:

DE sign:
(Deconstructing in-order to find new meanings)

A blogging space about my personal interests; was made during training in Stockholm #Young Leaders Visitors Program #Ylvp08 it developed into a social bookmarking blog.

I studied #Architecture; interested in #Design #Art #Education #Urban Design #Digital-media #social-media #Inhabited-Environments #Contemporary-Cultures #experimentation #networking #sustainability & more =)


Please Enjoy, feedback recommended.

p.s. sharing is usually out of interest not Blind praise.
This is neither sacred nor political.

Showing posts with label #ideas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #ideas. Show all posts

Thursday, June 13

Tällberg Forum 2013

Tällberg Forum 2013

 See all sessions from the Tällberg Forum here:
  • 13 June, 14.00-14.30 (CEST): Press conference
  • 13 June, 16.00-18.30 (CEST): Session I (Opening)
  • 14 June, 08.30-10.00 (CEST): Session II
  • 14 June, 14.00-15.30 (CEST): Session III
  • 15 June, 08.30-10.00 (CEST): Session IV
  • 15 June, 16.30-18.30 (CEST): Session V (Final Session)
http://www.tallbergfoundation.org/ACTIVITIES/T%C3%A4llbergForum2013/webbstreaming/tabid/1316/Default.aspx

http://www.tallbergfoundation.org/Portals/0/Documents/TF13/Companion_Overview%20program.pdf 
http://www.tallbergfoundation.org/Portals/0/Documents/TF13/Companion_Day-by-day%20program.pdf


At the heart of the Foundation’s activities lies the annual Tällberg Forum. 

The Forum integrates nature and the arts, where people feel free to step outside of their professional identity, to share doubts and new ideas, and search for ways forward outside of established frameworks.

The annual gatherings organized for over two decades by the Tällberg Foundation have evolved into an innovative global Forum characterized by an atmosphere of openness, honesty, warmth and creativity. Every year, leaders from all over the world and from various sectors of society gather to talk about and reflect upon the challenges and opportunities that stem from global interdependence.

The Tällberg Forum acts to stimulate the conversation on, and design solutions to the problems of our times in order to foster new thinking and solutions. People from business and finance meet people from politics, science, international organizations and civil society on equal terms, and not as stakeholders. They come to talk, listen, reflect, question their assumptions, and gain the new insights that give them new responsibilities. For many, the Tällberg Forum is viewed as a natural extension of a highly respected Swedish tradition of internationalism, progress, intellectual curiosity, mediation and sustainability.

The film is an overview of the Tällberg Forum 2007, published by Tyler Brule at Monocle.com. Monocle is a monthly magazine with original coverage in global affairs, business, culture and design along with a web-based broadcast component with news reports and mini-documentaries.


http://www.tallbergfoundation.org/ABOUTUS/AbouttheT%C3%A4llbergForum/tabid/1267/Default.aspx 


"How on earth can we live together?" is the over-arching theme of the Tällberg Forum

The Tällberg Forum gives leaders – and their families – from all over the world and from all sectors of society to convene for a few days in a beautiful environment to reflect and converse on the over-arching theme: “How on earth can we live together?” 

The Forum is characterized by humanism, systems thinking and principled pragmatism. The Tällberg Forum makes no declarations and issues no recommendations. Its impact lies in the many initiatives and ideas that the participants bring back home and integrate in their actions in their own environment.

It is the combination of place, people and process that makes the Tällberg Forum unique. The informality and beauty of the place has a decisive influence. The environment, in which people can freely, unpretentiously and creatively converse, conveys harmony and aesthetics.

The people are chosen to provide diversity of men and women, of old and young, and a true mix of nationalities from all continents: Politicians, global corporate leaders, thought leaders, artists, clerics, civic leaders and NGO leaders. Many participants bring their families and this strongly influences the atmosphere.
The process and program allow for each participant to combine sessions, talks and discussions with excursions, walks in the woods or spending time with their family. The conference program is a blend of plenary sessions, workshops and conversations that carry on in smaller settings where participants can explore in more depth subjects of their choice. Cultural performances and nature walks are an integral part of the program, as they help open minds and stimulate ideas.
We live in a world of transition, where the need for new ideas and strategies to deal with our common challenges is greater than ever. The Tällberg Forum is a contribution in this direction.

http://www.tallbergfoundation.org/Default.aspx?tabid=165
  

Sunday, June 2

open source knowledge sharing with UNStudio

UNStudio launches open source knowledge sharing - Unique knowledge developed
through building practice is the new core value of architecture.

