The Global Ideas Blog

The Alzheimer Screensaver

Great idea, great social invention. This idea combines a screensaver and a social network to aid Alzheimer's sufferers. As the inventor, Said Dajani, explains:

"The screensaver is a virtual scrapbook - a carer and person with dementia can work together to upload pictures, video, text.

We have found that an offline scrapbook has been of real benefit to both and we want to extend this to the digital world. It puts people in contact with their memories."

Combined with a social network to facilitate secure and shared discussions, the site will now be built: the prize for winning the design competition. Superb use of new technology....

Happiness Mappiness

Great post over at WorldChanging which goes through happiness maps in some detail. The guy who originally mapped it all (at the University of Leicester) reckons there is a strong correlation between happiness (or life satisfaction as it is often called in happiness science circles) and health. Or is it wealth? Ethan Zuckerman here looks at the data and reckons there are three groups of countries: the understandably happy, the understandably unhappy, and the surprisingly unhappy. There's very few in the surprisingly happy camp.....

GIB has covered this area quite a bit in the past (see happiness-related ideas here) and it's amazing to me that we still measure progress in primarily economic terms, despite there being no discernible upturn in life satisfaction/happiness as a result of more money. But perhaps that's because it's a long-term shift: looking at the rise of work-life balance on the agenda, at the priorities of new graduates/job-seekers, at ethical consumerism and social enterprise and venture philanthropy....we can see a gardual turn to a society that values more than money, and is beginning to understand what makes it happy.

Bizarre coincidences and memory blocks

OK, so let's start with the mental blockages: the more eagle-eyed of you may have noticed that the last post referred to the East End working class, and then failed to follow through on its claim....I forgot, having got carried away writing about BP and the X-Prize, to link to the Young Foundation's new publication, which follows on from Michael Young's pioneering research in the East End. I may go to the launch next week, so will report back.

Otherwise, it is a week of bizarre happenings thus far. I blog something nice(r) about BP, and then get an e-mail this morning from their Alternative Energy department, asking if the School for Social Entrepreneurs would be interested in hooking up with their entrepreneurial programme...

And, having made the momentous decision to move our work away from Lotus Notes, the Guardian makes Lotus Notes and why it is rubbish/not rubbish (depending on your status as user/administrator) a running feature in their Technology section. Indeed, my previous rant about the subject even gets quoted in that section today. The correspondence still seems to split pretty much exactly down administrator/IT people and the end users in organisations, which kind of backs up what I said previously. If it's not for the end user ultimately, who is it for?

Finally, referring back to the mental block stuff, there's a neat-ish electronic deck of cards to stimulate creative thought available from the Space for Ideas site, called the Creative Block. You download it to your desktop and then click on the deck for a technique to prompt you out of your confined thought-processes. It's not bad, although there are only 25 cards....but you can add your own. The idea, originally, relates back to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck of cards, which is well worth a look, particularly as he is a patron of the Global Ideas Bank and its work.

BP, X-Prize and East End working class

A round-up of a few interesting things that relate to stuff I've covered before:

- Having had a go at BP's relentless green-washing media campaign previously, I feel I should report on when they make genuine steps towards the future, and a financial commitment to go with it. So good to hear that they are planning a $1bn hydrogen plant in Arnie's backyard in California....progress will no doubt be tracked

- I think I've covered this before, too, but the people behind the $10 million private race to space, the X-Prize Foundation are widening their remit to other prize areas, namely genome codes and eco-transport....we shall see if the financial incentives prove as successful in these fields; worth noting that the GIB highlighted prizes as a way of promoting faster rates of research some time ago....see Reward the invention, not the feasibility study

- Most amusing piece of the week is David Stephenson's on open source, and why Lego are more forward thinking than the American Government: Thinking outside the blocks

- Finally, on the back of my discussion last week about how local and regional agencies are leading the way on environmental issues/community involvement, interesting news of the South West Regional Development Agency developing a Wave Hub to test wave energy systems (which are obviously the best long-term renewable option for that area of the UK, as anyone who's tried swimming against the Atlantic winds can testify). So kudos to them as well.....

Energy perspectives

Amazing sometimes how articles appearing on the same day in the media can set off thoughts and ideas in your own head. In the same way that the best innovations are often new combinations of existing ideas, so reading one article and then another can cause a greater effect than either on their own.

That's how I felt on my journey in this morning reading first that Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy. How marvellous, I thought, what a great forward-thinking attitude....only to turn the page to read that BP profits of £11bn disappoint the City. That's right, £11bn profits were disappointing; does anyone at the stock exchange read that and appreciate how absurd it is?

What stuck out to me in the article about Sweden was that their Minister for Sustainable Development (an innovation in itself) said that "A Sweden free of fossil fuels would give us enormous advantages"...by which she meant business advantages, because the country would be free from fluctuating oil prices and any future energy crises.

