From the earliest days of the industrial age, the greatest artists and scientists of the times have had their focus locked skeptically on the recalcitrance and even malevolence of new technologies. In fact one of industrial and postindustrial humanity’s perennial grievances is the prototype or the procedure that passes from stubbornness to unequivocal rebellion in its developmental stages. From time immemorial, romanticized episodes of experimental failures or of the “happy accident” have been the pervasive lifeblood of human progress that has inspired our appreciation for and misgivings about technology. However most developmental studies focusing on science and technology concentrate either on the actual production of the technology by established “professionals,” or on the cultural and economic consequences of the technology. Often times, the idea of the lay-person or the “user” as the producer of the technology is either overlooked or dismissed as anomaly. Yet history has shown time and again that people outside the centers of scientific authority regularly defy the perception that they are merely passive recipients of scientific knowledge and technology, by reinventing products and rethinking knowledge systems in ways that represent a critique, resistance or even rejection of them. Despite being so frequently overlooked, developing this type of anthropological awareness of the way people and groups use, reuse and reject technologies is a critical element in understanding how both cultures and economies develop. The explicit importance of technology in developing economies has emerged as part of a broader rubric of sustainable development theory for the global south. Yet curiously, many of the most renowned aid organizations are either unwilling or unable to seriously encourage the kind of nuanced thinking that is required to develop appropriate technology programs, because such strategies are simply too difficult to monitor and nearly impossible to regulate. The result of course has been a prolific and ineffective style of development aid characterized by technology or aid “transfers” and program contingencies that compel third world populations into roles of submissive recipients of technologies instead of rallying them to be active creators of it. Yet, as ineffective as these approaches to development may be, they are understandable in their economic rationale and perhaps even inevitable in considering the cultural pedagogy that has validated them. The perception of “new” technologies as the natural solution to improving daily life has been the propulsive hallmark of Western evolution for over two centuries, and it in fact does seem logical at first glance to assume that the “products” we have come to rely on everyday to function productively in our world would naturally have similarly beneficial applications in “less-fortunate” regions as well. However both history and present ventures have proven that the technological dream of a “self-correcting world” is in actuality a misleading illusion, no more prophetic than John Van Neumann’s 1955 prediction of energy so cheap that it would be un-economical to meter it by the 1980s.[i] The romantic, twentieth century social objective of machine-sustained societies of streamlined leisure has proven to be nothing more than a noble mirage, as technologies today have come to demand more human labor to function, not less, and has aided in the rapid disenfranchisement of countless millions from entering into the modern sector, reducing earlier predictions of the promise of future technology to mere science-fiction fodder. The French poet Paul Valery clearly seems to have been right when he wrote in 1944 that:
“Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole of the present world by scientific power. This invasion by active knowledge tends to transform man’s environment and man himself -- to what extent, with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and of the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing -- that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us…we do not know and can by no means imagine where.[ii]
When he wrote this, Valery was evoking the errors that the best thinkers of the late nineteenth century would have made in trying to predict the progress of the next fifty years. While a pointed and cautionary analysis, Valery could not have predicted the extent to which hyper techno-evolution would come to dominate our lives or the extent to which our understanding and misunderstanding of it would come to both help and hurt us.
Western Perceptions and Global Realities
Rod Serling’s 1961 short story, “A Thing About Machines,” is an incisive and haunting account of the ill-fatted, do-it-yourselfer Lord Finchley whose household appliances violently come to life and turn against him in murderous protest. As absurd a premise as it seems, what Serling was commenting on was not so much technology, or the “fickleness” of our technologies, but the sarcasm and arrogance we have all come to express in the face of technology and technology malfunction. However, Serling may also have more subliminally been tapping into our modern misgivings of industrial society--that is, the doubts and fears that have swelled to burgeoning proportions as we hear daily about promising and dangerous new breakthroughs in electronics technology, bio-medical discoveries and energy production. While Serling’s protagonist may have been a hysterical, waspish caricature of suburban American culture, he was beautifully created in that he expressed very real American misgivings about our technology. The United States may be home to the most renowned science and technology institutes in the world but is also the irrefutable birthplace of Lemon Laws. New Jersey and Pennsylvania for instance have officially defined a “lemon” as “a new car with a substantial defect that cannot be repaired after three attempts, or is out of service for a total of twenty to thirty days.”[iii] The creation of Lemon Laws in the United States is an important and paradoxical comment on our culture’s attitude towards technological development. That is, while we notoriously and proudly boast of our unparalleled technological prowess, we have unapologetically come to believe that things can sometimes simply be no good-- that certain products are just anomalously and categorically irreparable and unusable. Admittedly, many products in the United States and elsewhere are simply poorly designed and badly built, but the curious problem of certain devices just going bad is part of different problem that is unique to Western culture and characteristic of American society, and it has informed and directed our relationship with technology since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution.
