alan wells

During my last quarter at UC Davis, I worked on an independent study project to build a wiki focused on sustainable exhibit design – it’s now called the Green Design Wiki. I put it up on the web during the project and have updated it periodically since then. I checked the analytics for the site recently, and found it’s getting more traffic than expected. On March 22, Paul Orselli mentioned the wiki in his interview with Tim McNeil, the professor at UC Davis who was my advisor on the project. In the interview, Tim describes the wiki the we created:

Above and beyond the Design Museum website and exhibitions, the wiki is the most practical resource we can provide to the museum community. It is intended to provide a basic grounding in sustainable design concepts and initiate an ongoing dialogue about greening the exhibition design field. The array of materials and products is rapidly evolving, a wiki based platform is the best model for having others contribute and for keeping it current.

I hope the wiki has become a valuable resource to those that have stumbled upon it. Related to this goal, I recently came across the Huddler GreenHome site, a new community based around sustainable living products. After joining the site I realized that they might be interested in the Green Design Wiki – it turns out that the products used in exhibit design overlap in many areas with products required for the home (lighting, heating and cooling, paints and finishes, flooring, furniture…). After some quick work from their community manager, much of the content of the Green Design Wiki is now mirrored at GreenHome. Hopefully this will help spread the ideas on the wiki to as many people as possible.

The last few weeks have seen lots of interesting things going on around me and in my head. Sometimes I’m afraid of forgetting the details of these things so I write them down, and then I can stop worrying about forgetting about them.

“There are things in this life I would rather not sacrifice…” – John Butler Trio. JBT has a new album out, and I’ve been listening to it almost every day. Great music matched with meaningful and current lyrics, and a political edge if you choose to listen that carefully. They’re playing at The Fillmore in June, I’m gonna get tickets for sure.

I’ve been feeling really optimistic about things in general lately. I feel like there’s a tipping point approaching for environmental and humanitarian concerns, that people are interested on genuine, positive interactions more than ever, and that people aren’t buying the bullshit of governments and major corporations. The disconnect that I feel betweent the marketing and advertising I see every day and the actions of my peers makes me hopeful that we may be the generation to really turn some things around and redefine this unsustainable system we’ve created. The fact that the most valuable information these days seems to be coming from person to person, very human and very personal interactions. Blogging, social networking, all of these things are building human capital in ways I know that I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I’ll admit that I might be biased in my perception of this because every project I’m doing for every class this quarter is focused on sustainability, but I still feel like that tide is turning, and its a very exciting time to be a young person about to leave college and enter the working world.

And then Virginia Tech happened. My heart goes out to all those people at VT. I just can’t reconcile this general optimistic feeling of growing goodwill and humanity with something like that, it completely upends the faith that I have in my generation to do great things with this world. I don’t know how to rationalize those two things. Maybe its just a fluke, but something we’re doing as a society is allowing these kinds of things to happen more often and with more bloodshed. How do you get around this? I have no answers here, its just so hard for me to understand that mindset of someone that does something like that… and it seems like it could happen at any school.

Last week I went to two events. On Sunday my parents took me to see the Dalai Lama speak in San Francisco. A great opportunity to see a very interesting man speak. He said a lot of things, some of which I think went over my head, but two things that he said stood out to me:

1) You can disagree with someone and still have respect for them. Disagreement combined with respect creates dialogue and through that conflicts can be resolved. Compassion is key to this interaction.

2) The idea of one “right” religion applies only at the individual level. Whatever religion, whatever god is right for someone is the one that fits them personally. The idea of a universally “right” religion is just not something that people should concern themselves with, much less kill eachother over.

3) People are generally good, and don’t want trouble. No one wakes up in the morning looking for trouble, and people want to be happy.

On Thursday, I went to a mini-conference at Stanford put on for their Creating Infections Action d.school class. The conference focused on a newly coined idea called social entrepreneurship; basically the idea of business for social good, not just bottom-line profits. I say newly coined because apparently people have been doing this for years but it was just recently given this name. The speakers were the founders from Kiva, GlobalGiving, and Benetech. The conference was one of the most interesting lectures I’ve gone to in a while and made me even more sure that the path I’m following with my own professional career is the right one. Just a few highlights/thoughts:

