Recently, Continuum staffers Devorah Klein, Principal in Human-Centered Design, and Caitlin Toombs, Program Development Associate, braved a day of basic training at the famed West Point military academy in Hudson Valley, New York. Why, you ask, would these two subject themselves to such torture? They were lucky enough to attend a practice R-Day.

R-Day is the first day of training for the new class of recruits, done each year in the summer. The real R-day is run partially by the more senior cadets, so for a rehearsal, West Point opens up their doors once a year to a select few brave civilians, who allow themselves to be the guinea pigs for a dry run.

The Continuum team wasn’t just in it for the extraordinary stories they’d get to tell us when they got back. Klein and Toombs were interested in how R-Day—so tough that you are supposed to fail and fail fast—could affect behavior change. After all, change is hard. And the military knows a thing or two about effectively managing behavioral change.

How can going to extremes, beyond your personal limit, help you make dramatic changes in your life? What could they teach us about adherence and compliance—and, more importantly, about human behavior?

Find out what they learned in Devorah Klein’s video.

Designing from the Trenches from Continuum on Vimeo.

After a week of keeping up with the insane pace of business in Shanghai, and going online at night to keep things together back home in the US, I finally got a few hours to relax and walk around. I had already fallen in love with Old Shanghai, knowing it to be a doomed romance, as the object of my affection would soon be stolen by cranes. I wanted this time to see her while I could. Somewhere along the way, I dropped my wallet containing about 700 quay, ID and credit cards. I retraced my steps madly and, of course, in vain. I arrived back at The Longemont Hotel  and, even though I had not called the hotel, a staff met me at the revolving door with the news that my wallet was safe. An honest citizen had found my wallet and delivered it to the police, who found the hotel keycard and sent word. Of course I had to go to the station in person, bring a friend who could speak for me in Mandarin, sign many papers and endure some cranky officers who no doubt had more important work to do. But I was reunited with my wallet and its complete contents in time to have a relaxing Sunday. Of course I didn’t relax. I ventured North to the rapidly industrializing suburbs and found towns that existed on maps but not yet on the ground, which is testament to the completeness of central planning. I spent the day on foot without ever seeing another Westerner. I was approached from time to time by people who were concerned that I might be lost or who were hoping, correctly, that I would like to have a conversation consisting of my few halting words of Chinese and their few hundred words of English.

This city that once was so hazardous to foreigners that it was literally synonymous with kidnapping had become a largely coddling environment for visitors, both in and out of the typical ex-pat areas. Every big city is a branded entity in the global economy, and it would seem that being Shanghai’d now means being taken care of by generous hosts and kindly citizens.

Rule # 6 of great service: great rebrands come from changes on the inside.

“We’re here to try to do something different,” said Continuum’s Ed Milano, kicking off a panel discussion at the company’s Boston-area offices last Thursday to address a growing crisis within the field of microfinance. Milano, Vice President of Program Development at Continuum, set the stage with an apt quote from the de facto “father” of microfinance, Muhammad Yunus: “My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see…Poverty in the world is an artificial creation…Poverty is unnecessary.”

 

A proven tool for fighting poverty on a large scale, microfinance provides very small loans to people, mostly women, to start or expand small, self-sufficient businesses. In fact, 155 million of the world’s poorest people have received a microfinance loan—giving them the opportunity to transform their lives. But as these organizations face meteoric growth, managerial operations needed to effectively scale these institutions are suffering. Industry leaders claim that finding a solution to this “talent gap” is critical to the future of the field.

Continuum, in collaboration with a remarkable team, has just begun work on a project to solve this social challenge. The project’s goal is to create an innovative leadership development solution for middle managers, and, in essence, groom the next generation of leaders in these crucial organizations. The team includes Continuum Social Innovation Principal Anna Muoio; Peg Ross, director of the Human Capital Center at The Grameen Foundation; Lynn Pikholz, President of the microfinance development company ShoreCap Exchange; and Lyndon Rego, Director of Innovation at The Center for Creative Leadership, an international leadership education and research firm. “This is a burly problem,” says Muoio, “and we need the power of all these different disciplines and expertise—from microfinance to leadership development to organizational effectiveness and innovation—to solve it.”

