Chicago’s 3D Printer Experience: On Ratus plasticus, 3D Natives, Lions with their Heads Screwed on Straight and Topology Optimization

I would know that rat anywhere. The curve of his spine, the delicate perfection of his rib cage, legs bent in classic rodent crouch and that built-for-mischief rodent skull. The rat, or, more specifically, his white plastic skeletal facsimile, is a star, a celebrity whose photo has been splashed all over geek publications, including Wired magazine. 

So when Tom Burtonwood, master printer at Chicago’s brand spankin’ new 3D Printer Experience (3DPX)—a hybrid store, workshop and studio/classroom—handed me the plastic skeleton, almost literally hot off the press, it was like meeting an old friend. The magic, of course, is that Ratus plasticus (not its official name…), who was a mere 10 months old when he made his history-making voyage through a medical CT scanner, is very likely still alive, white fur and adorable whiskers intact. 

Almost 120 years after the accidental discovery of the X-ray gave us a way to peer inside bodies sans scalpel, it is now possible to recreate exactly what’s inside—and to make copies wherever and whenever we’d like. Ratus plasticus is immortal, an instant artifact slicing through time, space and imagination.

“We are like archaeologists,” notes Burtonwood, “but unearthing objects from the future.” Or recent past. Or, since virtually anything can be scanned, ancient history. Burtonwood, who also teaches at the School fo the Art Institute of Chicago, began to experiment with 3D printing by scanning pieces from the museum’s collection, turning them into plastic tchotchkes. Not even the iconic lions were safe…

The playfulness of the objects masks the serious potential of the technology. The lion’s screw and socket system, for example, was designed on a computer and printed so precisely to spec that the head twists on perfectly straight. 

Likewise, the popular “head scans” offered at 3DPX, are a kind of “gateway” amusement. It is fun—and funny—to stand on a platform in the window, spinning in place for a scan. But when you see a file of you in neon green being twirled and tweaked on a computer screen, your every gesture mimicked to perfection, the ramifications of what just happened begin to sink in. Mini-me is a kind of clone.

At least on the surface. The literal strength of additive manufacturing—as 3D printing is also called—is on the inside. “Topology optimization,” to use the fancy term, is about finding the perfect balance of strength and lightness, often biomimicking nature. 

“…The results of topology optimization are structures that have outward dimensions identical to normal load-bearing elements such as beams, yet have interior dimensions that look very different from traditionally manufactured parts.  In place of triangular or circular voids, these parts have remarkably organic, almost bone-like shapes. The reason is, topology optimization software systematically analyzes the stresses on these shapes and then removes the most superfluous material from the design. This process is repeated over and over by the optimization software, and by the end the computer design leaves only a skeletal interior structure…”

—Brian H. Jaffe, Topology Optimization in Additive Manufacturing: 3D Printing Conference

Additive manufacturing is a whole new way of thinking about how things can be created, whether it’s rat skeletons, fashions, or buildings. And just as there are “digital natives”—children who never knew a world without smart phones, touch screens and tablets—there will be “3D natives,” for whom the miracle of printing objects will simply be a regular part of everyday life.  

Indeed, a new middle school tech academy set to open in Charlottesville, Virginia, will have one 3D printer for every four students. Charlottesville is a pioneer, but as the costs of printers, scanners, computer software and feedstocks keep dropping— in no small measure due an onslaught of virally popular crowdfunded projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo—more schools will follow.

Almost every day—and from seemingly every part of the globe—someone is coming up with a nifty new way to play with 3D printing. For example, Doodle3D from the Netherlands, provides a child-friendly way to turn drawings into objects, no computer programming experience required. Tellingly, though, as the company’s Kickstarter video shows, it also brings out the inner-inventor in adults as well. 

“I still think it’s a little miracle,” says Frans Beelen, who designed a colorful handle to more easily carry several shopping bags at once. 

Yes, Frans, it really is. 

