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We’re running out of time to flatten the curve — for climate changeWe’re running out of time to flatten the curve — for climate change

If any image has singularly captured the public’s attention during the coronavirus pandemic, it has been The Curve. The graph charts the incidence of new cases — and by extension, the use of hospital resources. The rush to flatten its peak ensures health care systems won’t be overwhelmed by a deluge of COVID-19 patients.

As environmentalists strive to draw lessons from the coronavirus response, some have paused to consider whether climate science offers any analogous chart in need of leveling. The activist and author Bill McKibben, for example, writing for the New Yorker, notes that people have “emitted more industrial carbon since 1988 than in all of prior human history, utterly failing to flatten the curve. (In fact, we call the diagram that outlines our dilemma the Keeling Curve, and it just keeps rising.)”

The Keeling Curve, while offering a useful benchmark for grappling with that other global calamity, is no climate corollary to the COVID curve. Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide is an effect of the behaviors that worsen climate change. We want the cause.

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The coronavirus pandemic highlights the need for a surveillance debate beyond ‘privacy’

The coronavirus pandemic has stirred up a surveillance storm. Researchers rush to develop new forms of public health monitoring and tracking, but releasing personal data to private companies and governments carries risks to our individual and collective rights. COVID-19 opens the lid on a much-needed debate.

For example, Google and Apple teamed up to offer privacy-preserving contact-tracing help. The scramble for data solutions is well-meaning, but whether they work or not, they generate risks beyond narrowly-defined privacy.

Everyone has extensive digital records — health, education, employment, police contact, consumer behaviour — indeed, on our whole life. Privacy is much more than shielding something we’d rather not share; surveillance also affects our chances and choices in life, often in critical ways.

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Decolonizing Design

“Decolonization” is a word we’re increasingly hearing at design events, often being used interchangeably with “diversity.” It’s important to emphasize that while the terms are linked, they shouldn’t be confused. Diversity is about bringing more people to the table. Decolonization is about changing the way we think. So what does that mean for design and designers?

To understand the place of decolonization within design, it’s vital to first get our terms straight. “Colonization” is rooted in indigenous peoples’ experiences of oppression—specifically, the seizure of native resources, as well as the embedding of Western ideology into society. The word “decolonization” was originally used to describe the withdrawal of a state from a former colony. Now, decolonization has come to represent a whole host of ideas: it’s an acknowledgement that in the West, society has been built upon the colonization of other nations, that we exist within a system of privilege and oppression, and that a lot of the culture we’ve come to see as ours has actually been appropriated or stolen.

Save for the editorial platform and research group Decolonising Design and a number of scholarly articles, there’s little readily accessible information online about what decolonizing means for design. So with this article we wanted to give an introductory overview of the concept, addressing the questions: How have colonial histories affected the way in which we design? And what can we do to adjust our mindset and practices?

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The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Reshaping Global Protests

The global wave of protests in recent years has run headlong into the unprecedented array of lockdowns governments have imposed on their citizens to combat the new coronavirus. Despite the predictions of some observers, however, thus far there has not been a uniform ebbing of protest activities. As a new update of the Global Protest Tracker helps illustrate, a more mixed picture is emerging.

Most major protests have indeed faltered or subsided. In France, there have been no news reports of yellow vest protests since mid-March, while unions in Colombia striking in opposition to President Iván Duque’s policies have had to cancel public marches. In New Delhi, authorities disbanded the women-led sit-in protest in the Shaheen Bagh neighborhood, which had become a central site of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act that was passed into law last December.

Yet some protests have maintained their presence in public spaces. In Lebanon and Iraq, for example, protesters have continued to gather in the streets, though in lower numbers than in previous months. In Israel, several thousand citizens of diverse political affiliations assembled in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on April 19 to protest what they saw as the erosion of Israel’s democratic system under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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A geopolitical earthquake

The covid-19 crisis is holding up a mirror to Western countries – making us realise that the perception we have of ourselves might be distorted. 2020 is shaping up to be one of the most difficult years since the end of the second world war. As unexpected as it is disruptive, the global pandemic has huge social, economic, and political consequences. Today, states are fighting a threat that is growing exponentially and puts most of their citizens at risk. This is a global war against an invisible enemy.

The coronavirus crisis will undoubtedly be a defining moment in contemporary history. We will have to change our way of living as we knew it for a considerable time. We will close factories, ground planes, and empty office skyscrapers, while closing borders and enduring long waits in supermarkets, overcrowded hospitals, and many online meetings. We will suffer a significant loss of life, while social customs such as hugging or shaking hands will temporarily disappear from our habits. There is no doubt that we will eventually overcome this crisis, but its effects could be as relevant as those of a concentrated blend of 9/11, the Great Recession, and the Ebola epidemic. After we return to some form of normality, many geopolitical divisions will have grown and we will all be left with a deep sense of vertigo.

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New public space in the city with new eyes

A critical reflection on the complex—and at times controversial—relationship between the city and new urban technologies.

The pandemic is prompting us to rethink basic categories of thought. Personal rights that were assumed to be non-negotiable in mature democratic societies are being renegotiated on the national and transnational level: we may be willing to let our governments control us, after all, if this means a faster and safer exit from total lockdown, and a smoother progression through the next phases of adjustment. At this stage, it is not as important whether or not we will give in to technological surveillance or we will find alternative ways to minimize contagion on a wide scale, as much as the fact that both directions are at the center of public debate in the face of emergency. The “Eyes of the City” are an integral part of either, and only a measure of the extent of their agency in the different folds of urban space can give design a role in the discussion.

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