“Fail Faster” has become a mantra in innovation circles. And it dovetails well with our notion that Detroit can be a laboratory for the 21st century, solving problems that haven’t been solved before, in part because of its struggles.

But risk-taking is very counter-intuitive to most of us. So how do we develop this skill? Naturally, I’m thinking about games as a mechanism for learning this skill. Come join the conversation as we explore this idea in the Gameful community:

http://gameful.org/groups/the-game-collaboration-exchange/forum/topic/fail-faster-a-risk-taking-game/#post-10002

I won a game to design games! The gameful online community was founded by Jane McGonigal of TEDtalk, Steven Colbert and other-such-places fame. The community is dedicated to making games that actually improve the world. They regularly host game design challenges of various sorts. Over the summer, they hosted four challenges. And I recently found out that I ranked in 3 of the four challenges, winning one by myself, being part of a winning team on another, and getting an honorable mention on a third. Happy me.

You can read the overview and other fun designs here:
http://gameful.org/blog/2011/11/01/gameful-summer-challenge-series-winners/

I designed I Am the Genie, made the graphics for the simple and sweet Tint, and also created Curse of the Lost Doll (nee Curse of the Love Doll, but that sounded a little off…).

Car-Sharing options just got a WHOLE lot better (and therefore options for many people to get rid of their current cars without completely sacrificing car access just got better).

Peer to peer carsharing is this new model. The basic idea is you can rent out your own car when you’re not needing it, or others can borrow someone else’s car when they need it — but there’s a solid structure for scheduling, insurance, and other carsharing issues.

Using carsharing services costs much less than owning a car for many situations. And lending your car through a peer-to-peer carsharing program can offset costs for car owners.

The two prime service providers right now are RelayRides and Getaround. After an initial glance, I vastly prefer RelayRides simply because they provide a lot of information upfront. With Getaround you have to join in order to actually find out any details about the program – and to join you have to give them access to your Facebook account. Even if they’re not doing anything nefarious, it hits all the right warning signs to keep me away. RelayRides on other hand provides a bunch of FAQs and information about how they work up front.

The only drawback? The services only appear to available in a few select cities so far. I’ve contacted RelayRides to find out what their criteria are for entering a new market, so we can get it started here in Motown. If I get useful info, I’ll post it here.

After starting Motor City CarShare last decade (and then watching it fizzle out because it was the wrong fit of carshare model to local context and frankly being just about 4 years too early for Detroit but that’s a whole other story) I got a lot of questions from folks about how to set up something a little simpler that allowed them to do carsharing but with their own cars or with friends. While these new services aren’t quite the same thing, they’re a big step closer to that model and open a whole new field of options for folks interested in carsharing.

Saving the world is hard enough without it also being boring. So here’s a smattering of ways to have fun while being more eco-friendly.

1. The Fun Theory - a great competition that came up with a bunch of creative ways to get people to do more eco-things by making them the more fun option. Their site features a bunch of videos of the entries. Shown here was a great recycling bin design that got people to run around gathering recyclables to use it.
2. Japan’s Fun Train – Want to make more people use trains? What if they were great places to be in? These two trains from Japan are great examples of using this idea to make trains more kid-friendly. But really the idea could be taken in many different directions with amazing results.
3. Seed bomb vending machine – Treehugger pointed this nice one out, and I don’t know if it really makes anything more fun, but it tickled me pink, so here it is.
4. Designers’ eco- coloring book – Now, I know that many alterna-folks aren’t crazy about coloring books, because of the notion that it’s spoonfed “coloring-in-the-lines” instructions. But that wasn’t my experience at all as a kid. Rather, it was a great way to get comfy with using color, discovering color combinations and playing with different techniques and materials. In any case, this book is even more fun. Professional illustrators were asked to contribute pages on an environmental theme, making for a fun, arty coloring book that you can also use to indoctrinate your child into the eco-hegemony! Shown here, an illustration from the book by Delphine Vaufrey.
5. Rep. Markey’s statement on Climate Change Deniers – This just stands as a great example of how activism is far more fun when we bring in humor instead of just polemics. It’s only a little over a minute and really worth a listen.  See vid clip below.

As I’ve said before, I got all excited this winter about Jane McGonigal’s TEDtalk and the notion of making the task of changing the world FUN.  So imagine my thrill, when my first draft of an idea was listed as Game of the Week (for several weeks) last month at McGonigal’s Gameful website (home of games of the social good).