Over the last decade, microfinance has experienced explosive growth, with local banks expanding anywhere from 50 to 100 percent year-over-year to serve the needs of their clients. “But because of this enormous growth,” says Pikholz, “resources are stretched, staff isn’t adequately trained, and there’s no methodology in place for managing, grooming, and attracting talent.” For example, one microfinance bank in India has hired close to 1,000 loan officers and branch managers this year alone. The branch mangers, for instance, are largely in their mid-twenties with little experience in managing hundreds of employees, significant loan portfolios, and “non-textbook” situations, such as a local government officials urging people to default on their loan repayments or the death of a loan officer in the field. To put things in context: A comparable job in a city at a traditional bank would require seven to eight years of experience. “Microfinance institutions can’t reach their mission without help,” says Rego.

During the discussion, the team opened up the conversation to guests, who included individuals from the microfinance and financial service sector as well as graduate students from Harvard, Tufts, and Boston College. They helped to imagine what the solution would look like. All agreed that a trail-blazing mentality is needed to get the job done.

Although the project is still in its infancy, Grameen’s Peg Ross has already felt that working with Continuum has been eye opening. “This company has introduced me to a whole new way of finding a solution,” says Ross. “And with the work that the team will do on this project, they will effectively train the next generation of leaders.”

Click here to read “No Footsteps to Follow: The talent gap in the development finance sector in India,” field notes from the team’s initial trip to India in the fall of 2009.

On March 3^rd, Continuum and CCA hosted a panel discussion on the future of consumerism. The event drew an impressive crowd and great connections were made. 

Our LA team hooked up a dual quad-core CPU Mac tower to enable Professor Tim Kasser to present and participate remotely. Supported by a great deal of analytical data supported by psychologists, Professor Kasser predicted a future focused less on extrinsic values (materialism) and more on intrinsic values (spiritualism). This is important, he explained, because when people focus on extrinsic values, their level of happiness and gratification goes down, and vice versa. To further explain the difference, he compared people who focus on the material against those who focus on the spiritual the day before and after Christmas. 

Nathan Shedroff presented a thought-provoking piece around meaning and how to find it. He said that traditionally, when people say “Less is More,” it generally makes people nervous, as they believe things are being taken away from them. He proposed re-phrasing it as “getting more for less.” With a strong focus on meaning, he also spoke about how any two people can have their own definition of values such as freedom and security, but the expression of those values can be very different. One example of this is that while NRA folks believe possessing firearms is an expression of security, others may think the exact opposite. 

Sean Brennan’s presentation looked at a shift occurring in Gen Y; the first generation that will not be as economically successful as its predecessors. Since they can’t afford more, their aspirations and spending behaviors will be different (and incomparable to previous generations). He looked at how this generation is using the internet as a way to rapidly prototype new identities, form relationships, and use their creativity and experiences as currency (Flickr travel photos, twitter updates). They spend their money on tools and services that allow them to do these things. Sean also echoed Professor Kasser’s points by sharing some of the thinking that’s happening in Continuum’s NEXT community, particularly around how sharing plays an important role for members of this new generation and how technology and services allow this generation to be green and thrifty by default. 

The crowd was very engaged in the panel discussion and raised some very good questions. Since half of the audience was design professionals, the conversation focused around what the implications would be for the future of design. The event lasted well into the evening hours, and everyone walked away with new insights in the future of consumerism.

As the prolific pedagogue and founder of The Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, Kiran Sethi has infused the city’s youth culture with spirit and empowerment. Launching aProCh (A Protagonist in Every Child) early last year, Kiran has set after making Ahmedabad a child-friendly city. “They (children) understand intuitively that the real curriculum is not what’s taught in schools, but what’s written on the face of the land.” At the heart of the organization’s ideology is the fulfillment of the child’s need need for joy, safety, play, and the opportunity to explore the wider world. Bridging the gap between children’s teachers, parents, and their larger community creates the foundation of The Riverside School, and poises children to effect needed change.

Kiran’s latest thinking on how to enact change is The Design for Giving Contest. Through this, an entire emerging generation is called to action. She’s continued to drive home the point “Do not let the teachers drive the project; let them just guide it.”

With over 1300 entries pouring in from children full of earnest thinking and concern the teams from Continuum, IDEO, and the Institute of Design at Stanford were sure to be overwhelmed. As any contest of this size our team was rigorously making sure every entry had fulfilled each category with a level of clarity and conviction. Though, we also admitted how each entry would be its own mystery whose impacts we couldn’t possibly fully grasp: the elderly they visited, the thirsty villagers they spoke with, or the water sanitation issues they researched. Qualifying the entries would be soft, but also hard and fast. Sixth senses were hard to trust on this one.

