Lifestyle NW - Introduction
Exploring hopes, fears, trends and surprises
What do people really want?
This Eco-life NW prototype, came up in response to the carbon calculators now available:
These calculators are fine as a measure of what goes on now. But we wanted to focus on the question of where lifestyle and society might be heading in the future.
The NW Quest module also looks at this, from a more material angle, where you make policy choices and see the maps and charts change.
In contrast, the Lifestyle NW module here takes a more psycho-cultural angle. It uses simple visualizations to try to get under the skin, to explore the underlying values in what people want, and the implications of what they might get.
The question of 'what people want' is of course not so simple - there are issues of psychology, cultures, health, education, work, families, communities etc. In a contrast to the economic view, the recent focus on 'happiness' shows that despite more and more 'stuff' we are no better off than 30 years ago. This depends in turn on how you measure happiness...
In this case we took the very simplistic approach of the footprint scenario series. Then the challenge is to link the footprint analysis with a more personal kind of angle.
At this stage the Eco-life NW is an early prototype. As and when, it should develop into a more rounded and personalized 'semantic web' system, combining the best of e-bay, sim-city, genealogy sites, ebo and other virtual communities.
