Charlie Paton’s acceptance speech on taking the helm as Master of the Royal Designers for Industry, November 2023
Greetings to all and a special welcome to our new RDI’s. Congratulations!
I would like to thank Tom Lloyd for steering the ship with great skill, sensitivity and good judgement over the past 2 years, and a big thank you also to Wil for her wise counsel, diligent support and backup. Thank you Tom and Wil.
I must first make a confession, before anyone finds me out…
When Patrick Bellew first suggested proposing me as a candidate RDI over a decade ago, I said Patrick, you can’t do that, I’m a rubbish designer! He said, well so am I, but it doesn’t seem to matter.
I am learning that the term Designer has a broad and ever growing interpretation. There are many more definitions of Design than there are people in this room, but I especially love Alan Fletcher’s simplest:
Design is a mental utensil.
When I started my apprenticeship as a theatre electrician with London Festival Ballet, the National Theatre and the musical Hair, back in the late 60’s, it was more often than not that the Chief Electrician was the Lighting Designer. There were no Lighting Design courses in those days, but I was super lucky to get into the Theatre Design Course at Central School of Art and Design – with the inspirational Ralph Koltai RDI, at the helm, and be able to continue working as a theatre electrician at the same time, thus getting experience in both theatre and lighting design.
One of the things that lighting designers get to obsess about is the colour of light. What does it mean and what effect does it have? If you want to make something look spooky, you might use green light. Everyone looks weird. If you need to light a prima donna in an opera, she might insist that you use pink light. Most of them do. But what light does a leaf or a lettuce prefer for photosynthesis?
Most plants are green for reasons we don’t yet fully understand, but plants don’t prefer green light, rather the opposite. Plants are green because they absorb red and blue light – they reflect green light, which is what we see.
If you take green out of white light, you get pink. Pink light is the primary driver of photosynthesis. It was learning that plants and Prima Donnas had something in common – that I had my eureka moment, which eventually led to the Seawater Greenhouse design.
In the late 60’s, those heady and hippy days of change, we had no need for qualifications or passing exams, but we were encouraged to challenge and question everything - critical thinking – while at the same time learning and practising all the crafts that go into putting on a show.
My guru’s and mentors were people like:
Buckminster Fuller – who pioneered applying laws of nature to the design of structures.
Fritz Schumacher who wrote the hugely influential book: Small is Beautiful, and
Victor Papanek –who wrote Design for the Real World. To this day I am still haunted by the first sentence on the first page of that book..
There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few…
I thought I should slip that in just to cheer everyone up…!
He observed that In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation. I am sure he would shudder to learn that we have now replicated such human dominance across the planet.
The Weizmann Institute recently published their findings in Nature, that Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass.
Does this matter and should designers accept the blame? I rather think it does and that we should.
As Fritz Schumacher pointed out “anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist (Schumacher was himself an economist). He observed that the systems of Nature of which we are a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting and self-cleaning. Not so with man-made technology.
This explosion happened largely on our watch, but I still believe that design and creative thinking – with our ‘mental utensils’ will help us to correct this. Steve Jobs said that creativity was about connecting the dots – but there are an awful lot of dots to connect. Let me show you a few of the main ones:
We can go a long way to solving all of these problems simply by adding water, and in so doing, repairing the water cycle. If all the land area degraded by human activity were one country, it would cover 40% of the earth's land mass, and be bigger than Russia.
Just adding water enables plants to grow, providing food and forests, which in turn cool the planet and yes, actually make a dent in reducing sea level.
This may all sound hopelessly naïve, but NASA did a study where they simulated the effects of planting trees in the Sahara and Australian deserts.
And look, hey presto, planting and irrigating forests would cause surface air temperatures to drop by 4° to 8°C while resetting the carbon balance to net zero. Yes, the costs of doing this are colossal but maybe the costs are negative when offset by the benefits?
Around the time of this study a Munich based industrial group, companies such as Siemens, Bosch, Schott Glass etc proposed the idea of harvesting solar energy from North Africa and sending it to Europe. It was called Desertec.
Again, massively expensive, and it was considered at the time, especially by Angela Merkel and her economic advisors, that gas from Russia was a cheaper option – as indeed it was… In 2010 gas cost 13 euro / MWh. 12 years later in 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine and gas went up 18-fold to 240 euro MWh. Had Desertec gone ahead, would Putin have been able to afford invading Ukraine?
