This is a multimedia piece. For full effect please have this song playing while you read the article. - Annie.

During the afternoon of July 25th, the Design Exchange and the organizers of DigiFest 2008 ran their first charrette of a series that will spur innovative thinking around our treatment of water. The challenge of the day, admittedly rather misnamed í¢â‚¬Å“Adapting to Water Disastersí¢â‚¬  gathered 30 or so of Torontoí¢â‚¬â„¢s most creative thinkers to focus on imagining possible solutions to major catastrophic anomalies that the world could not have anticipated. I was happy to have been fortunate enough to participate.

Keynote Erik Davies, Senior Regional Program Advisor for the United Nations, Aceh, Indonesia, opened the problem space by showing some personally captured footage depicting relief work being done in Singapore today. The depiction of these current relief solutions being carried out, the mass burials, the attempt to construct new homes to specs decided upon by generations now extinct, proved to be more traumatic than uplifting. With mixed levels of comfort in the room, I noticed one man at the next table over glancing around the room nervously while seeking eye contact with anyone who shared his dismay. There were many eyes for him to meet.

Besides making us all squirm, Daviesí¢â‚¬â„¢ footage helped to put some simple facts about the anomalous tsunami of December 26th, 2004 into perspective for us: - The Boxing Day disaster was the second largest earthquake in the planetí¢â‚¬â„¢s history: it measured 9.3 on the Richter scale, ripped open the ocean floor 1000 feet wide, and knocked the planet off its rotational axis by half an inch.

- Out of the 250,000 people killed by the tsunami only 5000 of these casualties were in Thailand.

- The same wave carried the equivalent force of a 5 megaton TNT blast which is approximately the force of 1 million Hiroshima-type atomic detonations

- The average tsunami measures 30 meters high (the height of a 10 storey building) traveling at about 1000 km / hour, with the average wavelength being 1000 km long.

With these facts we realized that in one natural moment of the earthí¢â‚¬â„¢s history, absolutely everything that makes a society function is wiped out. The challenge was then laid out on the table: how do we rebuild it?Before dividing into groups to being our brainstorming, Davies made reference to Simon Winchesterí¢â‚¬â„¢s book í¢â‚¬Å“The Crack at the Edge of the Worldí¢â‚¬ , and pointed out that money is not necessarily the issue.

í¢â‚¬Å“You caní¢â‚¬â„¢t just rebuild civilization, you have to rebuild lives,í¢â‚¬  exclaims Davies. To this he added an ironically positive note: í¢â‚¬Å“Trauma studies have shown that 90% of all the tsunami victims were also recovering from political conflict, and the disaster actually created peace.í¢â‚¬ 

Questions began to flood my brain. Is this really a challenge for designers? Is this something we can actually solve? What is the role of innovation in the face of an anomaly? If people are part of the environment, a fact that we tend to ignore at our peril, can we meet demands that might be unrealistic? That very thought í¢â‚¬“ that we are not simply in the environment we are part of it, demands us to rethink how we live in the world.

My query was interrupted when Davies drew attention to his own: í¢â‚¬Å“Why did 911 change the world when the event that shocked it could be forgotten so quickly? One is an act of hatred, while the other is an act of God. One happened in an economy district, the other in the developing worldí¢â‚¬ ¦í¢â‚¬ 

Comparing the three years that followed these two drastic events might help us to draw some useful points of departure to begin the process of innovation. Where it might be easy for North America to decide that adaptive behaviour is more achievable for civilizations that have a simpler forms of living, it the same conclusion arrived at by Indonesian Muslims in regards to New Yorkers who rely on the very environment that threatens them í¢â‚¬“ How can Americans move out of the terroristsí¢â‚¬â„¢ way? Is it actually possible? It may seem like a silly question or at least one loaded with sarcasm, but weí¢â‚¬â„¢ve heard it repeated south of the border since the twin towers came down. Ití¢â‚¬â„¢s simply not easy to ask a community to move out of harmí¢â‚¬â„¢s way if they rely on the very environment that threatens it, especially as our access to water on this planet is increasingly limited. Any communityí¢â‚¬â„¢s belief system drives their behaviour, which cultivates their environment. Even when an anomaly arises, forcing people to question the systems in place, a change cannot occur unless the people holding that system in place experience a change in their beliefs. A quick survey would reveal that most people currently living in Vancouver probably doní¢â‚¬â„¢t believe that theyí¢â‚¬â„¢ll be living there when the tsunami hits the west coast of Canada í¢â‚¬“ although they are due for one any day. If they did believe it then their behaviour would be much different.