I will not forget one particular entry. As we were going through many dozens of entries we began to learn their rhythm, their formats, language and tactics. Shivesh Pandey’s entry was different. This 11 year-old dove into a problem we hadn’t seen in other entries. He started to envision a technology device for his local train station. He explained that his motivation was several deaths from people trying to cross the train tracks as unannounced trains wizzed through the terminal. Following his explanation he submitted his genius: a fully equipped, stacked device outlining each feature – in crayon and colored pencil. Without a flinch, he had the answer. He was simply calling for its production and installation.

Though the entry by standard was not as robust, it showed a kid ready to make it happen. This was his idea addressing a problem in his world – straight from the gut. I presume that no teacher held his hand while working through his sketch. I appreciated Shivesh’s entry not because it was a great design, or necessarily even the right solution – but his potential to realize and act on the problem. He thought to outline the opportunity it seemed nobody saw. After all, that attitude struck me as core to the contest. If we can be a part of activating this generation’s custom of giving and support their design thinking, that is a powerful thing.

We’ll look forward to staying involved in Kiran’s work as it surely evolves. Kiran recently shook things up at TEDIndia and her contagious thinking. It seems the contest already has a life of its own – in the best way.

Bench advertising is very commonly seen in bus stops and public parks. On my daily commute, they’re mostly dominated by dentists, realtors, pharmaceutical companies, and sometimes public health campaigns like HIV testing. Ever since the smart advertisers from “District 9″ flooded the city of Los Angeles with “Non-Humans seen in La Cienega exit off 10 freeway,” “Bus bench for humans only” warning signs (I actually followed the sign and called to report non-human sightings), Cougar Town is now following suit and put Courtney Cox on the typical realtor bus bench spots.  Compared to conventional posters, these attempts to make audiences feel as if they are actually living the storyline seem more effective. To those who watch Cougar Town, it adds realism and emotional connections, to those who don’t, it peaks curiosity to find out more from those www’s…

I have a 12-mile daily commute on Venice Boulevard, and it’s very interesting to see how advertisers try to grab commuters’ attention, especially now with digital billboards. As I wait for the lights to turn green, I now get the pleasure of being advertised by up to 6 different TV shows, whereas 2 years ago, I would have seen that billboard long before I arrived, and ignored it completely as I waited for the lights. Though none has impressed me until recently when I saw the smart advertisers from “Up In The Air” truly embrace the technology by shifting two images with the same background–one with George Clooney alone facing the runway, the other with two other travelers in the picture (as shown) within the same time frame given to each advertiser. I see a not too distant future when billboards will actually work with local traffic patterns (loaded with Google traffic data), to rotate content accordingly, or even work with cars embedded with smart chips to gauge the primary audience level at each given stop light.

With the recent banning of Speedo’s LZR sharkskin-inspired speedsuits and the exposure of possible steroid use by Boston Red Sox baseball player David Ortiz, it raises an exciting question: What role does design play in the evolution of sport?

Michael Phelps’ eight Olympic gold medals is a record that may never be broken, all set while wearing Speedo’s suit. The suit is modeled after the drag-resistant texture of sharkskin and compresses the swimmer’s body in key areas. Though Olympic records are falling, most world-class swimmers have access to the suits — is this an unfair advantage or an enhanced design?

Andy Roddick hits tennis balls fast. 153 MPH fast. Speeds like these were unheard of in the days of Rod Laver and wooden tennis racquets. Nowadays it is commonplace for men and women on the professional tour to be serving well above 100 MPH. Now that graphite, titanium and ceramic composites are routinely used for weight reduction and enhanced rigidity, even beginners have the opportunity to use something much improved over the tennis racquets of yore. But are the racquets improved or is the game just different?

400-yard drives on the golf course? Not before monster-sized titanium club heads.
Track spikes that are lighter than a slice of 7-grain bread? Not just for Olympians anymore.

Why should full-body swimsuits be any different?

Can a shoe be too light? Can a ski have too much spring?

Should altering an athlete’s equipment be any different than altering an athlete’s body? What is “ethical” body-altering? How about Red Bull energy drink? Can an athlete with a super-reconstructed knee jump higher or cut quicker than one without? How “able” should an athlete be? How soon will it be before athletes intentionally integrate prostheses or have healthy joints and limbs replaced with titanium ones before the original is worn out?

What is “performance enhancing design”? Few groups are asking and acting upon such questions — certainly there are lots of terrific opportunities to evolve sport and enable our bodies to push the limits of sport, but within what ethical boundaries? And how can (or should) design enhance such experiences?

