Here’s an interesting snippet from the pages of National Geographic magazine… see what this does to your understanding of league tables.
The following table has three dimensions. The left column represents ’spend per person on health care by country’. Naturally, the United States is top of the heap when it comes to ‘money spent’.
The right column represents ‘average lifespan by country’. Surprisingly, the United States doesn’t come 1st, or 2nd, or even 3rd. In fact it comes 12th, a long way behind countries like Portugal, Sweden and Japan.
The third dimension, which is the subject of this post, tracks the average number of visits to a doctor or hospital each year by citizens of the various countries. Basically, the thicker the line, the more often they see a doctor. The line for the United States is very narrow indeed.
What does all this mean in practice? Well, in Japan the average person will see a doctor or go to hospital as much as 12 times in a year. However, the total cost of all these treatments is only a third of the amount spent on healthcare by the USA. It seems that frequent, low level interventions cost far less than occasional, budget-busting operations. In addition, the average Japanese citizen can expect to live five years longer than their American counterpart.
Here in Britain, we are always listening to speeches promising more money for the NHS (National Health Service). The problem is that money and good health are not directly correlated. Our system is heavily weighted towards repair at the expense of prevention.
Here’s one quick example of a change I’d like to see made. Back pain is the number one cause of sick leave in the UK, costing the country billions in lost revenue and hundreds of millions in medical treatment costs. According to one of my fellow trustees at BackCare (a chiropractor), it costs 300 times less to prevent back pain than to treat it. One can quickly see how a pre-injury visit to a doctor, followed by the introduction of Tai Chi into one’s daily routine (as is commonplace in Japan), might lead to reduced health-care costs and an increase in quality of life.
I’ve been reading the Blue Skunk blog recently (”leaving readers confused at a higher level since 2005″) and was motivated to comment on a post asking whether the benefits of technology in education outweighed the distractions that it introduces. I replied saying “I’m someone that thinks that better use of technology, as opposed to better technology, is the key to learning.” But then we got into a debate about relative levels of distraction - which is more distracting, too much technology or poorly thought-out furniture? Here’s my response.
Between the age of five and 16 a child will spend around 12,000 hours sat on furniture that is deemed too dangerous for a teacher to use as their main seat. Health and safety legislation requires that employees are given furniture that protects their back and (usually) this means that it will be height adjustable as well. Children, incredibly, are treated as visitors to the school and are not covered by this legislation. They can be given the kind of seat that you find in doctors’ waiting rooms, village halls and other places with occasional need for basic seating. Such seats are typically designed to be cheap and easy to stack away in the corner (or on a desk). They do not deemed safe under health and safety law for long term use.
Now, what are the consequences of using a seat designed for occasional short meetings as your main seat for the whole of your time at school? The following is taken from a number of sources, including our own research, advice from spinal surgeons and a submission to the All Party Parliamentary Group on Education made by my colleague Anthony Hill:
Plastic seats are designed around a 90 degree bend at the waist and knee. It is physically impossible to sit in this manner without stressing the lower back. In fact, the person who popularised this position faked the pictures ‘proving’ that this was a safe way to sit. It is popular with manufacturers because it makes the seats easy to stack and therefore reduces transportation costs.
The seats used in British schools fit the measurements of children as they were in the 1950s. Today’s children are anything up to 10cm taller.
It is physically impossible to sit at a right angled chair and read something on a horizontal table without leaning forward. Doing so puts stress on the neck as it requires the person to suspend an 8lb weight (the head) in space in front of their shoulders.
The average focal length of a child is much shorter than that of an adult. Consequently they have to lean forward even more.
Sloping the desk (as they used to do in Victorian reading rooms and schools) greatly reduces neck strain, makes reading easier and has been shown to improve handwriting.
21% of children experience backpain by age 16. 15% of children under age 16 seek medical attention to deal with it.
Research conducted in Finland showed that height adjustable furniture led to significantly improved pass rates (ie fixed height furniture can reduce pass rates).
UK spending on school furniture is just 10% of the EU average
According to the British Educational Suppliers Association, “No EU country will purchase typical UK manufactured fixed height school furniture”.
