care – John Thackara

MicroStimuli: The New Science Of Persuasion

John Thackara — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:01:33 +0000

As a young boy in 1960s Newcastle, it was always a drama in my house when Proctor & Gamble’s advertising whiz kids came to dinner.

My father, as P&G’s Chief Engineer, basically designed factories – but he was also curious about the consumer advertising that these clever ad men (they were all men) were pioneering. (This was not so long after the first ever television commercial was aired, in 1941)

I remember a furious exchange about a tv commercial for Fairy Liquid and its immortal line, “Mummy! Mummy! Why Are Your Hands So Soft” . The ad men at our dinner table pronounced it to be genius. My feminist mother, outraged, said it was completely amoral.

I was reminded of that moment when reading Biju Dominic’s MicroStimuli: The New Science Of Persuasion.

A startling and thought-provoking new book, it challenges a widely held assumption about human behaviour: that we think before we act. The book describes, in contrast, how most decisions are made non-consciously through fast emotion-driven processes that operate beneath awareness. Biju Dominic’s radical approach is to use MicroStimuli, measured in milliseconds, to change our behaviour.

Awareness-action gap.

The promise of MicroStimuli, which grabbed my attention, was of “powerful solutions to the world’s most persistent challenges”.

One challenge in particular has preoccupied me for all my adult life: the dire condition of life on earth. Might MicroStimuli be the solution we need to help us fix the planet’s social and ecological systems?

Along with millions of fellow environmental campaigners, I had long assumed that that providing stronger arguments, and harder evidence, would change how people acted.

That approach failed. Yes, we raised the world’s awareness. But – in the absence of telling people what to do with this terrifying information – we also created widespread fear and anxiety along the way.

Biju Dominic calls this the awareness-action gap – and he has developed MicroStimuli as a way to close it.

Drawing on insights from neuroscience, artificial intelligence, consumer research, and design, MicroStimuli are nonconscious persuasive stimuli—tiny precision triggers – deployed in the final moment, often milliseconds, before an action. They activate the brain’s fastest pathways to influence behaviour.

Because MicroStimuli speak directly to the non-conscious processing system, Biju reckons that they “bypass the logical aspects entirely”.

The context for the book is the global smartphone environment. With smartphones now constantly in our hand, and always connected, the old advertising model of reaching people during predictable moments, like while they watch television in the evening, is now obsolete

We look at our phones 4,500 times a day, usually for just a few moments each time. Ninety nine per cent of smartphone interactions last just a few fleeting moments. But the number of such moments is vast.

In today’s always-on, always-with-you smartphone-filled world, MicroStimuli can “prompt desired behaviours throughout the day”

MicroStimuli for public good

The book contains many admirable examples of MicroStimuli used successfully for public good.

The best-known of these, the Railway Trespassing project, aimed to prevent sixteen deaths per day among pedestrians crossing railway tracks illegally in Mumbai.

Years of effort to halt the carnage had been ineffective. Pedestrian bridges had been added. Warning signs proliferated at accident black spots. But the deaths continued.

Then, after weeks of patient observation, Biju’s team made a life-saving discovery. The human brain finds it hard to judge the incoming speed of a large object, such as a train, correctly.

Based on that insight, simple and inexpensive solutions then proved effective. When a few sleepers were painted yellow at regular intervals, the speed of approaching train could be judged more correctly from a distance. Changing locomotive horn patterns – fast/repetitive or staccato sequences – further increased the alertness of trespassers. Many lives were saved.

MicroStimuli that stop you stepping in front of a train is a public good, of course. The book contains other examples behaviours being changed in a positive way: non-adherence to medication; the health benefits of walking a little more; he need to drink enough water; getting proper sleep; driving more safely.

Biju Dominic is justifiably proud. “Leveraging non-conscious brain processes to shape behavior is the responsible application of modern neuroscience to improve lives around us”.

MicroStimuli for consumption

But a second class of “behavioural problems” addressed by MicroStimuli is less obviously, for me, a problem we need to solve. This is the failure of hundreds of millions of people to click ‘Buy” when shopping online.

Although global brands spend two trillion dollars a year on marketing, millions of consumers, when shopping online, do not make it past the awareness stage and actually click “Buy.” Even when we are aware of a product, and its benefits, a phenomenon called Cart Abandonment runs at a steady 70 per cent.

In 2025, around 18 billion online shopping carts were cruelly abandoned. With twenty to forty per cent of all retail sales now online, this means that transactions worth an astounding seven trillion dollars were begun, but never completed.

These numbers are impressive, but I’m troubled by a question: does it matter?

If Cart Abandonment means you do not buy something online that you may really not have needed – and whose production, sale and use impacts the planet negatively – in what sense is it a ‘problem’?

For the Argentine writer Jorge Alemán Lavigne, rampant overconsumption drives many of our biggest social and ecological problems. “Consumer society has turned us into atomised individuals whose task is not to support each other, but to consume” he writes. “Decades of deregulation and privatisation have cultivated insecurity, individualism and status anxiety – and on a a mass scale”.

Libidinal operators

Around the world, malign political actors are tapping into fears and anxieties fostered by life in consumer society. Lavigne describes these populist leaders as libidinal operators.

With a focus on those who feel powerless, libidinal operators channel the desire for exclusion of the Other. They then offer diverse ways to be nasty, vindictive and cruel towards those the most vulnerable.

To the millions among us who are socially isolated, they offer a sense of belonging, meaning, and self-esteem.

