A hot day at the Evergreen Brickworks

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I’m sitting in the transfer bus heading for Evergreen Brickworks and the second day of Meeting of the Minds. Yesterday was one of the hottest days this year in Toronto, unusually late. Today we are expecting the kickback with humid heat and possible thunderstorms. Since the main area for the conference is partly outside it will be another hot day. It is always hard to summarise impressions and conclude half ways into a conference like this but let me reflect on a few things that was brought forward yesterday: Rogier van der Heide, Vice President and Chief Design Officer for Philips Lighting noted that we have moved from an industrial era into DIY (do it yourself). Everyone with a smartphone can today make, design, construct and create everything from music, movies and even objects ready for 3D-printing. Around the corner he sees a shift from DIY to DIT (do it together) where collaboration gets easier and easier with cloud services, shared and open data. This aligns with what I see in collaborative planning for sustainable cities and with new technology this will open up the possibilities for public participation and engagement even more. One difficulty with energy efficiency initiatives is to predict the actual savings. This depends on the sometimes irrational and hard-to-predict human behaviour in buildings but it is also crucial for making the business case. Paolo Gaudiano, President and CTO for Icosystem showed us how using game theory and agent based modelling different actions can be studied in advance and create a better understanding in how we as human will react to energy projects in buildings. Jared Blumenfeld, Administrator for US Environmental Protection, rightly questioned some of the over optimistic tech predictions in the room by noting that we need things that exist today and that we can scale up. This is very important and although we will benefit from future concepts and aroundthecorner tech, we need to realise that the is enough tech to solve many of our problems. We are in many cases lacking business models, cooperation and communication to endure confidence and funding of existing solutions. Can we focus on both? I think we need to, but if not, let’s work with speed up and scale up for now. As becomes apparent when the example of China came to the table. Time is limited for the shift if we not want carbon emissions to spin out of control. I’m hoping for more discussion like that today. That was just a few reflections and much more is of course to be learned by talking to other Minds as they move around the venue during coffee breaks and between sessions. Everyone needs to regularly take a step back now and then and reflect on your vision and direction and Meeting of the Minds is a great place to do just that. Let’s see what happens today… Stay tuned. Skrivet av Andreas på Swecos sustainability blog.