The GlobalGiving founders, former World Bank people, explained that they thought one of the problems/limitations with the world bank system is that it deals in huge quantities of dollars (hundreds of millions to billions), and deals directly with governments. Now, there are some things that you have to interface with governments to affect – taxes, trade laws, etc. But their point was that in many cases, the governments are not the best people to be distributing this aid. Their anecdotal story goes something like this: A government gets a huge sum of money from world bank, and they decide how to disperse it. 6 months to a year later, a bulldozer shows up in a village and starts building a school. The villagers stop the bulldozer and say, “What are you doing?” He says, “I’m building a school.” They say, “We don’t need a school, we’ve already got one that works well enough. What we really need is a new water well.” He says, “Thats too bad, because I have orders to build a new school, so that’s what’s going to happen.” The orders from higher up don’t necessarily reconcile with needs on a local level. To counter this problem, GlobalGiving fills the gap in the WorldBank system of local, smaller aid packages. This seems to be much more efficient, much faster, and ensures people get exactly what they need. Sounds like a great idea to me. Then, as a guiding principle for trying to effect change, it seems wise to try to work as locally as possible. Want to encourage education? Lets build schools and train teachers in the places they live, not make a top down command to make it happen. I’m sure people have been saying this for years, but the clarity with which I understand this point is new to me. The exciting thing about technology an the Internet is that it allows the global connection between highly specific, localized efforts. I think this is going to be on of the most exciting things to watch in the near future.

Kiva is an organization started by a current Stanford MBA student, and they connect lenders with borrowers for micro-loans. Their minimum loan is $25 dollars. Over that past 2 years they’ve raised $5.5 million in loans. And the great thing is that these aren’t donations – these loans get paid back in a fairly resonable time frame! To me, it seems like they pretty much just created $5.5 million dollars, and in the processs are helping to create a lot of local businesses that will sustain families and communities for years to come. It seems like all of this sucess is being driven by creating the connections between lenders and borrowers – people are much more excited to participate when they can see the face and here the story of the person they’re loaning to. Right now update come back on a monthly time scale, but if you combine this idea with the ideas presented by Ray Kurzweil that I’ve talked about before, and look down the road of mobile technology a few years, I forsee a time when lenders can get weekly, maybe even daily, picture and text updates about the progress of their borrowers. Great idea that’s accomplishing great things.

One common issue with these organizations that they can’t seem to get the high school and college demographics involved. Surprising, because we’re usually the first to adopt these kinds of internet-based communities and networks. I have a few ideas about why this might be:
1) Most of the people on the other end of these systems, on the receiving ends, seem to not be in the high school/college demographic either. I don’t go on facebook to connect with the 35-50 year olds that I know, so maybe I’d be more interesting in getting involved with an organization like Kiva if the people on the other end were my age or closer to my age – right now they seem mostly like middle aged/married with family types.

2) High school and college students are a powerful consumer demographic, and we spend money, but disposable income is still a very precious thing for us. As financially well of as many in my position are, we are MUCH less financially comfortable than even a college grad with their first job. Working full time, even if its only 30k/year, gives you much more freedom to give or loan $100 here or there (Kiva’s average loan is $92). In my exporations of career and living options for after college, I am absolutely amazed how many things are possible with a 50k/year job that were just completely out of reach in college. So how to get around this? Maybe a new system needs to be created – sort of like the facebook $1 gifts, where we can donate smaller amounts more often. Another idea – maybe the best way the college/high school demographic can contribute isn’t with money. What other skills do we have, what can we do that requires time and not money (we usually have more of the former and less of the latter). I’m not sure what form this would/could take, but I think there’s something worth exploring here. I think there’s an opportunity for partnerships with companies that sell to this demographic – something along the lines of the RED campaign, but maybe each purchase adds $1 or $5 to a cause?

Once upon a time I bombed a Stanford undergraduate application because I really didn’t want to fight the battle of explaining to my parents why I didn’t want to go there if I did get in. I still think it would have been the wrong place for me as an undergrad, and I wouldn’t trade my UC Davis education for anything, but the interesting stuff they have going on down there and the access to the resources of Silicon Valley makes me strongly consider that as my best option for grad school in a few years should I choose to go that route.

Loved the free hugs video. Good to see it being used for a great cause.
End caption translation: “AIDS is not transmitted so. But love is.”

More free hugs? Watch the original:

More accurately, this would be a job decision update, as I was fortunate enough to have some really awesome opportunites dropped on my doorstep. Last week, I decided to move forward with a job at SNP. I’ll be doing a lot of things there, including some web design and web 2.0 kinds of things, but so far the people have proved to be great co-workers and I’m enjoying the work.

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?