alan wells

Here’s another video, courtesy of TED, of the multi-touch display system that I posted about a few weeks ago:

TEDTalk – Jeff Han / Multi-Touch Display

TED sounds like an amazing conference to attend, I’ve watched almost all of the published TEDTalks and have found them to be very interesting and inspirational. They’ve just announced their registration for TED 2008, and I think I’m gonna submit an application, I don’t quite have the achievements yet to back it up.

A big part of the reason that I cut short my stay in Australia was to return here, finish school as soon as possible, and begin to pursue some professional opportunities that were going to have to wait for my return to California. After being back since the morning of Superbowl Sunday, I’ve figured out the school thing; I’ll be able to graduate in June after one more quarter of school, with a degree in Ecology and a degree in Design with an emphasis in sustainable design. I’m very excited to be finishing up, and to have both degrees guiding me toward a sustainable future.As for the professional opportunities, to say they’ve been knocking at my door would be an understatement… breaking down the door with a battering ram seems like a more accurate analogy. In this past 3 days I’ve been offered 3 jobs with 3 different companies (two startups and one established), and have been developing plans for 2 of my own corporations, one non-profit and one for profit. When I left Australia I felt like it was a very significant example of the idea that we are defined by in life as much by what we choose not to do as what we choose to pursue. This goes hand-in-hand with my recent realization that I’m at a point in my life where everything has an opportunity cost (to use an economist’s jargon). That is to say that I am interested in so many things that I can’t possibly do all of them, and picking one means that I’m leaving something else unexplored. I’m not sure when I became interested in enough things that there simply aren’t time for them all – I don’t remember feeling like everything had an opportunity cost when I was a freshman in college, but sometime in the last two years I became interested and passionate about enough things that I just can’t do them all.My current job opportunities are a perfect example – all of them are good options and have benefits, both financial and educational, but I’m finding it hard to figure out which one is the best option. I’ll talk to some friends and people more experienced than I in a quest to find out what the right questions to ask are, but I think it’ll come down to gut feeling – the same gut feeling that brought me back to California 11 months early, and that seems to be working out just fine so far…So I pose this question to anyone that might be reading: Does everything your life feel like it has an opportunity cost? How do you choose which doors to open – and, equally important – which doors to close?

During my short stay in Australia, I found myself in a fairly unique position in a culture so saturated with media and advertisements. When I went grocery shopping, it was really disorienting because I knew none of the brand names or product labels. In Australia, I didn’t watch TV and preferred my iPod to the the radio, and read the books I had brought with me and not local newspapers and magazines. So I was almost completely unexposed to advertisements or other media publicity about the brands sold there. I never really thought about it in the states, but I take for granted that all the brands on the shelves look familiar, and the brands I buy here are often based on choices, sometimes informed but mostly arbitrary (what my parents bought, what my friends bought, what I grew up with, etc), that I made long ago and pretty much just stick to my habits. And who can blame a consumer? If you had to reanalyze all the available products at your local grocery store every time you went shopping you’d go crazy and also waste tons of time. So what’s the point of this story?Well, lacking any other basis for comparison, and being an environmentally conscious person, I decided that I would choose the brands based on sustainability and environmentally friendliness. Now this is harder in Australia that Californai because organic and earth-friendly products are not nearly as available, but I did what I could. I bought biodegradable detergent, recycled paper products, and bamboo fiber towels. When no good option was available I tried to not buy at all or buy the item with the least wasteful packaging or most recyclable materials.This got me thinking: not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to displace themselves into a new environment to force the breaking of consumption habits long enough to consider new priorities in consumer choices. But what if you could reset the brand knowledge of people without displacing them to new and unfamiliar places? I think maybe this is all it would take to make a huge change in consumption habits, if everything suddenly became unfamiliar and people were forced to reconsider their choices, many would voluntarily choose products that are better for the planet if given the chance. I don’t know how you’d go about doing this “reset” but I think the concept is interesting nonetheless.OK, so fast forward a few weeks, I’m back in the states, grocery shopping at Nugget Market (I definitely missed gourmet grocery stores in Australia), and I’m cruising around putting my usual items in the basket. And then it occurs to me, why not try to continue the trend I started in Australia, and try to break my buying habits? What would I buy here if I was looking at it with virgin, un-brainwashed eyes? So I tried to look at each product area with a more open mind, and to seek out some of the brands I’ve heard of as making sustainability efforts. I think it worked, at least a little bit. I ended up with some things I would have overlooked in favor of the familiar old brands and logos. For the milk dilemma, aware of both the impact of non-recyclable cartons and plastic jugs, I was pleased to find Strauss Family Creamery organic milk available in reusable glass bottles. For other dairy products, I bought organic, and with an eye for reducing packaging (buying quart yogurt instead of individual servings). For shampoo and conditioner, I couldn’t find Aveda, a company I admire because of their well documented sustinability efforts, but I did find herbal, organic products from a company I think is more earth friendly than your average haircare product company. Those are just a few of the choices I made, I don’t need to bore you with the contents of my grocery cart, but I leave you with this question:What would you buy if none of the familiar, main-stream brands were available? What would you buy if you based your choices on earth-friendliness instead of advertising or old habits?