A child sat on a plastic seat will typically begin to feel discomfort within 15 minutes. After that point it is a battle between the teacher and the furniture to hold the child’s attention.
An article that I wrote discussing the impact of furniture on concentration and health can be downloaded from the following location:
The latest adverts for super-light, super-green laptops shine a very interesting light on the question of disadvantage and design.
All adverts are designs. They are intended to both cause and remove anxiety.
1. Cause. The manufacturer wants you to feel dissatisfied with your existing product
2. Remove. They want you to feel that replacing it would be a positive step, even to the extent of making the world a better place.
Examples abound. For instance, those plug in devices that spray perfume into the air every half hour are intended to distress and upset by making you wonder if your house smells. Having it ‘refresh’ (ie pollute) every half hour is presented as a way of providing a nice welcoming environment for family and guests.
But Apple’s latest offering really does take some beating. It is a concious and deliberate attempt to deceive buyers into thinking there is something wrong with their existing model, and that replacing it would help to save the world:
Some years ago, I was asked by the MD of a large freight company what he could do to reduce his impact on the environment. Should he replace the fleet with a new ‘green’ alternative? No, I answered, he should keep on using the existing fleet until they fall apart. The reason for that is to do with the cost of replacement, which is basically another way of saying that being green means reducing your additional impact on the environment.
According to a friend who works at Arup (a global technology and engineering company), the cost of replacement of a single laptop is a huge multiple of its actual cost and weight. The CPU in a new ‘green’ laptop (like all computers) will be made by creating vast silicon mines; the plastic in the keyboard by drilling into the oceans; the case by melting rocks to extract aluminium. If you include all the materials that were destroyed in manufacturing your light-as-air laptop, it would actually weigh around 100 tonnes.
If that is how much damage a laptop does, then imagine how much goes into manufacture of a fleet of lorries. Adverts such as the one above systematically make no mention of the environmental cost of purchasing. It is certainly the case that sticking with your existing laptop - no matter how inefficient it is - is better for the environment than scrapping it and building a new one. And note that Apple’s laptop is described as ‘recyclable’ not ‘recycled’.
Adverts such as this are intended to delude people into feeling good about environmental destruction. They lead to the paradox whereby people building a green school will buy new ‘green’ laptops for 1000 children, unaware that they have created a hole in the ground big enough to take 100,000 tonnes of desolation. And that is just for the laptops.
The cost of manufacturer is also a multiple of its sale price - because someone else has to pay to clean up the mines, the smoke plumes, the landfill and the airborn toxins created by the manufacturing process. So when I see an advert describing its product as ‘light’, ‘recyclable’ (not recycled), and free from ‘many’ of the toxins, I don’t see green - I see red.
Before you buy your next laptop please consider the following points:
All laptops built in the last five years are capable of running any and all office programs.
New memory costs £20. New batteries cost £30. New hard disks cost £40.
In order to deliver the laptop at a price of x, costs of several times x will have been transfered to another person or sector of the economy. For instance, manufacturing will be transfered to a country where employees are not entitled to healthcare, and the cost of cleaning up the toxic damage will be transfered to governments or simply ignored.
Your laptop will have been deliberately designed to look out of date within 12 months. Before replacing it, think about how you use it rather than what it looks like. Wouldn’t it be good if people made old laptops their badge of eco-credibility?
If you are still reading this I would like to point you towards The Story of Stuff. This amazing and compelling 20 minute video will hold you in its grip and have you squirming as it explains, in simple and elegant ways, just how destructive we have become. It is a truly brilliant basis for teaching about the environment and may help you to see how we create systems that hide the consequences of our actions.
In an earlier posting I pointed out that as of today we live on an urban planet. In 2008, for the first time in history, a majority of the world’s 6.6 billion population were recorded as living in towns and cities.
