Nov 2, 2023

How important is it today to embrace AI including LLM as part of wider professional practices, those dealing with creative, IP, and planning fields?

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

************************************************

Imagine a situation where you as an architect, interior designer or furniture designer go to a client with a couple of alternative design options and you find the client ready with dozen odd design and remodeling alternatives of their own, along with the articulated conceptual description and most efficient cost estimates; just because an app on their phone today or tomorrow allows them to do so effortlessly. Imagine a situation where these AI-based apps and websites, for instance, produce highly tailored designs that precisely suit the personality and profile of the client based on their psychometric analysis, and health profile among others. Also imagine AI making it possible to deliver different bespoke design solutions for each of 1000 odd units of mass housing before handover, including different choices and grades of material, finishes, and appliances tailored to each unit and to the preference and paying capacity of each household; something which is certainly beyond the means and resources of individual architect or firm. Likewise, hundreds of possible logos, products, land use, and masterplan options which AI can generate just like that. These are the cases of AI overshadowing your manual hard work in times to come. It may even qualify as an existential crisis for creative professionals.

It makes one think how prepared we are today to embrace the use case application of AI and LLM in the creative and idea-driven fields; and the answer is, we are not as prepared as we think or as we should be.

For example, around 20-odd years ago, architectural education and architectural professional practice were going through a similar but slower quantum shift, i.e., from analog to digital. That was made possible through the means and tools like the proliferation of affordable computers, emerging drafting and visualization software, and access to online resources among others, all happening at the same time. These technological shifts changed things like lesser focus and reliance on hand-drawn concepts, moving away from hand-rendered visualization, physical drafting tools slowly getting obsolete, and lesser trips to university libraries among others. On different parameters, these were good and bad for the industry. On the one hand, it helped access new resources, forge possibilities, and made way for faster execution; but on the other hand, it also led to the mechanization of creativity and loss of sublimity and fluidity of imagination.

At that point in time, other than a few privileged niche institutions, the architectural education and architecture industry in general especially in the global south were certainly not prepared for this shift, at least they had no concrete strategy or plan in place to fast embrace this technological transition that was at the doorstep. That is evident from the fact that there was no corresponding radical restructuring that could be seen in architectural curricula or radical transformation that could be seen in architectural professional practice. It is understood because traditionally socio-technological changes take longer, sometimes a decade or so, before fully integrated into practice. It is also understood because it was a different time and a different pace of technological diffusion.

Today we are witnessing a technological breakthrough that is happening every other day, that is immensely disruptive, shapeshifting, and at an unparallel pace in history, be it Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) potential use cases. In creative, conceptual, and vision-driven knowledge areas like design, architecture, and even urban planning, the impact of the same is unfathomable. Unless serious thought and effort are given to understand the impact and application of AI and LLM in the above areas by academia and practitioners alike, we are either going to miss the unparalleled opportunity that AI and LLM offer today or technology is going to outpace education and industry practice, making them look like outdated craft and institutions.

When it comes to technology, there was some ignorance, skepticism, and resistance 20 years ago and there is again apprehension and lack of comprehension today; today it’s about technology like creative AI. The discomfort of not knowing how technology like text-to-image, text-to-animation, ChatGPT, and whatnot may shape the industry, is obvious. The only difference is that today not immediately embracing AI in education and practice, may come at unforeseen and unparallel costs. The forces of technology are inescapable and contagious today, it may only be a wise idea to be an early adopter and to embrace the changes. The possible way might be to swiftly acknowledge, integrate and treat AI in design, architectural, and planning education as well as professional practices, as an aid to the scenario building, design thinking, and optimization process.

This may also mean for everyone, all the academic and professional institutions involved in some sort of design and planning process, to increasingly shift their focus and energy from creativity, drafting, visualization, and project economics (increasingly being taken care of by AI), to originality, system thinking, design and life philosophy, causality, value proposition, and core human values, which AI today may not entirely be equipped to address. Thinking of what differentiates creative souls and humans in general from AI, it occurs that while AI including LLM may logically synthesize perceivable output based on the vast dataset and training, AI has not yet reached a point to have the ability like encountering eureka moments, ideas that descend unconsciously and in dreams, surreal and spiritual experiences as humans do.

