Thinking about ecology and community

I was thinking today about the way in which the word ‘communities’ is being used to describe both physical and digital groups of people. I came across this article – Using Communities to Drive Performance and Innovation in Arup written by colleagues at my old company. They rightly show that online communities can only perform certain functions. They mention ‘powerful search’ and ‘threaded discussions’ but they do not believe that they can replace face to face or physical communities. Instead its all about balancing the costs and benefits of the physical and the digital.

I then looked at their home page and saw that Peter Head, their director of Planning and Integrated Urbanism is giving a lecture next week entitled, “Entering an Ecological Age”. “Human development is now following a dangerously unsustainable path globally,” he explains. “Waves of investment in low and middle income countries are accelerating this problem because they are following an unsustainable model. Our urban areas and methods of food production consume land and non-renewable resources inefficiently. But we can do something to turn the situation around: we can move towards an ecological age.”

At the SEA, we believe that an ecological approach is one of the key elements required to develop better (more creative, more engaging and more caring) products and services, whether they operate at a global or a local level.

We’d like to work with clients who have a similar belief or would like us to prove to them that this approach is worth following from an economic perspective as well as from a social and environmental one.

Please do get in touch.

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