Post-a Rica: Trip in Review (The White City)

Liberia was the closest city to the Earth campus. It is also known as the White City because the ground on which it is built is all volcanic tuff (or limestone, depending on whom I asked). In Liberia's less developed days, most of this white rocky dirt was exposed, and when the wind blew, everything got coated in a fine white dust. There are some areas outside of Liberia where this ground is still visible.

On one of our days at Earth, we took a trip to one of the communities students were working with, a squatter's village on the outskirts of Liberia. It was surreal to drive through the paved streets of the city, turn a corner in a residential area, and suddenly be in a dusty, blindingly white landscape.

We spent the morning helping out with an Earth project, building a garden for the community. The people mostly make their living from scavenging the nearby dump for sell-able goods. The hope was that they could begin to grow greens and vegetables for sale as well.

There were only a few sources of water in the area--7 hose spigots scattered throughout the neighborhood--so we started off the work by filling the water barrel of the man who lived in the house in front of the garden. First we filled a carload of plastic jugs, then brought the jugs up to the house. Like many of the materials the man used, the jugs were scavenged from the dump. Below is a picture of Jacob filling the barrel with one of the jugs. After we were done filling the barrel, one of the students pointed out that the writing on the jug says (in Spanish): Danger, Toxic, Floor Cleaner. She said that it's pretty common, that scavenging from the dump often means reusing jugs that used to hold nasty chemicals or collecting leaking batteries.

Part of the hope with the project was that the garden would provide a safer and more reliable way for people to sustain themselves. Below is a picture of the growing beds that we helped setup. The beds had to be level to keep the water from just pooling on one side. At first we were just doing it by eye, but then Patricia broke out the iPhone level.

Below is one of the coolest versions of the Topsy Turvy I have ever seen. They would cut the legs off of jeans, stuff the legs with dirt, hang the resulting sausage off of a nearby tree, then plant tomatoes in holes cut into the denim.

What was left over after all these jean planters were made? The largest collection of Jorts I have ever seen.

Post-a Rica: Trip in Review (TREES!)

I like trees....a lot. So I tend to take pictures of them when I travel. There were some pretty interesting things going on with the Costa Rican trees and woodworking. For example, a lot of the trees had trunks that were made up of a mass of intertwined mini-trunks. On the left I have an example of this, and on the right are columns from the Earth campus. You can see how these intertwined trunks translate into some pretty dynamic columns.

Another cool tree was the Naked Indian (below). The green trunk contains chlorophyll and just like a leaf, goes through photosynthesis....photosynthetic bark! It's kind of like the original version of using solar panels as siding for a house.

The Naked Indian is  commonly used by farmers as a living fence post:

On the woodworking front, I was particularly taken by some of the wooden beams on the Earth campus (below). They had this cool waving scallop shaped cuts:

I'm guessing they were made with an adz (below), which makes me wonder if they used a saw at all, or if the beams were shaped entirely with an adz, literally hacking the rectangular beam out of the log.

Trees also means fruit, and Mango trees (below) were a pretty common sight. It was cool to see the Earth students continually plucking mangoes and cashew fruits from the trees as they worked.

Below is a picture of the cashew fruit and nut. Eating the fruit is an interesting experience...the texture is a little bit like eating wet, gooey cotton balls. The taste is one part sweet, one part squash, with a tiny bit rotten thrown in to the mix. As you can see, the cashew nut hangs in a shell below the fruit. The shell is filled with a sap with the same compound that makes poison ivy give you a rash, so I didn't venture in to find the nut. Apparently you can roast the shell to get the nut out, but that can make the nasty compound go air born, so I decided to leave the de-shelling to the professionals. The director at Earth told us a story about how a cashew farmer noticed that all the plants would always die around the area where he piled his cashew shells. They are now looking into cashew shells as a natural herbicide.

Last on the tour of trees is the Tamarind. We spotted these as we were getting a tour of the mango orchards and rice fields (below). They were being used as a wind break around a rice field. Tamarind trees have a long brown seed pod with a sticky brown paste covering the seeds inside (below below). The paste is a popular ingredient in a lot of tropical cooking--it's what produces the tart flavor in Pad Thai. It's also used for a lot of sweet and sour candies throughout Latin America. I'm a big fan of the paste straight from the pod.