Author: Anoop Jha

Image: Pixabay

************************************************

[Recent update

Starting 2024, launching urban management, interior design, home decor and commissioned artwork services in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

Please Note, that I am also conducting a FREE 45-minute online individual consultation on your interior design and home decor needs and aspirations if you are in the Netherlands or even internationally. Drop me an email at anoop.jha@gmail.com

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

Instagram interior design page @urbantenets

Instagram fine art and illustration page @urbanoregional

************************************************

#AI #design #architecture #designthinking #urbanplanning #artificialIntelligence #valueproposition #designphilosophy #university #collegeofarchitecture #technology #distuptivetechnology #AIusecase #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #Utrecht #Hague #Netherlands

Ways we solve world problems i.e., by education, by reward-penalty, and by design - What worked, what is the catch, and where the focus should shift?

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

************************************************

The way we have been trying to solve world problems i.e., by education, by reward-penalty, and by design - What worked, what is the catch, and where the focus should shift?

SOLVING PROBLEMS THROUGH EDUCATION

Education is usually considered the universal and baseline intervention to solve world problems, but there is a catch. Education here may imply, in all its encompassing connotations, from the simple awareness, to the education system, to Reading, Writing, Arithmetic (RRR), to research and innovation, to system thinking, and anything that enables us and inspires us to take action to solve the problems in the life of the individual, community, and world at large.

The catch here in terms of education is manyfold, first, education may take a decade or generation or two to actually see the benefit and by that time whole context and definition of the problem may change. Second, education doesn’t guarantee the resultant desired action due to the lack of accountability, i.e., in spite of education, one may or may not choose to act in a specific expected manner. Third, there is no common denominator in the diversity and pursuit of specialized education, i.e., while everyone acknowledges, faces, and is to some extent accountable for aggravating common world problems through their action, be it a subject of climate change, energy crisis, poverty, inequality, material scarcity, erosion of bio-diversity, etc. but just education has not been a panacea for these problems. The “education” around common big world problems that impact each one of us without discrimination, must find its way to the curriculum across hierarchy and specialization of course without discrimination, i.e., the themes mentioned above (like climate change, poverty, inequality etc.) must be introduced and taught to every stream of education, irrespective of hierarchy and specialization, i.e., from science to law, to agriculture, to hospitality, to philosophy and more. Big world problems require collective action and collective consciousness to resolve them, and for that, a common definition of problems must be understood, and a baseline sensitization and sensitivity across the educated population must be there.

SOLVING PROBLEMS THROUGH REWARD-PENALTY

Reward-penalty is another superimposed approach tried and tested over centuries to solve a range of world problems, essentially in an attempt to bring order. There is the catch again. Reward-penalty may imply here every enforcement effort like incentives, recognition, penalty, and punishment, imposed primarily by institutions of all kinds, across all hierarchies, that encourage actions that are compliant with social and statutory norms and discourages any action otherwise. The simple catch here is this is the archaic notion of attempting to solve problems. In a utopian scenario, in a civilized and conscious world, the systems and actions should be self-regulatory and should be in equilibrium on their own, but the counter forces like unawareness, ignorance, greed, pursuit for short-term gain, etc lead to unbalance and disproportion of individual and collective actions, which hence in turn require checks and balances in terms of reward-penalty.

SOLVING PROBLEMS THROUGH DESIGN

Finally, what you can’t solve through education and reward-penalty, you solve through design. Acknowledging that the most urgent and big challenges of the world are usually wicked problems, still solving problems “by design” may possibly be the most appropriate and fastest way to attempt to solve the small and large problems that the world is facing. The “design” here may imply a framework, schemata, method, system, philosophy, engineering or automation, that provides a ground, a conduit, or a datum, which is conducive, self-regulatory, and self-healing; and that works even if there is a lack or disparity of education and enforcement in terms of reward-penalty. There are numerous ways, examples, and possibilities of how the world’s key problems are being tackled and must be tackled through scaling up this approach of solving problems “by design”. These are a few examples and possibilities for solving problems by design –

✅Example includes, connecting poor and remote households with off-grid power, internet, banking, community food bank, and seed bank as a means of empowerment, access to education, food security, and means for bringing them out of the poverty trap, and not leaving this to fate and chance.