In fact Mary Shelly’s horror story Frankenstein, first published in 1818, during the midst of the Industrial Revolution, may be the earliest deliberate account of the unintended consequences of unfettered technological invention. While Shelly may have been pointing to a dilemma latent in all science-based technology, at a time when the institutional sciences were only beginning to formally influence technological practice, she wrote prophetically about the inevitability of “technological systems” thinking.[iv] She does not describe the monster as a machine, but she is careful not to treat it as human either, despite its very personable characteristics. Still less however, is it an animal, lacking any proper name of its own-- the monster is simply a haunting personification of a sophisticated integration of exogenous systems. The implication is merely that a machine cannot be endowed with a will of its own in the way that Serling dramatized, unless it is a “system,” not merely an absolute device. Most technologies before Shelly’s time however were not systems based. Well into the nineteenth century, most tools, especially tools used in agriculture and manufacturing were designed and used as extensions of the users’ body. In many central European regions for instance, a scythe was a custom-tailored piece of equipment that was proportioned to the cultivator’s body to maximize the tool’s performance. [v] Still more suggestively, the simple concept of a workbench changed the relationship between the workers’ body and his tools. The employment of a solid table on which to operate tools, for the first time allowed craftsmen to anchor materials and tools with vices and pegs in repeatabley accurate ways. In this way, the tools became programmed to certain extent with the worker’s intelligence and skill. Planes for instance need to be mastered, adzes and drawknives demand a high level of proficiency as well, yet once a job is set up properly, even an inexperienced worker can craft an elaborate piece. What something as seemingly unremarkable as the workbench evidences is a dramatic and unstoppable change in how the human and the instrument interface with each other. At this point, people are no longer users of tools, but rather they become managers of them, in the exact same way that we have become managers of the high-tech equipment we keep on our desks and in our pockets everyday. That is, we have come to direct and control the processes that take place, rather than actively shape them for ourselves.[vi]Of course the precision of the managed tool has a price, and while it may be less robust as it becomes more complex, it also becomes increasingly unpredictable. This inevitable trade-off between precision and reliability is understood by most users of high-tech equipment, but it is nonetheless a key factor in the creation of our modern Western mentality that certain technological problems are simply in “the area of metaphysics,” and that “strange things happen in electronics for which there is no reason.” [vii] Because of this culturally accepted reasoning, many of our “good products that go bad” are simply disposed of out of frustration or retired to a more obscure use by “informal” users. The indignation of nineteenth-century producers and the irritation of twentieth-century consumers as created a techno-evolutionary paradigm that is violently disruptive at times, but also necessarily inspirational in its critique of new products and technologies. This is the contentious and dismaying mentality that has proven both the importance of pyramidal structures and centralized technologies in our world, while illustrating there ineffectiveness in others.
The Paradox of Appropriate Technologies and Housing
Failure to understand and respond to essential differences in the perception of issues and tools, and between principles and practices has exacerbated the dissonance between “the West and the rest” for centuries. The West’s cultural certainty in its centralized, regulated economic and technology programs has overshadowed smaller, self-governing initiatives, fostering a development paradigm that purports a limited set of preferred modern strategies as the most effective means for achieving immediate ends. That is, while corporate organizations generally employ heavy centralizing technologies, they have completely different benefits and capabilities than local, autonomous organizations which typically employ light, decentralized technologies. For instance, while there may certainly be strong and important arguments to consider in favor of the small-scale production of high-quality cars, it is unlikely and in fact simply bad business to think that it could compete with the mass-production that has so successfully come to dominate the industry. Alternatively, consider the mass-production of housing, which is intrinsically uneconomical as well as socially and ecologically damaging. To distill the car/house analogy further, it is obvious that car manufacturing needs to be highly standardized because it is assumed, and to a point guaranteed, that car owners will be using their cars in the same general ways. That is, all car owners will drive their cars, obey the same traffic laws, and operate their vehicles in the same designated areas -- hence cars can and should be designed as complete products and used as tools. The same cannot be said of housing projects. Contractors, planners and architects will be unable to invest their resources or mine the full “use-value” from the end “products” unless they are free to use the resources available to them, in their own ways that do not limit the freedom of others or harm future generations.[viii] This is the enduring and divisive inconsistency between formal sector production and innovation and informal sector use and innovation that has come increasingly to be defined as a conflict between “heteronomy” and “autonomy.”[ix] In considering the extremes between heteronomy and autonomy a clear illustration can be observed in the distinctions between modern public housing and local housing initiatives. Tenants of modern public housing for instance have little if any control over where they live or what kinds of dwellings and local amenities they have access to, and they have no control over the way in which the structures are built and managed. Alternatively, most peasants and pavement dwellers are forced to do all of these things for themselves, within the often narrow limits of what they are in fact free to do. Their autonomy in short is limited only in the control they have over the resources around them.