To those who feel fearful, they promise order and security – often by the use of force.

These negative social consequences – fear, insecurity, and isolation – are well known to global brands. After all, they study our states of mind obsessively – in order to sell us things. But despite these dire social consequences, they show no signs deviating from their market-fixated ways. They will continue to create new needs, and increase consumption, to the maximum extent possible.

And the explict promise of MicroStimuli? Help them do so with greater precision, and more effectively, than ever before.

A striking example in the book comes when Biju pitches for work at a major chocolate brand. He describes the three slides he presented to the high-level meeting. “On Slide One, we proposed approaching the problem from a neuroscience perspective. On Slide Two, we explained that chocolate, at its core, is glucose. And when glucose levels drop, our bodies instinctively seek replenishment. On Slide Three, we showed how identifying the moments when gluose dips – the real moments of glucose craving- could unlock the exact digital moments most suited for chocolate persuasion”.

Is an insufficiency of chocolate consumption one of the world’s most persistent behavioural challenges? I’m not convinced.

Does this make MicroStimuli unethical?

The author highlights that quandary when he asks, on the book’s first line: ’Is it ethical to influence someone’s behaviour without their conscious awareness?”

This question is not new. The world of marketing has long had the unconscious in its sights. Seventy years ago, Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders dramatically raised public awareness of advertising, consumerism, and media manipulation. A worldwide media studies industry, born at that moment, now produces thousands of papers every year.

But growing public awareness did nothing to slow the industry down. On the contrary: according to Grok, when Hidden Persuaders was published in 1978, global marketing/advertising spend was in the range of $50–80 billion. Today, MicroStimuli is being pitched to an advertising economy that, at up to $2 trillion, is 40 times higher than when Hidden Persuaders came out.

Now you may well complain, at this point, that it’s unfair to blame MicroStimuli for the political dystopias now unfolding around the world. And I would have to agree. The capitalist system is to blame, not a pragmatic marketing technique.

Besides,casting blame is not just unfair, it’s ineffective

Ever since those ad men came to dinner when I was a boy, and I witnessed my mother’s appalled reaction, I’ve been sceptical that ad persons will ever turn down the opportunity to increase sales. Indeed, when I asked a marketing expert recently whether or not MicroStimuli are ethical, he replied, “I don’t know, but do they work?”

My point here? Moralistic finger-pointing does not create positive change. Making demands on business, or telling politicians what they must do, are also ineffective.“You must end this obsession with perpetual growth”. “The government must end our dependency on fossil fuels”.

They’ won’t, because they can’t. We all live within a system – capitalism – whose very essence, its basic operating system, is to stimulate consumption, invent new needs, and extract resources from the earth to meet them.

Changing awareness on its own cannot, and will not, change this system. Critique, without action, is a recipe for anxious introspection and debilitating climate guilt.

How positive change happens

After years of ineffective activism, I made a resolution to stop shouting that we must stop doing something (because it’s bad for life on earth, etc etc) without also, at that same moment, pointing to practical acts of care we can do, instead.

The good news is that millions of living alternatives to consumer society – and the means to change the system – are all around us. These millions of grassroots projects – some new, many more the descendants of historical practices – are the seedlings of a replacement for business-as-usual.

These practices are scattered, and for the most part unseen on the world’s smartphones – but they don’t have to be invented from scratch.

I maintain a collection of case study collections on my website. I have also written about 60 new kinds of jobs that you probably never heard of before, but that people are doing now.

Will these myriad small projects wash away capitalism like some giant green tsunami?

On their own, no, of course not. But they don’t have to.

The main reason we’re in a polycrisis now? An intense global debt-energy system has duly reached limits to growth that scientists have been warning us about for decades. The global system – the energy-intense, extractive, grow-to-infinity capitalist system – is degrading of its own accord. Its running up against biophysical forces that are beyond its or anyone else’s control.

Once all the infrastructures, networks and gadgets of modern life are factored in – the cars, planes, factories, buildings, infrastructure, heating, cooling, lighting, food, water, hospitals, information systems, and their attendant gadgets – well, a New Yorker or Londoner today ‘needs’ about 60 times more energy and resources, per person, than a hunter gatherer did, 10,000 years ago.

And these ‘needs’ are escalating. Think, data centres. Think, airconditioning for the masses.

To put it more personally: you and I use more energy & resources in a single month than our great-grandparents used during their whole lifetime – and we’re doing so on a finite planet.

It can’t, and won’t, persist.

Practical acts of care

But back to MicroStimuli and my earnest resolution: “never argue that we should stop doing something without also suggesting practical acts of care we can do, instead“.

Rather than get millions more of us to press “Buy”, could they get us to click a button called “Care”?

Care is the essential activity people have always undertaken to raise and educate their families, cultivate their land, and support each other in times of difficulty. Care is how billions of people with low cash incomes meet daily life needs outside the money economy – through traditional networks of reciprocity and gifts.

Whether it’s cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, ironing, consoling, caring for others, listening, value, in this parallel care economy, arises from relationships – not from transactions, and not from things.

A cooperative care ecosystem does not have to be invented from scratch. Myriad examples, as I have shown here, already exist.

But health, care, and wellbeing – whether social, or ecological – are not something ‘delivered’, like a pizza – or ‘produced’, like a car.

What we can do is use can use well-tried design and marketing methods to enhance caring relationships and platforms Maps of actors and resources; product & service prototypes; system architectures; artful meetings; collaboration formats.