– J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED: 

• 3D Printing of Preclinical X-ray Computed Tomographic Data Sets / Journal of Visualized Experiments (JOVE) / video & scientific paper
• Shapeways, MakerBot, and Lux Capital Stoke Ambitions for 3-D Printing / João-Pierre S. Ruth / xconomy

Hot Topics: On Weather, Preppers and the Promise of a “Blue Economy”

It was subtle at first. It stopped getting hotter. It was more comfortable outside at ten in the morning  than it had been eight. Winds began to blow life back into Lake Michigan’s tepid water, sending white-capped waves to shore. Sweaty air dried out. Colors returned. Thought was possible. 

What difference a few degrees and a good breeze can make. A few days ago, electrical transformers lit up the skies like giant Tiki torches here in Chicago. Power outed. Roadways buckled. A bridge collapsed. Tempers flared. Guns blazed. People died.

But the next few days stretch out like a National Geographic dream: highs in the low 80s and lows in the sleep-perfect 60s. That was just a patch of weird weather, right?

Maybe.

Probably not. 

The massive dome of hot air continues to incinerate much of the country, sucking the life out of everything—reservoirs, crops, lawns, savings, dreams—pushing ecosystems to the edge and people to the brink.

The heat magnifies every vulnerability, sparking epic wildfires measured in dozens of square miles, and triggering fast moving “direchos” that hurl hurricane force winds to the horizon and beyond. As drought-ravaged ranchers sell off cattle in record numbers, desperate auto dealers slash prices on hail-dimpled cars. But a cheap steak dinner and a pre-ding’ed ride seems like a pretty thin upside.

Where did all the water go? English streets. Russian resorts. Indian wildlife parks. Thai rice paddies and computer hard drive factories. Medieval Italian hill towns. Pretty much everywhere it’s not wanted, at least in such quantity.

The last few years have shattered records for shattering records. Indeed, there is an app just to keep track. Droughts, floods, snowmageddons, heat waves, cold snaps, ice melts. “Freak” has become the new normal. The climate has tipped. Just ask the insurance companies tallying the bills.

We are past the point where doing less bad is anywhere near good enough:

…(A) thief who steals less will always be considered a thief, whereas a company that reduces pollution by 80 percent is heralded as an environmental success.

Gunter Pauli, founder, ZERI and the Blue Economy 

We map, we monitor, we measure. Yet clever tech-driven insurance schemes to help farmers micro-navigate around wild weather still can’t stop it. This year’s record corn planting in the US is quickly withering into record losses, with global implications. Not even the most super duper of GMO seeds can hack it without rain. Likewise, given the options of Hot and Scorching, how smart does a thermostat—even a lusciously designed one—really need to be?

When the meta system of climate is knocked off its tracks, all bets are off. In news story after news story, reporters wander debris fields, filming neighborhoods of leveled homes, wrecked businesses and mangled towns, invariably comparing the scenes to a war zones. Well, they are. 

Resilience? There is no bouncing back, only onward.

• PREPPERS

If you can’t fix it, prepare for it. Survivalism has gone mainstream, the focus of a new  National Geographic reality series with perhaps the most dystopian title in TV history: Doomsday Preppers. NatGeo’s mission has apparently morphed from “inspiring people to care about the planet,” to teaching people how to hang on in the Mad Max era. So man up, whales. You’ll have to save yourselves…

Learn how to stir-fry crickets, dig a spiderhole, power a car on wood, forage for plant-based medicines and shoot the heck out of anybody who gets in the way! One unusually hopeful prepper has even amassed his own private seed bank with 11,000 seeds.

The companion website includes a special feature called “The Doomsday Dashboard”  that tracks social media trends of doom and gloom. It’s a bit like watching a car wreck, only on a planetary scale: You can’t help looking.

The Doomsday Preppers are ready for a variety of cataclysmic disasters that could mean the end of the world as we know it. But which end-of-the-world scenario are we all really worried about? Using Twitter, we are mining the chatter to see what is at the forefront of the public’s collective consciousness. Will it be a megaquake, economic collapse, global pandemic, a 2012 cataclysm, nuclear war, solar-flare-induced power failures, or an extreme oil crisis that leads to the unraveling of society? Check back to see what the masses are saying, and see which catastrophe is on top of the Doomsday Dashboard.