Mushrooms (Part Duex)

I'm still investigating the possibility of using mushrooms for bio-assembly, (e.g. using mushroom "roots" to turn the products into a paper/plastic type material). I saw one of these at Whole Foods the other day:

Not my kit...but this is how it is intended to be used

It's a grow your own mushroom kit from Back to the Roots. I had been looking for a source for the spores I would need to inoculate the rice straw, and here it was, right between the ginger and the bean sprouts. The package contains a bag of spore-infused coffee grounds and a little misting bottle. All you do is cut open the cardboard, soak the grounds in water overnight, and mist regularly. My plan is to boil the rice straw so it is free from competing organisms, and then blend into small pieces so the mushrooms can do their work quicker. Then I'll mix the rice straw with some of the inoculated coffee grounds and hope those mycelium start to party. I'm hoping for tasty mushrooms growing out of some kind of bio-assembled papery product. We shall see!


Also, I couldn't resist noting that website for the mushroom kit proudly displays an endorsement from this guy:

Weird.

Highlights from the Peabody

We made a trip up to Cambridge to get a close look at some of the pieces collected by The Peabody Museum at Harvard University. The focus was on the use of agricultural materials in textiles and basketry.

This felted cloth was my favorite. It is made by mashing plant fibers together until they all interlock, just like felting wool.

This weaving is incredible...so tight and regular.

In terms of weaving or basketry, out materials are far too irregular in shape and size. Unless of course, we could find some way to change that. I'm going to look into the rice straw and see if I can break it down into it's individual long fibers...that might open up the possibility of being able to spin them.

The felting is of course another path to investigate. I've been doing some boiling and mashing, which I'll report on soon!

What Are Other People Doing With This Stuff? (Part 1)

Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic? | Video on TED.com

MIND = BLOWN

It seems like a slow process, and we're not really a world of slow manufacturing, but there's a lot of room to grow. How interesting that we have boxes and boxes of agriculture byproducts coming our way.

Given the chopped-up bits and pieces nature of the materials we will be working with, I'm sure some form of pressed composite material will take shape at some point. However, the approach of adding a bunch of glue and making it into different shapes feels...boring. But this makes that approach more interesting.

Question: Can you also grow mushrooms at the same time, and not just the root structures? In other words, could you make the composite and food at the same time?


Also, there's more info at ecovativedesign.com

About Me

What design studios have you taken in the past? Which did you enjoy most?

I am a new grad student at RISD so this is my first design studio here. In undergrad I took a year of architecture design studios.

Do you have a background, a double major, or a previous degree in a discipline other than ID?

I got my B.A. from Middlebury College in Vermont. I was a double major in Studio Art and Religion, focusing on sculpture and eastern religions. My senior project for religion was a paper comparing Buddhist visualization mediation with a western scientific understanding of how the brain processes visual information. My senior project for sculpture was a series of installations in the art building. They were all about bringing attention to the movement of air and light through the building, about making these largely invisible processes concrete and visible.

What are your strongest skills in terms of craft/visual communication?

I’m a pretty good builder/fabricator. I love organizing information, but my drawing skills needs some work.

What skills would you most like to build during this course?

Designing with a sustainable business model in mind.

What areas are you most and least interested in working on during this course?

Most: Designing for positive social impact and not just business viability

Least: Why is this so hard to answer? I guess I don’t want to spend too much time working on form and aesthetics. I think they’re important, but given the limited time frame of the class, I’d like to focus on the entrepreneurial aspects of the process.

So you have experience working on social entrepreneurship projects in the past? If so, what were they?

I was the Program Director of the Steel Yard for six years before coming to RISD. The Steel Yard is an industrial art center on the west side of Providence…check it out! (www.thesteelyard.org)

Do you have long-term goals for yourself in terms of social entrepreneurship? If so, what are they?

I hope I can make it a central part of my work. I believe in design triage, a sort of hierarchy that keeps designing for our critical needs and reshaping our fundamental understanding of things on the forefront of our minds. Let’s focus on our collective health and wellbeing before we spend a ton of time and energy redesigning BBQ grills and stereos (unless of course we redesign those things in a way that addresses a critical need).