As a start, enabling platforms and practical measures can be designed to support the people who already do the bulk of caring, and will continue to do so – from child care, to dementia support..

Among other possibilities:
Enable people to become active participants in ecological repair, or biodiversity restoration
Enable local communities to share resources, collaborate, and develop new livelihoods.
Transform community participation, optimise engagement, personalise interactions on social networks,.

Nature reconnection

The Spanish theologian Raimon Pannikar explains this moment beautifully: ”A truly just transition will happen when we see nature differently, experience nature differently, and understand our purpose here differently.”

Recent ecological research confirms an important truth: the vitality of ecological and social systems is determined by the quality of social and ecological relationships.

I believe MicrosStimuli at the service of care could enhance the health of those relationships.

In diverse combinations with AI, science, design, and art – MicrosStimuli, can become a medium of experience and learning that can help us realise everything in the living world is connected.

As an example: A new app called Okio – described as “your AI-powered field companion” – connects you with nature experiences, based on location. It’s your AI-powered nature guide for exploring, identifying, and learning about the living world around you.

But re-connection – with nature, and with each other – is not just about words; it’s about encounter and community.

The philosopher and theologian Martin Buber counseled just such activity in his book I and Thou of 1923. “All knowledge is dialogic”, he wrote – but he did not just advocate talk. Conversations needs to be embodied, and situated. At a social level, we need to talk to each other more face to face.

How will MicroStimulii help us reconnect in such a way? That, respectfully, is for you to design.

NOTE

MicroStimulii: the New Science of Persuasion
https://www.linkedin.com/in/biju-dominic-5a08764/

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Care, Value, Place2, Mumbai, October 2025

John Thackara — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 10:57:31 +0000

The following is my introduction to the second edition of “Care, Value, Place”, a professional workshop hosted annually by #BITSDesignSchool in Mumbai. Our programme featured social and ecological practitioners, and project leaders, who met as peers to discuss care, value and place as an interconnected design space.

The design of products, places and services for health care has become a huge economic sector – in India, and around the world. So-called “digital health” , especially, is a substantial chunk of the global design economy.

But even as the costs of modern biomedical health systems escalate, a new awareness is dawning: modern health systems treat the effects – but not the causes – of ill health.

The alternative narrative – that caring for life should be at the centre of the economy, rather than production, and ‘output’ – is not a new idea. 2,400 years ago Hippocrates, father of modern medicine, said that “the health of individuals and communities depends on the health of airs, waters, and places.”

Even earlier than Hippocrates, the Taoist ritual of renewal, still performed by Taoist priests today, affirms a belief that the affluence of a society can be judged by the number of different species that live there.

“If all things in the universe grow well, then a society is a community of affluence. If not, this kingdom is on the decline”

Today’s concept of ecological health (sometimes called OneHealth) brings these ancient wisdoms back into alignment with today’s health narrative

Once you realise that caring for nature, and caring for people, are the same story, one’s priorities change profoundly. An ecological health perspective shifts our focus upstream – to natural farming, soil restoration and care, river and watershed recovery, community health, the foods we eat, the air we breathe, and so on.

As we learned at last year’s CVP, India is a global centre of care right now if the growth of Natural Farming is any guide.

In the Andra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming movement (#APCNF) a million and more of your fellow citizens are caring for life, in myriad practical ways, today.

We agreed last year that design has a lot to learn from this rainforest of social diversity, so I called Swati Renduchintala, their representative here last year, for an update.

Natural Farming

The Natural Farming movement is going better than ever. They are now active in 20 of India’s 29 states, and the Indian government has just launched an all-of-government National Mission on Natural Farming (NMNF). naturalfarming.dac.gov.in/AboutUs/MissionAndObjectives

Among the key objectives of NMNF are to promote chemical-free farming, and to do so with a focus on traditional knowledge. The Mission aims – in its first phase – to enrol ten million farmers organised into 15,000 natural farming clusters across the country. Swati also informed me that the Natural Farming Movement has launched pilot projects in Zambia, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

Talking with Swati reminded me of the confession I made on this stage last year: that I don’t care about ‘climate change’ as such. I don’t care about ‘sustainability’ Nor, for that matter, do I care about “saving the world”.

Our places and communities don’t need feelings, I said then. They need practical acts of care.

With that simple remedy n mind, I asked Swati what practical acts of care design might offer to India’s Natural Farmers. We rather quickly came up with an initial list:

– farmer-to-farmer knowledge-sharing;
– shorter routes to market;
– on-farm diversification;
– village-scale diversification; and – appropriate agritech – or what Swati termed “women-centric mechanisation”

That list from Swati Renduchintala, on its own, is a to-do list for many design lifetimes. And because it replaces passive anxiety with meaningful activity, it’s also a proven remedy for modern stress and burnout.

Which is the reason we chose Care as one of our three, interconnected, themes.

Value

Care is intimately linked to our second theme this meeting, Value.

Our renewed attention to care work is part of a larger transformation that’s now happening not just In healthcare and biomedicine, but also in food and agriculture, urban design, and regional development.

A remarkable new consensus is emerging that health and well-being are properties of the social and ecological contexts in which people live..

That’s why I say we should call the world’s small farmers, parents, and cooks – who give us good food – “health professionals”.

Place

Our third theme – and of course all three are connected – is Place .

The power of connection between people and place is a key ingredient in systems change. That’s especially important now that restoring our own health, and caring for place, are understood, once again, as single story.