• OR…

For those of us who prefer not to dress in camouflage or dream of a future spent bartering for shelf stable sour cream (there really is such a thing), serial entrepreneur Gunter Pauli’s ideas for a “Blue Economy” offers some hope. For Pauli, founder of the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI), the answers are, zen-ishly, in the questions. Too much atmospheric CO2? That’s an opportunity! In what can CO2 be used as an input to create something useful that generates jobs and revenue?

Inputs and outputs, virtuous spirals, biosystems thinking and business: Nature doesn’t  waste anything, so why do we?

Ecosystems only work with what they have. … And so I started to criticize my own green economy of which I was a part. I realized that green energy depends on subsidies and those organic products cost more money. And that means if we were ever to succeed, it was going to be for the rich and the few and not for everyone on this earth…

So I imagined the Blue Economy. An economy where we innovate, where we generate more cash flow, where we have more jobs, where we build up social capital and where we deliberately do everything we can to stimulate entrepreneurship.

(Gunter Pauli TEDxFlanders lecture)

Pauli cut his entrepreneurial teeth over twenty years ago with Ecover, a Belgium-based pioneer in biodegradable detergents, but learned—the hard way—that eco-friendliness was really a big picture supply chain issue. Although palm oil biodegraded like an eco-champ, palm oil plantations degraded Indonesian biodiversity. What was good for the rivers of Europe was nailing rainforests and the orangutans who lived there.

These days Pauli looks to the always reliable laws of physics and biomimicry for better answers. He touts the virtues of a cell phone powered by body heat, sound waves and microwind, a filterless water system with vortex-enabled purification, a building that uses a termite-mound inspired design for air exchange and thermal regulation—no AC required. Dozens of ideas are listed on The Blue Economy website.

So what kind of innovations do I want? I want innovations that eliminate the symbols of unsustainable production and consumption, like the 300 billion bottles of Coke we’re going to throw away. Like the 100 tons of titanium from our razors that we’re going to throw into landfills. Like the 40 billion batteries we’re going to do away with, without recycling.

Like the cup of coffee you’re drinking.

…You are only consuming 0.2% of what the farmer produced. 99.8% is wasted and generates methane gas. You never associated coffee drinking with climate change. And what about the shitake mushrooms for all you vegetarians who want to save the animals, but are responsible for the logging of oak trees in China?  We don’t make the connections. We don’t see how the business evolves.

For Pauli, smart businesses dovetail income streams.

We need to imagine businesses that generate multiple cash flows—where the waste from the coffee bean is used to grow the shitake mushroom. And thanks to the caffeine, the shitake will grow three times faster. And with the waste from the shitake, feed the pigs. I have three cash flows. And on top of that I am converting methane gas into CO2, which means I even have a CDM, a Clean Development Mechanism Project on my hands. Four cash flows. We’re in business.

Heeding the lesson of Ecover’s early missteps, Pauli keeps a big picture perspective. Organic cotton, for example, cuts out pesticides, but still drinks up vast amounts of water. The eco-issue is cotton itself:

…Time has come to explore the abundant local resources, and hemp is a first obvious option. Hemp and kenaf along with flax produce quality fibers that last, grow prolific on poor soil and have an appetite for water which is only a fraction of the thirst displayed by cotton. While the processing of hemp, kenaf and flax is still dependent on water, the overall performance is a multiple better. Time has come to create a portfolio of solutions.

Gunter Pauli (“Better Than Organic”)

It turns out we really can have it all because we actually do have it all already. But we have to quit sabotaging ourselves by poisoning the planet, making less from more and finessing outmoded ideas. Business as usual got us into this climate mess. Business smarter than usual might just help us survive it.

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED

• It Takes a Banker: Ecosystem Economics, Climate Change & the Poor / J.A. Ginsburg

• Insurance Companies Face Increased Risks from Warming / Ben Schiller / Yale Environment 360

• World Economic Forum: Global Risks 2012

• Surrounded by Solutions from Nature, Gunter Pauli, Forbes India

The Good, the Bad and the Myopic: What Nora Ephron has to do with Techweek

Techweek 2012 is a wrap. Despite some organizational stumbles, the sheer mass of programming and the crowds guaranteed good things would come of it. They certainly did for me.