The empowerment of consumers in a free market society affords us all our dollar votes. However, the balance of this free market scale, originally defined by 18th century economist Adam Smith, implies a level of transparency and knowledge. These days, products which are built to last are undervalued and “Made in USA” claims are no longer the heavyweights they were, much less possible. Now that our society is in deep with China, who manufactures over $280 billion of our products, is it time for us to take a closer look at our values and dollar votes? How will we decide the shape of designs to come? How will we as consumers re-energize our economy to support a healthier American body? 

Consumer Activism

Consumer activism has been part of our history since the boycotts of the Revolutionary War. Through consumer’s choices the “invisible hand” leads us to patronize and invest. Supporting products and services with our patronage is apart of our country’s heritage. However, voting with our dollar has never been more complex. Nearly every product aimed at us with precision comes decked with variables in fine print and a barrage of implications. As our ability to understand our product’s make-up and their respective systems has declined, our means for consciously buying has dwindled away.

If we apply this same activism to the more literal consumption of food we see an analogous battle. Many consumers are becoming more aware of the organic vocabulary and are slowly realizing the impact of ingesting these manufactured goods into their own bodies. Agribusiness will face real growing pains as book titles like “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan slowly bend our mainstream mentality. Robert Kenner’s recent film, Food, Inc., also takes direct aim at transparency in agribusiness. In parallel, we must consider this ingestion in a wider view of products. How complete is the public’s knowledge of the impacts of the products we support? Are we as buyers the well-versed nutritionist or the kid in the candy store with little knowledge of our own health? As we put a close eye on each dollar spent in today’s economy, the demand is up on values and knowledge. Each dollar counts.    

Disconnection to Manufacturing

The consumer’s ability to vote for product systems properly has been nullified by their detachment from making goods. To understand how our stuff is made requires a full understanding of its material sourcing and manufacturing processes, shipping and distribution channels, and where it ends up. As it stands, life cycle analysis is not for the common consumer. Most of people’s time at the point-of-purchase is dedicated to figuring out gangly new interfaces, not an analysis of shipping routes and raw material mines. To highlight the disconnection between consumers and manufacturing processes, we find programs like How It’s Made, on The Discovery Channel, a fantastic spectacle. To many, this is the closest they’ll get to understanding the processes of making everything we own, to scale. Edward Burtynsky shows how it’s no Gepetto hammering away making our stuff. He paints a rarely seen picture.

Burtynsky, the acclaimed documentarian of Manufacturing Landscapes, is not out to ruin our comfort with buying our cozy products. He’s a photographer who wants to honestly depict the reality of the modern machine. Within the space of consumerism literature and publicity, Burtynsky’s approach is unique; his open narrative quietly emphasizes the potency of scale. He is one of many making the profound point that we have a very limited understanding of the resources it takes to make our products, how many countries and stakeholders were involved, and where our products go after their planned obsolescence. We must consider how such large and complex systems effects our free market scale where knowledge and transparency are key.  It’s oddly enlightening to find anything like the Footprint Chronicles, an honest window into Patagonia’s process of making. We must work towards a new intimacy with making. While Big Box retailers continue slashing prices with a wink consumers need to think twice about their vote. 

Mainstream vs. Underground

More than a third of Americans shop at Walmart each week. Alongside this we notice its ever burgeoning counter force, the world of handmade craft. Marking this industry’s progress are web communities like Supermarket and Etsy. Only started in 2005, Etsy now has over 200,000 sellers who bring in over $12 million worth of goods per month. Documenting this recent explosion is Handmade Nation. They captured the movement late last year with their film and book release telling a new story of our roles as both consumers and producers. It exposes a different side to product development, the punk rock side.

As craft fairs pop up in gymnasiums, warehouses and small boutiques around the nation the movement appears as a rebellion. This time consumers are introducing something new to buying: community. The new-found value of having an authentic understanding of a product and a relationship with its maker is like a slap in the face. Designers in this realm thrive off of networking and joining into a collective understanding of their resources. Handmade Detroit shows a vibrant online hub for exchanging ideas, skills, resources, and events. This exchange has allowed the craft world to move beyond an incestuous offering of kitchy stationary and cutesy flowery cut-and-sew products. These communities can now develop structures that allow for more complex processes and advance as the industry becomes more robust. The makers can nimbly select materials that accurately align with buyer’s most current values such as sustainable materials or local produce. Ultimately, this helps refine the creative expression of individual communities, making beautifully unique culture.

With new values of community and hand craft, Hartmut Esslingers’ original expression of emotional design through Apple’s early products is sure to evolve into something more transparent, connected, and hands-on. 