For the architect Pamela Mang, “place is a doorway into caring. Place can unite people across diverse ideological spectra and makes a shift to true sustainability possible”.

So could we practice care as if the health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, are a single story?

For Didi Pershouse, place-based, and systems-based, ecological medicine, restores health to people as well as the social and ecological systems around them. This approach requires ecological literacy, and a whole-systems understanding of the world.

A corollary of Caring for one’s place is paying better attention to the local. ‘Local’ is great for two reasons.

First, because local uses time, space and energy in radically less wasteful ways than global does.

And secondly, ‘local’ is already mainstream. The vast majority of economic activity to meet daily needs is already local. Changing the word faster, to closer is not as hard as it sounds.

Desired outcomes

So Care, Value and Place are our three themes for the day. But what about our desired outcomes?

Well our first and most important desired outcome was to get you together in one room. And here you are!

Our second aim is to hear first-hand, from you, about place-based partnerships for social change. What are you trying to achieve? What works for you? What comes next?

Our third aim builds on that last question – “what comes next?” – by adding a supplementary another one: “are there ways that design can help?”

We are all here because the leadership and faculty of this design school are adamant that learning from and with places, and communities, will be central to this new education.

Easy to say – but what should next-generation community projects look like? Who else nebe involved, if not just designers?

In discussions project leaders before this event, we heard about several cross-cutting themes that are especially important to them, and that they they thought design might be able to help them with.

How to tell the story of a place in ways that will connect with city people;
How to meet the demand from funders for metrics of progress, how to measure positive social or ecological impact;
Better ways to host and organise meetings, and other ways of being together.

Those cross-cutting questions are a lot on their own – and only have one day together.

But let me end this introduction on a reassuring note. There’s no way we can ‘solve’ all these issues in one go. This event is not a problem-solving hackathon. It’s about making new connections, and starting new conversations.

As I said at the start, the variety and quality of people in this room answers the first of those two ambitions. As for the conversation part – well, it’s it’ time for me to wrap up here – and leave you to get on with it.

LINKS

Care Value Place 2024
www.bitsdesign.edu.in/news/care-value-place-conference-mumbai

My preview and summary of Care Value Place 2024 is here:
thackara.com/bioregioning/care-value-place-social-ecological-project-leaders-to-meet-in-mumbai/

Videos of the 2024 talks -and soon those from 2025 – are on the BITS Design School Mumbai YouTube channel. #bitsdesigncvp

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From Green Design to Ecological Design (2): Beyond Calculation: AI and Sustainability

John Thackara — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 10:17:12 +0000

Trillions of dollars of climate finance need nature to be machine-like. But nature is not a machine. So how shall we proceed? In this 20′ talk, I explore two questions: Can AI serve all of life, not just human life? And if so, how?

BACKGROUND TO THIS TALK
In Shanghai, at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Yongqi Lou (President of Shanghai University of Engineering Scienc) I’ve been developing developing the agenda for a Thematic Cluster around the agenda of Regenerative Design. My job is to identify opportunities where Regenerative Design meets climate finance, artificial intelligence, ecological restoration, green infrastructure, and agro-ecology. The work builds on the bioregioning agenda, and the Urban-Rural expo we did at the end of 2019.

Transcription: From Green Design to Ecological Design, Beyond Calculation

Good data are important if we are to understand and reverse the destruction of nature that’s so distressing to us all. And it is good news that more and more data about biodiversity is becoming available thanks to the marvels of satellite imagery, DNA analysis, and other data analysed by AI.

But is artificial intelligence enough, on its own, to drive the ecological transition we so desperately need?

My key point today: AI can be a support for transformational change. But a truly just transition will only happen when, in the words of Raimon Pannikar, we “see nature differently, relate to nature differently, and understand our purpose here differently”.

Seventy five years ago, in 1944, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published his First Law of Robotics. It stated: “A robot may not injure a human being nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”.

Around the world, numerous groups have puiblished ethical principles for AI. By one estimate, 172 statements have been published so far. China’s version is aligned with most of the other statements: AI should be re-oriented in the service of human good.

If we think of Artificial Intelligence as a kind of robot, then Asimov’s law could easily be updated: “AI may not injure a human being nor, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm’.

There’s been more disagreement about implementation of such a law. How can we ensure, experts ask, that AI systems will understand what we mean? Do what we want? This question, too, has a history. Back in 1960, the mathematician Norbert Wiener asked, “Are we quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire?.”

That one word – ‘purpose’ – highlights the core dilemma that I will focus on today.

Because even if we could be sure that AI would understand and obey an updated Asimov law, such a law would only mention “what’s good for humans” . There’s no mention of all the other life forms we share the living planet with. This humans-first approach has had catastrophic consequences throughout the industrial age.

Even before AI came along, “what’s good for humans” helped shape an economy that extracts vitality, as well as resources, from the planet’s living systems.

This cultural disconnection – between the living world, and the economic one – explains why we either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as natural ‘resources’ whose only purpose is to feed “the economy.”

The idea that “the economy” exists in a separate domain from life itself sounds crazy when you say it out loud.

By the same token, It makes little sense to discuss the purpose of AI in isolation from the bigger picture of life on earth, and our place within that.

President Xi alluded to the need for a larger purpose just a few days ago. In a speech about the Belt and Road Initiative, he called for a “new development paradigm”.

This idea – a new concept for development – is for me the best place to start in any discussion of where and how we use AI.

