Changing the world one design at a time
Jamie Cross’ quest to power 1 billion lights actually sustainably
Hello folks,
Today a slightly different set-up for the newsletter. I attended a few interesting talks about social innovation, and I thought it would be nice to present you with some key takeaways. The first talk was part of a panel about “green frontiers in energy transitions”, by Jamie Cross on a better solar lamp. The second was the opening keynote by Patrick Devine-Wright for a two-day conference on social innovation in energy, on the value of place (attachment) in responsible and responsive innovation. Both presented evocative examples of how to do innovation collaboratively, and realize social or environmental values in the process.
This week I’ll talk about Jamie Cross’ presentation. Next week, I’ll pick up the thread with Devine-Wright’s contribution.
So, if you’ll remember, the SLE edition that properly launched this whole series on social entrepreneurship in sustainable energy was actually a discussion of Jamie Cross’ research on solar lanterns. He tracked the efforts of solar lantern entrepreneurs to achieve some scale for their products through the UN’s (and other’s) refugee assistance, in order to open up the west African market.
Well, it turns out that Cross is something of an entrepreneur himself! Together with his students and colleagues at Edinburgh and Nairobi he’s been building a more sustainable solar lamp and trying to bring it to market 👏.
Why? Well, that’s where the notion of “green capitalism” comes in. The basic idea behind this notion is simple: just because it’s a market in sustainable technologies, doesn’t mean the market doesn’t reproduce capitalism’s built-in tendencies towards exploitation, inequality and crisis. It may be green, but it’s still capitalism. Green capitalism™.
This notion, in fact, is the whole point of this series on social entrepreneurship – to explore ways in which we could maybe do markets differently. To not just call it a day after swapping out fossil-fuelled devices for electric ones, because making our presence on this planet sustainable impels us to question some of the most ingrained ways of doing things – ingrained over the course of some 200 years of industrial (and thus fossil-fuelled) capitalism and which we’ve come to accept as natural. Extirpating these ways of doing is hard and the answers to this question must come from many different sources and perspectives, but at least “social innovation” presents an emerging methodology for entrepreneurial spirits to take up the challenge, and a way for governments to help them on their quest.
Sustainable design as critique
Alright, back to Jamie. So what specifically is the problem with solar lamps? Well, they “continue the extractivist logic” of conventional carbon economies and mass consumer goods: the exploitation of both labour and nature. For example, as it turns out, nobody has made an effort to make these lamps recyclable or repairable, they come with a pretty terrible year-and-a-half average life-span after which it will produce 300g e-waste, and the materials they use aren’t particularly eco-friendly either. So, how “renewable” is this?
Now that this sector is preparing to go big after the recent Global Compact “to power 1 billion lives”, which will combine government and investor funding, the e-waste situation is a bit of a problem.
So, rather than sitting on the side lines, Cross decided to get creative and move from a desk critique to a design critique: what would a sustainable, repairable solar lamp look like and how would you get it built?
Introducing: the “Solar What?!”:
It doesn't include any glues or adhesives. The electronic circuitry is sourced from accountable suppliers who meet minimum ILO conventions on labour rates. The whole unit is designed to be taken apart and repaired by anybody who uses it. And the design is entirely open source.
This design is a way to enter into a (critical) conversation with manufacturers that would not be possible with just another report. A material conversation, if you will. It’s also a different sort of critique: if you see design as world-making, then trying to make the world differently is to “become part of the struggles between carbon and post-carbon worlds”.
Democratizing design
Design as critique ran through the whole project. First, students disassembled the lamps that Cross brought back from field. Seeing how they were built to disallow repair, to trace the materials back to their problematic sources, allowed them to understand the relations of power embedded in the lamps in more acute ways. It thus heightened their critical sensibilities.
But then building an alternative also showed the limits of critique-by-design. The first student-led DIY assemblies of alternative solar lamps used non-industrial (organic) and scrap materials. Definitely more sustainable and renewable, but the prototype were also too far beyond what could be integrated into chains of productions for actual solar lamp companies. The ‘conversation’ was therefore limited. The ‘challenge’ to existing practices was feeble.
So to bolster their pitch to the manufacturers, investors and trade associations, they contracted an Edinburgh manufacturer to use a kind of plastic to build a more easily reproducible prototype and they focused on another angle to reduce waste: to disaggregate the solar panel from the lamp, which are currently always sold as one unit.
Guerrilla interventions and systemic change
This is still a project in motion. In Cross’ own current evaluation, this design critique has been successful but its success has been limited. While the solar watt has been well received in the industry, it has not been able to really disrupt "rational, efficient" chains of production and distribution. Dominic Boyer, a discussant in the panel, was more optimistic though: as we increase the kinds of design interventions that Jamie Cross has led, we might find out that what seems like an unassailable “system” (fossil-fueled, extractivist, and ‘efficient’ capitalism) is actually vulnerable and subject to subversion and conversion.
I therefore hope this inspire yous to persevere in your own guerrilla attacks on unsustainable systems or attempts to change them from within!
Take care,
Marten
Read more
Interested in this idea of green capitalism? I’ve written about it earlier too, in relation to renewable energy’s geopolitical and financial dimensions, land ownership and platform logics. (Robinson Meyer at the Atlantic also just wrote about this uneasy aspect of green capitalism: the intersection of sustainability with big business and the quest for global dominance.)
In case you missed the other design ethnography editions, check out my interview with Abhigyan Singh on how he used design interventions (with solar power) to explore and anticipate possible futures for (solar powered) energy markets; and Karthikeya Acharya on making private household data public.
I’ve also covered the social life of the solar lamp in a piece about the rural frontier of micro-grids.
Extra extra reading: fellow Substack newsletter Hothouse discusses yet another intervention in the energy supply chain, wholly in the spirit of last edition’s “institutional entrepreneurs”, for solar powered A/C in Iraq.