The Second Sustainable Design Philosophy Symposium at the New School centers on the recent critical reviews of socio-technical transition theories by Bruin Carleton Christensen. Respondents will be Jay Bernstein, Rachel Heiman, and Harvey Molotch.
Thursday, January 22nd, 10:30am-12
5th Floor, 72 5th Ave, NYC
In April 2008, the World Wildlife Fund UK released a quite surprisingly academic position paper entitled, Weathercocks and Signposts: The Environmental Movement at a Crossroads (available for download from wwf.org.uk/strategiesforchange). To some extent, the paper is a response to the controversy following Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ The Death of Environmentalism (the original 2005 article, now expanded into a book, is available for download from www.thebreakthrough.org/images/Death_of_Environmentalism.pdf). That position paper derided the ineffectiveness of trying to develop sustainability by continuing to cultivate a (renewed) empathy for (restored) wilderness, and instead advocated the real politick of marketing more sustainable lifestyles (comprising green products and practices) within existing (generally still consumerist) values.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus were in fact promoting what has already been happening outside of North America, where sustainability-advocating government and non-government agencies had already switched to ‘social marketing’ strategies after experiencing for at least a decade the non-correlation of pro-natural-environment attitudes and more sustainable behaviors. The Weathercocks paper characterizes the tenets of this now mainstream social marketing approach as:
• Reliance is placed on ‘small steps’, often in the expectation that these will lead individuals to engage in more significant behavioural changes.
• Particular emphasis is placed on marketing green products or services (‘green consumption’).
• Reliance is placed on the ‘commodification’ of behaviours that are not otherwise directly associated with a particular product – such that a good or service becomes a proxy for the desired behavioural change.
• Reliance is placed on audience segmentation; either by socio-economic criteria, or according to the motivations underlying willingness to engage in behavioural change.
• Of these motivations, particular emphasis is placed on the role of self-interest as a motivation for behavioural change.
• As a corollary to market segmentation, the emerging consensus must necessarily insist on the irrelevance of the reason that an individual adopts a piece of behavioural change – the emphasis is on using what appeals to a particular audience segment – irrespective of whether or not attention is drawn to the environmental imperatives for behavioural change.(14)
A leading example of this is the ‘community-based social marketing’ website of the consultant and trainer Doug McKenzie-Mohr, entitled Fostering Sustainable Behaviour – www.cbsm.com. McKenzie-Mohr’s program explicitly relies on the well-established research field and professional practice of ‘health behavior change,’ translating its quit smoking, get fit, do regular breast checks, etc campaigns to the promotion of recycling, composting, energy conservation, etc.
On the one hand, this framework leads to the behavioral economics currently in vogue, which tailors information to the bounded not-so-rational conventions of everyday practical reasoning. (See also Robert Cialdini’s testimony to the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education in September 2007 concerning “The Contribution of the Social Sciences to the Energy Challenge,” which argues for the importance of carefully worded exhortations to behavior change that do not unwittingly draw attention to, and so reaffirm, the prevalence of unwanted behavior – available for download from http://science.house.gov/publications/Testimony.aspx?TID=7921 .)
On the other hand, and significantly for this symposium, the pragmatism of this work extends it beyond its discipline of social (and economic) psychology and into the material culture of design. A key step in sustainable lifestyle promotion is the identification of instrumental barriers to progressive behavior change. These need to be overcome with the design of tools or the redesign of the built environment: for example, information about the value of reusable over disposable plastic bags will only foster sustained behavior change if it takes the form of decal on your car windscreen, reminding you to bring your reusable bags each time you jump in the car to race up to the shops.