In June this year UNStudio will launch the new organisation of its practice as an open-source knowledge-based practice operating projects around four specialised Knowledge Platforms.
As part of the reorganisation of the studio a new interactive online knowledge platform will be launched, aimed at facilitating the open exchange of knowledge, with the ultimate goal of introducing and encouraging the expansion from a collaborative to a co-creative working model for architecture.
Whilst the architect will continue to design his or her own projects, the practice of architecture needs to adjust, to gather, edit and apply co-creative intelligence in order to create responsive architecture that is more integral, more holistic, more responsible and more intelligent.
Ben van Berkel:
From the outset at UNStudio we have continually reexamined and reevaluated our practice, with the result that at certain key moments we have recognised the need for extensive reorganisation. Now, once again, the challenging climate within the profession today has in turn challenged us to take a close look and to rethink our organisational model with the ultimate aim of improving our architecture and ensuring its relevance within contemporary conditions. However, finding ourselves unable to locate a relevant model from within the profession, we became fascinated by the new initiatives put in place by online start-up companies – such as social networking firms – who have moved from an old economy to a far more innovative economy which celebrates communication, open exchange and co-creation. Believing that architecture can benefit greatly from adopting and adapting such an approach, in recent years we have set about the reorganisation of our studio into an open knowledge-based practice.
KNOWLEDGE PLATFORMS – AN INTERNAL MODEL
Since the founding of the practice, UNStudio has been developing knowledge as a result of combining the design and building of projects with an active participation in architectural theory. Following on a continued interest in geometry, digital production, material effects and attainable design solutions, this communal knowledge led to the introduction of four distinct Knowledge Platforms to the studio. Whilst the primary objective of our project teams is to deliver the ‘result’ of architectural thinking (buildings, plans, designs), the objective of the Knowledge Platforms is to distill knowledge from within the practice of architecture in order to propel design thinking and innovation.
NStudio’s Knowledge Platforms have been developed into self-organised groups, operating as cross-linked platforms within the studio. Instead of being organised as processes which run parallel to the design work, the Knowledge Platforms form an integrated part of the practice. Organising the Platform-project relationship in an interactive, non-linear manner allows us to effectively combine research with practice, cross-fertilise innovative solutions and discover new approaches to architecture.
The dual goals of the Knowledge Platforms are facilitating the exchange of knowledge within the studio and expanding UNStudio’s range of co-creation with our current and future collaborators. Each Platform, within its specific topic—Sustainability, Organisation, Materials, or Parametrics—is mandated to assemble our project knowledge and produce new knowledge through internal initiatives and innovative external collaborations.
Caroline Bos:
Our primary goal with the introduction of the Knowledge Platforms is to improve our buildings though the creation of new dynamic ways of working and to develop expertise through knowledge-based strategies and working models. People who join UNStudio can choose a platform that they would like to participate in – and perhaps after a few years they will join 2 or 3 platforms – with the result that they can eventually become specialists in very specific areas of design. In this way we can create highly concentrated knowledge exchange with individuals within the company and thereby create more dynamics and more innovation in the creative process of working with knowledge in design.
KNOWLEDGE SHARING – FROM NODES TO KNOWLEDGE, FROM NETWORK TO MESHWORK
Equally essential to developing UNStudio’s in-house knowledge however is the mutual value to be gained by the exchange of expertise with external collaborators. Ben van Berkel: “It is essential to continuously gather information and to make this knowledge available when engaging in dialogues with other specialists with whom we collaborate, both within and outside of the profession.”
The recent expansion of the profession of architecture has meant that architectural collaborations have now become increasingly wide and varied, encompassing both the sciences and cultural fields. Similarly today’s climate calls for an architecture that is responsive to environmental, political, social, cultural and economic requirements and as such there is call for an architecture that contains all possible layers of knowledge.
In order to initiate and encourage this exchange of knowledge, in June this year UNStudio will introduce a new interactive online platform that will share information about our current research projects and the knowledge garnered from these, whilst actively inviting contributions from collaborators and interested parties. The goal of the online Knowledge Platform is to create a podium where UNStudio can become more open with its expertise and thereby share knowledge on a wider scale. In so doing it is our aim to encourage a co-creative approach to architecture; one which intensifies knowledge and ultimately results in a more responsive architecture born of innovation through co-creation.
ONLINE KNOWLEDGE PLATFORM – THE FIRST STEP
UNStudio’s interactive online knowledge sharing platform is currently in the final design stages, however in the meantime, we have updated and upgraded our research pages with new information about current research projects generated by our four internal Knowledge Platforms. Also integrated in the updated pages is a ‘contribution’ function, which allows readers to actively participate and share their own references and related expertise, rate the usefulness of information, find related knowledge and share posts on social networks.
In addition a ‘Platform Dialogue’ section has been added in which video content relaying discussions and events carried out by UNStudio’s Knowledge Platforms can be viewed online.





Sunday, May 5

Zaha (at) GSD

Zaha (at) GSD

Published on Mar 18, 2013
Zaha Hadid Architects (London) has become a world leader in urbanism, architecture and design through projects that integrate man-made systems and preexisting topography. The practice has benefited from its collaborations with leading artists, designers, engineers, and clients, and from its work with state-of-the-art technologies. The MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome, BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Guangzhou Opera House, and Aquatics Centre for the London 2012 Olympics are salient examples of the firm's dynamic architectonic sensibility. Current projects include the KAPSARC Research Centre in Riyadh, High-Speed train stations in Naples and Durango, an office tower in Marseille, and urban master plans in North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Zaha Hadid was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004.
#Women-in-Architecture http://architecturelab.net/2013/03/lecture-by-zaha-hadid-at-harvard-gsd/

Learning from Laureates

Learning from Laureates
Thom Mayne, FAIA, the 2013 winner of the AIA Gold Medal winner and 2005 Pritzker Prize laureate, sat down (via Skype) with 2013 Pritzker Prize Laureate, Toyo Ito, Hon. FAIA. The SoCal Sculpturalist reached out across the Pacific to talk to Tokyo's post-Metabolist master about his career in design and the changing role of architectural practice in a post-digital age.
Mayne describes Ito as an "architect's architect"—and in this exclusive video for ARCHITECT, the two discuss what that means.
  Learning from Laureates from ARCHITECT Magazine on Vimeo.