Perhaps this explains why we doní¢â‚¬â„¢t expect the anomalies, why we deal with its effects after they happen. Perhaps it explains why the UN is not looking to develop preventative solutions, but have turned to campaigning that we believe in the reality of anomalies in international situations. Consider, for example, the establishment of Islam in Indonesia, compared to what affect it had on believers when the hand of Allah wiped out civilization. Ití¢â‚¬â„¢s much the same as any culture found living in the shadow of a living threat made dormant by manner of some kind of disbelief. To New Yorkers it was a surprise attack on their economy, an anomaly in the history of America. Yet in the context of civilization, war on such terrorism is what we have come to expect. So it feels like no anomaly when the relief work that follows 911 is a war in the Persian Gulf. At this point, an intelligent member of the group spoke up with some amount of passion, í¢â‚¬Å“Any existing belief signifies a lack of belief somewhere else. Right now there is a lack of belief in the time and scale of the earth.í¢â‚¬  He was right, I thought, we doní¢â‚¬â„¢t know how to adequately address how we live in the environment because we are only so present in our minds here.Being fully present usually only happens if and when we notice the warning signs, the fish flopping on the beach, the ocean retreated a kilometer deep, the planes flying too close to the buildings. If our level of presence is imperative to our perception of anomalies, how can we react or adapt if we are not wholly present in the context in which they arise?

As the conversations continued around the room, a book came to mind that I am currently reading. It addresses why we become accustomed to others in our company accepting a phone call mid-conversation. It explores the level of presence in cultures, communities and individuals and discusses how being present helps to make profound change in the world. í¢â‚¬Å“Presence: Exploring Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society.í¢â‚¬  Four smart people got together to write this amazing book, Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers.

The co-authors are all members of SoL (The Society for Organizational Learning, Inc), an outgrowth of the former MIT Centre for Organizational Learning, a non-profit international membership organization that connects researchers, organizations, and consultants in over thirty countries in building knowledge for systematic change. More information on the topic can be found at www.presence.net as well as on Otto Scharmerí¢â‚¬â„¢s home page, dedicated largely to the study of presence as a social technology. www.ottoscharmer.com. Ottoí¢â‚¬â„¢s links are particularly interesting to the conversation. I will add one here to end on a note hopeful for the future of our technology. Although the avid thinkers at the Digifest charrette came up with some fantastic ideas, from SMS emergency communications systems to inflatable safety pants, we can only begin to fathom the best solutions to the anomalies of our climate when we are present enough to sense them.POEMS (Perceptually Oriented Ego-Motion Sensors) http://www.presence-research.org

The ambient sound you hear is produced by Toronto based sound artist Isabelle Noel. It was originally composed for Alissa Firth-Eagland and Brenda Goldstein's video "Spin" (2007), where Noel remixed the natural sounds captured during the teamí¢â‚¬â„¢s filming a take on feminist theory in Banffí¢â‚¬â„¢s Bow Valley.

Isabelle Noíƒ «l is a Toronto based musician, composer, and producer who has worked on numerous projects in audio and visual media. She has an interest in works based on re-contextualizing pre-existing audio and visual references. She has collaborated with filmmakers, choreographers, designers and visual artists in creating soundtracks and soundscapes for space, movement and narrative. Noelí¢â‚¬â„¢s practice involves ambient allegorical tracks and video focused on themes of memory and the geography of identity. Recently she has presented a series of music videos entitled "The Canadiana Project" at Mercer Union in Toronto, of which í¢â‚¬ËœSpiní¢â‚¬â„¢ was a successful component. Other recent projects include remixes featured on audio-art collective Ultra-Red compilations as well as live audio-remixing for their "Silent / Listen" performance at the Art Gallery of Ontario, a soundscape for artist Kianga Ford's "The Story of This Place" at the MoCA Miami, and a video in collaboration with Donna Szoke entitled "like", which was shown as part of the Year 01 Yonge-Dundas Billboard video series. Currently she is working on a sound and video installation, as well as the development of a series of experimental "mash-up" audio performances.