The TEN Project
THE TEN PROJECT
www.thetenproject.org
THE PROJECT’S AIM
To distribute a game in 2010 to every single ten-year-old living in the ten most influential mega-cities of the future, to inspire them to create a ten-year plan for redesigning their world into one that will be sustainable and worth inheriting in 2020.
THE GAME’S AIM
As the game Monopoly prepared previous generations for capitalism, this game aims to make lucrative sustainability second nature to the children of a new world in which biology and economics are inextricably linked. The game aims to do this by exciting its players into creating a ten year plan for sustainability problem solving, empowering them as a connected global network, and alerting them to their major role in this next crucial ten years of human civilization.
(Statistics quoted are courtesy of the UN, N.A.T.O., and WHO)
WHY SUSTAINABILITY IS VITAL
IPCC reports reveal that the world has reached a state of emergency, and that during the next ten years we must bring to fruition the monumental advances in Green Technology, social innovation and human compassion that have already begun, if we are to survive. The TEN Project focuses on the positive outcome of this critical age of change, particularly in the vibrant mega-cities of the future.
WHY THE MEGA-CITIES ARE VITAL
51% of all humans now live in cities. In seven years, Lagos Nigeria will be the third largest city in the world, after only Mumbai and Tokyo. We are building the equivalent of a city the size of Seattle (0.6 million) every four to seven days.
Well over a billion people live in resourceful slums and vibrant squatter communities, full of social and economic prosperity, innovation, and hope. In 2010 a global taskforce will distribute the game to every single ten year old in the following ten mega-cities: Lagos, Mumbai, Karachi, Dhaka, Mexico City, São Paulo, Jakarta, Tokyo, Shanghai, New York.
The effectiveness of such a global taskforce was proven by the eradication of Smallpox, which killed more people than all the wars, violence, natural disasters, AIDS and all the other infectious diseases of civilization added together. It was finally defeated in 1979 against all odds, by 150,000 volunteers who were mobilised (without cheap telephony and the internet) and inoculated over a billion households until they succeeded.
THE TARGET AGE GROUP
Over the age of about eight and before puberty, the child’s innovative capacities are boundless. They are not yet educated out of their creativity, their ideals are still flexible and they have a natural understanding of the transforming world (such as computers). More than one third of the world is under the age of fifteen, and they are becoming ever more connected, and they are every nation’s most valuable natural resource.
50% of the entire world population already owns a cell phone. OLPC are distributing millions of ‘$100’ wi-fi laptops to the world’s poorest children, with staggering results. The Project’s game will empower its players as they connect to form a global network.
THE FUTURE
We are hurtling toward a future no one can predict. Yet one thing is certain: our capacity to mend is as powerful as our capacity to break. Mass-extinction, bio-weapons, uncontrollable disease and the horror of climate crisis, are on one side of the coin. On the other is a powerfully connected society of problem solvers on the streets and in the labs of the world’s cities.
KEY POINTS OF THE GAME DESIGN BRIEF:
1) Must be cheap and self-maintaining, require minimal interface. A short form/ SMS game type would be practical and take advantage of rapid cell phone connectivity in squatter cities. The web, cell phone SMS, word of mouth and creating visual clues in the urban environment, might all be equally effective ways for the players to interconnect within the game. In this way the game environment could become the real environment of the player’s city. Instead of using elaborate graphics in a virtual world, the very fabric of urban life could become the game landscape. (This is also more practicable for areas without computer access).
2) For children in squatter cities who might have no community access to internet or other electronic media, periodic unofficial ‘social connector’ stations might be set up on a word of mouth basis for that particular community, each with periodic contact to practical nearby internet access in another part of the city. Gamers on a rotation suggested by the game itself could be responsible for these.
3) Must enable the children to keep track of and share each other’s ideas, scores and creations, across the global community. Regardless of the simplicity of the game’s interface, it must create a global video gaming community that crosses cultural boundaries as effectively as if it were a ‘Massively Multiplayer Online Game’ (MMOG). It must have networking, collaborative and web-based elements.
4) Must be able to develop and grow in complexity with the child, and maintain its appeal and functionality throughout a ten-year period.