✅Possibility of leveraging existing supply chain networks of many kinds to serve multiple functions like food and medicine aid networks to connect local, remote communities and entrepreneurs to the global market, is a poised possibility.

✅Further, the possibility of leveraging big data to reinvent urban travel by predictive matching of ridership demand and supply around public transport so that no bus is running nearly empty in a city.

✅Leveraging big data and AI to reconfigure land use in real-time, matching vacant housing stock and other vacant land use properties with current and predicted housing demand and homelessness, to provide everyone with a home and much-needed shelter.

✅Redefining census parameters to include information including, household health condition, household debt profile, and specific skill profiles, that may encourage institutions to take steps towards better social security, service delivery, aid, well-being, encourage entrepreneurship, untapped employment like post-retirement and dual household income (translating opportunity cost to actual economic gains for households).

✅Preparing tangible layers/networks/ sub-systems and blueprints for autonomous circular cities and communities based on resource demand-supply match, sharing, pooling, product life extension, community storage and preservation, community repair facilities, off-grid renewable energy provisions, etc.

✅Applying AI and robotics for mass-scale waste profiling, segregation, and high-value reuse, and taking humans out of the unhealthy waste stream

✅Going beyond documentation, actually devising the easiest means of providing intellectual property rights to indigenous and artisanal community practices across the world to preserve these practices and protect them from exploitation, biopiracy, etc., and strengthen their socio-economic conditions.

There may be many more examples of how small and big problems of the world must be solved “by design”. Of course, there are inherent challenges in doing so primarily, through the aid of technology, but those challenges can always be tackled through appropriate governance.

Author: Anoop Jha

Image:Pixabay

************************************************

[Recent update

Starting 2024, launching urban management, interior design, home decor and commissioned artwork services in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

Instagram interior design page @urbantenets

Instagram fine art and illustration page @urbanoregional

************************************************

#climatechange #energytransition #poverty #inequality #circulareconomy #biodiversity #urbanplanning #urbanmanagement #mobility #transportplanning #census #AI #bigdata #supplychain #community #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #Utrecht #Eindhoven #Hague #Netherlands

From the traditional art of city-making to the science of future-ready cities.

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

************************************************

The cycle of the “city in making” through centuries somewhat seems to follow this evolutionary pattern.

TRADITIONAL ART OF CITY MAKING

a. Greenfield cities

[Utopian vision > identified potential > anchor economic activity as a growth magnet (or) infrastructure and real estate stock as a pull factor > achieving saturation and autonomous target functionality sooner or later > gets into brownfield city cycle]

b. Brownfield Cities

[Organic growth > agglomeration as a centre of the economy > critical mass > the influx of population > additive infrastructure and real estate stock as coping mechanism > deterioration of the environment and degradation of the quality of life > urban overhaul as remedial measures > agglomeration continues to grow and get caught in a remedial cycle > confrontation with new age climate emergency > sense-making and search for coping mechanism continues]

What is noteworthy here in terms of the evolution of the traditional art of city-making, is that despite the wealth of learning, the city-making process still seems to be caught at the remedial stage.

FUTURE-READY CITY

Two preconditions of a future-ready city seem to be on the horizon.

A. Finding new meanings and ways to make use of technology that is at doorsteps.

It appears that the summation of the plethora of technological aid that we have access to, for city-making until now, still only primarily served the purpose of sense-making and has only been used as a coping mechanism.

