No Exit: Ecological Limits and Climate Change

During Marco Polo’s travels in the 13^th Century he came across a village in China which made a kind of porcelain requiring it to be left to mature for 40 years. The people who dug the clay did so for the next generation, not themselves. This kind of long term thinking seems alien to much of modern western society. The short term view reaches into all areas of life and many areas of design ethics such as natural conservation, futures and most salient, climate change.

Although the scientific evidence on climate change is not conclusive, there are few in the scientific community who disagree that CO₂ emissions lead to global warming. The prevailing issue about climate change is that people either do not think about or do not understand the effects of their actions in the long term.

How would a designer tackle the problem of trying to make people think in a larger time frame? One solution is the Clock of the Long Now, currently housed in the London Science Museum. Designed to run for 10,000 years, it ticks once per year, bongs once a century and cuckoos once every millennium. Not only does it perform the task of getting people to think about the longer term by contrasting the 12 hour timescale of a normal clock with a period far longer than we would normally consider, but also tries to enter the conscious of the viewer by creating myth and event. The clock is supposed to be a continuous reminder that the world will not end when we die, and perhaps a desire to protect the clock can trigger an urge to protect the earth as a whole for the people of the future.

www.longnow.org
Hinte, E. Eternally yours: Time in Design 2004