Tonkinwise “Radical Sustainable Innovation” DRAFT July 2, 2013 Page 1 of 18 It’s Just Going to be a Lotta Hard Work – Four Problematic and Five Potential Ways of Accomplishing Radical Sustainability Innovation Cameron Tonkinwise There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: bigness. Oversimplified as this may seem, we shall find the idea more easily acceptable if we consider that bigness, or oversize, is really much more than just a social problem. It appears to be the one and only problem permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big. Leopold Kohr The Breakdown of Nations 1 The unsustainability of our societies is a big problem. To some extent, it is a problem of bigness. Our societies are unsustainable because they are too big: they require too much stuff to be moving too far too fast. Unsustainability is also a big problem because it seems so difficult to work out how we could possibly get our societies to use less, more slowly. It is difficult not just because the problem exists on such a large scale, but also because the problem seems so ingrained. On the one hand, the problem is ingrained because it is the outcome of big systems – for instance, consumer capitalism, growth-based economic modernization, fossil-fuel dependent suburban planning, etc – systems that have been in operation fairly unchallenged for around a century. As is often remarked, this means that the project of enhancing societal sustainability is like trying to mid-course correct a super-tanker – it takes enormous force and a long time to slow, let alone turn such a vast thing with so much momentum. 2 On the other hand, the problem is ingrained because it manifests at a small-scale, in the semi-conscious everyday activities of billions of households and workplaces around the world. Developing more sustainable societies is not just something that can happen through a few top-down decisions. It is something that will involve changes to nearly every thing every one of us does each day: what we have for breakfast and how it got into our homes, how we clean our teeth and where our waste water goes, what we wear and how we care for our clothes, where we need to go to work and how, how those work environments are heated and/or cooled and lit, etc. The bigness of unsustainability comes from how many small things are going to need to change. So, tackling unsustainability requires big thinking, or thinking bigger. Designers are forever being told that sustainability demands that they start to expand the scope of any particular design problem they are working on: that they better understand where all the materials that they are working with come from and will end up going; that they question the short-term business models of their clients and the expectations and habits of customers; that they take more responsibility for redirecting the supertanker filled with billions everyday household