Designing For All Children of All Species for All Time

Walpole, NH, (March 10, 2008) TriVillage Energy and the Walpole Town Library will be offering a free public screening of William McDonough’s TED talk on “Cradle to Cradle” design. The screening will be on Saturday, March 22, 2008 at 10:30 am in the Walpole Town Library.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, is an annual conference that brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, and challenges them to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED.com is an amazing, rich resource that makes the best talks and performances from the TED conferences available to the public, for free.

TriVillage Energy and the Walpole Town Library are screening William McDonough’s talk as a follow up to the February screening of the “Story of Stuff”. That film described the straight line “materials economy” that starts extraction, moves on to production, then distribution, then consumption, and finally, disposal. In an upbeat and entertaining manner, it highlights the absurdity of a system that assumes there is an unlimited amount of raw materials from which to make stuff, an unlimited area into which we can toss the used items we no longer want, and an unlimited tolerance for the toxins produced along the way.

Mr. McDonough’s talk suggests this system is a design failure, and that there is a wiser, healthier, and more nourishing alternative. Mr. McDonough asks, “If design is the first signal of human intention, what would our intention be?” He answers with another question: “How can we design in a way that we “love all the children of all species for all time?” His talk suggests an answer this question. He wants to turn the straight line described in the “Story of Stuff” into a circle in which used-up products ready to be thrown away are instead used as the raw materials from which the next products are made.

Mr. McDonough offers a challenge: design something that “makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars as food, creates microclimates … and self replicates.”

Oh, wait. It’s already been designed! If you don’t know what it is, you can find out when you come watch this uplifting talk.

The Walpole Town Library, at 48 Main St. in Walpole, is wheelchair accessible, and a sign language interpreter can provided if requested in advance. For more information, contact Jill Robinson at films@trivillageenergy.org or Fritze Till at 445-5283.