Thursday, April 4

Toyo Ito :: 2013 Laureate


Biography
Toyo Ito was born on June 1, 1941 in Keijo (Seoul), Korea (Japanese). His father was a business man with a special interest in the early ceramic ware of the Yi Dynasty of Korea and Japanese style paintings. He also was a sports fan of baseball and golf. In 1943, Ito, his mother, and his two elder sisters moved back to Japan. Two years later, his father returned to Japan as well, and they all lived in his father’s hometown of Shimosuwa-machi in Nagano Prefecture. His father died in 1953, when he was 12. After that the rest of family operated a miso (bean paste) making factory. At present, all but one sister who is three years older than Ito, have died.
Ito established his own architecture office in 1971, and the following year he married. His wife died in 2010. They had one daughter who is now 40 and is editing Vogue Nippon.
In his youth, Ito admits to not having a great interest in architecture. There were several early influences however. His grandfather was a lumber dealer, and his father liked to draw plans for his friends’ houses. When Ito was a freshman in high school, his mother asked the early Modernist architect, Yoshinobu Ashihara, who had just returned to Japan from the U.S. where he worked at Marcel Breuer’s office, to design their home in Tokyo.
He was in the third grade of junior high school when he moved to Tokyo and went to Hibiya High School. At the time, he never dreamed he would become an architect—his passion was baseball. It was while attending the University of Tokyo that architecture became his main interest. For his undergraduate diploma design, he submitted a proposal for the reconstruction of Ueno Park, which won the top prize of the University of Tokyo.
Toyo Ito began working in the firm of Kiyonori Kikutake & Associates after he graduated from Tokyo University’s Department of Architecture in 1965. By 1971, he was ready to start his own studio in Tokyo, and named it Urban Robot (Urbot). In 1979, he changed the name to Toyo Ito & Associates, Architects.
He has received numerous international awards, including in 2010, the 22nd Praemium Imperiale in Honor of Prince Takamatsu; in 2006, The Royal Institute of British Architects’ Royal Gold Medal; and in 2002, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement for the 8th Venice Biennale International Exhibition. All of his honors are listed in the fact summary of this media kit. He has been a guest professor at the University of Tokyo, Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Kyoto University, Tama Art University, and in the spring semester of 2012, he hosted an overseas studio for Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, the first in Asia.
His works have been the subject of museum exhibitions in England, Denmark, the United States, France, Italy, Chile, Taiwan, Belgium, and numerous cities in Japan. Publications by and about him have appeared in all of those countries and more. He holds Honorary Fellowships in the American Institute of Architects, Royal Institute of British Architects, the Architecture Institute of Japan, the Tokyo Society of Architects and Building Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
One of his first projects in 1971 was a home in a suburb of Tokyo. Called “Aluminum House,” the structure consisted of wooden frame completely covered in aluminum. Most of his early works were residences. In 1976, he produced a home for his sister, who had recently lost her husband. The house was called “White U” and generated a great deal of interest in Ito’s works. It was demolished in 1997. Of most of his work in the 1980’s, Ito explains that he was seeking to erase conventional meaning from his works through minimalist tactics, developing lightness in architecture that resembles air and wind.
He calls the Sendai Mediatheque, completed in 2001 in Sendai City, Miyagi, Japan, one of the high points of his career. In the Phaidon book, Toyo Ito, he explains, “The Mediatheque differs from conventional public buildings in many ways. While the building principally functions as a library and art gallery, the administration has actively worked to relax divisions between diverse programs, removing fixed barriers between various media to progressively evoke an image of how cultural facilities should be from now on. This openness is the direct result of its simple structure, consisting of flat concrete slabs (which are honey-comb steel plates with concrete) penetrated by 13 tubes. Walls on each floor are kept to an absolute minimum, allowing the various functions to be freely distributed throughout the open areas between the tubes.“
In delivering the Kenneth Kassler lecture at Princeton University in 2009, Ito explained his general thoughts on architecture:
“The natural world is extremely complicated and variable, and its systems are fluid – it is built on a fluid world. In contrast to this, architecture has always tried to establish a more stable system. To be very simplistic, one could say that the system of the grid was established in the twentieth century. This system became popular throughout the world, as it allowed a huge amount of architecture to be built in a short period of time.
However, it also made the world’s cities homogenous. One might even say that it made the people living and working there homogenous too. In response to that, over the last ten years, by modifying the grid slightly I have been attempting to find a way of creating relationships that bring buildings closer to their surroundings and environment.” Ito amends that last thought to “their natural environment.”
In the fashionable Omotesando area of Tokyo, Ito designed a building in 2004 for TOD’S, an Italian shoe and handbag company, in which trees provided a source of inspiration. The Ito office provides its own description of the project:
“Trees are natural objects that stand by themselves, and their shape has an inherent structural rationality. The pattern of overlapping tree silhouettes also generates a rational flow of forces. Having adapted the branched tree diagram, the higher up the building, the thinner and more numerous the branches become, with a higher ration of openings. Similarly, the building unfolds as interior spaces with slightly different atmospheres relating to the various intended uses.
Rejecting the obvious distinctions between walls and opening, lines and planes, two- and three dimensions, transparency and opaqueness, this building is characterized by a distinctive type of abstractness. The tree silhouette creates a new image with a constant tension generated between the building’s symbolic concreteness and its abstractness. For this project, we (Ito and his staff) intended to create a building that through its architectural newness expresses both the vivid presence of a fashion brand and strength in the cityscape that will withstand the passage of time.”
After designing critically-acclaimed buildings like Sendai Mediatheque, Ito became an architect of international importance during the early-2000s leading to projects throughout Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Ito designed the Main Stadium for the 2009 World Games in Kaohsiung and the under-construction Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, both in Taiwan. In Europe, Ito and his firm renovated the façade of the Suites Avenue Apartments with striking stainless steel waves and, in 2002, designed the celebrated temporary Serpentine Pavilion Gallery in London’s Hyde Park. Other projects during this time include the White O residence in Marbella, Chile and the never-built University of California, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive in California.
Perhaps most important to Ito, however, are the projects in his home country, made more pressing by the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011. The disaster spurred Ito and a group of other Japanese architects to develop the concept of “Home-for-All” communal space for survivors. As Ito says in Toyo Ito - Forces of Nature published by Princeton Architectural Press:
“The relief centers offer no privacy and scarcely enough room to stretch out and sleep, while the hastily tacked up temporary housing units are little more than rows of empty shells: grim living conditions either way. Yet even under such conditions, people try to smile and make do…. They gather to share and communicate in extreme circumstances – a moving vision of community at its most basic. Likewise, what we see here are very origins of architecture, the minimal shaping of communal spaces.
An architect is someone who can make such spaces for meager meals show a little more humanity, make them a little more beautiful, a little more comfortable.”
For Ito, the fundamental tenets of modern architecture were called into question by “Home-for-All.” He adds, “In the modern period, architecture has been rated highest for its originality. As a result, the most primal themes—why a building is made and for whom—have been forgotten. A disaster zone, where everything is lost offers the opportunity for us to take a fresh look, from the ground up, at what architecture really is. ‘Home-for-all’ may consist of small buildings, but it calls to the fore the vital question of what form architecture should take in the modern era—even calling into question the most primal themes, the very meaning of architecture.”
The Pritzker Jury commented on Ito’s direct expression of his sense of social responsibility citing his work on “Home-for-All.”
Recently, Ito has also thought of his legacy, as apparent by the museum of architecture that bears his name on the small island of Omishima in the Seto Inland Sea. Also designed by Ito, the museum opened in 2011 and showcases his past projects as well as serving as a workshop for young architects. Two buildings comprise the complex, the main building “Steel Hut” and the nearby “Silver Hut,” which is a recreation of the architect’s former home in Tokyo, built in 1984.

