In an informal meeting held earlier today a suggestion for Universites United's alternative name came to light. During the course of the meeting (between Phil Waywell, Phil Sams, Sandy Black, Helen Storey and Caroline Coates) and whilst Phil Waywell was talking about what free radicals do, Helen suggested it become the new name for the group - all thought it was great!
But what do you think? Please post a note with your views - we'll need to hear back by Tuesday 2nd Dec. If we have a positive consensus we can put it forward to NESTA for the OK.
Thank you!
Friday, 28 November 2008
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
Life-giving and Murderous
As members of Universities United we have all been given water usage charts to fill in. Unless someone is very dirty, I suspect that I will ‘win’ this one. We built a house for ourselves, which helps. It looks like this on the left. It has a composting toilet, and hence no water for flushing. Fact: over 70% of visitors to our house look down the loo.
At our poo.
Weird...
We do not have a dishwasher.
We save all our rainwater and use it for the office toilets and our washing machine. The rest of it (there are two 3000 litre tanks) we use to water our garden in times of need (a garden that is fertilised by the contents of the composting toilet). Two summers ago we felt oh-so-pleased with ourselves as we freely watered during the hose pipe ban, and some snooper had sent round the water police to chastise us; we ended up chastising them.
So this sounds very self-righteous.
So this sounds very self-righteous.
We are water smugs.
But all this is rather less straightforward than it sounds. As with all matters to do with the environment, values in water become contested. The composting toilet is made in Sweden of naughty plastic and takes up two square metres of floor space (with all the embodied energy that takes), and has a small fan running all the time to extract the smells. So, if this blog was about carbon emissions, the composting toilet would be on the bad list. The pumps for the recycled water are temperamental and need constant adjustment, and sometimes very expensive expert help. So if this blog was about lo-tech, they would be out. And then the water police got their own back later, enforcing us to install another piece of kit that stopped our rainwater potentially backing up into the ‘fresh’ water supply.
It is with this latter that the contradictions about water itself are so apparent. Water from the sky is not allowed to ‘contaminate’ recycled wee which has been pushed around in 150 year old pipes.
But all this is rather less straightforward than it sounds. As with all matters to do with the environment, values in water become contested. The composting toilet is made in Sweden of naughty plastic and takes up two square metres of floor space (with all the embodied energy that takes), and has a small fan running all the time to extract the smells. So, if this blog was about carbon emissions, the composting toilet would be on the bad list. The pumps for the recycled water are temperamental and need constant adjustment, and sometimes very expensive expert help. So if this blog was about lo-tech, they would be out. And then the water police got their own back later, enforcing us to install another piece of kit that stopped our rainwater potentially backing up into the ‘fresh’ water supply.
It is with this latter that the contradictions about water itself are so apparent. Water from the sky is not allowed to ‘contaminate’ recycled wee which has been pushed around in 150 year old pipes.
The way that we highlight the contradiction of water is by bottling the liquid that comes out of the composting toilet and putting a rather classy label on the bottle.
We then hand out these bottles to visiting journalists. The more cultured ones smile at the Manzoni reference (the artist who tinned his shit), but most draw back in disgust. We are giving them a bottle of our urine. We are giving them the best liquid compost I know.
The most profound writer I have found on this contradiction is Ivan Illich. Illich always seems to get there first, whether to the medical profession (Medical Nemesis), education (Deschooling Society), technology (Tools for Conviviality) or water (H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness) - all sharp classics which kick against received wisdom. In the last book he writes about the dual nature of water:
“The water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination. More tangible than space, it is even more elusive for two reasons: first, because this water has nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors, and second, because water…always possesses two sides. The flood, the blood, the rain, milk, semen, and dew, each of the waters has an identical twin. Water is deep and shallow, life-giving and murderous. Twinned, water arises from chaos, and waters cannot but be dual.”
It is this duality that makes water so ripe for this group; neither fully technical nor fully creative, water is the stuff, in the end, of culture and society (hence a male scientist relating it to feminism in an earlier entry), and whenever one half pulls one way, the other half must pull back to locate it in this contested area, where ideas are always located in a wider political territory and not as autonomous technical or creative fixes.
We then hand out these bottles to visiting journalists. The more cultured ones smile at the Manzoni reference (the artist who tinned his shit), but most draw back in disgust. We are giving them a bottle of our urine. We are giving them the best liquid compost I know.