On the other side, the technology that is maturing and emerging right now, be it machine vision, automation, parametric, sensor fusion, LLM, advanced robotics, 5G/6G, quantum computing, or carbon capture etc., with AI as a binding factor, holds potential unlike anything witnessed before and offers an opportunity for potential application in the city-making unlike before and thus holds the key to achieve future-ready cities. The unprecedented pace of technological evolution that we witness today and onwards, seem to indicate that this is the ripe time to move away from the vicious cycle of remedial measure and coping mechanism associated with traditional city-making and city-retrofitting and leverage this opportunity to reflect and build something new, i.e., the future-ready city, be it greenfield or brownfield or a new type.

B. The governance must outpace technological breakthroughs.

While a comprehensive policy and robust governance framework are essential for managing the dynamic entity called “city”, it is essential that governance in any part of the world, itself has to be future-ready by thinking deep into the future, generating future-ready policies based on simulations, and hence must outpace the technological breakthrough.

Author: Anoop Jha

************************************************

[Recent update

Starting 2024, launching urban management, interior design, home decor and commissioned artwork services in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

Instagram interior design page @urbantenets

Instagram fine art and illustration page @urbanoregional

************************************************

#urbanplanning #futurecities #smartcities #AI #machinevision #IOT #5G #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #Utrecht #Eindhoven #Hague #Denhaag #Netherlands

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

************************************************

The secret of the human edge over AI lies in undocumented knowledge.

The quality of online search results has improved manifold over say past 15-20 years and the quality and speed with which results are generated shall continue to improve with the advent of LLM, but the quality of such search results essentially still remains a function of underlying bulk content. The more data that will get added for processing the more refined results we’ll get, and more the data that will be used, segmented, labeled, and annotated to train machines, the more efficient AI use cases will be.

Thinking of machines and humans and what differentiates them, and taking a case of the decision-making process. The potential application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in boosting the degree of confidence in judgment is well understood. The application of AI in critical and scientific decision-making processes is also understood. It is also acknowledged that AI holds immense potential to supplement or eliminate part or bulk of human manual efforts and provide a fast baseline content for judgment and decision-making. That being said, still, the chances are that the key decisions across industry, businesses, and governance will continue to be made based on human judgment. The human judgment that stems from the life experiences of individuals and fraternity, not surprisingly most of which never gets documented. What differentiates the decision-making process of AI and human beings outside of the scientific application, is that the key decision made by humans goes beyond empirical evidence, rationality, and explanation and are also based on their instinct and their belief system. We are not even discussing the occult, spiritual, and depth of human subconsciousness. It is also noteworthy that AI is only as smart as the data it has access to, even if it may claim to extrapolate the data gap.

AI including Large Language Model (LLM) is fueled by data, but no amount of data seem to be enough to supersede the collective consciousness of human. The data that is undocumented is the missing piece of the puzzle and the documented data that AI has access to and on which it is being trained is possibly only the tip of the knowledge iceberg, and that's what will continue to differentiate humans from machines. This undocumented knowledge or data is almost like a treasure that is seated within the individual’s psyche, cultural experiences, contextual understanding, belief system, and their evolutionary instinct; such knowledge or data is hidden in plain sight and never gets documented, as there is no need.

How humans behave or act is many a time counterintuitive, intriguing and captivating. Each of these acts translates into experiences, the kind of experience that enriches individuals and fraternity but never gets documented, hence never becomes a data point. For instance, those seasoned drivers and commuters who take the shortcut route other than what is shown by the navigation app, by instinct as they have known the rhythm and streets of the city by heart over decades. Those investors who will buy stocks, or strike a deal based on numerology and their lucky number or based on perceived auspicious time or period, a deal that is different from predicted trends or obvious choice, as it goes with their belief system and has worked in their favor in the past. Those project leaders who navigate smoothly through challenging situations based on their life learning, that is nowhere to be found in textbooks and hardly get documented. Those businessmen who take day-to-day and big decisions based on the wisdom earned since childhood while helping their parents in their business, a kind of emotional intelligence not to be gained from business school. Also, those local guides who take you to hidden jewels of the city not to be found in best of the travel guide books, somehow remain a trade secret. Likewise the ordinary and extraordinary trade secrets or individuals, collective, fraternity, and sectors. The million interpretations of a single art piece and craftwork in the gallery and museum by varied spectators, many of which are no less vivid than the interpretation of an art critic. Even the quantum and richness of knowledge that gets instantly and momentarily generated in classroom discussions, ideation and Q&A sessions, but never find their way to the published literature of any kind or public domain. Examples of undocumented knowledge are innumerable, prolific and unfathomable.