>>
http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2013/biography

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2013/jury-citation

http://www.pritzkerprize.com/2013/works



 

Sunday, September 23

Design and destiny


Philippe Starck

It's  an Old Design talk yet it could embed some reason/s for designers to go on.

Wednesday, September 19

TED > Reading List

Of TED's Reading List
Steven Johnson ::: Future Perfect 
(Copied)




Steven Johnson’s new book, Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age, tackles subjects ranging from underground music video makers to New York’s 311 telephone service to the planning of the French railway system to Capt. “Sully” Sullenberger and the “miracle on the Hudson.” His point? That new solutions to old problems are not only possible, but are on the rise.
Initial reviews for this new tome appear very positive.Publishers Weekly writes, “In the future, progress will not arise primarily out of government directives or policies but out of peer networks. A peer network builds tools that lets a network of neighbors identify problems or unmet needs in a community, while other networks propose and fund solutions to those problems … Stimulating and challenging, Johnson’s thought-provoking ideas steer us steadily into the future.”
Brainpickings.org calls the book “an absorbing, provocative, and unapologetically optimistic vision for the society we have the capacity to build if we use the remarkable tools of our age intelligently and wisely.” And Kirkus Reviews describes the book as a “thought-provoking, hope-inspiring manifesto.”



Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. That's its great claim to fame, and I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment.
And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice.You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin -- particularly around 1650 -- and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice -- right -- because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more alert. And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee.
But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense -- ideas would get together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from.What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity? And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media environments, like the world wide web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few.
But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and languagesteers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "eureka!" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment.
But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea -- a new idea -- is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain.
So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent --a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called ... an organization called Design That Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple -- we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So, the technology is there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless.
So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?" And this is what they ended up coming with. It's called a "neonurture device." From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern, Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm -- it runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.
We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new.That's really where innovation happens. And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then.This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions -- people from different backgrounds. So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that -- strangely enough -- look a little bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here.
And one of the problems with this is that people are actually -- when you research this field -- people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image -- you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. And "oh, eureka," they've got the idea.
What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope.They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. And something about that environment -- and I've started calling it the "liquid network," where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests,jostling with each other, bouncing off each other -- that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.
The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation downto kind of shorter time frames. So they want to tell the story of the "eureka!" moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head."But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods -- I call this the "slow hunch." We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve.
Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic "eureka!" moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it,and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time.
Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right? It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020. Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies -- like Google -- they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more,valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.
And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. And it's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. And they start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing?There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea."
And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office. And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start kind of noodling around -- hacking, as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. So they made it really easy to find it.
So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, "Wow, that's pretty cool. Can I hear? Wow, that's great." And before long, they think, "Well jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it." And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And they they start thinking, "Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect." And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties.And they said, "Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest away. That's pretty cool."
And eventually, they get permission -- this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description. They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning.
A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it and they said,"Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back, and they thought about it. And they came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that's great. Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?"
And that's how GPS was born. 30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform,left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last -- (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right?
(Applause)
And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch,this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War,and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte.
(Laughter)
That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)


