, but lack of reference material also rears its ugly head occasionally. This isn’t because I lack the information; it’s because I’ve seen it somewhere but can’t find it again!
I’m not the only one. Not by a long shot. Everyone faces this. I have a slight advantage in that I’m beginning to recognize some of the ways that this is solvable, but at a slight disadvantage in that I am not quite as involved with stuff like social tagging or folksonomies — though I should note that Wikipedia has it wrong; folksonomies and social tagging are not the same thing, and saying they are is misleading. Anyway, the main reason I have a problem is that I don’t have a quick way of finding any annotations or relevant readings for a particular topic. If I wanted to remember a bit about economics, for instance (a highly relevant subject for me at the moment because of PB AF 594), I don’t have any way of knowing what articles I’ve read related to the subject or where my books are that cover that subject or what I might’ve taken as notes in classes three or four years ago that talked about the subject. This is partly lack of time to look all this crap up. This is also partly because that requires locating things – like my ink in my last blog post, I may not know it’s already around or may think I loaned the book on the subject to someone else. I actually thought I had loaned one of my economics books to my mother (don’t ask me why I thought this) until I spotted it going to bed one night on a bookshelf directly across from the bed!
I’ve tried recently to reduce the amount of stuff I hang on to that makes it harder to find things. I’ve started a “clippings binder”, where I rip out magazine articles that I think might be useful for future reference and recycle the rest of the magazine. I can’t bring myself to do this for my copies of eco-structure, since those are just pure gold, but most of the other magazines I have floating around succumb to this sooner or later. I can’t do this to books (and won’t – my father, who is doubtlessly reading this, would about have a conniption and ban me to the seventh or eighth layer of hell). Last year before moving to Seattle, I donated a bunch of (admittedly mostly fiction) books to Olympia’s Goodwill branch to reduce the number of books I had sitting around. But really, this hasn’t done much – I still have a lot of books I want to be able to reference.
There’s an extra dimension here – not only is there stuff I have read, but there’s stuff that looks relevant that I want to read, but can’t find the time.
It seems like the only really good way of doing this would be to start creating additional notes on every single book I read that might be relevant to future work, but that in and of itself is a lot of additional work. Would it increase my ability to look for and find information? Probably, especially if it were implemented correctly (I’d guess a wiki system with some sort of tagging grafted on would work quite well for this). Perhaps I’ll take a sabbatical in 2009 after I graduate and spend the summer reading and making notes and putting them into some coherent system. Yeah, right. So how do we organize all these resources that we personally find relevant? There are answers — maybe — and those answers are (fairly) likely to be relevant. But in the meantime, if I want to remember all I’ve seen on sustainability, I’ll have to read it all over again, or at least spend a copious amount of time reading over whatever notes I made in the margins of books or on paper somewhere in a binder buried in my closet.
That’s assuming those notes existed at all, and that’s a whole ‘nother problem.
I’ve been thinking I needed printer ink for the last several weeks, since my printer is reporting that several of the cartridges are getting quite low. I had intended to order some tonight, and nearly did until I opened my filing cabinet and found refills for every single ink cartridge I have.
Well, at least I found the cartridges before I ordered new ones…
Note – I use a business-level printer that does duplexing and provides an insane amount of paper storage capacity (and it’s got a wireless connection built in to boot) – why do I use something with that much power? Home-use printers seem to fall a bit short in the areas of networking and duplexing, thus I went to business models. This is an HP OfficeJet Pro K550dwtn (actually, it’s a K550dtwn), and thus far has served me quite well. It helps that I keep my need for ink down by forcing all printouts to only use black ink and to use the “Fast/Economical Printing” setting (which is essentially draft printing). There is no visually appreciable difference between draft printing and normal printing speeds, except that draft printing uses a lot less ink.
On April 10th, 2008, a small group of the country’s top young progressives and post-environmental thinkers and activists will come together in Washington, DC to outline a vision and a strategy for a new progressive movement, one that leaves behind the old generation’s narrow and complaint-based politics.