Techweek ran the gamut, from Howard Tullman’s tour-de-force talk on the data-sliced present/future, full of utopian potential and dystopian risk, to Dennis Manarchy’s stunning oversize Vanishing Cultures portraits, an homage to the present/past of both people and technology. It was wonderful to meet and reconnect with people, to talk about projects, business models, progress. And god bless those ever-resourceful Task Rabbits who brought the Wow Bao buns: brilliant marketing—really, truly I will use you when the need next arises.

Yet throughout the event, there were little off-notes of sexism, most likely unintentional, but nonetheless there.

• Only 7 women on the Techweek 100 list
• An all male panel of judges for the 2012 Final Five Launch competition
• Only one woman entrepreneur in the Final Five pitch

Which is neither to say that there are not a lot of talented men on the Chicago tech scene, or that all of the men on the list didn’t deserve to be there. Rather, it is point out that the number of talented women on the scene is on the rise. And though plaid and t-shirted men still outnumbered women strolling the trade show aisles and attending lectures, I would guesstimate that at least a quarter of attendees were women. 

There are more women enrolling in Code Academy. Three of what I think are among the most promising startups in Chicago happen to be women-run:

• Sharon Schneider, Good Karma Clothing for Children
• Julie Bashkin, KLUTCHclub
• Jennifer Thomas, Travel720

This is something to celebrate. Yet when numbers skew so badly—only 7% of the techs-to-know in Chicago are women? really?—it raises questions.

I probably would have let this slide, but for a quote of Nora Ephron’s that I read this morning in an obituary. In a graduation address to her alma mater, Wellesley College, she talks, with her trademark razor sharp wit, about changes in attitudes toward women and by women since was a student in the early 1960s. Then she gets to the rather serious nut:

“What I’m saying is, don’t delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don’t let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you — there’s still a glass ceiling. Don’t let the number of women in the work force trick you — there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents.

Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.”

So it makes a difference. There are good things happening on Chicago’s women-in-tech front. More good things need to happen. And we all need to do a better job both seeing and acknowledging them.

—J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

(originally posted on Built in Chicago)

The 3D Adventures of Henry and Balley!

Last fall, I was invited to TEDxMidwest, a TEDx on steroids that goes on for a day and half, after-parties included. In between the Big Ideas and the small food, I stepped back, looking at the 1,000+ crowd and thought, “There are a lot of interesting people doing a lot of interesting things here in Chicago.”

Professionally, my opportunities in recent years have been mostly with organizations on either coast and in Europe. My only project with Chicago roots has been a math musical I sparked into being (it’s really good…).

The big pull to stay? Family. But in truth, I could really live anywhere. In some ways, I know New York and Boston better than my home town. Still, this is where I imprinted as a young duckling. I love the Lakefront—nowhere is the interface between Big Urban and Big Nature more beguiling. And the people—these are wonderful people!

So I put on my journalist’s hat and set out to discover who was here, what they were up to and whether I should stay. For the last several months, I have attended just about every event I could that included the words Innovation, Creative, Accelerator, Makerspace, Incubator, Tech, Start-up, Design and Hack in the title.

It turns out Chicago really is having a moment. The buzz at 1871, the snazzy new tech incubator sprawling across 50,000 square feet on the twelfth floor the Merchandise Mart, is addictive. I spent an hour there on a recent Friday afternoon, sipping Intelligentsia coffee, MacBook Pro open, blending in with the crowd. All around me were people busy thinking, imagining, doing. I wanted to get to know every one of them.

The not so great news?  There is little mixing between creatives—designers, architects, artists—and tech entrepreneurs. Creative Mornings is a sun-cycle and  world away from  Entrepreneurs Unpluggd evenings. Nor is there much overlap between Igniters and Pecha Kucha regulars. Design thinking and Lean Startup are two sides to the same coin, but speak to very different audiences.

Yet real innovation is in the mix. When Art is added to STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering and Math—it becomes STEAM. This fusion of science and art, tech and design was the genius of Steve Jobs. It is why MIT Media Lab is such a gusher of good ideas (according to Sal Khan, “the closest thing to being Hogwarts…” ).  It is an integral part of the Silicon Valley alchemy and Seattle’s caffeinated culture, and how New York and Brooklyn stay in a perpetual state of reinvention. It is also why little Shreveport, Louisiana has become a hub of tech / art magic. State grants lured Moonbot Studios, whose founders include a Pixar alum, to, Louisiana. Their very first effort, a film/app book, won best short film Oscar this year: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore.