:
I want to take you back basically to my hometown, and to a picture of my hometown of the week that "Emergence" came out. And it's a picture we've seen several times. Basically, "Emergence" was published on 9/11. I live right there in the West Village, so the plume was luckily blowing west, away from us. We had a two-and-a-half-day-old baby in the house that was ours -- we hadn't taken it from somebody else.
(Laughter)
And one of the thoughts that I had dealing with these two separate emergences of a book and a baby, and having this event happen so close -- that my first thought, when I was still kind of in the apartment looking out at it all or walking out on the street and looking out on it just in front of our building, was that I'd made a terrible miscalculation in the book that I'd just written. Because so much of that book was a celebration of the power and creative potential of density, of largely urban density, of connecting people and putting them together in one place, and putting them on sidewalks together and having them share ideas and share physical space together.
And it seemed to me looking at that -- that tower burning and then falling, those towers burning and falling -- that in fact, one of the lessons here was that density kills. And that of all the technologies that were exploited to make that carnage come into being, probably the single group of technologies that cost the most lives were those that enable 50,000 people to live in two buildings 110 stories above the ground. If they hadn't been crowded -- you compare the loss of life at the Pentagon to the Twin Towers, and you can see that very powerfully. And so I started to think, well, you know, density, density -- I'm not sure if, you know, this was the right call.
And I kind of ruminated on that for a couple of days. And then about two days later, the wind started to change a little bit, and you could sense that the air was not healthy. And so even though there were no cars still in the West Village where we lived, my wife sent me out to buy a, you know, a large air filter at the Bed Bath and Beyond, which was located about 20 blocks away, north. And so I went out. And obviously I'm physically a very strong person, as you can tell -- (Laughter) -- so I wasn't worried about carrying this thing 20 blocks. And I walked out, and this really miraculous thing happened to me as I was walking north to buy this air filter, which was that the streets were completely alive with people.
There was an incredible -- it was, you know, a beautiful day, as it was for about a week after, and the West Village had never seemed more lively. I walked up along Hudson Street -- where Jane Jacobs had lived and written her great book that so influenced what I was writing in "Emergence" -- past the White Horse Tavern, that great old bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and the Bleecker Street playground was filled with kids.And all the people who lived in the neighborhood, who owned restaurants and bars in the neighborhood, were all out there -- had them all open. People were out. There were no cars, so it seemed even better, in some ways. And it was a beautiful urban day, and the incredible thing about it was that the city was working. The city was there. All the things that make a great city successful and all the things that make a great city stimulating --they were all on display there on those streets.
And I thought, well, this is the power of a city. I mean, the power of the city -- we talked about cities as being centralized in space, but what makes them so strong most of the timeis they're decentralized in function. They don't have a center executive branch that you can take out and cause the whole thing to fail. If they did, it probably was right there at Ground Zero. I mean, you know, the emergency bunker was right there, was destroyed by the attacks, and obviously the damage done to the building and the lives. But nonetheless, just 20 blocks north, two days later, the city had never looked more alive. If you'd gone into the minds of the people, well, you would have seen a lot of trauma, and you would have seen a lot of heartache, and you would have seen a lot of things that would take a long time to recover.
But the system itself of this city was thriving. So I took heart in seeing that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the reasons why that works so well, and how some of those reasons kind of map on to where the Web is going right now. The question that I found myself asking to people when I was talking about the book afterwards is -- when you've talked about emergent behavior, when you've talked about collective intelligence, the best way to get people to kind of wrap their heads around that is to ask, who builds a neighborhood? Who decides that Soho should have this personality and that the Latin Quarter should have this personality? Well, there are some kind of executive decisions, but mostly the answer is -- everybody and nobody. Everybody contributes a little bit. No single person is really the ultimate actor behind the personality of a neighborhood.
Same thing to the question of, who was keeping the streets alive post-9/11 in my neighborhood? Well, it was the whole city. The whole system kind of working on it, and everybody contributing a small little part. And this is increasingly what we're starting to see on the Web in a bunch of interesting ways -- most of which weren't around, actually, except in very experimental things, when I was writing "Emergence" and when the book came out.So it's been a very optimistic time, I think, and I want to just talk about a few of those things. I think that there is effectively a new kind of model of interactivity that's starting to emerge online right now.