Countless modern examples of local, autonomous construction and self-directed strategies for survival have illustrated the marked discrepancy between the effectiveness of heteronymous goods and autonomous goods, and it has been romanticized and celebrated by Western observers often in the form of escapist fiction like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Turneir’s Friday. Yet what these famous examples of survivalist ingenuity in fact also come to represent, is the ineffectiveness of “modern” products in “un-modern” contexts. That is, “products” or tools that are often designed to be “managed” and not necessarily proactively wielded are often rendered unusable in any sort of off-hand application because they are designed as absolute devices that are packaged and marketed for a limited and specific type of use. Consider for instance what good a cell phone or a computer or a desk lamp would be for someone marooned on an island today if there is no infrastructure to make those tools operable. This perception of our products as complete, packaged devices that we need only call upon to operate is in fact the most effective and fatal way of depriving people of control over their own lives and of alienating the products themselves. This occurs because of two general factors in the production of modern products. The first is that most manufactured products are supplied in mysterious and opaque forms, often veiled behind shiny covers and booby-trapped. These sorts of devices are the instruments that we often dismiss as just plain bad or useless when they malfunction. In many instances it is often cheaper and easier to buy a new one instead of diagnosing and fixing the problem. Packaged foods are not very different and illustrate an equally as compelling point. That is, not only are consumers paying a high price for the containers the food is packaged in, but more and more foods are processed to the point where they are only usable or edible in a highly unique way-- try for instance using a cake mix to bake another type of cake. Packaged housing and “transferred technologies” can be seen in much the same way. They are notoriously inflexible, they typically consume far more energy and resources and they almost always have shorter life-spans than housing built by small, local builders who employ local materials and resources, and respond to specific demand cycles and locations. This type of practice exemplifies the autonomous model of development that is so desperately needed to inspire more appropriate initiatives today in both “formal” and “informal” communities, and while many examples of effective self-sustainability remain all too obscure, there is valuable inspiration to be gained from the notable exemplars that we do have.
The Importance of Collective Will in Appropriate Development Solutions
The viability of any technology system (or housing system for that matter) depends in the long run on the efforts of the users to interface with the product and by extension on their will to invest those efforts, and not merely on their capacity to do so. To illustrate just how crucial a point this assertion is, a more specific case study ought to be discussed to categorically prove the irrefutable effectiveness of self-directed, autonomous development. The community in Gaviotas Columbia is perhaps the most palpable example of this type of development paradigm, and it occupies a unique area in the greater discourse of development theory, situated tentatively between formal policy-based initiatives and unfettered, informal innovation. The community, in what might has matured over the past six decades to prove in no uncertain terms the extent to which technology and local innovation can “free people more than subjugate them,”[x] and help create opportunities for people to improve their individual utility as well as the utility of the collective. While Gaviotas may not have originally been envisioned exclusively as a model for Third World development, the ingenuity and vision of the community have provided invaluable examples of how even the most remote, disenfranchised regions can not only survive, but thrive and grow to make substantive global contributions. The powerful success of Gaviotas and of its founder Paolo Lugari, cannot be attributable to one, single causative factor, but there can be no doubt that much of its prosperity is owed to a uniquely serendipitous mentality that put a premium on collective empiricism and rejected the standard conventions of past design and financing models. Gaviotas exists today as a sterling example of how self-directed and circumstantially appropriate technological development can propel a community from a status of relative destitution to an engaged, contributing society, and it is a mentality that would do well to be incorporated into a more mainstream development paradigm.
Born in rejection of the conventional industrialization model of the past, Gaviotas has heralded a new era of development based on a refusal to accept Western precedent, and countless examples of the community’s experiments illustrate this attitude in ways both modest and revolutionary. Allen Weisman’s narrative account of the community’s development in his book Gaviotas: a Village to Reinvent the World, provides a variety of examples of the propulsive nature of the Gaviotan mentality. Weisman’s description for instance of Jaime Davila and Alonso Guitierrez’s collaboration on the design of a solar hot-water heater, speaks very clearly to the Gaviotan’s skepticism of Western certainty and their drive to achieve self-reliance. In a trip to London to investigate the effectiveness of solar hot water systems in dreary climates, Davila and Guitierrez are told that the systems used throughout London are dependent on sophisticated computer main-frames and precisely calibrated components to make them operable. However, once Davila and Alonso leave London, they not only conclude that they can reappropriate the British idea into a system that will perform without a computer infrastructure but they declare that theirs “will be even better without one.”[xi] Their refusal to merely adopt or transfer the developed technologies of the West should be distinctly observed, however their ability and their eagerness to reinvent for themselves the technologies they need is the granite bedrock of any sustainable development initiative. Not only does the local development of technology ensure its appropriate implementation within the community, but the process of developing it provides the community with information, ideas and a sense of pride they would have never enjoyed otherwise had they resigned themselves to be passive recipients of already developed technologies. Gaviotas’s unique appreciation for engaging technology design for themselves and their ability to revel in their failures is the powerful source of the community’s stamina, and it has allowed them to demonstrate to the world just how important independent technology development is in enriching the lives of its users.