New development paradigm

We need to ask, first: What are the social and ecological objectives of development? and, within that framework, How can AI help us achieve them?

For me, “new development paradigm” means development that helps all of life thrive – not just human life. It means: Enable natural systems to endure. It means: Beneficial relations between ecosystems.

How would AI help us achieve this?

I believe that AI – used together with science, design, and art – can be a medium of experience and learning that can help us realise that nature, and the economy, are not two different places. Everything in the living world is connected

AI can support a learning process that re-awakens our capacity for ecological thinking – and help us “see” the life that surrounds us – but invisibly.

There are positive developments along these lines in the worlds of AI and Machine Learning.

In 2019, Machine Learning heavyweights from GoogleAI, Deep Mind, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, ETH Zurich and others published this 111-page report “Tackling Climate Change With Machine Learning”.

Their report included a comprehensive list list of “Climate change solution domains” . These range from remote sensing, to the rededsign of financial markets.

It’s a long list, but one theme united these experts: If we’re going to manage the climate crisis – if we’re going to find “solutions” – then we need more data” !

Global demand for environmental data was supercharged two weeks ago at COP26 in Scotland.

Mark Carney announced that 130 trillion dollars in climate finance commitments had been promised by various financial actors. The mysterious acronyms he used disguise a lot disagreement about what counts as climate finance, what the money is for, and who gets to spend it.

But Carney made one point clear in plain language: this money would prove hard to distribute in the absence of metrics and verification.

Carney’s announcement can only increase the search for climate disclosure metrics. A.I. is being promoted as a global observation platform that monitors ecosystem health at multiple scales – from the planetary, to the microscopic.

Planet Labs, on a larger scale, have deployed a swarm of Earth-observing satellites that can monitor every forest, every tree, and every city block, everywhere on Earth, on a daily basis.

This real-time ecological dashboard, say Planet, can enable forest managers to see the signs of deforestation as they are occurring – as opposed to long after.

Its satellites can also spot but also detect the precursors of deforestation they say – such as the establishment of illegal roads that tend to appear before trees are illegally harvested.

Another big project, Microsoft’s AI For Earth, give people the power to make accurate climate predictions using artificial intelligence tools.

In England, researchers at Exeter University are training AI systems to classify all this raw data – from sensors on the ground, in the sky, or in space.

Integrating data and information from multiple, inter-related, sources, they claim, affords better understanding of complex interactions between the climate, natural ecosystems, human systems, the economy, and health.

In Switzerland, the Crowther Lab has launched an open data platform, Restor, that connects everyone, everywhere, to local restoration.

Restor connects people to scientific data, supply chains, funding – and each other – to increase the impact, scale, and sustainability of restoration efforts.

“We believe that anyone can be a restoration champion” they say, “ including you”

Bird research is also being transformed by Artificial Intelligence. The BirdNET platform, for example, combines bioacoustics with an AI based algorithm to automate bird species recognition from acoustic data.

Citizen science has radically expanded the scale of data collection: birdwatchers have contributed than 140 million observations

In Germany they use eDNA metabarcoding to analyse the health and diversity of insect populations.

Soils are the most complex microbial ecosystem we know. A single teaspoon of healthy soil may contain thousands of species, a billion individuals, and one hundred metres of fungal networks. The soils in forest ecosystems, especially, are a foundational part of the global carbon cycle. But to most of us in the modern urban world, they’ve been invisible and uncared for.

Julian Liber studies the rhizosphere – the soil around the root of plant where microbial activity is especially high. Helped by AI, he tracks fungal hyphae – their rate of growth, how often they branch, and other metrics.

The number and vitality of worms is another good indicator of soil health. Thanks to machine learning, observations from diverse sources can now be used to make diagnostic maps.

Fish farming is investing heavily in sensors and AI tools. Some of these systems can even even monitor what they eat.

Another agricultural process, composting, transforms organic waste to nutrient-rich manure. But composting infrastructures tend to be installed away from residential areas. This makes tending to the compost heap a tedious task.

Thanks to compost monitors, Internet of Things, and AI, composting has now become a more viable as an urban activity.

The scale and scope of biodiversity sampling is being expanded dramatically by small, low-power computing devices, advances in wireless communications, and data-recognition algorithms in the field of machine learning. AudioMoth, for example, is being used to understand the world of bats in real time.

These efforts are vital in efforts to prevent another Covid. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are using AI-supported bioacoustics to plot the distribution of bat species.Their aim is anticipate any danger of ‘spillover’ – from wild into urban – as a result of habitat disturbance by human activity.

But let me return to the core issue of PURPOSE of AI and the new development paradigm mentioned earlier.

The restoration of ecosystems damaged by decades of extraction is surely central to that over-arching purpose. AI, here, can play a important role in identifying restoration options that diversify the local economy, and create jobs. For example, the use of fiber crops to remediate degraded land and provide future livelihoods.

In Australia, where numerous mine sites are being rehabilitated back to their native ecosystems, eDNA metabarcoding helps ecologists determine what insects, pollinators, and bacteria used to live there, and so what should be planted there, next.

Add all these experiments together, and the tools and connectivity are within our grasp, today, to monitor every patch the vital signs of of the planet in real time.

We could repurpose the giant screen used by Alibaba to monitor sales during Black Friday. We could feed in data – from satellites in space, to microbial communities surveyed by eDNA.

We’d get a wondrous insight into the health of planet – place by place, patch by patch.

But there’s a dilemma here. A new dashboard is not the same as a new system.

