Sustaining Ability

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.

In no particular order:

• Focus on evolution, not revolution. Change doesn’t happen quickly or in huge quantities; it happens through each innovation, each successful (or failed) prototype, and by sharing those experiences.
  

  (Example: Beth Ferguson and her SolarPump Station; Beth mentioned during the Zero Waste panel that the SolarPump installed outside the Trinity St. firehouse was the fourth prototype her group had put together, and they were still working to find the right mix of components to ensure durability in the face of many users and being exposed to the elements.)

• Tell your story. Tell other people’s stories. Conveying information is great, but it’s the details, the quirks, the little moments that stick with us and make the sharing richer.
  

  One example: The Gupta brothers spoke at SXSW about collecting stories from South Asian immigrants by having family members interview them at home, hoping the familiarity of family would bring out details that a journalist or researcher, a stranger, never could.
  Another: Jessamyn West painted a picture about the “digital divide” by spinning yarns about her experience working as a traveling library technologist in rural Vermont; she told us about senior citizens who thought their computer knew they were fat because it flashed ads at them about weight-loss pills, and about people new enough to the Internet that they needed to learn Web basics from scratch.

• Profits aren’t antithetical to innovation or good works. Just don’t victimize anyone to get them. Panels all over SXSWi were buzzing about social entrepreneurship, how to help nonprofits fundraise or communicate better, and how techies can pitch in on the clean energy economy and the zero waste movement. For every panel on personal success, there were three on the importance of understanding/respecting your audience, your clients and the larger world around us.
• (Paraphrasing Rushkoff) Every day, once a day, just… unplug. Go for a walk. Or a bike ride. Or a swim. Or close your laptop and look out over the beautiful vista you live over. Just give yourself leave to untether and go somewhere at least once a day that feeds, quiets or calms you.