However Gaviotas’ technological pedagogy is perhaps best embodied in the renowned hospital the community built for itself. Considered by some to be one of the fifty most significant buildings in the world, the Gaviotan hospital was constructed as an artful “maze of angles rising above the savanna, formed by white walls, glass awnings…and a sense of warmth and well-being.”[xii] The hospital was designed out of “what looked like machine parts,” to create an incomparable environment of human healing. The building represents both formally and literally the community’s belief that technology is “an enrichment of human existence, not a steamroller that turn[s] on its inventors and crush[es] them.”[xiii] The design of the hospital and the subsequent technologies that the building would come to house, including a legendary “solar kitchen,” is both a demonstrative and symbolic work that reconciles Promethean technology with practical necessity. In fact the hospital in many ways is the penultimate embodiment of Lugari’s original vision for a self-reliant city. The building is able to condition itself, power itself and sustain itself without required human intervention or oversight, and the successful integration of technology systems in a single building belies the previously assumed claim that all technologies require “compulsive maintenance.” The economist Albert Hirschman coined the theorem of “maintenance compulsion” after observing that all great technological progress required some sort of great catastrophe during its development, and that regular and “compulsive” human monitoring of systems is required to assure effective operations and prevent any further catastrophe.[xiv] Yet while Gaviotas owes its success to the failures that preceded it, the Gaviotans’ ingenuity and passion congealed in this project to produce a work that will likely continue to be operable well into the future and will always and forever represent the importance of self-directed technology innovation for sustainable development.
Despite its inspiring innovation and phenomenal engineering accomplishments, the unfortunate shortcoming of Lugari’s grand model for the world is its failure to gain appreciable, global traction. Policy-based development programs or initiatives that develop and transfer products are widely known within both professional and non-clerical venues, yet localized examples of self-induced development like Gaviotas seem to be overlooked because they are perceived as “unmarketable.” What Gaviotas’ shortcoming has proven is that effective development programs cannot be perceived of or designed as exportable “products” to be implemented at the will of an individual or an institution. Development ought to be inspired not mandated, and if Gaviotas offers us anything it is demonstrative proof that powerful inspiration is the most important ingredient in creating any type of lasting vision. Contrary to Lugari’s shortsighted belief that the spirit of Gaviotas cannot be replicated somewhere else[xv], it is actually the Gaviotan spirit that is the community’s most important and useful export. While the technology the community was able to invent could be enormously useful in other places, Lugari didn’t found Gaviotas as a manufacturing plant of exportable technology, rather he founded it as an example of how a remote, disenfranchised village can will itself to survive by developing new ways of thinking and uniquely tailored innovations. When Lugari expressed frustration over the community’s financial situation in the late 1980s, he bemoaned that they were struggling because while “a lot of [their] innovations [were] beautiful, they [were] beautiful failures.”[xvi] However, these failures are “products” that are just as valuable as solar kettles, or wind scoops, and they are important commodities that formal development programs would do well to study and purport themselves. What Lugari has provided the world, unwittingly or not, is a set of exemplary values that can “show the world how to be environmentally aware, creative, egalitarian and still make a decent living,”[xvii] and it is inestimably more valuable than any packaged, UN approved product they could have ever deployed. This is the fundamental distinction between what Gaviotas has contributed to the discourse of global development and what other communities in the “formal sector” like Brasilia have contributed, and their discrepant perceptions of what Third World populations need in order to develop will unfortunately be a contentious difference for many years to come.
