Luminous Green notes

From this page, you can delve into an assortment of sundry notes from the sessions organised during the Luminous Green Retreat (Expert Gathering) and the Hands-on Workshop during May 2007. Taking notes was a responsibility of the session leaders, hence the difference in style and completness…

[please feel free add content, polish the reports and continue the discussions!]

• Self sustaining, autonomous systems
• Pasta making
• sustaining soundbytes
• Hydrogen Lunchbox Laboratory
• Voodoo objects
• AIR session
• Human generated power
• EcoTech
• Ecological Affect
• Foamy ecosystems
• Ecological games
• Crafts and patterns
• Film Screening: http://luminousgreen.org/articles/angelo-synopsis.pdf

• Solar Power Plant
• Organic power
• Decosystem
• Future of computing
• Oldskool microscopy
• Spaceflight
• Anticricket
• Eco-engineering
• Low power computing
• No power media

Things that keep people's minds occupied, ideas that are beginning to sprout, things to think about for future luminous greens

Question of motivation: what motivates people to change their behaviour?

• choices based on an 'evolutionary imperative', or made for personal gain?
• can we design games and competitions in order to make 'the invisible visible'?
• how can we 'exploit' the natural human motivators?

The value of sharing

• Siva Vaidhyanathan (http://www.sivacracy.net) - growth of the open source movement contradicts the widespread belief that people only do things for selfish reasons - people participate primarily for the satisfaction of creating something new that becomes a part of a larger whole.
• can we figure out frameworks for collective creating without consuming?

• how can we push some of the ideas that arose during luminous green into preliminary brainstorms and prototyping sessions - and how can we do this remotely
• transmitting Luminous Green podcasts on Worldchanging

• working on developing the hydrogen lunchbox laboratory

• became workshop facilitator at the Fabric of Life workshop
• in 2008 will work with FoAM on Lucent Grey, a project about the crumbling of civil rights under the boot of contemporary technocracy

• thinking about writing an article on ecological games

• is looking forward to collaborations that will come out of the whole operation of Luminous Green

• writing for the eco-architectural magazine 'Building for a Future', a good resource for Luminous Green designers (http://www.greenbuildingpress.co.uk)

• thinking about different takes on how urgent the perception is on the need to take action and to what degree - how can this be charted sociometrically?
• how gloomy do people think the situation is? how much off the map are we?

• does anyone know if a Metal Peak is heading along any decade soon? (see Bjorn Berge's 'Ecology of Building Materials')

• thinking about a Luminous Forest proposal involving forests, timber buildings, and mixing realities…

• how can we fill our changing environments and structures with luminous green (see foamy ecosystems). can we materialise the concept of 'eco-post-its' - as decorations (or vandalising) of public spaces, homes and workplaces – best practice and guerilla tactics. Randall can contribute stats and numbers, as well as sourcing of the “things you can do”

• source code for urban design: most improvements to green buildings can be done during the design and construction phase. how should this design phase change? – It's like the source code for an urban operating system. Gutierres (Arup): “We're not focused on the form, but on the performance of the form” from http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.05/feat_popup.html

• transport: is as green as possible green enough? there were many questions about this that arose in LG discussions, so Randall followed this up. See http://www.aef.org.uk/downloads/howdoesairtravelcompare.doc

• sociometric ecology: linking discussions about systems, ecologies and interlinkages together with discussions about sociometry. this would be interesting to understand the 'natural' interrelations within systems and the human factors within them

• wondering what would a minimal unit be like that could run Max/MSP and analyze data from a serial interface and control servos and run on 12 V? This is of interest also to Andrea and Annemie, who are looking into systems which would measure the humidity of soil and control separate valves to distribute water to plants – could lead to a fairly autonomous system which could combine rain water harvesting with WOD - WATERING ON DEMAND.

• working on “Polar circuit #4” concept:islands workshop in 2008

• as plants do not have batteries, but can be one themselves, it's time to look deeper into photosynthesis and technologies that try to imitate this process. in fact, this means that i will have to explore in depth the crashing photons and their mother, Inti, as she is called in the Andes.