Rethinking… almost everything: The Global Village Construction Set
- by Ken Webster
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- Unpublished
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How about a global village construction set (GVCS) which comprises “an advanced industrial economy-in-a-box that can be replicated inexpensively anywhere in the world. The GVCS is like a Lego set of modular building blocks that work together – creating sustainable, regenerative, resilient communities.”
It is intriguing to say the least: some key features – a set of 40 cheap but modern tools providing people with technology to do more with less, open source development so that a global community can contribute and share the development and the benefits, a wide range of interchangeable parts, and new approaches to familiar problems. I think the video helps make the point and is worth two minutes of anyone’s time.
Feeling better? From the Foundation‘s perspective what is striking is the way in which this project has refused to work piecemeal but has combined a ‘big picture’ sense of where it wants to go using some of the best creative and collaborative tools to come out of the digital age. In its own words it “combines appropriate technology, high technology, resilient community development, sustainable living, economic development, automation, open source product development, community construction, open source economic development, and livelihood topics.”
Perhaps it is the audacity of the whole thing and its clear references to one of my favourite designers Buckminster Fuller which also appeals but as a retake on how to create abundance by “questioning everything” you thought you knew about building communities while adding a sense of fun and engagement it is a fantastic talking point – and so, truly educational.
Could this be part of a ‘circular economy’? It could be argued that it looks more like a shift towards providing people with tools – and the means for their use and maintenance – a sort of post oil community building… but just a moment – sustainability requires, absolutely requires a way of restoring and rebuilding social and natural capital, and it also requires us to rebuild economies in a way which gives people opportunities to work at a wide range of scales and meet more of their own needs outside the formal market. Yes, it is still vitally important for waste to be food and there to be technical cycles, but look closely – the tools are designed to be fixable, repairable, reusable and they hardly consist of the sort of kit which would end up in landfill. No doubt its not perfect but it is way over in a positive direction. I’ll become a True Fan ($10 a month) and discover more and maybe chip in around this point to their discussions. Watch this space, as the cliché goes… Maybe we’ll get some comments from their project here.
As an aside, nobody, I hope, is suggesting that a sustainable economy is “business as usual with ‘cradle to cradle’ products” tagged on! The first rule of systems thinking appears to be ‘you cannot change just one thing’; hence the Foundation’s rather energetic support for rethinking and redesign. The next industrial revolution will bring a society about which we have only the vaguest notions but we are holding up some of the likely principles that will need to be in play for it to be sustainable and regenerative. We can’t say much more than that.
This is why the GVCS is such an interesting concept, it is creative and challenging. In these days when tools and ideas and energy are being decentralised to communities of many kinds and spread at digital speed it is the institutions, most of which whom have a reluctance or inability to adapt, who may be most surprised by innovation that springs up all over the place, finds traction and simply bypasses traditional structures. As in the French Revolution, when a politician noticing the mob rushing down the street below his lodgings cried: “I am their leader I must follow them!” (but in French you understand…)
Marcin Jakubowski, creator of the GVCS, at TED
1 comments
Patrick Andrews wrote on November 22 2010:
I agree that openfarmtech is intriguing. To me it is a nice model of how open source principles could be applied in a hardware world. I can't really imagine a sustainable (or circular, as you put it) economy without dramatically increased levels of sharing of knowledge and dramatically increased levels of collaboration. My view is that this is unlikely to be achieved by big companies who are more focused on efficiency, which tends to dull creativity. It is more likely to emerge from communities of people round the world freely sharing ideas. We are trying to apply these principles at 40 Fires (www.40fires.org)
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