If the minds in Gaviotas teach us anything, it is that we should all learn to revel in our foibles. The “setbacks” and mishaps experienced universally by the engineers and designers at Gaviotas, is something everyone can identify closely with. The story of Alfonso, weaving copper into their homemade photovoltaic grids to make them less corrosive and to save solder is only a modest example of the kind of invention that is often born of failure. After all, Murphy’s Law as originally mumbled by the frustrated military physicist was expressed not as a fatalistic, defeatist principle, but rather as a call for adaptation, alertness and understanding. Developing this type of nuanced understanding of the way individuals and institutions alike make decisions and respond to their circumstances will go a long way in helping to meaningfully identify more enduring solutions to development problems. Debates over the effectiveness and appropriateness of technology transfer programs, public housing initiatives and product packaging is only a small and integrated part of a greater, multifarious unease about responsibly engaging those who are simply tragic victims of geography. These debates do not belong to the realm of any single profession or discipline and are not only sustained by committed technophiles and determined technophobes. These issues are in fact accessible and relevant to the great majority of laypeople who are merely stumbling through a Rube Goldberg world and participating, at times unwittingly, in a dizzying and empirical process of engineering upsets and economic stops and starts. These debates touch on a limitless variety of subjects and disciplines and are in fact significant to anyone who has every marveled at the brimming recycling bins in our electronically networked offices, or to those who have ever expressed frustration about not being able to repair their own cars, or for anyone who has ever watched in helpless frustration at a city contract into social and physical indigence -- but most of all these issues are for those who want to face the future head on, but with an informed and benevolent grin.
When he wrote this, Valery was evoking the errors that the best thinkers of the late nineteenth century would have made in trying to predict the progress of the next fifty years. While a pointed and cautionary analysis, Valery could not have predicted the extent to which hyper techno-evolution would come to dominate our lives or the extent to which our understanding and misunderstanding of it would come to both help and hurt us.
Western Perceptions and Global Realities
Rod Serling’s 1961 short story, “A Thing About Machines,” is an incisive and haunting account of the ill-fatted, do-it-yourselfer Lord Finchley whose household appliances violently come to life and turn against him in murderous protest. As absurd a premise as it seems, what Serling was commenting on was not so much technology, or the “fickleness” of our technologies, but the sarcasm and arrogance we have all come to express in the face of technology and technology malfunction. However, Serling may also have more subliminally been tapping into our modern misgivings of industrial society--that is, the doubts and fears that have swelled to burgeoning proportions as we hear daily about promising and dangerous new breakthroughs in electronics technology, bio-medical discoveries and energy production. While Serling’s protagonist may have been a hysterical, waspish caricature of suburban American culture, he was beautifully created in that he expressed very real American misgivings about our technology. The United States may be home to the most renowned science and technology institutes in the world but is also the irrefutable birthplace of Lemon Laws. New Jersey and Pennsylvania for instance have officially defined a “lemon” as “a new car with a substantial defect that cannot be repaired after three attempts, or is out of service for a total of twenty to thirty days.”[iii] The creation of Lemon Laws in the United States is an important and paradoxical comment on our culture’s attitude towards technological development. That is, while we notoriously and proudly boast of our unparalleled technological prowess, we have unapologetically come to believe that things can sometimes simply be no good-- that certain products are just anomalously and categorically irreparable and unusable. Admittedly, many products in the United States and elsewhere are simply poorly designed and badly built, but the curious problem of certain devices just going bad is part of different problem that is unique to Western culture and characteristic of American society, and it has informed and directed our relationship with technology since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution.
In fact Mary Shelly’s horror story Frankenstein, first published in 1818, during the midst of the Industrial Revolution, may be the earliest deliberate account of the unintended consequences of unfettered technological invention. While Shelly may have been pointing to a dilemma latent in all science-based technology, at a time when the institutional sciences were only beginning to formally influence technological practice, she wrote prophetically about the inevitability of “technological systems” thinking.[iv] She does not describe the monster as a machine, but she is careful not to treat it as human either, despite its very personable characteristics. Still less however, is it an animal, lacking any proper name of its own-- the monster is simply a haunting personification of a sophisticated integration of exogenous systems. The implication is merely that a machine cannot be endowed with a will of its own in the way that Serling dramatized, unless it is a “system,” not merely an absolute device. Most technologies before Shelly’s time however were not systems based. Well into the nineteenth century, most tools, especially tools used in agriculture and manufacturing were designed and used as extensions of the users’ body. In many central European regions for instance, a scythe was a custom-tailored piece of equipment that was proportioned to the cultivator’s body to maximize the tool’s performance. [v] Still more suggestively, the simple concept of a workbench changed the relationship between the workers’ body and his tools. The employment of a solid table on which to operate tools, for the first time allowed craftsmen to anchor materials and tools with vices and pegs in repeatabley accurate ways. In this way, the tools became programmed to certain extent with the worker’s intelligence and skill. Planes for instance need to be mastered, adzes and drawknives demand a high level of proficiency as well, yet once a job is set up properly, even an inexperienced worker can craft an elaborate piece. What something as seemingly unremarkable as the workbench evidences is a dramatic and unstoppable change in how the human and the instrument interface with each other. At this point, people are no longer users of tools, but rather they become managers of them, in the exact same way that we have become managers of the high-tech equipment we keep on our desks and in our pockets everyday. That is, we have come to direct and control the processes that take place, rather than actively shape them for ourselves.[vi]Of course the precision of the managed tool has a price, and while it may be less robust as it becomes more complex, it also becomes increasingly unpredictable. This inevitable trade-off between precision and reliability is understood by most users of high-tech equipment, but it is nonetheless a key factor in the creation of our modern Western mentality that certain technological problems are simply in “the area of metaphysics,” and that “strange things happen in electronics for which there is no reason.” [vii] Because of this culturally accepted reasoning, many of our “good products that go bad” are simply disposed of out of frustration or retired to a more obscure use by “informal” users. The indignation of nineteenth-century producers and the irritation of twentieth-century consumers as created a techno-evolutionary paradigm that is violently disruptive at times, but also necessarily inspirational in its critique of new products and technologies. This is the contentious and dismaying mentality that has proven both the importance of pyramidal structures and centralized technologies in our world, while illustrating there ineffectiveness in others.