Design Within Reach

Shifting into a paradigm of consciousness means a tough learning curve. With more values infiltrating our systems of “voting” for products consumers will look for simpler, more transparent solutions. Sure, language systems will need to be invented to communicate a product’s social and ecological impacts (certifications and “nutritional facts” labels for products). However, today’s handmade craft world shows how it’s more than feeling good through effective communication and marketing. Product systems which sustain will ultimately be made through an involvement in the community and an intimacy with the creative process.

Being involved in a community of commerce is about personal relationships with the people involved, the stakeholders. Who’s behind the process? What motivates them? Strong product development companies and vendors know the value of these connections and spend big on fine-tuned service and sales. Similarly, we still realize the value of that ashtray we made in art class for our parents (smoking or non) and its endless value, a stamp in time.  Owning things that are connected to strong relationships is of the highest value. The tighter our list of stakeholders becomes, the more we gain an understanding of the process and invest in our communities. We may see how development systems working on this community scale can more efficiently customize solutions to its needs and promote its own expression. As consumers understand their products more, stakeholder’s values of fair trade, worker’s rights, and local manufacturing will be heightened.

With the typical scale of production, involving the consumer in the creative process oftentimes means more SKU’s, colorways, mass customization, or a complex aftermarket. However, as we grow closer to the process, consumers will be offered more personalized solutions and empowered to adopt the DIY movement. In a struggling economy we’ll realize great design and powerful dollar votes by enabling communities to access the creative design process. Ponoko is one example of an enabling product system that allows an online community to submit their own designs using laser cutting as its medium. Places like 3rd Ward and The Workroom can now get more traction as people in their community jump in and get designing. Systems like these promote an collective and accessible process which naturally fulfills its needs and potential, starting to look very much like an open source network.

Considering these ideas of transparency and craft, the mentality of “good design” will be more accessible for common consumers to grasp. They can start to vote for products which they understand, enabling them to invest in products which align with their values. In just a couple generations, the ancient tool of design has been refined for making products on massive scale that encompasses many cultures. Reapplying the same tool with a bit of consciousness may just help us navigate through the economic wasteland. Maybe we can spend less time moping about the economy in Walmart, and instead realize our own resources and creativity. The US is rebranding itself, spread the word.

“I’m just a regular person who thinks everything is out of control.”

This is how Woody Tasch, author of the new book Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered and founder of the burgeoning Slow Money Alliance, began his talk last week to a group attending Boston’s Slow Food meeting.

The topic on hand: How to bring money back down to earth. Literally. How to slow money down from its dizzying (and destructive) speed where all it takes is seconds for “collateral” to get parsed into pieces, distributed as “debt” that no one is responsible for, or understands where it actually ends up. The world of finance has been like playing a high-priced game of “Musical Chairs”—with no chairs. And in this world, there is no place that’s “here.” Investing is perplexingly abstract and has little to do with place or relationships. Externalized this way, few grasp the implications of financial dislocation, of a financial system where money is nomadic and wanders un-rooted—until, as we’ve witnessed with the meltdown, the game ends abruptly and we’ve all landed on our butts wondering where the chairs went.

In this blog, I’ve talked about the current “redesign” of capitalism led by leaders such as Bill Gates to John Mackey. From creative capitalism to conscious capitalism there’s another to add to the discourse: nurture capitalism. It’s the new strain of capitalism being promoted by Woody Tasch a guy who cares about soil, farming, food, money and and new ways of thinking about how they all go together. Tasch is ex-chairman of the Investors’ Circle, a network of angel investors, venture capitalists, foundations and family offices that have facilitated the flow of over $100 million to hundreds of early-stage companies dedicated to sustainability. He’s now got a new mission on his mind.

Tasch’s Slow Money Alliance is about redesigning a segment of the market so it’s not, as EF Schumacher famously said, “an institutionalization of irresponsibility.” It’s about designing ways to mobilize capital to invest in small food enterprises to create viable local food networks—that support local food communities and soil fertility. Quite simply, it’s about creating a food system where you can buy a clove of garlic that comes from the farm in your own state, not from one 7,000 miles away in China. Not because “locavore” and the precise calculation of food miles is all the trend these days; but because to choose not to design a sustainable system is to continue to threaten the very thing that sustains us: our soil and the people who extract food from it in sustainable ways in order to fill our bellies.