The Henry & Balley Project was developed as a way to bring Chicago’s creative and tech communities a little closer together, designed for collaboration across disciplines and across the city. It was inspired in part by Morris Lessmore, in part by the social media-mediated success of Go the Fuck to Sleep (narrated by Samuel L. Jackson), and in part by a news story about makerspaces being built in or near libraries, (visions of books being digitized in one part of the building and sent heavenward into the ether, while downloaded digital files are turned into physical book objects via a 3D printer in another part of the building…).

So why not a digital children’s book complete with downloadable 3D patterns of the characters and the objects in the story?

PROJECT BACKGROUNDER (click to read pdf)

Within the next few years, 3D printers will become a staple in schools, offices, museums. Indeed, the Chicago Children’s Museum is already developing a makerspace for kids.

From IIT to Pumping Station One, Northwestern’s School of Engineering and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 3D printers, ranging from high end industrial grade machines to tabletop MakerBots and RepRap units, abound.

The project also includes a crowd-shared storytelling website—”The Ballroom”— designed to go viral (and likely delight Chicago alum, Stephen Colbert…)

I have been mulling this idea for months, alternately energized by the possibilities and overwhelmed by logistics. A visit to MIT’s Media Lab a couple of weeks ago lit a fire. Why can’t Chicago be a bit more STEAMy? The relationships that could develop, the kismet of combinatorial culture (HT to Brainpickings’ Maria Popova), the joy of collaboration and the collective sense of pulling off something rather wonderful—let’s figure out how to do this thing!

— J. A. Ginsburg / jaginsburg (@) gmail (dot) com

DATELINE SOUTHERN-CALI-CAGO: Speedy Spring

For years, I joked that Chicago would be one of the few climate change winners. My home city sits next to 20% of the world’s fresh water, surrounded by some the most fertile soil anywhere (thank you, Pleistocene glaciers). While a flooded New York City would be distributing buckets for citizen bail brigades, Texas would toast and the West Coast would crack, erupt, drown-by-tsunami and otherwise suffer the onslaughts of climate-triggered geological debacle. Meanwhile, my little weather-maligned speck on the planet would finally look like paradise. Take that (tornado-blasted) Hawaii.

Of course, I also said that below zero temps and window-high snows kept the riffraff from California at bay and that if the best thing you could say about a place was that the weather was good, run.

But now, after a week of record shattering pleasant weather (we no longer merely break records), watching the winter-that-never-was skip past spring and move straight to summer, suspicions nag that this can’t be good. Will June be August? With no snow pack and spotty rain, are we headed for a drought? What will this do to the Great (and I do mean great) Lakes?

While the birds are in full competitive song, daffodils daffing and forsythia sything, tens of thousands of street pot holes are not being born, a generation blighted by the lack of freeze/thaw cycle.

So as I trade in my snow boots for Birkenstocks, grab some sun-block cream and head to the beach, it is with a certain “enjoy it while it lasts” trepidation. Although the skies above my head are blue and the air soft and fragrant, record shattering tornadoes fueled by the same record shattering heat have torn up more than a dozen states, chewing up land, annihilating whole towns and irreversibly changing the course of survivors’ lives.

A few weeks ago, a group of insurance industry representatives gave a few members of Congress who were willing to listen an earful:

“From our industry’s perspective, the footprints of climate change are around us and the trend of increasing damage to property and threat to lives is clear,” said Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. “We need a national policy related to climate and weather.”

Property and casualty insurers in the United States experienced an estimated $44 billion in losses last year when hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes and other natural disasters were more severe, longer, more frequent and less predictable than in the past.

According to Swiss Re, the average weather-related insurance industry loss in the U.S. was about $3 billion a year in the 1980s compared to approximately $20 billion annually by the end of the past decade.

