On September 7th, VisionArc director Landon Brown presented a talk and public workshop entitled Confronting Comfort: Visual Systems. In the talk Landon spoke on how, today, conventional definitions of comfort as an individual measure are being upended by unseen risks in the shared systems that our social and personal comfort-ability depends upon.

As a stepping-off point, the talk explored the notion of visual language as an index to some of the shared systems that we encounter throughout our day-to-day lives in the city. The initial discussion about “hard systems” like mass transit and energy networks transitioned to those “soft systems” found in even the most mundane of routines like going to the laundromat or the corner deli. Ultimately, the “making visible” of the intersections between these systems was shown to represent opportunities for developing resilience in even the most varied of urban contexts.

In a concluding workshop/open forum, Landon, along with participants from the audience, discussed ways in which the re-purposing of familiar parts of New York City’s social, infrastructural and commercial landscape might offer a glimpse into future solutions for confronting shared risk at the urban scale.

See some visual excerpts from the talk in the slideshow above.

About the BMW Guggenheim Lab:
“The BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile laboratory traveling to nine major cities worldwide over six years. Led by international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents in the areas of urbanism, architecture, art, design, science, technology, education, and sustainability, the Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. Over the Lab’s six-year migration, there will be three distinct mobile structures and thematic cycles. Each structure will be designed by a different architect, and each will travel to three cities around the globe. The theme of the Lab’s first two-year cycle is Confronting Comfort—exploring notions of individual and collective comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility.”

A calendar of other events and happenings at the Lab can be found here.

Japan is the only developed country in the world where household energy consumption exceeds industrial and business use. In the days following the earthquake and tsunami and the accidents at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, it became clear that issues of energy security and availability loomed large and the risk of future blackouts due to summer home cooling and other power demands in Tokyo were imminent.

VisionArc and the Global Agenda Council on Design studied a concept we called “Teiden Kensaku”, or “Blackout Alert”, for using a social networking platform to create a feedback system that could connect daily energy consumption to its larger consequences at the regional and national scale. The idea promoted behavioral change through consumption habits and encouraged individual actions of conservation through information and incentives. Instead of a centralized top-down policy of enforcement or surveillance measures, the system proposed a voluntary bottom-up framework. The platform would demonstrate that small individual gestures of conservation can account for a major impact on overall resource usage.

The platform proposed short and long term functions. For short-term concerns, an alert function would send mobile device notifications thirty minutes prior to a blackout, encouraging people to turn off their individual air conditioners and instead spend time in public places with air cooling systems. While this direct reactionary behavior would be important, we proposed putting the system in place for one hundred days prior, to begin encouraging and training new habits for the citizens of Tokyo. The implementation would also include various incentives for citizens to reduce energy consumption and use fewer appliances at home.

This mobile device program, conceived as a design tool, would also allow software and utility companies to directly engage their consumers through data analysis, behavioral science, and marketing expertise. At the same time, consumers are empowered to make smarter and more sustainable choices to conserve resources and save on household expenses, while contributing to the greater good.