I was on a panel on Friday with Bob Elton, Stefan Story, and some others, up at the University of British Columbia. The topic was energy resilience in a post carbon world. I was in a room full of mostly engineers, the token social scientist.
When I fired up my right brained presentation, I wasn’t really sure how to address energy resilience through a behaviour change lens, in less than ten minutes.
So I just took a leap into the specifics of what makes people tick, assuming people would agree that people were an important part of the equation.
The other presenters discussed resilience through a quasi-linear systemic, structural lens. And I found the presentations interesting, but I find it problematic, and slightly too clinical, to describe our societal-wide philosophical problems in terms of non-human structures such as buildings and roads, and heat exchange systems; despite their obvious utility.
So I’m thinking a lot, again, about the classic intersection of the non-human and the human worlds — within cities — this week.
And wondering about prescriptive behaviour change and philosophy and how they implicitly inform our system design decisions, despite the non-human, mechanistic leanings of many engineers and builders.