The quest of mankind is to structure the knowledge, and the underlying assumption is that every case that is to be analyzed for empirical research has been categorized already, but no amount of sample size is large enough to tap into the experiences of individuals and the consciousness of the collective. Each individual’s experience is the rich embodiment of exceptions, like their life journey, meanwhile, the exceptions always get discarded in quest of a pattern, hence missing out on vital knowledge or data that stems from the individuals, subsets, and fraternity. This is an example of unstructured, undocumented data. AI and LLM while processing seemingly vast, heterogeneous data will most likely still continue to face the challenges of not having access to knowledge that is there but not documented, especially that is seated within individual, community, and culture, and remains obscure and unintentionally out of reach. Yes, one can pay to get the experiences documented and labeled for machine learning but that will still be like scratching the surface.

Acknowledging that humans bring a different value to the table, might be a solace in the turbulent changes in the technological landscape that is happening right now with no sign of slowing down.

Author: Anoop Jha

************************************************

[Recent update

Starting 2024, launching urban management, interior design, home decor and commissioned artwork services in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

Instagram interior design page @urbantenets

Instagram fine art and illustration page @urbanoregional

************************************************

#AI #LLM #Chatgpt #Technology #ML #Machinelearning #urbanplanning #smartcities #Rotterdam #Hague #Amsterdam #Utrecht #Spain #Barcelona #Germany #Stuttgart #Demnark #UK #EU #Europe

Cities must thrive!

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

************************************************

Offering economic choices and linking them to urban public spaces.

There is an inherent insufficiency in the way we plan urban spaces world over, that is a flaw of inertia, a self-limiting prophecy, that is this notion of designing mono-functional public, semi-public and outdoor spaces, irrespective of their size. The idea that a particular space and asset should only function in a way as per its perceived functionality. Because it has been done this way all along, the inertia of centuries. The perception itself is limiting, hindering choices and discarding opportunities. The idea that a parking space is to be designed and used only for parking cars or bikes with almost no functional heterogeneity. The idea that parks must only serve recreational and health purposes, denying multifunctionality. The idea that school should only be used for teaching, that too for an assigned grade, an asset that remains idle for the rest of the day and night, for instance. And more.

This inertia of what a city can offer to its citizens is inherited limitations of capabilities that we had centuries ago. The century-old idea of what city spaces should comprise of, the idea of its functional constituents like land use or degree of land use heterogeneity is based on human capabilities of calculation, modeling, and scenario building. Fitting the infinite choices within half-odd dozen land use, or a dozen or two land use compatibility matrix. While the computation power enabled by tools that we have today, has increased astronomically in past century, city planning frameworks and methodologies have not used them effectively world over.

On the other economic side, there are way too much of lost opportunity cost and several barriers to economic choices. If we just observe the skill profile of individuals, households and society around wherever we are or try recollect from our memories, if we do that even without any matrix, it is easily noticeable that we are surrounded by a lot of talent and scores of people with borderline entrepreneurial drive, irrespective of age, gender and ability. For instance, the guy just retired from financial services, with immense wealth of industry knowledge who can offer banking, investment, and financial advice to others. The homemaker who is excellent at cooking and baking. The part time worker who also has a knack of art. The business student who can teach the basics of marketing to others. And many more alike, possibly million others, who want to do something about their spare time and talent, but find processes too taxing, convoluted, and tortuous, and confronted by not having accessible, affordable and legit neighbourhood spaces to get in touch with their prospective customers. Those who may not be willing to go through the preparation of full-fledged business plan, or too shy or feel incapacitated to launch a startup, or may find business registration processes, tax compliance and legality of businesses too complex, or may not be willing to invest in commercial property, but who might still like to try some economic activity, given a choice, given a humble non-imposing space in their neighborhood, on a nominal per day or hourly basis, those who might like to start small, with simple handholding, who might opt to rent a few square feet in public space, if available, where they can try sell their product or services. Not to be generalized as street vending activities, nor to be tagged as informal economic activity. The current threshold to enter into economic activity is too high for them to give it a try, so most of them simply drop the plan, and hence the loss of opportunity cost.