The most profound writer I have found on this contradiction is Ivan Illich. Illich always seems to get there first, whether to the medical profession (Medical Nemesis), education (Deschooling Society), technology (Tools for Conviviality) or water (H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness) - all sharp classics which kick against received wisdom. In the last book he writes about the dual nature of water:
“The water we seek is the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination. More tangible than space, it is even more elusive for two reasons: first, because this water has nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors, and second, because water…always possesses two sides. The flood, the blood, the rain, milk, semen, and dew, each of the waters has an identical twin. Water is deep and shallow, life-giving and murderous. Twinned, water arises from chaos, and waters cannot but be dual.”
It is this duality that makes water so ripe for this group; neither fully technical nor fully creative, water is the stuff, in the end, of culture and society (hence a male scientist relating it to feminism in an earlier entry), and whenever one half pulls one way, the other half must pull back to locate it in this contested area, where ideas are always located in a wider political territory and not as autonomous technical or creative fixes.
Jeremy Till
Friday, 7 November 2008
Picking up on the simple-but-fun water meter, I gave Miles Pennington of RCA and DesignStream a ring and asked why it had disappeared from their website. A very pleasing answer - he's finalising a deal to get it up and running and thence into the market, so everything is under wraps until Feb next year. I really hope it flies - take it from me, dear reader, Miles's stuff is always good, and it will be something to look forward to.
Today we have finished having a new bathroom fitted, complete with the now-standard 6l flush - just in time for the on-the-blog water diary for UU. My main problem with diaries is remembering to do them...
phil
Today we have finished having a new bathroom fitted, complete with the now-standard 6l flush - just in time for the on-the-blog water diary for UU. My main problem with diaries is remembering to do them...
phil
Thursday, 6 November 2008
So I didn't regale you with water stories
Because of the vagaries of the US immigration I never got to sit next to Christine on the plane. She’s a British subject and not a British Citizen (having been born in Ireland but lived in the UK for nearly 60 years) and needed a visa to enter America. Unfortunately we only found out that she wasn’t a British citizen when we were checking in, and, to cut a long and sad story short she stayed at home! We did talk about water the night I posted but I’m sure she would have enjoyed telling me more about life growing up on a farm in rural Ireland.
They collected rainwater in butts and used it for washing. She insists that your hair feels softer washed in rain water and who am I to question that. She was a young girl when she washed it that way, it had never seen a perm or a colour, and I’m sure it was softer then than it is now. Perhaps our Unilever colleagues can offer some evidence here. I guess rainwater is really soft (i.e. low Calcium ion content) so that will make a difference.
We also talked about sanitation. My wife, Angela, remembers going Elfin as a child. In the mid-60s the toilet was still a bench over a bucket in the cowshed and she hated going to the toilet there as a child because the cows were only a few feet away when you were sat down! How different to our children’s experience with 3 WC inside the house and 4th at the bottom of the garden. Never-the-less our youngest still enjoys the occasional ablution in the open air and many of my outdoor mates take some pride in being fellows of the ODL (outdoor defecators league) and the joy of using sphagnum moss instead of paper. But the clichéd “Do bears crap in the woods?” takes on a whole different meaning when you realise that 2.5 billion people have no option but to do what the bears do. And this could become a theme for us in the future. How can we provide sanitation and improved public health for those in the world who are deprived of it? And in the UK can we harness the intellectual power and campaigning energy of Universities United to come up with acceptable technical solutions that don’t use vast amount of potable water?
So when I was on my vacation in Florida I reflected on the worlds need for improved sanitation every time I saw the euphemistic signs for “restrooms”. What was interesting though was that in nearly all the facilities I used the amount of water per flush was stated on the cistern. It was as if they were expecting me to be filling out my Universities United Water Diary whilst I was there. I also thought about the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World a lot. It remains one of my favourite books, I read it as an impressionable sixteen year old, and I’ll have to go back a read it again. As far as I can tell Huxley was a time traveller and has visited present day Orlando. I came back to try and find my copy and stumbled upon a great analysis http://www.huxley.net/. In Brave New World, happiness comes from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug soma. Well I missed out on the promiscuous sex and had to substitute cycling and Sam Adams for soma; but we looked at each and said “we are at the feelies” during a 3-D cinema show at Disney World. The seat puffed out steam, splashed us with water and generated smells as the cartoon characters charged out the screen and made us duck for cover. Orlando is dedicated to consumption of mass-produced goods and whilst we couldn’t find activities with precisely the same names the sporting opportunities of Pharoahs MiniGolf and Baby ‘Gator Wrestlin came pretty close. So it really was a pleasant surprise to see that every patch of landscaped vegetation carried a sign that said “irrigated with recycled water”. It went some way to assuage my guilt at having flown there as the residents are obviously aware of the impact of our excessive consumption of the worlds resources.