[ . . . ]
The Breakthrough Generation 2008 Conference seeks highly motivated and talented young individuals who are willing to challenge accepted social and political norms and possess an ability to think and work in new ways.
Ann Thorpe, author of The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, gave a talk entitled “Central Debates of Sustainable Design” as part of the UW’s Luce lecture series. My notes from this are below.
Wanted to cover in the book where people come from when approaching sustainability and how to “do” sustainability
Book systematically and visually presents the concept
“The making of” – the book started in 2001
Based on the principle of “If worth doing, it’s worth doing badly” – had to start somewhere for the idea
Central debates: responsibility, pace (of adoption), scale, operation, and appearance. The talk focused on the first three central debates.
Designers rarely have time to get up to speed if they don’t know about sustainability
The market is not the same as the overall economy
Natural resources have different prices
“Let the market decide”
The operational spheres of nonprofits, private, and public organizations all overlap with the economy
It appears cheaper to destroy natural or societal resources than it is to preserve them according to the market
What responsibilities do designers take across a market economy?
Nonprofits will be seen as having a potential for a proactive stance in promoting issues
Part of the problem is how we take things from the ecosystem and then redistribute it
We don’t see the costs for the global distribution of produced materials
Different things work at a different pace – art/fashion, communication, infrastructure, culture, nature (this list is actually sorted fastest to slowest in terms of rate of change)
Commerce is starting to control the pace of change
Much as we want to push change, we need stability in the (economic) system
Change takes three forms: physical, economic, and cultural
Audience question: sustainable costs more – can we make it cost less? Do cases of this happening exist?
Answer: marketplace tools are a solution here. There are some cases where this has happened.
Things are cheap in monetary terms that aren’t in sustainable terms – this is a systemic problem
“Be an active citizen” to make sustainability viable – knowledge is power
Sustainability is complex and depends on context of values
How might open source play into sustainable design?
Audience: We do sustainable buildings, but it “doesn’t look good”
The New York Times wrote recently on conflict between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Minerals Management Service. In brief, these two agencies plan to implement two different policies that will impact the polar bear population. The Fish and Wildlife service intends to list the polar bear population as endangered, while the Minerals Management Service intends to open up potentially vital habitat for the polar bear to oil companies. The energy problems surrounding this notwithstanding, this is a beautiful example of how two kinds of sustainability come into direct conflict with one another. Which is more important – energy or saving world species?
This is where value judgements enter quite strongly into play, and, much as we might like to ignore the fact, sustainability is in fact a value – more specifically, it’s a personal value rather than a cultural value, since the culture of the United States as a whole has yet to embrace the idea. Economists would say that sustainability is also a part of a person’s utility, since doing things to assure sustainability increases a person’s well-being. When that’s the case and sustainability is not prevalent enough on a cultural level, which way do you swing the pendulum? Do you declare the species endangered to protect their habitat, or do you attempt to increase our energy independence by allowing drilling operations? Doing both is certainly entirely possible, but one act makes the other inherently more complicated.
I’m not sure there is a right answer here, but there is certainly a more correct answer given the direction of the economy and the overall political environment: declare polar bears endangered and protect their habitat, but allow for drilling elsewhere if it is feasible and can be done in a reasonably low-impact manner. I acknowledge the relative absurdity of the previous statement, since by definition, no drilling is low-impact, ever, and the likelihood of such drilling occurring anywhere within the lower 48 states is likely to be met with extreme resistance by concerned citizens. The debate over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and drilling rights there notwithstanding, Alaska is, plain and simple, an easier state to drill in, since much of its population is concentrated.
One hopes that we can arrive at a sustainable solution for both the problem of habitat and energy independence; indeed, it’s the only thing we can reasonably attempt as a nation.