The Desertec concept still lives on, but the economics have shifted dramatically since it was first proposed. Solar Power is now the cheapest on the planet, provided you are in a sunny location. A UK company – Xlinks have developed a scheme to transmit solar + wind power from Morocco directly to the UK and they don’t need state funding to do it. The economics stack up.
We have a dream called:
One World, One Sun, One Grid
The sun never sets for the entire earth
Prime minister Narendra Modi, 2018
Our contribution to all this suggests that solar power installations could, and indeed should, include seawater desalination and evaporative cooling to provide fresh water and cooler air – to enable plant growth, and to focus on the areas where it would be of greatest benefit to the local populations, especially those most threatened by desertification.
This map illustrates such places. See how they provide a close overlap with the most productive regions for solar energy?
Let me illustrate this with an example on the edge of the Australian outback.
It turned out to be highly successful, but also hugely expensive, so we set about designing a simpler solution – specifically to suit the huge expanses of degraded land, and we built a pilot in Somaliland – also somewhat against the odds. Somalia is perhaps the worlds No 1 failed state where drought, desertification and climate change have made drought the norm, and famine follows drought. The rainfall graph tells the story: Since 1906, rainfall has declined by 80%. Compare the illustration bottom left of Hargeisa in 1850 with now.
This simple shade net solution is over 100 times cheaper than the Australian project, but it is still driven entirely by sunlight and seawater, making its own fresh water, and growing tomatoes, lettuce and cucumber, as well as making salt.
Let me show you a 1 minute animation that explains the process and how we envisage it may be scaled up:
We pump seawater to our greenhouses. Some is turned into fresh water to irrigate the plants, but most of it runs over evaporator panels.
The wind blows through the evaporators, making the air cooler and more humid. This substantially reduces the water needed by growing plants.
Fresh produce can now be grown and salt is made from the concentrated brine. The cool, humid air doesn't just affect crops in the greenhouse, but also the downwind environment, creating oasis conditions where we have adopted a more traditional forest gardens approach
This approach effectively mimics the water cycle. What goes up must come down - re-greening degraded and desertified land over time.
At scale, growing forests capture carbon while growing food and restoring biodiversity.
See? Too easy! but don’t you have to be by the sea for this to work? let me show you a few other solutions:
A similar scheme for Egypt has often been proposed, and most recently by the Architects SOM. Egypt has one of the lowest levels of rainfall in the world – just 10mm/year. It relies entirely on the Nile – which doesn’t provide enough, and the flow goes through 11 countries in Africa, causing endless conflicts on how to share it equitably. It is often cited as a potential trigger for water wars. The Qattara Depression is 130m below sea-level and 50km from the Mediterranean Sea. A tunnel could provide both hydroelectricity and refill the depression, which could then become a lake of 19,000 square km, and kick start the cooling and reafforestation of the Sahara.
Egypt also has borders with Israel and Gaza, where water wars have been going on decades. Although they are not referred to as water wars, a root cause of the conflicts in the region is the inequitable ownership and control of water.
This satellite image illustrates Gaza, the most densely populated region on the planet, next to an area of intensively irrigated farmland. It explains why the ground water in Gaza is no longer fresh water, but sea water.
For over 50 years, a ‘Peace Canal’, also known as the ‘Red Sea - Dead Sea Conveyor’ has been discussed and the World Bank and many others have developed detailed feasibility studies. Saving the Dead Sea from collapse must be a desirable outcome in itself, and the drop of 400m gives the potential for substantial and continuous production of hydro-power. But having an inexhaustible supply of sea water, and converting much of it into fresh water, must surely go a long way to improve the lives of all the people living in the region, as well as restoring the vegetation that collapsed, through desertification – some 5 centuries ago, apparently as a consequence of King Solomon’s mines and their voracious appetite for charcoal for smelting copper.
Banksy, as usual, hits the mark – ‘Just Add Water’ A climate recipe.
I leave you with a quote from one of my favourite books.
The prospects for humanity are somewhere between glorious and dire. It’s hard to be more precise.
The Secret Life of Trees, Colin Tudge