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Down To Earth

Happy 10/10/10!

The photos are coming in by the minute over at 350.org from all over the world and I'm about to ride up to Heron Pond Farms. However, this morning I thought I would share a different kind of video for 10.10.10, the classic Power Of 10 from the Eames Office:





James Hunt argues the film is more relevant than ever:

We've become very practiced with scaling in and out of satellite images of our earth, using those funny, awkward sliders on the edges of Web maps to peer in on our homes, our cities, and Area 51. But this mass application of Powers of Ten is not the reason we should celebrate the film today. Instead, we need to approach it conceptually, at the level of scale.

Increasingly, designers are shifting scale from rethinking artifacts (whether buildings, posters or toasters) toward whole systems thinking. I would call this a scale shift from, let's say, 10^1 to 10^5. Prompted originally by environmental thinking and more recently by the rise of networks and globalization, we are starting to recognize that it is impossible to design things in isolation from the larger systems that they live within -- whether those are systems of resource extraction, manufacture, distribution, consumption, or waste.



Down To Earth

The DTE blog is committed to reporting and sharing environmental news and sustainability information from across the Inland Northwest.