On the contrary. For most if the world’s economic and political actors – the ones that will spend $100 trillion of climate finance announced by Mark Carney – the climate crisis is not a system failure – it’s a problem of management, efficiency, and control.

All those promises to plant billions of trees? A Yale study found that 45% of these trees, planted “efficiently”, will be monocultural plantations – managed as cash crops and devoid of biodiversity.

That’s the problem with the dashboard idea. It frames the living world as some kind of machine to process “natural resources” and “ecosystem services”.

Returning to Mark Carney again: that tsunami of climate finance could actually increase ecological destruction.

Demand for carbon offsets, net-zero, and nature positive credits, is escalating. And in order to meet this demand on a large scale, investors demand standardised metrics in order to simplify and speed up verification.

But biodiversity is the literal opposite of standardised.

The best indicator of biodiversity health is diversity, continuous adaptation, and change. The health of an ecosystem lies in the vitality of interactions between its component species.

The study of living systems tells a consistent story. Whether it’s sub-microscopic viruses, mosses, and mycorrhizae – or trees, rivers and climate systems – science has confirmed an ancient wisdom: All natural phenomena are not only connected. Their very essence is to be in relationship with other things -including us.

The health of the soil, microbes, soil, plants – and the health of people – are a single story. Diversity and adaptation are the best indicators of vitality.

No matter how massive the datasets and simulations created by AI, computational models cannot comprehend the complexity and interdependence of ecosystems. They will remain just that: models of reality.

The bank Credit Suisse, with remarkable candour, has put it best: ”biodiversity is the anti-commodity”.

This is bad news for an industrial economy that that treats raw materials as commodities.

In an industrial system, efficiency and control are success factors. The system demands uniformity and standardisation. Diversity, of the kind found in healthy nature, makes the game impossible.

And this is why climate finance could make things worse.

Every social and ecological context is unique – but finance needs the living world to behave like a machine – like the tree plantations I mentioned earlier.

The inherent complexity of nature is confirmed by real-world restoration projects – especially in the world’s critical zones. To monitor their vitality, scientists have established critical zones observatories throughout the world including this one in China.

Yes, they use sensors and highly technical instruments to collect data in these outdoor laboratories. But making sense of this complex data involves multiple skills.

AI can help with interpretation, but the story on the ground remains complex.

As well as the diverse scientific disciplines, ecological restoration can often involve dozens of organisations. This social and organisational dimension further intensifies the complexity.

And as my colleague Professor Lou Yongqi has explained, social systems are just one among four that we have to contend with: Nature, Human, Artificial, and Cyber.

As well as involving multiple systems, real-world ecological restoration also involves multiple timescales.The timescales of restoring land, measured in decades, are way beyond the ultra-fast tempo of financial markets that can be measured in milliseconds.

If finance needs nature to be machine-like – but nature is not a machine – how best are we to respond?

I believe designers are well-placed to help us cope with this tangled dilemma .

Learning from the last 50 years, it’s surely clear that we don’t need more messages, concepts, instructions. What we need, and what we yearn for, is connection – connection with each other; connection with place; and above all, connection with the living.

Designers can use their creative skills to represent social and natural systems immersively. In so-called ‘system in the room’ intallations, we humans can experience being part of nature, not outside.

The word, experience, I believe, is key. AI, as I’ve shown, can provide extraordinary data and insights – but something more is needed to awaken the experience of interconnectedness.

Design-plus-AI can be a medium of attention – such as with ecosystems we have neglected; a medium of connection – so we don’t just look; a medium of relationship with the living world that can persist through time

Beyond Calculation

The destruction will stop when we stop thinking of the oceans, fields and forests as ‘resources’ or ‘solutions’ – and start thinking (and acting) in them as lifeworlds.

Making that shift is the basis of a new way to measure and create value, and therefore purpose. That’s why we need to experience the health of a place, and of the persons who inhabit it, as a single story.

Such a change of course requires ecological literacy, and a whole-systems understanding of the world. AI, art, design, I believe, can help us acquire these skills and understanding.

end

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In a cave with crows

John Thackara — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 14:30:44 +0000

What would it be like to be in and amongst a flock of crows?

In a soundscape called The Cave, it’s as if you are surrounded by crows and even interact with them.

At different moments one hears the call of a solitary crow; a communal chorus; the sound of mass fluttering when they all take off at once; or the barely audible cheeps of what seem to be intimate conversations.

You experience the soundscape inside a darkened translucent dome made of layered gauze screens that is bathed in multiple projections. The sounds are composed of 72 field recordings that you hear through eight concealed speakers.

Qingyu Zhang*, who designed the installation, told me she named her piece after reading Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

Reading Socrates’ cautionary words – that “there is more to reality than the shadows we see against the wall” – Zhang realised that her version of being in a cave with crows, while creating a real sense of proximity and intimacy, would never match the real thing.

But it did not need to.

In The Wake of Crows, Thom van Dooren describes as ’field philosophy’ his research into people’s shifting relationships with crows around the world.

As I read van Dooren’s reflections on multispecies knowledge practices, I mentally changed his words field philosophy into ‘field design’ – and the narrative still made perfect sense.

Van Dooren says himself that he’s in a search for “new ethical approaches to the worlds we craft together”.

In design, the ways we pay attention to the ways of life of nonhuman others are therefore an important and sensitive matter.

As as our attention turns more-than-human contexts, we can learn from (and with) the artists, philosophers, and scientists who have been exploring multi-species knowledge practices for quite some years already.