5) Must inspire children to workshop a personal and a social ten year plan for surviving the current ecological emergency (short-term radical solutions to get us through the critical moment); as well as a long-term sustainable world that will never again forget how to maintain its own lifeline, its planet/world/environment.
6) Must not have anything to do with their schooling or come across as an educational tool, but be action-based, and fun enough to compete (or even integrate) with their current popular activities. It must be fashionable and at least as much fun as stealing cars, sniffing glue, skateboarding, playing play-station etc.
7) Despite operating above and without requiring literacy, the game will need still to demonstrate, however subtly, the following three key points… a) That technology is a biological system with its own evolution. b) That the onus is on us to ensure that system works properly (makes all species including our own happy, healthy and prosperous as opposed to miserable, diseased and extinct). c) That technology is sustainable for itself and in context to all biological systems, and how important it is to re-evaluate the things we think we need to make us happy in light of what is actually sustainable.
THE TWO-YEAR DESIGN PROCESS:
It is an ambitious design brief, but as an open source design project, a heavily networked global team of ten thousand voluntary designers (amateur and professional) will have two years to ponder the game (from January 2008 to December 2009).
Child psychologists, teachers, counselors, game designers, large corporations such as Sony Inc., and successful recruitment organizations (e.g. The Military) will be offered corporate sponsorship or other incentives in exchange for knowledge about how to captivate children’s imaginations, and possibly even promotion for recruiting volunteers.
The best ideas will be consolidated on the TEN Project website, where they will be instantly accessible for revision by everyone involved. Minimal game summaries will be encouraged at this point rather than over-complicated descriptions. The website will then divide into separate design branches for multiple cultures and tastes modifications, and the most successful ideas to emerge will be rigorously tested for appeal on children in multiple cultural, consumer and stylistic contexts.
2010 POINT-TO-POINT DISTRIBUTION PROGRAM:
The distribution targets of the game are every bit as ambitious as its design, but the globally conscious and philanthropic community that grows daily cannot be underestimated. Abundant and popular web 2.0 sites, which allow for an intermesh of discussion and social networking can be used to amass a vast team. This will operate in a decentralized fashion with a common directive. A million volunteers will be needed to personally deliver the game to ten million children of around ten years old across the globe.
The game will not insist on any proof of age, and its target figures allow for the fact that the game will very likely be played initially by eight to eleven year olds. By targeting every child of this age bracket in each of the target cities, the TEN Project hopes to make a significant impact on those cities, and in the way this growing generation, en masse, thinks about economics, sustainable city living and the future.
The cities were chosen based on having the highest ten-year-old populations in the world, with the exception of Shanghai and New York, which are included to complete the picture of global influence represented by this top-ten list of tomorrow’s mega-cities.
The numbers of children in the target age group for each city are:
Lagos (1,500,000), Mumbai (1,400,000), Karachi (1,300,000), Dhaka (1,200,000), Mexico City (1,000,000), São Paulo (900,000), Jakarta (800,000), Tokyo (800,000), Shanghai (600,000), New York (600,000)
The TEN Project is a way of maximizing the promises and staying ten steps ahead of the threats of this accelerating world in our race toward the sustainability of a future no one can predict.
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Sign up for participation in whatever capacity you like, however small, by emailing us at thetenproject@gmail.com
Any comments or suggestions whatsoever about the project concept, alternative name suggestions or the wording of the brochure would also be greatly appreciated at the above email.
Tags: , gamers, games, internet, social action, sustainability+education, sustainability+programs
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
[...] The TEN Project - by Tenproject [...]
January 4th, 2008 at 6:32 am
THE TEN PROJECT
(A speech by John Tattersall, which he presented to politicians and business leaders of the BVI on 3rd January 2008)
Good afternoon, how is everybody?
I believe Rotary’s most famous motto is “Service above self” – is that correct?
About 150,000 ‘service above self’ types banded together, back in the seventies with a single aim: to eradicate forever one of the three greatest killers of our civilization. The other two are heart disease and cancer, but do you know what that third one is?
Smallpox. It has killed more people than all the wars, violence, natural disasters, AIDS and all other infectious diseases of history added together.
