Evolution of the practical means of change: The Metapallet
When I entered college, I wanted to be a designer, but the practical necessities pushed me into business and a furniture design business, but during that time, I continued to think of everything as a design problem, and the Club of Rome Report stimulated within me the solution I present here. It is heavily influenced by the macro design thought and the role of entrepreneurial motivation of the productive members of humanity.
A drive to change our way of life to allow continued population growth will need a substantial shift in our way of doing things. It was 1977, and we were in the midst of the greatest shift in human history; the Information revolution was pressing the limits of all economic activity, and its ability to double in power and halve in cost every two years meant that all the knowledge in libraries and all that was being created would be available to address us every problem, be it social, economic or technological. In my analysis, I concluded that cities were the first information revolution; how much more important could it be to know what was happening that could affect you than to be within earshot of the most current information? Proximity is the first tool for information sharing.
Clearly, the driver of economic growth was access to information and the rise of information technology that made the entire world within your proximity. Networking, data transfer, and storage took years to implement before the eventual digital convergence we have now emerged as the standard. At the time I began to consider this as a design problem, the pattern in front of me was that it would be implemented piecemeal. Every job that existed would get smarter and faster, but what I felt would be needed can only be described as a full redesign of our social economy around total information availability everywhere at all times.
In 2018, this is the actual case. Thanks to digital convergence and the Internet, information is truly ubiquitous.
In 1977 the issue was not if this would happen but how we could use this to redesign the economy to make everyone’s life fully optimized and to eliminate the need for an underclass. In this quest, the most basic needs underlying daily life, the ones that required the most physical effort and affected everyone, were the highest on the list.
A short time of researching, the answer became clear, logistics and the management of material for uses like living and working would be the most impacted. Access to real-time information by people doing things would save time and eliminate waste. Now the issue was to find a way to improve the way people moved material and managed it.
Containerization came to the public mind only twenty years earlier and was the driving force of worldwide commerce. The containers were massive, replacing the forty-foot truck trailer with a solid steel enclosure of the same size. With this bulk, the containers were stackable and easily handled with cranes moving them from ship to rail or trucks. It was a brilliant innovation that swept global commerce and now characterizes our entire global culture. Deadhead containers were being converted into storage solutions and even functioning as buildings, homes, offices, and workspaces. The impact of the adoption of containerization impressed me, but the ocean shipping containers were too bulky to be functional as a uniting element for the logistics of daily living.
The answer was to find a new containerization platform, one between the ocean shipping container and the pallets that were used to fill them with cargo. Although some shippers hand-packed their containers, the idea of using a new standard to load them appealed to me mechanically. This was the jumping-off point for what became a lifetime preoccupation: the Metapallet.