N(Qu)otes

Cradle to Cradle By William McDonough & Michael Braungart
p. 16 Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.

p. 27 Think about it: you may be referred to as the consumer, but there is very little that you actually consume- some food, some liquids. Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it.

p. 37 Loss of resources, cultural depletion, negative social and environmental effects, reduction of quality of life- these ills can all be taking place, an entire region can be in decline, yet they are all negated by a simplistic economic figure that says economic life is good.

p. 50 This devouring impulse in Western culture is comparable, they maintain, to a drug or alcohol addiction: "Recycling is an aspirin, alleviating a rather large collective hangover...overconsumption." "The best way to reduce any environmental impact is not to recycle more, but to produce and dispose of less." - Robert Lilienfeld and William Rathje's Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are.

p. 59 Just because a material is recycled does not automatically make it ecologically benign, especially if it was not designed specifically for recycling. Blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better- and perhaps even worse- than doing nothing.

p. 65 Efficient destruction is harder to detect and thus harder to stop.

p. 66 Humans are condemned as the one species on the planet guilty of burdening it beyond what it can withstand; as such, we must shrink our presence, our systems, our activities, and even our population so as to become almost invisible.

p. 67 But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of imagination... What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

p. 78 Thus the "right things" for manufacturers and industrialists to do are those that lead to good growth- more niches, health, nourishment, diversity, intelligence, and abundance- for this generation of inhabitants on the planet and for generations to come.

p. 79 Individually we are much larger than ants, but collectively their biomass exceeds ours. Just as there is almost no corner of the globe untouched by human presence, there is almost no land habitat, from harsh desert to inner city, untouched by some species of ant. They are a good example of a population whose density and productiveness are not a problem for the rest of the world, because everything they make and use returns to the cradle-to-cradle cycles of nature... [they supply nutrients, recycle, aerate the soil, etc]...But although they may run the world, they do not overrun it...they make the world a better place.

p. 127 In planetary terms, we're all downstream.

p. 152 Does waste equal food? Are we using current solar income? Are we sustaining not only our own species but all species?

Shaping Things By Bruce Serling
p. 22 Designers must design, not just for objects or for people, but for the technolsocial interactions that unite people and objects: designing for opportunity costs and cognitive load.

p. 23 We interact with infrastructure differently in a world with representative design. In particular, with enough informational power, the "invisible hand of the market" becomes visible. The hand of the market was called "invisible" because Adam Smith, and 18th century economist, had very few ways to measure it. Adam Smith lacked metrics. Metrics make things visible.

p. 38 All around us we see obsolescence - but our ideas about obsolescence are not supposed to obsolesce.

p. 47 Generating new knowledge is very good, but in a world with superb archives, accessing knowledge that you didn't know you possessed is both faster and more reliable than discovering it.

p. 50 Then there are sensors, which do not merely measure qualities, but measure changes.

p. 58 Humans have always failed to deal with our trash as we made it. The role of trash is therefore exalted over the longer term. Civilizations collapse, but their ruins are a byword. Trash is always our premier cultural export to the future.