How many minutes of the day do you spend thinking about soil fertility? I would venture close to none. The opening of Tasch’s book is an eye-opener as to why we should, if not care, at least expend a few CPU cycles thinking about the importance of something so banal as dirt. A litany of grim statistics about loss of soil fertility (“It takes roughly a millennium to build an inch or two of soil; it takes less than forty years, on average, to strip an inch of soil by farming in ways that are more focused on current yield than on sustaining fertility…) and the direct implications—for our stomachs and the necessary act of eating—of a continuation of this trend, are packed into his preface.

What’s refreshing is that Tasch directs the conversation of sustainable agriculture away from a parade of possible technological fixes (better synthetic fertilizers, smarter seeds, more efficiency, etc) to the financial fix needed to address this problem:

The problems we face with respect to soil fertility, biodiversity, food quality, and local economies are not primarily problems of technology. They are problems of finance. In a financial system organized to optimize the efficient use of capital, we should not be surprised to end up with cheapened food, millions of acres of GMO corn, billions of food miles, dying Main Streets, kids who think food comes from supermarkets, and obesity epidemics side by side with persistent hunger.

Speed is a big part of the problem. We are extracting generations worth of vitality from our land and our communities. We are acting as if the biological and the agrarian can be indefinitely subjugated to the technological and the industrial without significant consequence. We are, as the colloquial saying puts it, beginning to believe our own bullshit.

Tasch’s book, part factual spreadsheet part poetic diatribe, consistently asks us to reexamine the, uh, feces of thought we’ve been buying all these years. Last week he quieted the room when he asked: “What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?” It’s a brow-furrowing question without a set of easy answers or platter of puffy platitudes. And it’s a larger set of issues Tasch and his Slow Money Alliance are addressing: How to effectively keep money local. Rooted. Attached to place.

These ideas have a direct lineage to and share DNA with those of Slow Food, an international movement out of Bra, Italy which I wrote about in a previous life for Fast Company magazine. It’s no surprise that Carlo Petrini, Slow Food’s founder, wrote the forward to Tasch’s book. Now with over 100,000 members in 132 countries, Slow Food is still countering, as they say on their web site, “fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.” (italics mine) It’s a conversation that’s been perpetuated and fortified by food luminaries such as Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan and Marc Bittman.

A paragraph from the article I wrote about Slow Food echoes much of Tasch’s current sentiments and stresses the imperative of designing alternate systems of food production:

Over the years, Slow Food has evolved from a gourmet organization concerned solely with exalting food and drink to a movement with a mission to promote food diversity and to prevent the extinction of domestic animals, plants, fruits, and vegetables. In the Slow Food worldview, a loss of diversity — driven largely by our obsession with speed — means a gain of one thing: a bland, new world. “At the beginning of the century, for instance, there were about 200 varieties of artichokes in Italy,” says Sardo. “Now there are only about a dozen. Each day, we lose several varieties of vegetable or animal species. Not only does that have huge gastronomic implications, threatening the diversification of taste, but it also has profound ecological implications.”

While Slow Food addresses this relentless commoditization and standardization of food from a cultural imperative rooted in the importance of diversification (and a fair amount of outrage at the deterioration of the pleasure of eating by the blight of fast food purveyors), Tasch is focused on rethinking how we fund modern enterprises. Of the $500 billion of professionally managed philanthropic money in play, for instance, only 100th of 1% (so roughly $50 million) is currently invested in sustainable agriculture. Slow Money hopes to bring some balance to this equation. Like Slow Food—that aims to “offer people an entirely new food-production-and-distribution model, an alternative to the current big-scale, industrialized model”—Tasch and his merry band of venture capitalists aim to: “Create local capacity to invest local capital in local food systems—as a way to build a complimentary set of economic activities to counter the buy low, sell high, profit maximization methods of our current economy.”

I had a distinct feeling of déjà vu listening to Tasch—like this conversation has spent a long time weaving and winding its way through the zeitgeist. But is was a welcomed experience. I left the conversation with Tasch thinking about, of all things, Deep Throat. It was his advice, if you want to gain insight into how things truly work, to “follow the money.” In this case, it will be interesting to see if money directed in a “slow” way can give us a new understanding of different ways of structuring our world. Give us different ways of producing and consuming food. There’s no reason the design community cannot lend its formidable talents to this dilemma and help rethink the intersection of food, farms, (soil) fertility and money as if it mattered—because it does.

If you’re so compelled, visit the Slow Money Alliance site, read their guiding principles and sign up. Tasch’s goal is to get 1 million people to sign his alliance. And if you’re really compelled, head to Santa Fe this September for the first national gathering of the Slow Money Movement.