But I want to end on a note about the joy of water. My favourite day of the holiday was spent on Daytona Beach. It was cold by Floridian standards and the sea was warmer than the air. So I spent a couple of hours jumping waves with my daughters and a flock of pelicans. The shore was covered in all kinds of birds: sandpipers, herons, egrets and many different gulls. The sandpipers were very busy, dashing about and squabbling, they gave us much joy. But the highlight of the day was sat on a dock, in the inlet behind the beach, watching the spectacular sunset and having dinner. There were lots of birds out on the water and the catfish were literally jumping. Then a Manatee slowly rose from the water and breathed in before slowly sliding back below the surface. We were convinced it looked at us, and they do seem to have a smile on their faces. It was the perfect antidote to the Florida most tourists see. Later that night the Obama campaign was in Kissimee. I didn’t have the energy to attend the midnight rally but how we have since rejoiced that he prevailed!
They collected rainwater in butts and used it for washing. She insists that your hair feels softer washed in rain water and who am I to question that. She was a young girl when she washed it that way, it had never seen a perm or a colour, and I’m sure it was softer then than it is now. Perhaps our Unilever colleagues can offer some evidence here. I guess rainwater is really soft (i.e. low Calcium ion content) so that will make a difference.
We also talked about sanitation. My wife, Angela, remembers going Elfin as a child. In the mid-60s the toilet was still a bench over a bucket in the cowshed and she hated going to the toilet there as a child because the cows were only a few feet away when you were sat down! How different to our children’s experience with 3 WC inside the house and 4th at the bottom of the garden. Never-the-less our youngest still enjoys the occasional ablution in the open air and many of my outdoor mates take some pride in being fellows of the ODL (outdoor defecators league) and the joy of using sphagnum moss instead of paper. But the clichéd “Do bears crap in the woods?” takes on a whole different meaning when you realise that 2.5 billion people have no option but to do what the bears do. And this could become a theme for us in the future. How can we provide sanitation and improved public health for those in the world who are deprived of it? And in the UK can we harness the intellectual power and campaigning energy of Universities United to come up with acceptable technical solutions that don’t use vast amount of potable water?
So when I was on my vacation in Florida I reflected on the worlds need for improved sanitation every time I saw the euphemistic signs for “restrooms”. What was interesting though was that in nearly all the facilities I used the amount of water per flush was stated on the cistern. It was as if they were expecting me to be filling out my Universities United Water Diary whilst I was there. I also thought about the Aldous Huxley novel Brave New World a lot. It remains one of my favourite books, I read it as an impressionable sixteen year old, and I’ll have to go back a read it again. As far as I can tell Huxley was a time traveller and has visited present day Orlando. I came back to try and find my copy and stumbled upon a great analysis http://www.huxley.net/. In Brave New World, happiness comes from consuming mass-produced goods, sports such as Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy, promiscuous sex, "the feelies", and a supposedly perfect pleasure-drug soma. Well I missed out on the promiscuous sex and had to substitute cycling and Sam Adams for soma; but we looked at each and said “we are at the feelies” during a 3-D cinema show at Disney World. The seat puffed out steam, splashed us with water and generated smells as the cartoon characters charged out the screen and made us duck for cover. Orlando is dedicated to consumption of mass-produced goods and whilst we couldn’t find activities with precisely the same names the sporting opportunities of Pharoahs MiniGolf and Baby ‘Gator Wrestlin came pretty close. So it really was a pleasant surprise to see that every patch of landscaped vegetation carried a sign that said “irrigated with recycled water”. It went some way to assuage my guilt at having flown there as the residents are obviously aware of the impact of our excessive consumption of the worlds resources.
But I want to end on a note about the joy of water. My favourite day of the holiday was spent on Daytona Beach. It was cold by Floridian standards and the sea was warmer than the air. So I spent a couple of hours jumping waves with my daughters and a flock of pelicans. The shore was covered in all kinds of birds: sandpipers, herons, egrets and many different gulls. The sandpipers were very busy, dashing about and squabbling, they gave us much joy. But the highlight of the day was sat on a dock, in the inlet behind the beach, watching the spectacular sunset and having dinner. There were lots of birds out on the water and the catfish were literally jumping. Then a Manatee slowly rose from the water and breathed in before slowly sliding back below the surface. We were convinced it looked at us, and they do seem to have a smile on their faces. It was the perfect antidote to the Florida most tourists see. Later that night the Obama campaign was in Kissimee. I didn’t have the energy to attend the midnight rally but how we have since rejoiced that he prevailed!