We design people are not the first to seek new ways to spend time in, and learn about, these other worlds.

But by designing new ways knowing, design can add a new dimension to relationships with worlds we have all neglected for too long.

* Qingyu Zhang is a designer at Tongji University, D&I, Ecology and Cultures Innovation Lab
ecology.shanghai-visual.org

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Introduction (and postscript) to ‘Care, Value, Place’ in Mumbai

Kris — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 17:15:27 +0000

The following is the text of my (12 minute) introductory talk in Mumbai, in September, at the Care, Value Place event hosted by the new design school BITSdesign together with RMIT. I was the co-curator. Here is a summary of the programme, . Videos of most of the talks are on the BITS Design School Mumbai YouTube channel. Scroll down here, too, for a Postscript in the form of an interview I did with a national newspaper journalist.

[The text below is reconstituted from my notes, it is not a literal transcription.
I will align the two versions when the recording is found]

I am billed on your programme today as as an expert in design for sustainability.  But I have a confession to make – which some of you may find shocking. I don’t care about climate change. And I don’t care about sustainability.

The reason I don’t care is that I can’t care. For me, care is something you do. It is not how you feel. It is not a pleasing state of mind.

I’m haunted by the words of John Berger when he wrote:

“The words ‘climate’ and “sustainability” are universal, placeless, and abstract.
They bathe us in feelings of sadness. But our places and communities don’t need feelings. They need practical acts of care”

As an antidote to the decades of high-level but abstract talk about sustainability, I’ve spent forty years seeking out people whose actions, in meeting daily life needs, bring the s-word to life: restoring the land, sharing water, making homes, growing food, designing clothes, journeying, and caring for each other.

People like that are the focus of this event, and the reason we chose Care as one of our three, interconnected, themes.

Care, when it’s practiced, replaces passive anxiety with meaningful activity.

Care work has been at the center of society for uncountable generations. And as Naomi Klein reminds us, it was only when economics (and economists) came along that the work of carers – mainly women – disappeared from the story.

It’s also thanks to economists that we have a system today which “the more one’s work immediately helps or benefits other human beings, or nature, the less you are likely to be paid for it”. That was the late, great, David Graeber.

The German theologian Ina Praetorius, in her book The Care-Centered Economy, reinforces this key point https://www.boell.de/en/2015/04/07/care-centered-economy

”Unpaid and underpaid care-work – embedded in nurturing nature, history and society is by far the biggest economic sector”,

she writes, before lamenting that “economic thinking is resolutely oblivious to this fact. The idea of “care” can be used to revitalise the very word economy”.

Our second theme in this meeting is Value.

Value is important because it’s part of a larger transformation that’s also now happening – a shift in understanding of what matters. In healthcare, in biomedicine, in food and agriculture, a remarkable new consensus is emerging. Health and well-being are properties of the social and ecological contexts in which people live. Health is not a product or services that you ‘deliver’ to people for a price.

That’s why I call the world’s small farmers, parents, and cooks – who give us good food, and care for our soils and rivers – “health professionals”. And we’ll be hearing from some of them over the coming two days.

Place

Our third theme – and of course all three are connected – is Place .

The power of connection between people and place is a key ingredient in systems change. That’s because restoring our own health, and caring for place, is a single story.

For the architect Pamela Mang, “place is a doorway into caring. Place can unite people across diverse ideological spectra and makes a shift to true sustainability possible”.

A corollary of Caring for one’s place is paying better attention to the local.  ‘Local’ is great for sustainability for two reasons.

First, because local uses time, space and energy in radically less wasteful ways than global does.

And secondly, ‘local’ is already mainstream. The vast majority of economic activity to meet daily needs is already local. Changing the word faster, to closer is not as hard as it sounds.

Desired outcomes

So those are our three theme for the next two days. But what about our desired outcomes?

Well our first and most important desired outcome was to get you together in one room.

Our second aim is to hear first-hand, from you, about place-based partnerships for social change.  What are you trying to achieve? What works? What comes next?

Our third aim starts with that last question – “what comes next?” – and asks a follow-up: “are there ways that design can help?”

We are all here because a new design school – BITSdesign – is just starting out. Its leadership and faculty are adamant that learning from and with communities will be central to this new education.

But what should next-generation community projects look like? Who else should be involved, if not just designers? And, are Rules of Engagement needed to ensure that communities get a fair deal when they host design researchers?

An agenda with five threads

We’ve asked each invited project leader to make a 15-20 minute introduction. We’ve organised these into five threads.

The first thread is about regenerative water systems. What happens when tradition, and historical water practices, meets technical innovation.? How does one involve communities in projects that integrate technology, social innovation and local government?

Our second thread is about the social life of mobility, and alternative, less energy intensive ways to inhabit and move around the city: energy-light cargo-bikes, bike sharing, walking, We will hear how roads, parking, and gas stations can be repurposed enhance the social and ecological vitality of urban spaces.

Thread three is about community-based recycling systems linked to local crafts and material processes. What is the potential of technology and new business models to scale grassroots recycling initiatives, based on circular economy principles?

Our fourth strand is about success factors in social design and, in particular, how BITSdesign can best nurture socially-conscious designers

Our fifth strand is about Community Managed Natural Farming. It’s been described as the most important stories in the world, so how can we establish learning relationships with the movement? What are the best ways to codesign, with the farmers, improved ways to share knowledge and develop new skills?