It is possible that through urban planning and urban design interventions, and through some procedural elasticity, city administration, labor department, and tax authorities together may solve this dilemma. This is to be done on a pilot scale for a year or two, before scaling up. What is required from them is that city administration allows experimental economic activities in a range of urban public spaces, they carve out hundreds or thousands of such small spaces from the existing public spaces and urban residual spaces to facilitate these economic activities, allow multifunctionality of semi-public spaces on a timeshare basis, and offer them to these people on a temporary basis, also allow real-time changes in land use at granular scale of square feet or so. Labor department that may allow such activities to happen while assuring the support infrastructure is in place, tax authority issues easy online and offline formality to be done for the legitimacy of such economic activities, further without the tax liability in say first 6 months. This period with access to space for functioning, will be sufficient for people to try many economic activities that they think they are capable to execute, without the associated burden, they will get real taste of trying new things hands-on and may decide if it makes business, societal and personal sense for them, and many of them may later decide to continue these activities on a regular basis while switching to formal business protocols and tax regime.

How difficult it could be to liberate economic choices even for experiment’s sake, how difficult it may be to repurpose public outdoor spaces and reassign multi-functionality in semi-public spaces to make them more heterogeneous and allowing integration of economic activities in them. If we remove the bureaucratic processes associated with it, rest is a fairly easy task and target to achieve. Any city and its citizens can thrive, it’s a matter of making choices that we haven’t made till now out of inertia, or possibly not thought about them.

Author: Anoop Jha

************************************************

[Recent update

Starting 2024, launching urban management, interior design, home decor and commissioned artwork services in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

Instagram interior design page @urbantenets

Instagram fine art and illustration page @urbanoregional

************************************************

#opportunitycot #economy #city #urbaneconomy #economic #urbanplanning #urbandesign #publicspaces #livelyhood #vocation #community #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #Utrecht #Hague #DenHaag #Netherlands

Where do we think a large share of finite resources get consumed?

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

************************************************

The blog post continues here...

There is wastage in terms of summation all the material, energy, labor, and time, that gets consumed in producing all the products that is never used, in creating infrastructure and built environment that never gets utilized or remains underutilized, through leakage in network like NRW, in creating services and systems that runs under capacity, in commuting to all the places that doesn't serve its intended purpose, in developing multiple design or planning alternatives 50% to 80% of which gets discarded, in all the repetitive works like digitization in absence of open-source ve
ctor data and more. Some of these have their due place, but there is also ample opportunities for saving on resources, manpower or time here.

Most of these seems to be a systemic problem rater than originating from individual action. Yes, also individual responsibility but specifically of those who are in decision making position, who can do something about over production, systems and infrastructure inefficiencies, underutilization, resource and time wasted in repetitive tasks, data hidden behind paywall that prompts repetitive works and more.

While it is understood that world problems that emerge and accumulate over decades, need similar cooling down period of decades to reverse or sequester or see a different fate, through tools like education and mass sensitization for instance. The urgency of resource, time, and energy conservation is such that, time is of essence here. Considering part of the problem is systemic in nature, that is also an advantage in a sense that, there is at least theoretical possibility that sub-parts of these problems can be solved in one master stroke. And this can be solved through design rather than education. A design flaw, be it systemic or otherwise, should ideally be solved though design intervention and process re engineering rather than education and appeal. This is only possible if we pause, see the point, and explore the possibility of fixing systemic flaws through design.