And the old one looked like this. This is not the future King of England, although it looks like it. It's some guy, it's a GeoCities homepage of some guy that I found online who's interested, if you look at the bottom, in soccer and Jesus and Garth Brooks and Clint Beckham and "my hometown" -- those are his links. But nothing really says this model of interactivity -- which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 -- than"Click here for a picture of my dog." That is -- you know, there's no sentence that kind of conjures up that period better than that, I think, which is that you suddenly have the power to put up a picture of your dog and link to it, and somebody reading the page has the power to click on that link or not click on that link.
And, you know, I don't want to belittle that. That, in a sense -- to reference what Jeff was talking about yesterday -- that was, in a sense, the kind of interface electricity that powered a lot of the explosion of interest in the Web: that you could put up a link, and somebody could click on it, and it could take you anywhere you wanted to go. But it's still a very one-to-one kind of relationship. There's one person putting up the link, and there's another person on the other end trying to decide whether to click on it or not. The new model is much more like this, and we've already seen a couple of references to this. This is what happens when you search "Steven Johnson" on Google. About two months ago, I had the great breakthrough -- one of my great, kind of shining achievements -- which is that my website finally became a top result for "Steven Johnson." There's some theoretical physicist at MIT named Steven Johnson who has dropped two spots, I'm happy to say.
(Laughter)
And, you know, I mean, I'll look at a couple of things like this, but Google is obviously the greatest technology ever invented for navel gazing. It's just that there are so many other people in your navel when you gaze. Because effectively, what's happening here, what's creating this page, obviously -- and we all know this, but it's worth just thinking about it -- is not some person deciding that I am the number one answer for Steven Johnson, but rather somehow the entire web of people putting up pages and deciding to link to my page or not link to it, and Google just sitting there and running the numbers. So there's this collective decision-making that's going on. This page is effectively, collectively authored by the Web,and Google is just helping us kind of to put the authorship in one kind of coherent place.
Now, they're more innovative -- well, Google's pretty innovative -- but there are some new twists on this. There's this incredibly interesting new site -- Technorati -- that's filled with lots of little widgets that are expanding on these. And these are looking in the blog world and the world of weblogs. He's analyzed basically all the weblogs out there that he's tracking. And he's tracking how many other weblogs linked to those weblogs, and so you have kind of an authority -- a weblog that has a lot of links to it is more authoritative than a weblog that has few links to it. And so at any given time, on any given page on the Web, actually, you can say, what does the weblog community think about this page? And you can get a list. This is what they think about my site; it's ranked by blog authority. You can also rank it by the latest posts.
So when I was talking in "Emergence," I talked about the limitations of the one-way linking architecture that, basically, you could link to somebody else but they wouldn't necessarily know that you were pointing to them. And that was one of the reasons why the web wasn't quite as emergent as it could be because you needed two-way linking, you needed that kind of feedback mechanism to be able to really do interesting things. Well, something like Technorati is supplying that. Now what's interesting here is that this is a quote from Dave Weinberger, where he talks about everything being purposive in the Web -- there's nothing artificial. He has this line where he says, you know, you're going to put up a link there, if you see a link, somebody decided to put it there. And he says, the link to one site didn't just grow on the other page "like a tree fungus."
And in fact, I think that's not entirely true anymore. I could put up a feed of all those links generated by Technorati on the right-hand side of my page, and they would change as the overall ecology of the Web changes. That little list there would change. I wouldn't really be directly in control of it. So it's much closer, in a way, to a data fungus, in a sense, wrapped around that page, than it is to a deliberate link that I've placed there. Now, what you're having here is basically a global brain that you're able to do lots of kind of experiments on to see what it's thinking. And there are all these interesting tools. Google does the Google Zeitgeist, which looks at search requests to test what's going on, what people are interested in, and they publish it with lots of fun graphs. And I'm saying a lot of nice things about Google, so I'll be I'll be saying one little critical thing.
There's a problem with the Google Zeitgeist, which is it often comes back with news that a lot of people are searching for Britney Spears pictures, which is not necessarily news. The Columbia blows up, suddenly there are a lot of searches on Columbia. Well, you know, we should expect to see that. That's not necessarily something we didn't know already. So the key thing in terms of these new tools that are kind of plumbing the depths of the global brain, that are sending kind of trace dyes through that whole bloodstream -- the question is, are you finding out something new?