“As a member of the global insurance industry, we have witnessed the increased impact of weather-related events on our industry and around the world,” said Mark Way, head of Swiss Re’s sustainability and climate change activities in the Americas. “A warming climate will only add to this trend of increasing losses, which is why action is needed now.”

— Pat Speer, Insurance Networking News (HT ClimateAdaption)

The average cost of weather-related insurance pay-outs is up seven-fold in the US?! Even for those who don’t “believe” in climate change (honestly, this is not a matter of faith but fact), insurance bills never lie.

Meanwhile, the Asian Development Bank, another hotbed of bean-counting realists, just issued a report connecting the dots between climate shifts and mass human migrations. In just the past two years, 42 million people have been displaced by climate-driven weather disasters in Asia. That’s the equivalent of the population of 5+ Chicago metro areas collectively getting up and moving. They can’t go home again.

In Canada, it is ticks that are on the move, exponentially expanding the range of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. Pine beetles, which have been chewing through billions of trees over the last 20 years, turning the country’s famous forests into net carbon emitters, are in their salad days, churning out multiple generations of little nibblers in an ever-lengthening warm season.

On the flip side, Europe, clobbered by a newly minted snow machine fueled by arctic melt-water, will be digging out for some time.

FLUKE OR FUTURE?

According to phenologists, those tireless, mostly volunteer record-keepers of daily change who meticulously chart the annual emergence of plants, migrations of animals and other seasonal markers, 2012’s headline-grabbing weather fits neatly into long range trends.

We are seeing strong trends almost wherever we look. In the last decade, we’re actually now starting to be able to say OK, well, we see patterns of plants and animals coming earlier. And we have better and better climatological records, temperature records, and we can start to link those together. And there’s a paper coming out it seems every week now that’s saying OK, here’s a trend in bees coming out 10 days earlier over the last 130 years, and we can attribute that to warming temperatures.

— Jake Weltzin, ecologist and the executive director of the USA National Phenology Network / NPR Interview  (HT ClimateAdaptation)

TECH FORECAST

Lost in the din of overhyped apps and endless debate on the merits of aggregation at SxSW (re the latter: sharing is good—and so is giving credit where it is due) was an annoucement of yet another SxSW conference: ECO, slated for October.

As worthy and wonderful as it no doubt will be, it seems like a missed opportunity not to have had at least a mini-ECO conference overlapping the Interactive party.

Imagine if the critical mass of digitally adept entrepreneurial thinkers had actually been presented with a worthy challenge, rather than left to literally twiddle thumbs keeping creepy tabs on alleged “friends” because it’s fun (yes, looking at you Highlight).

Instead of “situational awareness” of the stalker kind, we actually need Situational Awareness writ large to help navigate a dangerously shifted and still shifting climate. This is about food supplies, water resources, migrations of man, beast, plant and microbe. This is about the future.

Clean energy, carbon footprints and conservation, yes, but also sturdier materials (see Neri Oxman’s video at the end of this post: “And You Can Print That, Too”), savvier  supply chain logistics and speedier humanitarian response.

If problems present opportunities, techies, this is your moment to shine.

The World Bank is sponsoring a first-ever competition called Apps for Climate. Submissions will be posted online for public review in early April, but already the discussion on how best to crunch big data has proved valuable.

Over at the UN, the Global Pulse group is mining data for early signals to slow crises—humanitarian disasters that can take years to make the news. “Finding out today what was happening two years ago is an exercise in history,” noted GP’s director Robert Kirkpatrick, in an presentation at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference last year. “There must be a better way.”

At this point we are talking about triage: how to keep bad from getting worse. But the real goal is resilience.

As I sit here looking out my screened window at a specular June day in mid-March, smelling the fresh scent of new growth, reveling in the haze of maple tree blossoms and red buds a’bursting, it is hard to believe that this isn’t the way things are meant to be.The birds and bugs and bulbs seem to be adapting just fine. Whether the rest of us can catch up is anybody’s guess.

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED:

• Nina Leopold Bradley on Phenology:

A Chicago Tale of Parking, Innovation, Bad Deals and Better Options

SpotHero has, indeed, become my hero. The Expedia of local parking—pre-selling parking lot spaces, often at a discount—has made Chicago a little more do-able in the aftermath of the now fomer Mayor Daley’s parking privitization fiasco. 