It's Thursday and my turn for the blog.
I'm stood here in my kitchen in Ludlow, looking out over the river Teme to Whitcliffe Common. Last year, the floods came up the garden twice. Could have been worse – if I knew how to put pics into this posting, I'd show you what one of the bridges in town looked like after the flood destroyed it... and not even over the main river, but a (usually) small tributary.
So, the power of water – and that's just in a provincial middle England town.
It's lovely when you've got plenty of water like us, but that's no reason to be complacent.
I'm gonna toss into the soup a couple of pieces of work that link to things we talked about in Belfast.
First, there's the No-Wash Sweatshirt, because water and energy use through washing is a bigger resource sink for clothes than manufacture. For those of you who don't know the lovely collection of design stories that is 5-Ways from Kate Fletcher and Becky Early, do take a look at them all http://www.5ways.info/docs/projects/nowash/projects.htm - so simple yet such clear signposts to core ways for design to make more sustainable products.
Kate is now Reader at LCF, and was at at the Fashioning the Future Summit meeting there last week. So too was (eco)architect Mike McDonough. He preached that the way towards a durable/sustainable future involves appropriate technology. I have found that a good way to use 5-ways is as a challenge to technologists “Kate and Becky use simple design routes to make their stories come to life – can you add to it/do it better through technology”
On the no-wash subject, really bringing the Man in the White Suit to life is one of the projects that I've always wanted to do to link fashion and technology. Perhaps this is one for Universities United.
Then there's the magic greenhouse. I've lost all my late-stage concepts on this, but I have an early sketch to show you sometime (again, I would post if I knew how - perhaps someone can advise!). It is all about using the power of bacteria and condensed water to create a living “washing machine” . This was territory explored by some young industrial designers at RCA back in 2005 – and I'm very pleased they have stayed good friends. The main idea they worked on was for a low-water, hand powered washing machine, probably more practical, but it is the greenhouse that really catches my imagination.
That's it for now. I've still got a water use visual meter to talk about, but am trying to contact the designer to get some information on current status – so hopefully more soon.
Best wishes
Phil
I'm stood here in my kitchen in Ludlow, looking out over the river Teme to Whitcliffe Common. Last year, the floods came up the garden twice. Could have been worse – if I knew how to put pics into this posting, I'd show you what one of the bridges in town looked like after the flood destroyed it... and not even over the main river, but a (usually) small tributary.
So, the power of water – and that's just in a provincial middle England town.
It's lovely when you've got plenty of water like us, but that's no reason to be complacent.
I'm gonna toss into the soup a couple of pieces of work that link to things we talked about in Belfast.
First, there's the No-Wash Sweatshirt, because water and energy use through washing is a bigger resource sink for clothes than manufacture. For those of you who don't know the lovely collection of design stories that is 5-Ways from Kate Fletcher and Becky Early, do take a look at them all http://www.5ways.info/docs/projects/nowash/projects.htm - so simple yet such clear signposts to core ways for design to make more sustainable products.
Kate is now Reader at LCF, and was at at the Fashioning the Future Summit meeting there last week. So too was (eco)architect Mike McDonough. He preached that the way towards a durable/sustainable future involves appropriate technology. I have found that a good way to use 5-ways is as a challenge to technologists “Kate and Becky use simple design routes to make their stories come to life – can you add to it/do it better through technology”
On the no-wash subject, really bringing the Man in the White Suit to life is one of the projects that I've always wanted to do to link fashion and technology. Perhaps this is one for Universities United.
Then there's the magic greenhouse. I've lost all my late-stage concepts on this, but I have an early sketch to show you sometime (again, I would post if I knew how - perhaps someone can advise!). It is all about using the power of bacteria and condensed water to create a living “washing machine” . This was territory explored by some young industrial designers at RCA back in 2005 – and I'm very pleased they have stayed good friends. The main idea they worked on was for a low-water, hand powered washing machine, probably more practical, but it is the greenhouse that really catches my imagination.
That's it for now. I've still got a water use visual meter to talk about, but am trying to contact the designer to get some information on current status – so hopefully more soon.
Best wishes
Phil
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