Starting again

To anyone finding their way here via What’s Next DC, feel free to read up on me first here.

1.  Where I’ve been.

“A whirlwind” doesn’t begin to describe the past year and a half.  The short version goes something like this:

Finished grad school (public affairs w/focus on energy and climate change policy, niche of CSR/sustainability).  Finished 1.5-year internship for sustainability consulting group.  Gig as freelance energy analyst.  Gig as freelance communications/social media strategy consultant.  Offer to become fellow at EPA.  Move to DC, find/set up apartment. Move wife/cat/life north.  Start work in wholly regulatory big-government sphere after a lifetime in startup environments.

At the end of the day, this is who I am:  a storyteller, matchmaker and technology fiend, sensing connections between groups, helping them see they’re characters in the same story, and finding the right tools or devising strategies that will help them work together effectively.

2.  Where this blog’s been.

I put Sustaining Ability on hiatus in order to sort through what I wanted to talk about, and ended up adding stacks of additional topics to the list.  Ethonomics, byproduct synergy, community investments in green infrastructure… there’s a lot to talk about.

My focus hasn’t changed since last March— finding fresh ways and channels to talk about sustainable practices and public policies that could reinforce them — just added more moving parts to it, that’s all.

3.  Where this blog’s going.

As I’ve taken a stronger interest in Web/mobile technologies working as levers to increase public participation in local issues or policy development, it’s clear I need to talk about the medium as much as the message.  Web tools, data visualization, mobile apps, and building on the deceptively simple SCVNGR hunt…

Transmedia’s the strange-feeling piece of the puzzle I’m building.  A lot of transmedia work is focused on building storyworlds, engaging viewers or consumers, building a brand or crafting an immersive experience… but not a lot of that work tackles real-world issues* — and authors, please, write in and tell me about your work if I’m wrong — or helps organizations doing the good work to get beyond the unidirectional-message dynamic.

I want to add the personal, sustainable practices or larger environmental picture to the mix and create immersive experiences that don’t just inform, but move people to action, both online and in their own lives.  Take the storyteller and policy wonk sides of my brain and make them one.

Intuitively, it makes sense that strong stories, strong characters, interactivity and play — the building blocks of reader engagement — would be tools that people engaged in this kind of work would be playing with feverishly, like sugar-crazed kids inventing reasons that Transformers would live in the same universe as Legos.

As with everything else I’ve done in my life, if I have what seems like a good idea, I’ve just gotta try it.  So expect notional essays and ideablasts on here while I sort out my first project (venue TK)… and in between, lots of fuel for the fire.

* Some gaming/transmedia examples I’ve already heard of and dig on:  Ayiti: the Cost of Life; Collapsus, the Harry Potter Alliance.

SXSW Interactive: Biz from waste

Valerie Casey, executive director of the Designers Accord, started her Sunday SXSW keynote speech by calling the interactive community to task for not engaging in the global conversation on sustainability.

And in some ways, she was right to; it’s a community rife with future-shaping talent who, by and large, haven’t pounced on these issues.

The interactive field is one full of designers, communicators and architects: systems thinkers who consider on a daily basis how to shape narrative, user experience, or communications architecture to engage and sustain an audience. They’re deeply familiar with the notion that it isn’t enough to get their audience’s attention, that the real goal is to motivate them to (preferably continual) action, whether that means playing a game, buying products, engaging in offline or online communities, or donating to/participating in a nonprofit’s work. More importantly, they can look at a system, take it apart and redesign it while incorporating dramatic leaps in efficiency.

Casey pushed SXSW-goers to imagine what that immense pool of talent could achieve if their abilities were directed towards cultural sustainability rather than commerce.

That said, I was pleased to find that, while jumping from panel to panel and having hurried conversations in the halls, more than a few of SXSW’s attendees were trying to embrace both at once, building their business models around addressing one of today’s biggest — and least sexy — environmental and business issues: solid waste management.

SXSW Interactive: observations

SXSW Interactive ended last night, and I’m back home uptown, feeling the way I expect many are: exhausted and elated, trying to remember every great quote, find every business card, sort out what I came away with from it.

So I’ll start with this: plenty of folks have started posting about the big lessons from this year’s show, but I’d rather hone in on some larger lessons I saw on display throughout the show and in the people who make it up.

Demand management, one shower at a time

Electric utilities have been trying a variety of measures to encourage their customers to conserve energy — “smart” thermostats that show you your usage in real-time, a guilt-gram of annual power usage included with one’s bill, Web interfaces that let one monitor/control consumption from their PC — but beyond the novelty of flicking an “off” switch on your A/C from work, getting people to curb consumption can be as tough as getting 5-year-olds to eat broccoli.

TreeHugger offers a rundown of another (impossibly simple) sort of demand management measure: a $5 device that lets you know — in colors a 5-year-old could recognize — when you’re taking too long of a shower.

