Environmental Sustainability is a perfect example of “knowledge in the age of the Net”. It’s all linked data and results; new information arrives constantly to build knowledge and that constant influx means there are always new ways to try to improve our green work – it’s a journey, not a destination.
Those characteristics mean that environmental sustainability today is better-suited to succeed even when it didn’t in the Net-less 1970’s.
In David Weinberger’s article The Machine That Would Predict The Future, in Scientific American, December 2012, he wrote how predicting the future includes an understanding of “knowledge” even as its definition changes.
We humans are used to limited-source, printed or recorded information: a book, an article, a study or a history -- what Weinberger calls a publishing system. However, increasingly knowledge has a much broader medium, he says, better described as a networked public. He writes “We may get lots of knowledge out of our data commons, but the knowledge is more likely to be continuous argument as it is tugged this way and that. …never fully settled, never fully written, never entirely one.”
No wonder museums use green teams to get work done. And no wonder integrated design fuels environmental sustainability solutions. Green team, integrated design...they're just other names for a networked public. Do you have one?
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