To tackle these, new ways of thinking must be encouraged, with technology as enabler, for instance production units which should explore producing alternative products in lean time using its existing infrastructure instead of overproducing a specific product. Technology for mindful traveling that allows getting more done in single return trip. Technology that allows matching spatio-temporal supply-demand in real time. Interoperability and open source data that curbs repetitive tasks allowing resources to focus on most critical aspects. AI that generates and tests alternatives in background so that manpower, time and energy can be targeted to enhance final output. And likewise.

Author: Anoop Jha

Image: Author

[Recent update

Starting 2024, launching urban management, interior design, home decor and commissioned artwork services in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

Instagram interior design page @urbantenets

Instagram fine art and illustration page @urbanoregional

************************************************

#AI #urbanplanning #economy #production #resource #circulareconomy #urbanmanagement #city #smartcity #Amsterdam #Rotterdam #Hague #Utrecht #Netherlands #EU #Europe

Being mindful of what socio-technological norms we celebrate, and need of constant reflection!

Please visit my consulting web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

************************************************

[NOTE: Thank you for visiting my Blog, hoping you will like it. Please Note, that I am conducting a FREE 45-minute online individual consultation on your interior design and home decor needs and aspirations, if you are in the Netherlands or even internationally. No strings attached. Drop me an email at anoop.jha@gmail.com to connect and schedule the session]

************************************************

The blog post continues here...

History has taught us that every new technological breakthrough that finds a social and business relevance today, becomes mainstream norm tomorrow, gets celebrated for a little while, until embedded issues starts to get recognised. Being mindful of what we celebrate today, means constantly reflecting on what is perceived as a good practice today, and challenging the norm only to find even better alternatives, and achieve next breakthrough as soon as possible.

This is true for any country or region, industry and sector, and examples are prolific.

An example for instance, what a waste of precious energy, manpower and time as we sort, crush, break, shred, smelt, glass, metal and plastic bottles and containers to recreate glass, metal and plastic bottles and containers once again with a fresh label. Somewhat with an illusionary sense of satisfaction that we have intercepted, retrieved and recycled the material, but at what cost? Even if we sort using AI only to crush and shread it, its still an inefficient process. Even though it may not qualify for low value reuse of material, its also not high value usage of material.

The large fraction of these bottles and containers of all sort, size and material which can be retrieved intact and reused in its current shape with very little efforts and science.

Crushing, grinding and smelting an otherwise intact (millions and more) glass bottles and metal cans, to its constituents, to rebuild the same bottle again defies all logic and sensibility, considering all the megawatts of energy that might have gone into the process over years. When a glass bottle or glass vase can technically be retrieved, refilled and reused an infinite times for instance.

All this as an example, done in a rush to celebrate something, like a technology that we seem to have mastered today and also in absence of finding an alternative like practical and scale use-case of reverse logistics and high value reuse, where bottle and metal cans go to original producers or local authorized partner/ affiliate/ distributors for refilling. This is possible only if we see the point, do the math, do policy and regulatory restructuring, brainstorm with industry and research entities, retrace the supply chain distribution path, take environmental cost into consideration and reimagin accountability matrix.

Author: Anoop Jha

Image: Author

************************************************

[Recent update

Starting 2024, I am launching urban management (urban segment), interior design and home decor services and commissioned fine artworks (design segment) in the Netherlands, serving local as well as international remote clients.

The design segment is also capable of serving the unique needs of expats including the Indian community in the Netherlands.

Please visit the web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

Please also check and follow my Instagram interior design page where I am starting with sharing thoughts on what makes a great interior design. Follow @urbantenets

Also, do not forget to check my Instagram fine art and illustration page @urbanoregional

Thank you for your attention!!]

************************************************

#circulareconomy #wastemanagement #energytransition #climatechange

#urbanplanning #smartcities #Rotterdam #Amsterdam #Utrecht #Hague #Denhaag #Netherlands #EU #Europe