Cross-cutting questions

In discussions with project leaders before today’s event, we’ve heard about several cross-cutting questions that are especially important to them – and that they thought design might be able to help them with:
– How to tell the story of a place in ways that will connect with city people?
– Funders keep demanding metrics of progress – but how do you measure social or ecological impact?
– Are there better ways to host and organise meetings, and other ways of being together?

Those five strands – not to mention those cross-cutting questions – are a lot . And we only have two days together.

So let me end this introduction on what I hope is a reassuring note. There’s no way we can ‘solve’ all these issues in a couple of days. But that’s not why we’re here.

Yes, we hope to learn from each other what works – but this event is not a problem-solving hackathon. It’s about making new connections, and starting new conversations.

As I said just now, the variety and quality of people in this room answers the first of those two ambitions.

As for the conversation part – well, it’s it’ time for me to shut up and leave you to get on with it.

Q1.
What was your experience at the CVP conference like?

JT I have not encountered such fresh thinking for a very long time. The launch of a new design school turned out to be a good moment to move beyond business-as-usual responses to climate change, and biodiversity loss. But I had the strong sense, too, that obstacles to positive change are being pushed aside after decades of inertia.

The emergence in India of the natural farmimg movement, from its roots in Andra Pradesh, is a perfect example. Agriculture reformers and farmer movements around the world been advocating for agroecology for years, but have felt ignored. Now, nearly a million mainly women small scale farmers are making it happen for real. It’s one of the most signifcant stories in the world – but far too few people know about it.
The other project leaders we met at CVP were also real-world pioneers in urban ecological restoration, river and watershed recovery, two-wheeled commerce, 15-minute cities, ‘the last mile’ in waste ecosystems, and more. They’re doing brilliant work, but they need our respect and far more support.

Q2
You emphasized care for life over care for GDP.
Can you elaborate?

JT Well, GDP extracts value from the planet, caring for life adds to its vitality by restoring living ecosystems.

The health sector is a good example. The design of products, places and services for health care has become a huge economic sector in India, and around the world. But modern health systems are becoming unaffordable even for rich countries – and unavailable to the majority world. And besides, modern health treats the effects – but not causes – of ill health.

The concept of OneHealth transforms this picture. When you realise that caring for nature, and caring for people, are the same story, one’s priorities change, profoundly. The notion of “One Health” shifts attention upstream to the causes of health – or ill-health, and redirects of priorities to soil restoration and care, river and watershed recovery, the foods we eat, the air we all breathe, and so on.

Q3
What were your biggest takeaways from the conference?

JT Another world is not just possible, it’s already happening . Practicable, workable solutions are being implemented, right now, by grassroots communities across the world. But you have to seek them out – and universities and design schools have been too inward-looking to notice in recent times. We have a lot of catching up to do! We need to understand the development and growth, so far, of Community Managed Natural Farming, establish learning relationships with the movement, identify ways that design can serve it, and how.

Q4
How can Mumbai and India incorporate the concept of care into design ?

JT India is a global centre of care right now. Today. Hundreds of millions of your citizens care for each other, and their places, in myriad creative ways. Design can learn from this social rainforest of diversity .

But the great challenges we face won’t be solved by design in its own. It was striking just how many disciplines were involved in the projects at CVP: the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources; the service designer’s capacity to create platforms that enables regional actors to share and collaborate; the artist’s capacity to represent real-world phenomena in ways that change our perceptions.

Q5
In what ways is this relevant to industry?

JT Care Value Place brings much needed new social energy to industry. Corporate Social Responsibility, and ESG investing, are a box-ticking duty for many firms – but what I call Business-to-Place, or B2P, replaces dutiful reporting with meaning, and purpose. When companies are involved in place-based partnerships for social change , the result is sustanability you can touch, and feel. Staff don’t just feel better about their work, they also acquire green skills that are so badly needed as we develop and support a sustainable and resource-efficient society.

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care – John Thackara

MicroStimuli: The New Science Of Persuasion

Awareness-action gap.

MicroStimuli for public good

MicroStimuli for consumption

Libidinal operators

Does this make MicroStimuli unethical?

Practical acts of care

Nature reconnection

NOTE

Care, Value, Place2, Mumbai, October 2025

“If all things in the universe grow well, then a society is a community of affluence. If not, this kingdom is on the decline”

Natural Farming

Value

Place

Desired outcomes

From Green Design to Ecological Design (2): Beyond Calculation: AI and Sustainability

Transcription: From Green Design to Ecological Design, Beyond Calculation

In a cave with crows

Introduction (and postscript) to ‘Care, Value, Place’ in Mumbai

[The text below is reconstituted from my notes, it is not a literal transcription. I will align the two versions when the recording is found]

Desired outcomes

An agenda with five threads

Cross-cutting questions

Q1. What was your experience at the CVP conference like?

Q2 You emphasized care for life over care for GDP. Can you elaborate?

Q3 What were your biggest takeaways from the conference?

Q4 How can Mumbai and India incorporate the concept of care into design ?

Q5 In what ways is this relevant to industry?

[The text below is reconstituted from my notes, it is not a literal transcription.
I will align the two versions when the recording is found]

Q1.
What was your experience at the CVP conference like?

Q2
You emphasized care for life over care for GDP.
Can you elaborate?

Q3
What were your biggest takeaways from the conference?

Q4
How can Mumbai and India incorporate the concept of care into design ?

Q5
In what ways is this relevant to industry?