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Our systems are failing. Old models—for education, healthcare and government, food production, energy supply—are creaking under the weight of modern challenges. As the world’s population heads towards 10 billion, it’s clear we need new approaches. In We Do Things Differently, historian and futurologist Mark Stevenson sets out to find them, across four continents.
From Brazilian favelas to high-tech Boston, from rural India to a shed inventor in England’s home counties, Mark Stevenson travels the world to find the advance guard reimagining our future. At each stop, he meets innovators who have already succeeded in challenging the status quo, pioneering new ways to make our world more sustainable, equitable, and humane. Populated by extraordinary characters—including Detroit citizens who created new jobs and promoted healthy eating by building greenhouses; an Austrian mayor who built a new biomass plant using the by-product of a local flooring company; and an Indian doctor who crowdsourced his research and published his findings online—We Do Things Differently paints a riveting picture of what can be done to address the world’s most pressing dilemmas, offering a much-needed dose of down-to-earth optimism. It is a window on (and a roadmap to) a different and better future.
“Stevenson writes with enormous warmth and humor.” —Cory Doctorow
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 1, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781468315844
- File size: 809 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781468315844
- File size: 985 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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December 1, 2017
Profiles in courage--at least the courage to challenge conventional wisdom and innovate successfully in a world of business and institutions that don't necessarily welcome change.In his latest foray into the world of invention and life-hacking, business journalist and trend-spotter Stevenson (An Optimist's Tour of the Future, 2011) lauds "the pioneers, architects, and builders of a surprising and hopeful future," most of whom have done their work by bucking received opinion and admonitions that something can't or shouldn't be done. One such pioneer, motivated by a desperately ill brother, pulled together the largest research lab for Lou Gehrig's disease in the world only to discover that that research was far behind where it was supposed to be, so he became a "guerrilla scientist" devoted to challenging the status quo on drug discovery; his newfound resistance led to work in other maladies, such as Parkinson's disease. Finding new medicines is damnably difficult work, all the more reason for difficult evangelists, hard to please and hard to argue with, to come to the fore. One Indian pioneer whom Stevenson profiles adapted network theory to the way in which hot lunches are distributed throughout the teeming city of Mumbai; the delivery people averred, "we don't know management theories. All we have is decades of learning." That learning is key: all of Stevenson's case studies are wedded to the idea of constant learning, experimentation, and questioning, whether hacking government--a "stratospheric failure of modern democracies," the author writes, is their "inability to provide a financial system that serves the majority"--or revolutionizing educational systems so that schools actually teach. Stevenson offers no overt formulas, but his case studies are suggestive of the ways in which a willful innovator can ignore obstacles and do whatever needs to be done, allowing for failure just as much as for success.Solid reportage and inspirational reading for those who imagine they can do it--whatever "it" is--better.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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