The implications really are incredible:
The pace of acceleration. As recently as 1841, England was a rural country as a majority of its people lived in villages or hamlets. In 1851, it became the first urban country as the census taken in that year finally showed a majority of its citizens living in cities. At that time, with around 1.2 billion people on the planet, around 90% of the global population would have been classified as living in rural environments.Now, as Vietnam enters the industrial era (in 2007 industrial output overtook agricultural for the first time) we hear that just over half of the 6.6 billion people alive right now live in towns and cities. When England became the first urban country, London became cloaked in smog; as planet Earth becomes urbanised I wonder whether Ozone holes and climate change are the price that we will pay.
How to provide for ever-greater numbers of people in ill-health (particularly the elderly). When the welfare state was established (1949) there were around nine people of working age for every person who was retired, and the latter had a life expectency of around three years from retirement. Today, there are around four people of working age for every person who is retired, and (thanks to expensive medication, amongst other things) the average life expectency of a senior citizen upon retirement is at least ten years. By 2060, the ratio of working age to retired will by 2060 have fallen as as low as two to one. A third of the population will be over 65 and nearly half of retired people will be over 80. Source: William Reville writing about a Eurostat news release.
We see politicians wrestling with the implications every day. What should they do? Reduce state pensions? Raise taxes? Open the borders to immigrants? Raise the retirement age? As ever, the answer seems to be “Do all of them, but don’t admit to doing any of them”.In Russia, they have opted for another scenario: they are presently paying young mothers around £6500 every time they have another child. This scenario is likely to be copied by many countries (for instance, the European Union, which is heading for a 40 million shortfall in people of working age). While this may produce a workforce able to support the elderly, it also places an even greater burden on natural resouces and distribution systems linked to urbanisation.
How to ensure equitable distribution of natural resources. Forget food, oil and gas. Over the next 100 years, access to water is predicted to become the chief cause of conflict. In anticipation of this, Singapore, second only to Rotterdam in the global oil-refining stakes, is presently attempting to become water self-sufficient. It is doing so for military as well as social and economic reasons.The reason is that as governments expand their populations and seek to protect the welfare of their citizens, they will come under pressure from their own people to annexe natural resources such as water. Rivers which flow across two countries might, for instance, be dammed to keep the water upstream. As countries seek to protect their own citizens, staking claim to water, gas, oil and food, the most likely outcome for all is war.
Moore versus Malthus. Previously, we have relied on a form of Moore’s Law to get us out of situations like this. While demand for state support increased, so did productivity. By using machinery and technology we were able to create more goods for sale, which increased state revenue. It is possible that similar technological innovations will spare us this time (or at least delay the inevitable). However, there comes a point at which everyone who wants one has one, or where they have run out of money. For the moment, the latter is true. Urbanisation is an attempt to bring more people into the market, but it will bring its own price.
Two quick examples come to mind. Firstly, as fast as the population is expanding, the size of cities is expanding faster. In other words, every time we build a city we destroy more arable land than is required to sustain the people within it. Secondly, cities are remarkably good at spreading disease and trapping people during disasters. Should a man-made pandemic like HN51 reach any urban environment, Malthus (who predicted that when populations expand too fast they inevitably encounter massive loss) will succeed Moore as most significant predictor of our times.So what does this mean for disadvantage? The desire to look after an increasingly elderly population is already leading governments to amplify the problem by encouraging a rise in the birth rate. The subsequent rise in demand for natural resources will almost certainly lead to war. The natural consequence of that will be hunger, disease, and millions of refugees.
Thanks to everyone for making 2008 such a fantastic year for us.
As my wife and I embark on a much-overdue break, I have just one question for readers of Disadvantage and Design: how will you remember 2008?
For many Westerners, the defining memories may be of the Beijing Olympics, or of Barack Obama becoming the first black President-elect, the credit crunch or the truly awful prospect of a global pandemic.
For me, it comes down to one simple but truly extraordinary revelation. In 2008, for the first time in history, a majority of the world’s people were recorded as living in towns and cities.
As of today, we live on an urban planet.
In the words of Yeats, “All is changed, and changed utterly.”
May I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy, peaceful and prosperous new year.
There was an interesting interview with Malcolm Gladwell in a recent Irish Examiner (not available on web at time of writing). Gladwell is best known for his seminal work “The Tipping Point” and is now counted as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential thinkers. However, Gladwell himself would acknowledge that there is a difference between influential thinking and accurate thinking.