Bargains can be especially good in the evening. And there is something slightly “treasure hunt” about it, too. Once you purchase a space (payment via Amazon, which is one-click easy and secure), you print out a map with directions that thoughtfully include details such as “the entrance will be on the right” (even though the street number suggests the left) and “just before Miller’s Pub.” 

It turns out there is an unexpectedly fascinating labyrinth of parking beneath Chicago’s streets. What the Palmer House underground garage, for example, may lack in user-friendly design (some really tight turns on the way down—iffy for an SUV), it makes up for in architectural detail (not the pretty kind, but the kind where you get to see the roots of a building) and Downton Abbey vibe. Two floors up and you find yourself in the Palmer’s “they don’t make ‘em like this anymore” lobby, surrounded by glorious ceiling frescos and Tiffany statues, strolling on whimsical Paisley carpeting. It is enough to make you forget where you were going.

Liberace was the resident pianist here until 1947—a startling stray fact and a reminder of an era, sadly bygone, when parking wasn’t quite such a problem. 

••••••

It certainly is a problem now. Sitting in the sold-out Chase Auditorium (of “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” fame), listening to entrepreneurs give it their all the other night at a Technori Pitch, it occurred to me that the City could have used the services of start up It’s Agreed—which provides online contracts designed to simplify and organize agreements—when it negotiated that gobsmackingly bad parking deal. 

Instead, taxpayers—and their children, grandchildren and great grandchildren—are saddled with a contract literally hundreds of pages long, and so badly written, the City is on the hook for millions of dollars worth of parking meter fees waived for the disabled, along with revenue lost when streets are closed for repair, movie shoots or neighborhood festivals. 

Should anyone be surprised that the city’s street parking sell off continues to look worse and worse?

Here’s a hint: the answer is no.

In a certain place and time—Chicago City Hall, 2008—a billion bucks may have seemed like a lot of dough for a few thousand antiquated parking meters.

Then Chicagoans realized that the city had also hocked its ability to control street traffic, granted police powers to a private entity, and committed to parking fee and fine increases for the next several decades…

—Mick Dumke, Chicago Reader

The $1.5 billion Chicago received upfront for the 75-year deal (and has now spent) is, by some accounts, just a tenth of the revenue the meters will generate—even less if meter rates continue to skyrocket. Adding insult to injury, not only is the revenue lost to the Chicago, but a good chunk is departing the country, finding its way into the coffers of the government of Abu Dhabi. 

This means that billions of dollars that might have been spent to shore up and expand the metro area’s public transportation system, providing an affordable, safe, considerably less expensive and greener alternative, have been syphoned off. 

And that impacts Chicago’s competiveness. 

Over the last few months, nervous speculators have been driving oil prices to record levels, with the spector of $6 per gallon gasoline by summer. Good public transportion could easily become the key differentiator that shifts the value balance of one city over another—no tax incentives required. The (lean) bottom line: Companies need employees that can afford to commute. 

On the bright side, should gas prices go that high, fewer people will be able to afford to drive, leaving lots of privatized parking spaces empty—a sort of Don’t Occupy movement for cars. 

Now, juat add a carpooling service. For example, Zimride, a San Francisco-based start up that that just closed a $6 million funding round last fall. Like SpotHero, Zimride brokers unusued inventory—in this case, the seats in a car—adding a social network spin to the deal. Although to date primarily operating in colleage towns, they have, by their accounting, helped users travel over 100 million miles. 

So more people filling more seats in fewer cars, enjoying mutual savings, and finding bargain parking spots.  

Great public transportation is the best answer, but this could be, at least, a better one.

—J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

Innovation, Impact, a Darn Good Party and What Chicago Can Learn from Cambodia

If there had been a collective speech bubble over everyone’s head at last night’s “Founders” party for Impact Engine, a new social innovation accelerator program just revving up here in Chicago, it might have read, “Well, about time!”

In Boston and New York, techs, investors, ad execs, designers, scientists and journalists literally trip over one another. Seattle basks in the Microsoft effect. Silicon Valley is one big virtuous circle of critical entrepreneurial mass.