The WWF Weathercocks paper admits that this sort of social marketing has accomplished some level of change in this or that aspect of developed nation everyday life. However, it polemicizes against the possibility of significant enough change ever coming from this approach, because it is not based in changed values. Without an explicit value-change agenda:
Weathercocks therefore advocates that activists “Achieve greater clarity on the values that motivate the environment movement… Emphasise intrinsic goals in environmental communications… [and] Begin to deploy a broader vocabulary of values in policy debates…” (35)
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What is interesting about the discourse into which WWF is trying intervene is that at stake is not just the question of the most effective way of bringing about political change, nor the question of what the nature of the politics driving that change should be (which for WWF is still nature-based: the final recommendation is “Identify and promote mechanisms to [re]make public affinity for nature more salient” (36)), but the very nature of humans beings, the ontology they gives them the capacity for change, and the extent to which politics, or values, are or are not an essential aspect of that ontology.
This then is the context for Bruin Carleton Christensen’s recent work. As a Heidegger- Husserl scholar, and the author of Self and World: From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology, Bruin has been critically reviewing the philosophical claims, particular around politics and human existence, at work in various approaches to developing more sustainable societies.
A key difference in the territory that Bruin has been interrogating from that of the Weathercocks paper (which is very lacking in this regard) concerns design. As indicated above, this begins with the recognition that intentions are impotent without means; to compost, I something in which to compost. Designers tend to believe the reverse, that a device for doing something affords that doing, meaning the device does not just make certain actions possible, but makes them likely or desirable, and eventually habitual; a barrel on a stand that can be rolled makes composting cleaner and quicker, and more fun, and so, more regular. The negative materialist version of this argument is more widespread: that people are constrained in what they can do by the design of their built environments and the infrastructures servicing those built environments; it is difficult and sometimes forbidden to compost in highrise apartments, so I will not no matter how strong my commitment to waste reduction, climate change mitigation or nature and its organic processes.
There is obviously a tendency toward a environmental behavioral determinism here, a reduction of the human to an unthinking stimulus-response system, something on the Niklaus Luhmann side of Bruno Latour. However, a less reductionist version of the argument derives from practice-oriented sociology. This relatively recent field, theorized most extensively by Theodore Schatzki, takes the research unit of sociology to be constellations of designs, embodied skills and social meanings. The emphasis is on habitual but intelligible actions that accomplish qualitative goals, such as cleaning.
It is apparent that for new, less ecologically damaging ways of living to be sustainably introduced, they need to be conceived as practices around which converge many different types of change –changes to the design of devices, built environments and infrastructures; changes to the everyday skills of those who dwell in and with those designs; and changes to those people’s expectations about those designs.
In some ways, Bruin has been trying to reintroduce to this practice-based approach sustainable social change what it at issue in the Weathercocks paper. In terms of the philosophical question about the human, Bruin has been wondering about the extent to which practice-based humans are still politicians, reasoning with their affections. His claim seems to be that both social marketers and socio-technical transition enablers over-estimate the power of marketing. This causes them both to miss the importance of the affective side of being human, which is dismissed because of its vulnerability to perversion by advertising media. Rather, Bruin asserts, humans are always capable of negotiating with their desires, and this is key to social change over and above any commitment to a value set or any designed way of inhabiting a built environment.
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Bruin’s arguments have been formulated over a series of papers (critical reviews of
> Hunter, Hunter and Lovins Natural Capitalism
> John Thackara In the Bubble
> Behaviour-steering design (inspired by Bruno Latour) and Engaging design (inspired by Albert Borgmann)
> Elizabeth Shove Comfort, Convenience and Cleanliness
> a dialogue with William McNeill about Heidegger, Aristotle and sustainable service systems
All are available for download from the ‘Papers of Bruin Christensen‘ section of this blog.
Cameron Tonkinwise
The Second Sustainable Design Philosophy Symposium at the New School centers on the recent critical reviews of socio-technical transition theories by Bruin Carleton Christensen. Respondents will be Jay Bernstein, Rachel Heiman, and Harvey Molotch.
Thursday, January 22nd, 10:30am-12
5th Floor, 72 5th Ave, NYC
the nature/culture of sustainable humans 