Some details still need fleshing out, and it needs some real-time play testing. If you’re interested, write to boltofninjas [at] gmail.com. Meanwhile, here are the basics:

Bolt of Ninjas!

Your friend’s house has a Ninja infestation… started by YOU!

One of the problems with saving energy or water, is that to most people they’re invisible. No one can see the difference. Home improvements are more fun when you can see them right? Invisible is bad, right? Wrong! Invisible is good… when you’re a Ninja!

Bolt of Ninjas! is a real-life game that is a designed to be a bunch of fun, while also helping out your friends and making the world a better place. What’s not to love?

The goal: Help make a friend’s home more energy efficient.

The challenge: You have limited time in which to get the work done — without being caught!

The rules for Bolt of Ninjas! are really pretty basic and explained in detail below:

Instead of writing a more typical article this week, I thought I’d try an eco-splatter of different tidbits that I’ve been collecting – some are older, some newer, but all on a theme. For this starter eco-splatter the topic is  sharing (aww…).  Enjoy:

• A nice overview of the interest in shared resources here from the Economist with the nice subtitle: The Business of Sharing, what to do when you’re green, broke and connected.
• Of course, there’s all the standard cool eco things to share, such as cars, bikes, gardens and housing (for individual sharing, or in coop style, but below are some sharing options that were new to me and really cool.
• Locally, I’ve been seeing a nice roll-out of sharing around the local food scene with great projects such as Real Good Food, which coordinates people sharing the delicious food they make.
• On a related note (in that it’s about food), here’s a great resource for helping people share food in the time-honored potluck style. It’s a great, free online potluck organizer called Lucky Potluck. I’ve used it for Thanksgiving the last few years and everyone loved it.
• The Sobi bikeshare concept helps overcome some of the problems we’re seeing emerge with the usual bikeshare concept, and uses GPS and smartphones to lock the bikes up anywhere instead of in designated areas.
• The Landshare project goes beyond the usual community garden idea and links up people who want to grow with people who have land they’d like to see something grown on.

Who said that saving the world had to be a chore? I was blown away when I stumbled upon this TED talk by Jane McGonigal, who’s already tapping game design concepts and gamer geek enthusiasm to create awareness about peak oil and another to create solutions for major crises in Africa.

Watch this TED talk and see if you’re as inspired as I was.  Meanwhile, I’ve started talking with folks about possible games to help Detroit’s sustainability efforts. AND i just invented a game concept to help advance energy efficiency (though I have a few bugs to work out — I’ll announce it here once it’s completed).

So,  forget the Doom and Gloom! Try something more like Doom and Pictionary.

If you’re geeked enough to want to participate in the games-can-save-the-world revolution, be sure to check out Gameful.

I’m on a panel with Mitchell Joachim of Terreform Tuesday, Sept. 13 at Lawrence Tech University. Mitchell has some sci-fi-esque notions about future urban design — yet swears it’s all with current day technologies. His focus is NYC, but we know that Detroit’s a different creature with lots of room for redefining the American City. What would a Terreform approach look like in D-town? Should be a fun discussion.

Of course, I’ll be focusing on the human and social interface — new exciting technologies or no will still account for and integrate with real people to succeed.

Check out these images:

Detroit-folks might particularly appreciate their strong transportation focus and ideas:

Dug up from the vaults! I just came across this piece I’d spoken, then jotted down a couple of years ago.  I figured it might be appropriate to pop up here,  since nothing else is going up this week. While I’d roll these concepts out differently now, it’s still fun to see how some of us in the Detroit scene were rolling out these ideas only a couple of years ago — and now to see how dramatically the national conversation about Detroit has changed. What seemed pie-in-the-sky only two years ago is now being seriously discussed around the globe. How quickly things can change. Anyway, here’s the piece:

This is a paraphrase transcript (written after the fact) of a brief talk that I gave in Ann Arbor as part of the Sustainability Salon series at the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore in April, 2008. I liked how it came together and so I wanted to capture the thoughts in written form. I believe this is a pretty accurate representation of what was said – and I think I squeezed it all into a 12 minutes introduction, which is surely a sign that I could have another career as an auctioneer. That’s partly why I wanted to try getting it down into written form where there’s more room for absorption and debate. Thanks for letting me share it with you.

Good evening, everybody, and thank you for having me here. It’s an honor to get to be up here with the rest of the panel and to share this time with all of you here. Sustainability is a topic that I’m passionate about, and I’m honored to have this chance to join you in discussion about it.