One of the most interesting arguments put forward in the interview is that, in the same way as pilots generate confidence by amassing flying hours, we can generate change simply by doing it for long enough. In a world which is biased towards particular types of achievement, for instance academic qualifications, he argues that working class children fall behind simply because they are more likely to spend their summer holidays playing rather than attending summer camps or just reading and talking about issues with their parents. He backs this up with five year studies of children’s performance in literature and mathematics.
The argument, as presented in the interview, seems to contradict his other point – that people who labour in unfashionable industries and in support of unpopular causes can suddenly amass great influence due to a change in fashion or perspective. Children who spend all day talking with their parents or developing skills at summer school may go on to have a very successful career – but it is likely to be one built in imitation of someone else. Children who sit at home playing online games rather than talking with their parents may end up suffering in the long term – but equally, they could be amassing experience that will serve them well in the future – perhaps as surgeons operating battlefield robot medics from afar. We need to guard against the absolutism that is inherent in short, punchy, provocative books such as this.
There are other points put forward in the interview, including the merits of positive discrimination (which, in the end, is the reason why Barack Obama reached the White House). However, Gladwell’s argument ultimately amounts to a call for working class children to spend more of the year at school, for discriminated minorities to spend more of their time accessing areas that are traditionally closed to them, and for all of us to rack up more flying time in areas that are largely unknown to us as a way of acquiring confidence.
All of this casts an interesting light on questions I was asked recently while giving a talk on design for disability at the National University of Ireland in Galway. One of the big questions was “How can we get the public services to commission work of the type you have highlighted?”
Maybe a better way of looking at it would have been to ask “How can we provide more flying time for the public services to build confidence in design?” Answers on a postcard to…
Thanks to everyone for the incredibly positive feedback following my talk at the NCSL conference in London today; it’s flattering, and energising, to know that the ideas put forward made sense and have had an impact. Although many of the images used in the presentation are covered by licensing restrictions, I’ll do my best to put a version up here at some point this week.
[Photo used with permission]
My own thoughts about the two days include the following:
We perhaps do children a dis-service when we focus on change without considering continuity. Yes, there has been a lot of change since the internet took off in 1991 and children are now using it in ways that adults find almost unfathomable. But on the other hand, children are largely the same as they were 50,000 years ago, and will continue to be so for the unforeseeable future. Throughout that time, they have always needed to bend and stretch, to test themselves against others and seek out new stimuli. When we focus on the internet and online gaming we miss the fact that children are sitting in positions that are inherently bad for them, exercising only their finger-tips. We need to think about physical agility every time we consider learning.
Encouraging adults to set up accounts on Bebo reflects a colonial attitude in that it robs children of their own uniqueness. One of the most important aspects of a child’s identity is their difference to adults. When adults wore trousers, children adopted jeans. When adults adopted jeans, children adopted flares. We should respect their right to cultural distinctiveness. Bebo, txt and glottal talk reflect an on-going desire by children to have a ‘members-only’ club for that excludes adults. We should cherish them as proof that children are still exactly as different as they have always been.
It’s great to see the National College showing such commitment to supporting schools as they go through the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity that BSF is described as. Quite why we have to build all these schools in one burst rather than spreading it out remains a mystery to me. My own role, as it turned out, was to provide some balance to the idea that BSF (and design) is about buildings. I emphasised (and will continue to say) that schools are both a place of learning and a way of learning. Both the building and the educational systems used within can be re-designed to great effect. But which should come first? Is the building really a catalyst (ie a prerequisite) for change? According to CABE, 90% of school buildings completed in the last two years have been judged ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’ by users. Knocking down and rebuilding Grange Hill delivers no educational benefit unless it is accompanied by widespread and emphatic systemic change. By contrast, Hellerup was built around an entirely new approach to learning. The message is very clear: the education service on offer needs to be redesigned before the new building is created.