The Paradox of Appropriate Technologies and Housing
Failure to understand and respond to essential differences in the perception of issues and tools, and between principles and practices has exacerbated the dissonance between “the West and the rest” for centuries. The West’s cultural certainty in its centralized, regulated economic and technology programs has overshadowed smaller, self-governing initiatives, fostering a development paradigm that purports a limited set of preferred modern strategies as the most effective means for achieving immediate ends. That is, while corporate organizations generally employ heavy centralizing technologies, they have completely different benefits and capabilities than local, autonomous organizations which typically employ light, decentralized technologies. For instance, while there may certainly be strong and important arguments to consider in favor of the small-scale production of high-quality cars, it is unlikely and in fact simply bad business to think that it could compete with the mass-production that has so successfully come to dominate the industry. Alternatively, consider the mass-production of housing, which is intrinsically uneconomical as well as socially and ecologically damaging. To distill the car/house analogy further, it is obvious that car manufacturing needs to be highly standardized because it is assumed, and to a point guaranteed, that car owners will be using their cars in the same general ways. That is, all car owners will drive their cars, obey the same traffic laws, and operate their vehicles in the same designated areas -- hence cars can and should be designed as complete products and used as tools. The same cannot be said of housing projects. Contractors, planners and architects will be unable to invest their resources or mine the full “use-value” from the end “products” unless they are free to use the resources available to them, in their own ways that do not limit the freedom of others or harm future generations.[viii] This is the enduring and divisive inconsistency between formal sector production and innovation and informal sector use and innovation that has come increasingly to be defined as a conflict between “heteronomy” and “autonomy.”[ix] In considering the extremes between heteronomy and autonomy a clear illustration can be observed in the distinctions between modern public housing and local housing initiatives. Tenants of modern public housing for instance have little if any control over where they live or what kinds of dwellings and local amenities they have access to, and they have no control over the way in which the structures are built and managed. Alternatively, most peasants and pavement dwellers are forced to do all of these things for themselves, within the often narrow limits of what they are in fact free to do. Their autonomy in short is limited only in the control they have over the resources around them.
Countless modern examples of local, autonomous construction and self-directed strategies for survival have illustrated the marked discrepancy between the effectiveness of heteronymous goods and autonomous goods, and it has been romanticized and celebrated by Western observers often in the form of escapist fiction like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Turneir’s Friday. Yet what these famous examples of survivalist ingenuity in fact also come to represent, is the ineffectiveness of “modern” products in “un-modern” contexts. That is, “products” or tools that are often designed to be “managed” and not necessarily proactively wielded are often rendered unusable in any sort of off-hand application because they are designed as absolute devices that are packaged and marketed for a limited and specific type of use. Consider for instance what good a cell phone or a computer or a desk lamp would be for someone marooned on an island today if there is no infrastructure to make those tools operable. This perception of our products as complete, packaged devices that we need only call upon to operate is in fact the most effective and fatal way of depriving people of control over their own lives and of alienating the products themselves. This occurs because of two general factors in the production of modern products. The first is that most manufactured products are supplied in mysterious and opaque forms, often veiled behind shiny covers and booby-trapped. These sorts of devices are the instruments that we often dismiss as just plain bad or useless when they malfunction. In many instances it is often cheaper and easier to buy a new one instead of diagnosing and fixing the problem. Packaged foods are not very different and illustrate an equally as compelling point. That is, not only are consumers paying a high price for the containers the food is packaged in, but more and more foods are processed to the point where they are only usable or edible in a highly unique way-- try for instance using a cake mix to bake another type of cake. Packaged housing and “transferred technologies” can be seen in much the same way. They are notoriously inflexible, they typically consume far more energy and resources and they almost always have shorter life-spans than housing built by small, local builders who employ local materials and resources, and respond to specific demand cycles and locations. This type of practice exemplifies the autonomous model of development that is so desperately needed to inspire more appropriate initiatives today in both “formal” and “informal” communities, and while many examples of effective self-sustainability remain all too obscure, there is valuable inspiration to be gained from the notable exemplars that we do have.