I live in the nuts and bolts of green buildings and sustainable development on a daily basis, and I talk to people about the practical things they can do to green their buildings. But today, I’m going to step back a little bit and share some of my views on the bigger picture. I’m hopeful that this will help us in our discussion about how we collectively tackle sustainable development.

I think there are primarily two major tasks ahead of us today in the world of sustainable development. The first is to take all the good work happening around green development and expand it. The truth is that a tremendous amount of good work is happening around these topics, and we just need to grow it in a BIG way – on steroids! We know what the things are that we need to do, we just need to do a lot more of them. That’s a big part of our task, and bravo to moving it forward.

The second task is that we have to solve the impossible problems. Because there are certain things that we haven’t figured out how to do yet. We need to find the answers to those things, and that’s what I want to focus on tonight. Besides, it’ll be fun. So this is our second task: to solve the impossible. As an example, I’d like to offer some of the work that I do, and talk about why I think Detroit can save the world.     [laughter]

photo by max greenberg

Do you know the difference between Hell and Harmless? Most people have a clear-cut sense of the difference in at least one place: Casinos. Hell is having poorly defined boundaries in a place designed to take your money. You can go in, play some games, maybe even win a few, boost your confidence, and try for more. You can come really close to winning big. Close enough that you’ll come back at it sure that you’re on the trail for success. For many people, this is an intoxicating recipe that can lead to bad choices. And for the addictive personality that is driven by an unchecked need, this setting can lead to disaster. Hell. Each step of the way may seem like an okay choice, a risk, but a calculated risk (that wasn’t really calculated) that never seems quite catastrophic.

Harmless isn’t actually that hard. I have friends who’ll go to a casino and consider it an evening’s entertainment. They’re clear that it’s entertainment and not really expect to make money off of it. Still, knowing the powerful pull of the win, they’ve got a very simple guideline. They’ve got what I call Casino Rules. You set a clear limit. After that limit you stop. You can stay and play all night if you want to, but you walk in the door with a set amount of cash, and that’s your limit. If you have wins, and are making money, you can play all night. Or you can play small and stretch it out. Or you can quit while ahead. But if you use up what you walked in with, then you’ve hit the limit. And you stop. No borrowing from friends, run to the bank, or visit to the ATM. It’s a simple rule, and it’s effective.

Casino Rules can apply to any potentially risky behavior that may have gradual steps of loss. Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, gradual steps make it difficult to see the big picture and how far you’ve come from your starting point, or when you’ve gone over the edge into danger. This is a common problem with addictions of all sorts. It’s also a problem with economic risk-taking of various kinds from investing to entrepreneurial get-rich-quick schemes. The power of graduated steps to keep us in the present and lose sight of the whole path can be very useful when pursuing a positive goal that’s hard to achieve. For example, dieters often do well to just focus on losing 5-10 pounds at a time, since the task of losing 40 would be too overwhelming.  But if the path is one of damage and hurt, then the same principle is dangerous. Limits to the losses you’ll suffer must be clearly set at the beginning of the road – before you’re too far along the path and only seeing each gradual step in front of you. Thus the Casino Rules.

Casino players and stock market investors all have clear guidelines that they use for setting these limits. So why don’t we, as a nation of petroleum consumers, have a similar rule? Michigan’s had enough trouble the past few years. But now we’ve been hit with the worst oil spill in our history with approximately 1 million gallons released into the Kalamazoo River, on a pipeline that had been cited for poor maintenance earlier this year. So far, the oil hasn’t hit Lake Michigan, and EPA predicts that it won’t, but the very thought is quite chilling. The Great Lakes are the largest liquid repository of freshwater on the planet.

We cannot just take each accident at a time. We must use Casino Rules. We must set a limit with a fresh perspective. When is it enough to be beyond reasonable risk? If we address each crisis by itself, we may never make a solid long-term decision. If we’d set such a limit in 2009, the gulf spill would likely have surpassed it already. Instead, we focus on the crisis and the clean-up. Then do the same in West Michigan. And do the same off the coast of California. And do the same off the coast of Massachusetts. And in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. And in Florida, Texas and more. The list is already longer than you think, just in 2010.

We need  (as a state or a region or a nation or a world) to set a limit. Where’s the threshold? How much oil will spill before we collectively agree to change our reliance on it? We must set the limit, and we must set it now before we end up in an addicts anonymous chair, introducing ourselves and telling the story of how we wrecked our lives and betrayed our children to a silent, empty room.