One of the most interesting questions of the conference (for me) was “What do you do?” In part, that is a statement about the educational community’s exposure to design – but it also reflects the slightly unusual nature of our work. Most people think that designers create products like chairs and iPods. However, there is more to it than that. What we do is called “service design.” In effect, we help people to rescue failing public services. We do this by using a technique called ‘user led design’. This means working with people who are on the receiving end of a flawed service helping them to fix it, or even visualise and build replacement models. We’ve helped disaffected children to visualise more interesting education systems, we’ve helped marginalised communities to plan for the future, and later this week I’ll be working with some PhD students in Galway to help them understand how disability issues could be addressed more effectively. Hope that makes sense!
In case you missed it (and it was competing with news of Barack Obama’s election), live 3D holograms are now a reality.
On US election night, CNN broadcast a live interview between two cities using real time 3D holograms. Instead of appearing on a TV screen ‘from our other studio’, the guest seemed to be in the same room as the presenter. The effect really is stunning. Guest artist Will.I.Am also took part, hinting that the next step will be bands playing live in your studio from wherever they happen to be.
Here’s an excerpt from the event:
What’s this got to do with disadvantage? Well, if present pricing trends continue, this technology will have become relatively mainstream by 2013 - thus you could conceivably have something like it in your new school if you are due to enter a rebuild programme any time after 2011. The applications are endless - but one that particularly appeals to me is the idea of having teachers from other countries running lessons in conjunction with a ‘real’ one.
Outside of the school sector, we could potentially put these into hospitals so that consultants in London could do real time 3D assessment of patients in Manchester. Firemen and prison officers could potentially use a blend of virtual and physical environments to rehearse scenarios.
Just yesterday I was making a point about the importance of technology forecasting to a client. If you think that ICT means more and faster laptops for students then you are making a big mistake… I’ll come back to this point in another posting.
With so many blogs out there it is hard to find time even to check whether your favourite ones have been updated. So here are two ways of having the blog delivered to you automatically.
RSS. This will check for updates every day and deposit a copy in the folder called RSS Feeds (in the same panel as the Inbox, Sent Mail and Deleted Items). To add an RSS, just right-click on the RSS Feeds folder and select “Add a new RSS feed”. Outlook will open a box asking you for the name of the RSS feed. Enter the following: http://www.stakeholderdesign.com/thoughts/?feed=rss2
The only problem with RSS feeds is remembering to read them as they don’t go into your Inbox. If you’d prefer to have them arrive by email, then read on…
Simply Headlines is our preferred email distributor. If you visit their site (www.simplyheadlines.com) you can sign up for a free account and they will then deliver a customised email to you every day. The important thing to remember is that your daily email will contains only the subject matter that you choose; I’ve deleted everything apart from my favourite blogs, a daily photo and “On this day in history”.
To receive nothing other than this blog, just follow the new subscriber instructions as far as the “Choose the news and features you want” section. Then delete everything. Click on the “Add RSS” feed and enter http://www.stakeholderdesign.com/thoughts/?feed=rss2
Other sections of the new subscriber option allow you to decide on frequency and time of delivery so you can even have it arrive in time for your morning cup of tea. The picture below shows what it might look like. What could be better?
Here’s another great bit of free kit for schools that are trying to play a premiership game with championship budgets… Iterasi is a free download that allows you to make a free, online archive of any web page - yours included. So, no need ever to worry about web resources disappearing overnight.
I frequently make the point that companies that use design effectively have outperformed the FTSE 100 by 250% over the last ten years (in good times and bad). My source for this is a page on the Design Council website, but I have previously been beholden to them not to move, delete or update it. Iterasi takes away that worry.
Teachers will find it especially useful. Let’s say that you’ve found a web page that display’s the share price today for each FTSE 100 company as a graph. Over three days you could show one particular company soaring, diving and recovering - but only if you can archive each page. Using Iterasi you can view each archived page separately. Given the recent performance of HBOS shares in the UK this could serve as the basis of an excellent lesson on share valuations and recapitalisation.
Remember, archiving a page does not confer ownership! If you have placed someone’s page in an archive, remember to credit them as you use the information in the future.
My good friend John Connell first alerted me to it via his own blog. You can download the tool from the Iterasi website.
