We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of ‘raw materials’, and that we may safely possess those materials merely by taking them. This taking, as our technological means have increased, has involved always less reverence or respect, less gratitude, less local knowledge, and less skill. Our methodologies of land use have strayed from our old sympathetic attempts to imitate natural processes, and have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining.
- Wendell Berry, ‘The Total Economy’ (2000)
The condition in which some of us now live—and have lived for decades—is undeniably a luxurious one, energy-wise, comfort-wise. No one in human history has had what some of us now have; but equally there is a growing sense that if things don’t change neither will anyone have it again—we are rapidly depriving future generations of energy resources and a clean, stable environment, both of which have too long been taken for granted.
A piece of coal provides roughly eight kilowatt hours of energy per kilogram, which in one sense is extremely efficient. But the coal takes hundreds of millions of years to form. This almost unimaginable quantity of time is consumed with the flick of a switch, or at the press of a button—all dissipated, all devoured in an instant, to light a room or power a computer. When time is factored in, therefore, fossil fuels actually provide surprisingly low efficiency, low yield in terms of a time-energy ratio. A gravity battery, while seemingly of negligible energy storage value compared to fossil fuels, becomes much more powerful when time is factored into the equation.
The ideas underpinning our current exhibition (as the Reconstrained Design Group, until 15 April) at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) represent a radically different philosophy of energy storage and consumption. They indicate a shift away from quick, thoughtless consumption of ancient resources, towards visible, tangible, real-time consumption. Of course, at this stage the
Newton Machine is more of an intervention than a practical solution—it is not designed to be an instant fix for the world’s energy problems, which are complex and multifaceted.
But before our prototypes and the thinking behind them are dismissed on grounds of impracticality, it is worth noting that our everyday relationship with energy is also a dream, an illusion of through-the-wall magic. It is unsustainable, based on a fantasy of unlimited supply, when in fact it has long been operating on a system of sleight of hand and perpetual deferral. When oil supplies are dwindling, the short-term answer is new technologies of extraction or batteries made from lithium and other non-renewable materials. What the Newton Machine offers is a new way of thinking about energy—a gesture, however rough, towards the seismic paradigm shift that is urgently needed to bring about a more responsible future.
Time is at the centre of this proposed shift in thinking. So is our relationship with nature, which must become balanced rather than extractive and exploitative. Even the generic and ubiquitous electrical sockets in our homes are anything but harmless. The apparent banality of the plug and socket has masked a century of unprecedented environmental destruction. By hiding energy, we have made it seem free of both limitations and consequences. A temporal convenience such as a hot bath or a flash of light releases potential (stored) energy irreversibly. Buttons, switches and plugs conceal enormous infrastructures and exploitation of existing resources on a truly sublime scale.
Design influences desire. If in the past design has been used to encourage consumption, to make consumer goods desirable, then in the future we must enlist design in the fight to bring our desires more closely in line with our needs. A shift is required to preserve what has taken millions or billions of years to form in the past, and to avoid a legacy of waste stretching forward into the future. We have to adjust the scope of our consumption. Reconstraining time means shifting away from the behaviours that brought us into the nightmare of the Anthropocene, and living sustainably within our own modest scale as an animal species on Earth.
Images:
James Auger (top): Gathering black sand for casting at Praia Formosa, Madeira; Miguel Taverna: Images from CCCB exhibition
