Author Archives: jenna
Eliminating Homelessness
There are many ways to explode the box. So far (in my what, 3 blog posts?) we’ve only covered technological innovation, but I want to reconsider. If I’m truly interested in sharing things that change society, this can’t just be about stuff. There is so much more to making everything better than more inventions… Ideas, movements, acts of service… Exploding the box is about different ways of seeing the world, paying attention to what allows people to change the world for the people around them. And today, we’ll start by talking about Sam Tsemberis.
Sam Tsemberis has fundamentally changed the way many cities in America are thinking about homelessness because he’s come up with an idea so simple, so elegant, that it never occurred to the bureaucracy of America: Give the homeless homes.
Shockingly, this bizarre decision has actually saved the state of Utah hundreds of thousands of dollars since they implemented it; it turns out that paying for peoples’ housing is a lot less expensive for the state than leaving them on the street. Even better than that, it has allowed the people who have been housed to start putting their lives back together. It turns out it’s a lot harder to get someone to quit drugs or get treatment for a mental illness when their primary concern is where they’ll sleep tonight and whether or not they’ll be safe. Sam Tsemberis exploded the box by proposing this new way of dealing with chronic homelessness, and it seems to be working to great effect: In Arlington, the amount of people who are homeless has dropped from 531 in 2010 to 291 last year. There has also been a 95% success rate of people staying in their homes once housed. What an innovative idea!
For more reading on what’s going on, read :https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/06/meet-the-outsider-who-accidentally-solved-chronic-homelessness/ and https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/arlingtons-no-silos-approach-has-housed-hundreds-of-chronically-homeless-adults/2015/01/31/ba5dddaa-8571-11e4-b9b7-b8632ae73d25_story.html
Designing Global Light
European architect André Brössel has come up with an alternative way to harvest solar energy to the solar panel: an enormous glass ball that focuses sunlight (and possibly moonlight) to a concise point to gather energy. It’s mostly gotten people excited because it’s not only supposed to be more efficient than many solar panels, but it just LOOKS SO PRETTY:
image taken from designboom.com
Many places are claiming these balls are large enough to harvest energy from moonlight, but one of my engineer friends says it’s a pretty large claim. As far as I can tell, they are still in the early stages of fully figuring out the limits of the design system, but there’s already a great amount of interest in utilizing the final product in buildings and spaces where design is just as important as function. If they are, in fact, more efficient than solar panels, expect to start seeing these EVERYWHERE!
Want to know more? See more photos and read information about the balls here.
Poking the corners,
Jenna
One festival to rule them all
Imagine a desert in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada. The soil isn’t soil, it’s alkaline dust that slowly eats at your feet and can be whipped up by the wind into particles so fine you can’t see your hands if you were to hold them out in front of your face. The day temperatures can be over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius), and the night time temperatures can drop to nearly freezing. There’s no water, no trees, nothing that would entice you to come here and stay for a week or two. And yet, over 50,000 people (and counting) make the journey to this wasteland every year, to spend a week in the desert at the great performance art piece/insane asylum/party/temporary community/innovative convention/mass orgy/creative festival/gathering known as Burning Man.
Burning Man at dawn
Eat your waste!
Sometimes exploding the box isn’t about creating something completely new, it’s about re-envisioning what we’ve got in a different way. Two men in Melbourne, Joost Bakker and Danny Colls, have done just that by starting a zero-waste café called Silo that uses a $30,000 composter to turn all waste produced in the café into compost. The interior is made from recycled and reclaimed furniture, and there is no back kitchen area, all the food is made in front of the communal counter for the customers. Bakker and Colls have arranged with their suppliers to get their food, milk, and alcohol delivered in reusable containers that get sent back to the supplier after they are stocked, and have no trash bins in the whole place. Over the course of the first week, they had less than a half cup of waste, and that was from patrons leaving things behind.
Photography: Pip Grenda
Why is this incredible? Think about the amounts of trash that are produced where you work, or where your friends or family work, on a daily basis. Think about how much money people spend on stuff that just ends up being thrown away after it’s used. Revolutionizing the production line to eliminate the concept of waste is a HUGE step forward for any business to take, and one that has an impact on all the businesses around it (for example, the suppliers had to rethink how they were sending Silo stock as well). Silo creates compost as the end of their production line, and can sell that back to the farmers that are supplying their food. Or give it away to customers. Or plant their own gardens. What would happen if more businesses decided to design their company from the end to the front to eliminate waste? The possibilities are pretty endless… Does your local favorite business worry about the end product? If not, maybe it’s time to start supporting one that does. Or you could always start your own…
Looking for the dynamite,
Jenna
A different type of thought
I created this blog in response to reading a book called Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. Quinn completely redefined my perception of society by uncovering the meta messages of our culture and showing how we’ve gotten to this point. If you haven’t read it yet, I urge you to go out and buy it, or read it online here. I guarantee it will be worth your while.
Some people change reality; they don’t just “think outside the box”, they destroy it, forever changing the path forward. Galileo, Edison, the Wright Brothers, Steve Jobs… They altered history by redefining our planet’s location in the solar system, by lighting up the night, by giving us flight, by putting the world at our fingertips. These are oversimplifications, of course, but without their contributions, our history would inevitably be unrecognizable.
This is a blog dedicated to exploring and documenting those changes; to figuring out what sets these people apart, and to trying to help anyone “explode the box”. Enjoy
Explode The Box 