The Importance of Collective Will in Appropriate Development Solutions
The viability of any technology system (or housing system for that matter) depends in the long run on the efforts of the users to interface with the product and by extension on their will to invest those efforts, and not merely on their capacity to do so. To illustrate just how crucial a point this assertion is, a more specific case study ought to be discussed to categorically prove the irrefutable effectiveness of self-directed, autonomous development. The community in Gaviotas Columbia is perhaps the most palpable example of this type of development paradigm, and it occupies a unique area in the greater discourse of development theory, situated tentatively between formal policy-based initiatives and unfettered, informal innovation. The community, in what might has matured over the past six decades to prove in no uncertain terms the extent to which technology and local innovation can “free people more than subjugate them,”[x] and help create opportunities for people to improve their individual utility as well as the utility of the collective. While Gaviotas may not have originally been envisioned exclusively as a model for Third World development, the ingenuity and vision of the community have provided invaluable examples of how even the most remote, disenfranchised regions can not only survive, but thrive and grow to make substantive global contributions. The powerful success of Gaviotas and of its founder Paolo Lugari, cannot be attributable to one, single causative factor, but there can be no doubt that much of its prosperity is owed to a uniquely serendipitous mentality that put a premium on collective empiricism and rejected the standard conventions of past design and financing models. Gaviotas exists today as a sterling example of how self-directed and circumstantially appropriate technological development can propel a community from a status of relative destitution to an engaged, contributing society, and it is a mentality that would do well to be incorporated into a more mainstream development paradigm.
Born in rejection of the conventional industrialization model of the past, Gaviotas has heralded a new era of development based on a refusal to accept Western precedent, and countless examples of the community’s experiments illustrate this attitude in ways both modest and revolutionary. Allen Weisman’s narrative account of the community’s development in his book Gaviotas: a Village to Reinvent the World, provides a variety of examples of the propulsive nature of the Gaviotan mentality. Weisman’s description for instance of Jaime Davila and Alonso Guitierrez’s collaboration on the design of a solar hot-water heater, speaks very clearly to the Gaviotan’s skepticism of Western certainty and their drive to achieve self-reliance. In a trip to London to investigate the effectiveness of solar hot water systems in dreary climates, Davila and Guitierrez are told that the systems used throughout London are dependent on sophisticated computer main-frames and precisely calibrated components to make them operable. However, once Davila and Alonso leave London, they not only conclude that they can reappropriate the British idea into a system that will perform without a computer infrastructure but they declare that theirs “will be even better without one.”[xi] Their refusal to merely adopt or transfer the developed technologies of the West should be distinctly observed, however their ability and their eagerness to reinvent for themselves the technologies they need is the granite bedrock of any sustainable development initiative. Not only does the local development of technology ensure its appropriate implementation within the community, but the process of developing it provides the community with information, ideas and a sense of pride they would have never enjoyed otherwise had they resigned themselves to be passive recipients of already developed technologies. Gaviotas’s unique appreciation for engaging technology design for themselves and their ability to revel in their failures is the powerful source of the community’s stamina, and it has allowed them to demonstrate to the world just how important independent technology development is in enriching the lives of its users.
However Gaviotas’ technological pedagogy is perhaps best embodied in the renowned hospital the community built for itself. Considered by some to be one of the fifty most significant buildings in the world, the Gaviotan hospital was constructed as an artful “maze of angles rising above the savanna, formed by white walls, glass awnings…and a sense of warmth and well-being.”[xii] The hospital was designed out of “what looked like machine parts,” to create an incomparable environment of human healing. The building represents both formally and literally the community’s belief that technology is “an enrichment of human existence, not a steamroller that turn[s] on its inventors and crush[es] them.”[xiii] The design of the hospital and the subsequent technologies that the building would come to house, including a legendary “solar kitchen,” is both a demonstrative and symbolic work that reconciles Promethean technology with practical necessity. In fact the hospital in many ways is the penultimate embodiment of Lugari’s original vision for a self-reliant city. The building is able to condition itself, power itself and sustain itself without required human intervention or oversight, and the successful integration of technology systems in a single building belies the previously assumed claim that all technologies require “compulsive maintenance.” The economist Albert Hirschman coined the theorem of “maintenance compulsion” after observing that all great technological progress required some sort of great catastrophe during its development, and that regular and “compulsive” human monitoring of systems is required to assure effective operations and prevent any further catastrophe.[xiv] Yet while Gaviotas owes its success to the failures that preceded it, the Gaviotans’ ingenuity and passion congealed in this project to produce a work that will likely continue to be operable well into the future and will always and forever represent the importance of self-directed technology innovation for sustainable development.