Do you prefer team or individual projects?

I prefer individual projects with a lot of group feedback. While I enjoy group dynamics, how my own projects come together is always a bit of a mystery to me—it’s generally not so linear. Working as a group often feels disruptive to my workflow and I have a harder time putting pieces together.

Responding to "Reshaping Social Entrepreneurship"

Article: Reshaping Social Entrepreneurship, by Paul Light

I agree that we do often fall victim to the cult of personality. It’s so easy to over simplify and romanticize what lead to successful change and so much easier to focus on a single dynamic person rather than a complex dynamic group. It is important to expand our definition of social entrepreneurship to include the actions of a group and ventures that, for a multitude of reasons, never quite fly. However, I think reshaping our definition of social entrepreneurship might be easier than achieving what Light hopes this new understanding will lead to, namely spreading social entrepreneurship funding out to a broader audience. The main hurdle will be addressing the entrepreneurial ventures that fail. I think there are countless brilliant ideas that flop because they don’t get the startup resources they need, but one can’t ignore the fact that these resources are extremely limited, and funders are understandably cautious about how they distribute them.

 

Responding to “Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition”

Article: “Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition”

            I really enjoyed the clear approach this article took, starting by defining “entrepreneur,” then applying this definition to the social sector, and finally carving out some boundaries to clarify what it is not. Acknowledging that many ventures are hybrid approaches was icing on the complexity cake for me. I also liked their assertion that creating new sustainable, stable equilibriums was an essential part of entrepreneurship. I think it’s the notion that the change an entrepreneur creates is so significant that it would keep on moving forward even if they stopped acting. It’s an “Aha!’ moment not just for the entrepreneur, but for the whole world.

Responding to Dees’ "The Meaning of 'Social Entrepreneurship'”

Article:  "The Meaning of 'Social Entrepreneurship'" by J. Gregory Dees 

As Dees notes, I think that assessing the “creation of value” is one of the biggest challenges one faces in the social sector. I also think we wade into some pretty muddy waters when we start comparing the economics of the social sector with the economics of the business sector.  He seems to oversimplify the relationship between funders and social entrepreneurs, and I think misses the real value of that relationship and how similar it is to a business relationship. To describe the return on investment of a donation as “psychic income” really sells everyone short. It is true, that some people just write a check to feel like they have “done something” and enjoy the ensuing warm fuzzies. However, I think many donors, especially those operating on a local level, are consciously making an investment and are expecting tangible returns. If they regularly donate to the local watershed organization, and don’t see enough improvement in the condition of the river, they will most likely stop donating. They will stop being customers because they have determined the product is not worth the expense.

The real difference between the two sectors is that we hold the social sector to a much higher standard than business sector. He states that, “value is created in business when customers are willing to pay more than it costs to produce the good or service being sold.” Here, value creation is not necessarily about the effectiveness of the product, but instead about the willingness of others to purchase it.  Value is about perception of effectiveness. For example, a lot of people might purchase an herbal cold remedy because they think it will make them feel better. If the take it and feel better, then they’ll probably buy it next time they feel sick. The value of this product comes from how well the customer can be convinced it is working, but who knows, maybe the cold just got better on its own. The for-profit world is a bit of a free-for-all, so customers aren’t always requiring rigorous medical studies to prove its effectiveness. However, in the social sector customers(donors) are a little more discerning. They operate more like shareholders in a company in that they often want tangible numbers demonstrating a return on their investment. For example, they want to know exactly how many high school children received nutritious breakfasts that year.

            Where I think Dees hits the nail on the head is his description of how such tangible results are rare, “are the lower crime rates in an area due to the Block Watch, new policing techniques, or just a better economy?” However, in situations like this, I think the social sector operates a lot more like the business sector. Most people rely on a vague perception of value, rather than a scientific measurement of value. They donated to Block Watch, things got better, they’ll probably donate again.

In short, because this response is longer than I anticipated and a bit rambley, I think both business and social enterprise can survive on a vague perception of value, but more often than not social enterprise must also meet a stricter standard of tangible and measurable returns. I disagree with Dees--markets do work well for social entrepreneurs, but they must be prepared to work harder to prove that they are indeed creating value.