Shrugging Atlas*

June 19, 2009

The weight of the world is on our shoulders these days it seems, considering the burden of the seemingly intractable energy issues we bear:  swelling populations that harbor swelling aspirations to dramatically increase their energy use, national security insecurities and doubts about the security of energy supply, the depletion of finite fossil fuel resources, climate change and the things we might not know about costs to the natural systems that sustain life, wild swings in the price of fuel. Ugghh.It's bad. Really bad.

But maybe bad is the best thing that could happen to us. Maybe being hemmed in by problems sets the stage for particularly excellent creative response. As Margaret Boden suggests in her Stanford treatise creativity and unpredictability: "constraints, far from being opposed to creativity, make creativity possible. To throw away all constraints would be to destroy the capacity for creative thinking."

Consider the advent of air conditioning (AC). AC and cheap electricity liberated the building form from the function of tending to its occupants' thermal comfort (which required quaint artifacts like covered porches and cross-ventilation). And yet delivered air, which enabled the skyscraper and all manner of wonderful building forms, may also have wrought the barren, uncreative cubicle hell. It became too easy for designers to simply plow the building with AC, with many a soul-deadening space the result. (Another offspring of  cheap AC: I've been on projects with an obvious excess of AC capacity, since it's safer for a mechanical engineer to overdesign--they will never hear from building occupants if there's more capacity than needed, they will definitely hear from them if not. The building owner, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be able to correlate AC design with the electric bills they'll eventually get). Cheap AC contributed to a certain sloppiness, a certain boredom and inattention on the part of the building mechanical engineer. The fact that we've realized that cheap AC ain't so cheap, that there are costs beyond the electric bill, may actually be helping to sharpen the wits, to infuse building designers with a renewed sense of purpose, and to get engineers back to a core mission of designing for economy and efficiency.

Maybe big energy problems provide something useful to push against. Maybe problems are a necessary condition for making solutions that move us forward. Maybe to not have problems is to be in profligate, mind-numbing stasis.

* meaning this, fountainheads

Photo: Laurennicole81 on flickr