As of late, I’ve had a job search agent working for me on careerbuilder.com, sending me all jobs that match the phrase "sustainability". I originally intended it to try to isolate jobs that involve environmentally sustainable planning, advocacy, management, and thinking, but that’s not quite what’s turned up. Here’s a sample of job titles from the most recent alert on January 2nd:
Geologist
Civil and Structural CAD Technicians
Civil Engineers
Architects/Architectural Designer
Electrical Engineer
Mechanical Engineer
Regional Sales Manager – Retail
It’s fairly clear that at least some of these have some sort of ties to the environment – architecture and geology have clear ties (and to a lesser extent, so do the engineers). But why the regional sales management position?
Keep in mind: this is a keyword search. Thus, it simply matches the word "sustainability" in anything, and will match:
Supports marketing initiatives and ensures successful implementation and sustainability within the Region.
This is an indicator of two things, at least from my perspective as both an information management graduate student and as someone highly interested in sustainability:
It’s all about context. "Well, duh," I can hear you say, but it’s amazing how many people forget this. Search engines are only as good as the amount of context it has about what you’re searching for. What does this have to do with environmental sustainability? Pretty much nothing, until you consider:
While "sustainability" may be synonymous with "environmental sustainability", the reality of the job market would seem to dictate otherwise. Tying back to my previous post, this synonymy is not universal, though it would seem to be by glancing at the political atmosphere of a good chunk of first world countries. My job search might pull up a job that directly has to do with sustainability – my alma mater, The Evergreen State College, recently posted a job ad for a Director of Sustainability, for instance. But it’s equally as likely to suggest regional sales positions precisely because the meaning of "sustainability" depends upon its context!
The thing that’s perhaps most interesting about the sustainability movement isn’t so much that it exists, though that in and of itself is certainly an accomplishment. The recognition that we need to live in harmony with our surroundings is nothing new – Native American culture, to some extent, mirrors these exact values (though Alan Weisman in his book The World Without Us makes the point that Native American culture, too, hasn’t completely lived by this credo in the past). What is new is that sustainability has somehow become synonymous with the environment – so much so that when we say sustainability today, it’s assumed that we’re talking about environmental sustainability.
Why does this make a difference? Consider the many different contexts of the word:
Business sustainability, usually referring to whether a business or a business model can survive or not
Information sustainability, referring to how information is kept alive
Cultural sustainability, referring to whether a particular culture can survive
Ecosystem sustainability, which is a subset of environmental sustainability referencing a particular type of environment
Environmental sustainability is huge – it interweaves itself in and through our culture, our values, our economic system, our way of life. So what does it mean when simply saying the word "sustainability" is almost a given reference to the environment? There are four reasons that pop to mind:
It is a recognition of the current "fad" that is getting governmental attention, though to call it a fad is to grossly understate the urgency of understanding our relationship with our surroundings. This particular position is not one I agree with for exactly that reason, though it is held by various people.
It is an acceptance of the idea that we must change our way of thinking about our daily lives.
It is an encapsulation of many of the fears we have about the future and provides a focal point for our efforts to better understand and support the world around us.
It is a tacit recognition that we have ignored the environmental impact of a consumerist society.
The tricky part about the entire question of sustainability is that its many different spheres – environmental, cultural, and all the rest – are all so enmeshed that changing our way of thinking about one type of sustainability can drastically weaken or strengthen the rest. For example, the state of Washington (and every other state in the Union, for that matter) has strict policies on how long particular records must be kept by public organizations for audit purposes. If you change those rules, you immediately impact three types of sustainability:
environmental, because you’ve changed how the information must be stored and how the media must be preserved (which could require special material treatments, additional infrastructure, etc.);
cultural, because you’ve changed the rules on how long records must be retained and thus have required the people responsible for those records to adjust their practices (note that this is a smaller example of cultural sustainability than what I was referencing above); and
information sustainability, because you’ve changed the length of time that that information must exist.
What happens, then, when we begin to think sustainably about our environment? Our way of being changes. This is not only essential; it’s required. That’s why the word "sustainability" must be linked in people’s minds to the environment: to not do so is to put us all in grave danger of forgetting that we have to change.