And one of the things that I experimented with is this thing called Google Share which is basically, you take an abstract term, and you search Google for that term, and then you search the results that you get back for somebody's name. So basically, the number of pages that mention this term, that also mention this page, the percentage of those pages is that person's Google Share of that term. So you can do kind of interesting contests. Like for instance, this is a Google Share of the TED Conference. So Richard Saul Wurman has about a 15 percent Google Share of the TED conference. Our good friend Chris has about a six percent -- but with a bullet, I might add.
(Laughter)
But the interesting thing is, you can broaden the search a little bit. And it turns out, actually, that 42 percent is the Mola mola fish. I had no idea. No, that's not true. (Laughter) I made that up because I just wanted to put up a slide of the Mola mola fish.
(Laughter)
I also did -- and I don't want to start a little fight in the next panel -- but I did a Google Share analysis of evolution and natural selection. So right here -- now this is a big category, you have smaller percentages, so this is 0.7 percent -- Dan Dennett, who'll be speaking shortly.Right below him, 0.5 percent, Steven Pinker. So Dennett's in the lead a little bit there. But what's interesting is you can then broaden the search and actually see interesting things and get a sense of what else is out there. So Gary Bauer is not too far behind -- has slightly different theories about evolution and natural selection. And right behind him is L. Ron Hubbard. So -- (Laughter) you can see we're in the ascot, which is always good. And by the way, Chris, that would've been a really good panel, I think, right there.
(Laughter)
Hubbard apparently started to reach, but besides that, I think it would be good next year.Another quick thing -- this is a slightly different thing, but this analysis some of you may have seen. It just came out. This is bursty words, looking at the historical record of State of the Union Addresses. So these are words that suddenly start to appear out of nowhere, so they're kind of, you know, memes that start taking off, that didn't have a lot of historical precedent before. So the first one is -- these are the bursty words around 1860s -- slaves, emancipation, slavery, rebellion, Kansas. That's Britney Spears. I mean, you know, OK, interesting. They're talking about slavery in 1860. 1935 -- relief, depression, recovery banks.And OK, I didn't learn anything new there as well -- that's pretty obvious. 1985, right at the center of the Reagan years -- that's, we're, there's, we've, it's.
(Laughter)
Now, there's one way to interpret this, which is to say that "emancipation" and "depression" and "recovery" all have a lot of syllables. So you know, you can actually download -- it's hard to remember those. But seriously, actually, what you can see there, in a way that would be very hard to detect otherwise, is Reagan reinventing the political language of the country and shifting to a much more intimate, much more folksy, much more telegenic --contracting all those verbs. You know, 20 years before it was still, "Ask not what you can do," but with Reagan, it's, "that's where, there's Nancy and I," that kind of language. And so something we kind of knew, but you didn't actually notice syntactically what he was doing.I'll go very quickly. The question now -- and this is the really interesting question -- is, what kind of higher-level shape is emerging right now in the overall Web ecosystem -- and particularly in the ecosystem of the blogs because they are really kind of at the cutting edge.
And I think what happens there will also happen in the wider system. Now there was a very interesting article by Clay Shirky that got a lot of attention about a month ago, and this is basically the distribution of links on the web to all these various different blogs. It follows a power law, so that there are a few extremely well-linked to, popular blogs, and a long tail of blogs with very few links. So 20 percent of the blogs get 80 percent of the links. Now this is a very interesting thing. It's caused a lot of controversy because people thought that this was the ultimate kind of one man, one modem democracy, where anybody can get out there and get their voice heard.
And so the question is, "Why is this happening?" It's not being imposed by fiat from above.It's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now. Now, what's great about it is that people are working on -- within seconds of Clay publishing this piece, people started working on changing the underlying rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing. And basically, the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage. if you're the first site there, everybody links to you. If you're the second site there, most people link to you. And so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of links,and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the future, and then you get this kind of shape. And so what Dave Sifry at Technorati started working on, literally as Shirky started -- after he published his piece -- was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers. And he started looking at interesting newcomers that don't have a lot of links, that suddenly get a bunch of links in the last 24 hours.
So in a sense, bursty weblogs coming from new voices. So he's working on a tool right there that can actually change the overall system. And it creates a kind of planned emergence. You're not totally in control, but you're changing the underlying rules in interesting ways because you have an end result which is maybe a more democratic spread of voices. So the most amazing thing about this -- and I'll end on this note -- is, most emergent systems, most self-organizing systems are not made up of component parts that are capable of looking at the overall pattern and changing their behavior based on whether they like the pattern or not. So the most wonderful thing, I think, about this whole debateabout power laws and software that could change it is the fact that we're having the conversation. I hope it continues here. Thanks a lot.