According to Dezeen, you just put the tiny device at the bottom of your shower. The waterpebble measures and remembers the amount of water you consumed when you used it for the first time, and uses that as a bench mark for future showers. A series of LED lights tells you if you’re being more or less water efficient.

It’s got signals as simple as a traffic light, costs slightly more than a large Starbucks coffee and is so easy to use that kids could teach their parents how it works.

On December 31st, the EPA retired ENERGY STAR’s specification for programmable thermostats, one of the main tools of electricity demand-side management (DSM). One of the chief complaints utilities heard from customers was that the units were too complicated to use, that it was difficult to remember to keep changing the settings when you left the house or went on vacation. They’re working on a new specification with an emphasis on usability, but firms working on new thermostat designs that will comply with the new standard should look to the Waterpebble for inspiration.

Keep it simple, and keep your user in mind.

(Last thought: could you imagine if Scholastic could market these to kids through their school book clubs, alongside subscriptions to science magazines and Ranger Rick?)

(Really last thought: yes, there are drawbacks to the WaterPebble… it’s still a voluntary measure, it doesn’t raise awareness about water use via sprinklers, sinks and dishwashers, and the usefulness of it could be ruined by the user taking one insanely long shower while calibrating it.

I don’t care; it’s a very smart $5 piece of technology and cute besides.)

Teeing up a new climate bill, this time with oil’s blessing

A new climate/energy bill is in the works, c/o Senators Lieberman (I-CT), Graham (R-SC) and Kerry (D-MA), and while the contents are far from ideal, this trio has already made a few politically astute choices in this iteration.

The new bill takes a more fragmented approach to the climate issue, creating a cap-and-trade market strictly for emissions from electric utilities and a linked-carbon fee system for oil and other transportation fuels, writes ClimateWire’s Darren Samuelsohn. Thus far, no one in Congress has dared to swap the word “fee” with the dreaded “tax,” which would raise hackles on both sides of the aisle; but in effect, those fees would amount to a tax to consumers as producers pass those costs down the supply chain. This proposal has the blessing of the American Petroleum Institute (they came up with the pitch), and the bill’s authors hope this approach will ease the pain to consumers and render the bill more politically palatable.

Unfortunately, this approach leaves several huge portions of the U.S.’s contribution to global carbon emissions unaddressed:

• Emissions from manufacturing operations such as cement manufacturing, which is largely powered by coal on-site;
• Greenhouse gases released by oil drilling and refining processes (only levying a fee based on fuel sale/purchase relieves the oil industry of this obligation);

Other nagging questions about the proposed bill include how high the proposed carbon “fee” would be, where in the supply chain it gets levied, and how this piecemeal approach to addressing U.S. CO2 emissions will affect their negotiators’ credibility in the next round of UNFCCC talks.

What’s your sustaining ability?

Last September, my brother (and long-time collaborator) and I were working on a new business card for me.  He kept asking, “what title should I put on it?”  I couldn’t answer him.

I had just finished graduate school three months prior, and my head was still whizzing with the typical titles one transitions into from a public policy program — research analyst, program associate, policy director, etc. — none of which sounded right.

Finally, he shrugged, taking out his notebook.

“Fine, let’s work this out. What’s your ideal job?”

If you aren’t kept awake at night by visions of business cards with senior management titles on them or pursuing an iconic career like being a fireman, astronaut or concert pianist, this question’s not so easy to answer. It gets tougher when you’ve just finished a master’s degree that’s the start of a career change, and want to bring together your abilities and education without leaving pieces of yourself in boxes in the proverbial attic.

All of a sudden, An image flashed in my head, and I took his notebook and sketched out what became the final design:

It occurred to me that maybe the problem was that I was trying to squeeze into boxes I didn’t fit in, when I should instead be creating one that fits me instead.

My “ideal job” combines my policy analysis skills, my knowledge base and fervent interest in sustainable business practices and how those affect the livability of communities, and a writer’s passion for finding the right medium for the right story. In other words, finding fresh ways and channels to talk about sustainable practices and public policies that could reinforce them.

It isn’t a job description; it’s a three-legged stool, an illustration of abilities, the ones that, at this point in my life, I want to sustain me.

Hence, the business card and this blog. I’m here to apply my sustaining abilities — assimilating, communicating, and bridge building — and hopefully start a dialogue about any or all of these things:

• how the media landscape is changing;
• how that affects advocacy and message delivery;
• how behavioral economics offers new ideas about motivating consumers to change their daily lives;
• how framing the debate around sustainability is just as important as having winning arguments or superior products;
• how living our lives and reducing our impacts on the world aren’t mutually exclusive… in fact, bringing those two goals together is easier than any of us might think.

Pull up a stool. Let’s get started.