Despite its inspiring innovation and phenomenal engineering accomplishments, the unfortunate shortcoming of Lugari’s grand model for the world is its failure to gain appreciable, global traction. Policy-based development programs or initiatives that develop and transfer products are widely known within both professional and non-clerical venues, yet localized examples of self-induced development like Gaviotas seem to be overlooked because they are perceived as “unmarketable.” What Gaviotas’ shortcoming has proven is that effective development programs cannot be perceived of or designed as exportable “products” to be implemented at the will of an individual or an institution. Development ought to be inspired not mandated, and if Gaviotas offers us anything it is demonstrative proof that powerful inspiration is the most important ingredient in creating any type of lasting vision. Contrary to Lugari’s shortsighted belief that the spirit of Gaviotas cannot be replicated somewhere else[xv], it is actually the Gaviotan spirit that is the community’s most important and useful export. While the technology the community was able to invent could be enormously useful in other places, Lugari didn’t found Gaviotas as a manufacturing plant of exportable technology, rather he founded it as an example of how a remote, disenfranchised village can will itself to survive by developing new ways of thinking and uniquely tailored innovations. When Lugari expressed frustration over the community’s financial situation in the late 1980s, he bemoaned that they were struggling because while “a lot of [their] innovations [were] beautiful, they [were] beautiful failures.”[xvi] However, these failures are “products” that are just as valuable as solar kettles, or wind scoops, and they are important commodities that formal development programs would do well to study and purport themselves. What Lugari has provided the world, unwittingly or not, is a set of exemplary values that can “show the world how to be environmentally aware, creative, egalitarian and still make a decent living,”[xvii] and it is inestimably more valuable than any packaged, UN approved product they could have ever deployed. This is the fundamental distinction between what Gaviotas has contributed to the discourse of global development and what other communities in the “formal sector” like Brasilia have contributed, and their discrepant perceptions of what Third World populations need in order to develop will unfortunately be a contentious difference for many years to come.
If the minds in Gaviotas teach us anything, it is that we should all learn to revel in our foibles. The “setbacks” and mishaps experienced universally by the engineers and designers at Gaviotas, is something everyone can identify closely with. The story of Alfonso, weaving copper into their homemade photovoltaic grids to make them less corrosive and to save solder is only a modest example of the kind of invention that is often born of failure. After all, Murphy’s Law as originally mumbled by the frustrated military physicist was expressed not as a fatalistic, defeatist principle, but rather as a call for adaptation, alertness and understanding. Developing this type of nuanced understanding of the way individuals and institutions alike make decisions and respond to their circumstances will go a long way in helping to meaningfully identify more enduring solutions to development problems. Debates over the effectiveness and appropriateness of technology transfer programs, public housing initiatives and product packaging is only a small and integrated part of a greater, multifarious unease about responsibly engaging those who are simply tragic victims of geography. These debates do not belong to the realm of any single profession or discipline and are not only sustained by committed technophiles and determined technophobes. These issues are in fact accessible and relevant to the great majority of laypeople who are merely stumbling through a Rube Goldberg world and participating, at times unwittingly, in a dizzying and empirical process of engineering upsets and economic stops and starts. These debates touch on a limitless variety of subjects and disciplines and are in fact significant to anyone who has every marveled at the brimming recycling bins in our electronically networked offices, or to those who have ever expressed frustration about not being able to repair their own cars, or for anyone who has ever watched in helpless frustration at a city contract into social and physical indigence -- but most of all these issues are for those who want to face the future head on, but with an informed and benevolent grin.
Notes:
[i] Tenner, Edward. Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. Alfred A. Knopf Publishing, New York, NY, 1996, pg. xi
[ii] Paul Valery. “Unpredictability.” History and Politics. Translated by Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews. New York, 1962, pg. 71.
[iii] Tenner. Pg. 4
[iv] Tenner, Pg. 12
[v] Tenner, Pg. 13
[vi] Tenner, Pg. 14
[vii] Edward Sandberg Diment. Quoted in Tenner, pg 4.
[viii] Turner pg. 105.
[ix] Turner, pg. 105
[x] Weisman, Pg. 172
[xi] Weisman pg. 96
[xii] Weisman pg. 110
[xiii] Weisman pg. 110
[xiv] Tenner pg. 20.
[xv] Weisman pg. 142
[xvi] Weisman pg. 145
[xvii] Weisman pg. 127
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