:

If you haven't ordered yet, I generally find the rigatoni with the spicy tomato sauce goes best with diseases of the small intestine.
(Laughter)
So, sorry -- it just feels like I should be doing stand-up up here because of the setting. No, what I want to do is take you back to 1854 in London for the next few minutes, and tell the story -- in brief -- of this outbreak, which in many ways, I think, helped create the world that we live in today, and particularly the kind of city that we live in today. This period in 1854, in the middle part of the 19th century, in London's history, is incredibly interesting for a number of reasons. But I think the most important one is that London was this city of 2.5 million people, and it was the largest city on the face of the planet at that point. But it was also the largest city that had ever been built.
And so the Victorians were trying to live through and simultaneously invent a whole new scale of living: this scale of living that we, you know, now call "metropolitan living." And it was in many ways, at this point in the mid-1850s, a complete disaster. They were basically a city living with a modern kind of industrial metropolis with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. So people, for instance, just to gross you out for a second, had cesspools of human waste in their basement. Like, a foot to two feet deep. And they would just kind of throw the buckets down there and hope that it would somehow go away, and of course it never really would go away. And all of this stuff, basically, had accumulated to the pointwhere the city was incredibly offensive to just walk around in.
It was an amazingly smelly city. Not just because of the cesspools, but also the sheer number of livestock in the city would shock people. Not just the horses, but people had cows in their attics that they would use for milk, that they would hoist up there and keep them in the attic until literally their milk ran out and they died, and then they would drag them off to the bone boilers down the street. So, you would just walk around London at this point and just be overwhelmed with this stench. And what ended up happening is that an entire emerging public health system became convinced that it was the smell that was killing everybody, that was creating these diseases that would wipe through the city every three or four years. And cholera was really the great killer of this period.
It arrived in London in 1832, and every four or five years another epidemic would take 10,000, 20,000 people in London and throughout the U.K. And so the authorities became convinced that this smell was this problem. We had to get rid of the smell. And so, in fact, they concocted a couple of early, you know, founding public-health interventions in the system of the city, one of which was called the "Nuisances Act," which they got everybody as far as they could to empty out their cesspools and just pour all that waste into the river. Because if we get it out of the streets, it'll smell much better, and -- oh right, we drink from the river.So what ended up happening, actually, is they ended up increasing the outbreaks of cholerabecause, as we now know, cholera is actually in the water. It's a waterborne disease, not something that's in the air. It's not something you smell or inhale; it's something you ingest.
And so one of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing. So this was the state of London in 1854, and in the middle of all this carnage and offensive conditions, and in the midst of all this scientific confusion about what was actually killing people, it was a very talented classic 19th century multi-disciplinarian named John Snow, who was a local doctor in Soho in London, who had been arguing for about four or five years that cholera was, in fact, a waterborne disease, and had basically convinced nobody of this. The public health authorities had largely ignored what he had to say. And he'd made the case in a number of papers and done a number of studies,but nothing had really stuck. And part of -- what's so interesting about this story to me is that in some ways, it's a great case study in how cultural change happens, how a good idea eventually comes to win out over much worse ideas. And Snow labored for a long time with this great insight that everybody ignored.
And then on one day, August 28th of 1854, a young child, a five-month-old girl whose first name we don't know, we know her only as Baby Lewis, somehow contracted cholera, came down with cholera at 40 Broad Street. You can't really see it in this map, but this is the mapthat becomes the central focus in the second half of my book. It's in the middle of Soho, in this working class neighborhood, this little girl becomes sick and it turns out that the cesspool, that they still continue to have, despite the Nuisances Act, bordered on an extremely popular water pump, local watering hole that was well known for the best water in all of Soho, that all the residents from Soho and the surrounding neighborhoods would go to.
And so this little girl inadvertently ended up contaminating the water in this popular pump,and one of the most terrifying outbreaks in the history of England erupted about two or three days later. Literally, 10 percent of the neighborhood died in seven days, and much more would have died if people hadn't fled after the initial outbreak kicked in. So it was this incredibly terrifying event. You had these scenes of entire families dying over the course of 48 hours of cholera, alone in their one-room apartments, in their little flats. Just an extraordinary, terrifying scene. Snow lived near there, heard about the outbreak, and in this amazing act of courage went directly into the belly of the beast because he thought an outbreak that concentrated could actually potentially end up convincing people that, in fact, the real menace of cholera was in the water supply and not in the air. He suspected an outbreak that concentrated would probably involve a single point source. One single thing that everybody was going to because it didn't have the traditional slower path of infections that you might expect.
And so he went right in there and started interviewing people. He eventually enlisted the help of this amazing other figure, who's kind of the other protagonist of the book -- this guy, Henry Whitehead, who was a local minister, who was not at all a man of science, but was incredibly socially connected; he knew everybody in the neighborhood. And he managed to track down, Whitehead did, many of the cases of people who had drunk water from the pump, or who hadn't drunk water from the pump. And eventually Snow made a map of the outbreak. He found increasingly that people who drank from the pump were getting sick.People who hadn't drunk from the pump were not getting sick. And he thought about representing that as a kind of a table of statistics of people living in different neighborhoods,people who hadn't, you know, percentages of people who hadn't, but eventually he hit upon the idea that what he needed was something that you could see. Something that would take in a sense a higher-level view of all this activity that had been happening in the neighborhood.
And so he created this map, which basically ended up representing all the deaths in the neighborhoods as black bars at each address. And you can see in this map, the pump right at the center of it and you can see that one of the residences down the way had about 15 people dead. And the map is actually a little bit bigger. As you get further and further away from the pump, the deaths begin to grow less and less frequent. And so you can see this something poisonous emanating out of this pump that you could see in a glance. And so, with the help of this map, and with the help of more evangelizing that he did over the next few years and that Whitehead did, eventually, actually, the authorities slowly started to come around. It took much longer than sometimes we like to think in this story, but by 1866, when the next big cholera outbreak came to London, the authorities had been convinced -- in part because of this story, in part because of this map -- that in fact the water was the problem.
And they had already started building the sewers in London, and they immediately went to this outbreak and they told everybody to start boiling their water. And that was the last time that London has seen a cholera outbreak since. So, part of this story, I think -- well, it's a terrifying story, it's a very dark story and it's a story that continues on in many of the developing cities of the world. It's also a story really that is fundamentally optimistic, which is to say that it's possible to solve these problems if we listen to reason, if we listen to the kind of wisdom of these kinds of maps, if we listen to people like Snow and Whitehead, if we listen to the locals who understand what's going on in these kinds of situations. And what it ended up doing is making the idea of large-scale metropolitan living a sustainable one.
When people were looking at 10 percent of their neighborhoods dying in the space of seven days, there was a widespread consensus that this couldn't go on, that people weren't meant to live in cities of 2.5 million people. But because of what Snow did, because of this map,because of the whole series of reforms that happened in the wake of this map, we now take for granted that cities have 10 million people, cities like this one are in fact sustainable things. We don't worry that New York City is going to collapse in on itself quite the way that, you know, Rome did, and be 10 percent of its size in 100 years or 200 years. And so that in a way is the ultimate legacy of this map. It's a map of deaths that ended up creating a whole new way of life, the life that we're enjoying here today. Thank you very much.

>>>