But Chicago has long been lost in the shuffle: a great place with loads of talent and the occasional big hit, but somehow lacking the alchemy that transforms individual parts into a larger, qualitatively different whole.  

Steve Jobs famously talked about “the intersection of technology and the humanities.” It is the sweet spot—and speaks right to the mission of the TrackerNews Project, which is all about the mix and the match of ideas, disciplines and perspectives. 

The Founder’s party fairly glimmered with that elusive alchemy. It was, in fact, a mixer, bringing together entrepreneurs (wishful wannabe’s to those well on their way), mentors and investors. People whose paths simply never cross were seriously delighted to meet. Technology, have I got a Humanity for you… 

Over the last couple of years, Chicago has seen the emergence of a number of such “centers of mixing.” Tech pitch nights now routinely sell out. So do Creative Mornings talks. Maker space Pumping Station One has seen its membership zoom past a hundred. Incubators have opened, accelerators have accelerated. There is even a entire TechWeek.

And then there is The Plant—a vertical farm in a massive Sinclair Lewis-era meatpacking facility on the city’s southwest side—that seems to bring out the innovative best in everybody. It will take years for the build out to be complete, but in the true spirit of Burham, there are “no little plans” here.

Beyond systems thinking, there is ecosystems thinking at work. Waste is never wasted and it all weaves together: an artisanal brewery, mushroom farm, commercial kitchen space, grid-independent biodigester power and aquaponics set-ups. Technology meets Humanities meets Food. Even better. 

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At what point does all the mixing start to turn magical? What does it take for an entrepreneurial culture of innovation to really take root? 

Three years ago, halfway around the world in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, my friends at InSTEDD* decided to find out. They helped organize the first BarCamp ever in Southeast Asia. Three hundred people, almost all with minimal tech experience, came. Clearly, this was a community bursting to be born. 

Next, they opened an innovation lab—an iLab—a place where the community could develop.

CTO Eduardo Jezierski:  

We set up the iLab in early 2008, with support from Google.org and The Rockefeller Foundation. We started in a large house, with a mix of bedrooms, open space workrooms, classrooms, etc. A lot of people would crash in the bedrooms during BarCamps and other events. We had a constant cycle of foreigners—both from the region and beyond—who helped InSTEDD set up in Southeast Asia, or just wanted to connect with the accelerating local tech community.

We have iterated the physical set-up and now the iLab occupies part of a floor in an office building with beautiful open spaces. One thing, however, has remained constant: The internet connection is awesome—and a large part of the cost of the iLab’s infrastructure!

…Something I hope distinguishes the iLab from Silicon Valley, though, is that it helps foster a broader focus, one that includes social impact as an explicit initial goal of a business and part of the bottom line.

It is easy enough to write a grant to set up a space. Funders get that. But the InSTEDDers were actually hoping to spark something more enduring, if too ephemeral to include in a funding request: a sort of “garage culture” esprit de tech that would expand beyond the iLab to develop as sector; and enduring relationships between techs and groups working on humanitarian projects.

Today, the iLab is humming along, completely Cambodian-run. Whether or not it survives as a self-sustaining institution beyond its grants (likely, though you never know), a matrix that strengthens local resilience is now in place. The iLab, along with more Barcamps and Hackerspace Phnom Penh, have provided opportunities to collaborate and network. 

EJ: 

One the key moments for me was the day one of the developers told me about “Hello World of the Month.”

It’s brilliant. The iLab developers were getting tripped up, worried about their speed whenever they started to work in a new programming language. They realized they kept reverting to “old ways” that were more comfortable. So they created “Hello World of the Month,” an exercise to take something they knew absolutely nothing about and figure out how do something useful with it. There is always a mix of curiosity, frustration, even trepidation when trying to do something in a new programming language. “We want to feel comfortable with learning new things. We need to feel comfortable not knowing so we can look for the answer.” Now that’s the right attitude. We could all learn from that.

So, yes, you need the money (philanthropy or investor). You need technical expertise. You need good ideas. But the “secret sauce” turns out to be…us—meeting, talking, sharing, doing. 

Impact Engine, then, is already having an impact. Sweet. 

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

* full disclosure: The TrackerNews Project was incubated at InSTEDD