Obviously, the Global Ideas Bank has been a keen campaigner for progress being measured in terms of wellbeing, life satisfaction and happiness (see here)...but the fact is that there is a hugely powerful purely economic case for taking the lead from the Swedes. Even George Bush seems to be waking up to the fact that relying on oil from a region that is, in large areas, an antagonistically anti-American zone, is perhaps not a great long-term policy. So why are the governments dragging their heels? The UK is already behind schedule to reach 10% of renewable energy by 2012...and yet they continue not to address these issues. Businesses themselves are starting to lead government on such matters, in the knowledge that they will not be able to dodge the climate change bullet.

And these issues seem to connect like a Buzan mind-map for me across areas of social innovation: our short-termist political system leads to short-term thinking (and an underestimation, as Geoff Mulgan put it in a policy seminar, of what they can achieve in the long-term), so social innovations are needed to reform politics accordingly; the power of big business and corporations needs to be addressed; environmental innovations need to be given the chance to flourish and replicate; and the money:progress ratio needs to be broken, with a greater focus on life satisfaction and wellbeing....and so on and so forth.

The problems are out there; but so are the solutions. I'm optimistic, given the human capacity to imagine how things might otherwise be, that is to innovate and adapt, that we can overcome the obstacles that face us. But I might have to stop reading the paper to stay that way....

 

Backing the World Up

As the person responsible for changing the tape in our IT servers, this article in New Scientist about, well, backing up the world (or Doomsday vault to avoid world famine, as they put it) appealed to me. Two million seeds will be held in a concrete room in a mountain on a freezing island by the Norwegian government and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The theory being that this would "safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies", assuming anyone is alive to do it, of course (or can remember how).

Reminds me of some past ideas on the GIB, including:

- the similarly cheery Post-Apocalptic Human Knowledge Manual
- a Full Catalogue of the Edible World

and another one I can't dig out about storing this kind of knowledge / civilisation back-up off the Earth in some sort of space capsule......

[All this originally prompted via WorldChanging  and the Guardian]

Beyond Petroleum

Interesting post on WorldChanging about BP's announcement of its move into alternative energy sources. It is amazing what an impact marketing can have; in the UK, we've had a really heavy advertising campaign from BP which, if you didn't know what they were, might make you think they were an environmental campaigning organisation. A recent issue of the Economist was packed with similar ads from Exxon and others; indeed, it's amazing how far the ground has shifted, how the issue of climate change has mainstreamed into the thinking of big (energy) business.

But what is the reality behind this? BP aims for its alternative energy to earn $8 billion over the next decade. Place that next to BP's $350 billion of revenue generated last year. If they got $8billion in a year, that would be, ooh, about 2.25%. But in the next decade....hmmm. And little of the work is to be UK-based, despite the B for British in BP.

I don't object to this move, and there is no doubt that, amongst energy companies, BP are ahead of the game on this one. Let's be clear, though: this is an economic investment for them; there is no altruism or triple bottom line driving it. They know that oil will peak, and that their future (and future profits) could similarly dry up. So let's give a muted round of applause (what one of my friends calls a "golf clap"), continue the pressure for them (and their industry colleagues) to do better, press for genuine widesweeping corporate social and environmental responsibility, and remember that 99% of that tagline is Petroleum, and 1% is Beyond.

Fab labs: ground-up solutions

I meant to write about this some while back, but it slipped down the agenda. There's a really interesting article about using Hi-tech DIY to solve local problems on BBC online, which is very much in keeping with the ethos of the Global Ideas Bank: solutions to problems from people on the ground, the people who know them best. MIT are helping facilitate this process with the creation of what they are calling Fab Labs, which provide people with the impetus, some of the knowledge....well, the possibility, really, of creating technology rather than just buying and using it.

Would that we could achieve something similar for social invention: a social Fab Lab that gives people the tools to do some 'personal (social) fabrication', which is not lying about your identity, but, would be, according to a twisting of your MIT bod's words, "ordinary people creating social inventions, rather than using them".

There's definitely a need for this that goes beyond planning 4 communities tools, and beyond creativity in schools workshops, and even beyond social entrepreneurship; it's about a mix of all those things, giving people the room and belief to act.

An enormous sense of e-wellbeing

Sustain-IT's annual e-wellbeing awards are announced again. Now in their fourth year, the awards are "the UK's only national Awards that identify and promote social, economic and environmental benefits of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). " See here for more information...

It did get me thinking about the concept of e-wellbeing. Generally, the GIB has always been interested in the wellbeing / happiness debate, so what does e-wellbeing look like or involve? Is there such a thing? Can e-services be part of achieving wellbeing (for example, if community ties are a factor, do virtual community ties have the same effect?) or real, by which I mean not economically-related, happiness?

Balloon beaming broadband bonanza

Hugely interesting article in New Scientist which was pointed out to me by one the Global Ideas Bank's most prolific idea submitters/social inventors David Morgan. Basically, it involves using a stratospheric balloon to provide what is allegedly "blisteringly fast data downlink" from 24,000 feet to places on the ground. The uses of this are potentially massive: think of the ways in which bypassing that infrastructure could be used to connect up isolated communities, areas suffering from a recent disaster, explorers and mountaineers and countless other parties. They've already tested it in the Arctic. Interesting stuff: so read the full article here