And in 1976, they succeeded. This team of volunteers completely eradicated Smallpox from the planet, by inoculating over a billion households.
If we view problems as isolated from their solutions, it’s scary, because what if we never stumble across the solution? This paralyses us into inaction. My talk is about being inspired into action by problems because we know that they hold the key to their solution. Pandemic spread was both the problem (when applied to the Smallpox virus) and the solution (when applied to the pandemic spread of volunteers around the world finding and inoculating victims).
I will focus on what I think is our biggest problem, paralysing for some, inspiring for others. And I want to talk about it in three ways: the exciting solutions that are already happening, what we can do, and an actual project that I have just begun.
With Smallpox gone, what now is our biggest problem? Is it heart disease, cancer? No. It’s this:
Industrialization has only just in the last five years, begun to start figuring out how to do what nature has been doing all along and that’s continue through time, while prospering. But it might be too late. The old model of industry exchanges natural resources with toxic waste in a finite, closed world. This can of course only work for a finite length of time. And that’s what all the fuss is about: we’re realising the shocking truth that we are nearing the end of that time frame, and we never created an end game, a strategy for that.
So, is it really that bad? Well, its all a matter of how long we’ve got to fix it. This is where people disagree, some say a couple hundred years, and some say twenty. But the one thing everybody agrees on is that the next ten years are crucial. They are the make or break.
So in a word, our biggest problem is that of sustainability. And that’s not tree-hugging. It’s about the way our lives intermesh with industry, economics, and technology. It’s about the resources needed by industry, the wars and political disasters caused by those needs (Darfur etc), and the toxins and garbage exchanged for those resources.
You might be thinking, what’s this guy doing standing in the Moorings talking about the end of the world? Well I’m not being utopian, this is about local solutions.
People are kind of paralysed into denial by the words ‘sustainability’ or ‘climate crisis’. And I think that’s because traditionally we had no answer, no cheap or realistic solution, so we’re constantly hoping to discover that its all a load of rubbish and that global warming is nothing to do with our industries.
But we no longer have to be crippled under the weight of this scary topic. Instead, it’s time to act, because the problem itself has spawned a million wonderful and fun solutions.
Exciting thing number one: Rapid change:
It took 5000 years for us to put wheels on our luggage, but things are speeding upJ.
ß We’ve now got nets that can extract water from fog.
ß There’s a thing called “life straw” (which purifies any water source before it hits your lips into safe drinking water).
ß A baby blanket is on the market that gives your kids nutrition instead of Alzheimer’s, cancer and birth defects. The same American company is building 12 cities in China (for 400 million people), by preserving and using the existing bio systems: they put the fields on the roofs, regenerate sewerage into cooking gas, use wind direction and solar, make sure every apartment gets direct sunlight, and save money. They have built buildings that produce more energy than they need and purify their own water.
There are exciting changes in economics:
It’s cheaper to save fuel than to buy it and this avoids costly political conflict with countries that have oil.
William McDonough Associates saved Ford 35 million dollars by sustainable design solutions. Wallmart have just gone green to make millions. Brasil saved 59 billion dollars since 1975 by switching to ethanol.
But here’s the most exciting change:
We’ve finally switched from learning ABOUT nature to learning FROM nature. Nature has had four billion years of design and field-testing to get things right, so the answers we need are all out there.
Locusts never collide. It’s simply a large collision avoidance neuron in its brain, which the can be redesigned for cars. Bio mimicry looks at the tardigrade, a bug that dries out completely for months then regenerates, and uses that technology to dry out vaccines so they can be transported in Africa without refrigeration.
Whales have little bumps on their fins. By applying that design to the edge of its wing, an aeroplane can increase efficiency by 32%.
There are leaves that inspired biodegradable plastic made out of CO2.
There are bugs that actually pull water from thin air.
With a global water crisis, we need those bugs, that technology. If we allow the species extinction acceleration caused by old style industry to continue we’re going to be in big trouble.
Admittedly we are in a state of emergency, time is running out, mass-extinction is well underway, uncontrollable diseases caused by way too much meat consumption are threatening, the breeding of cows for eating has exploded out of all proportion (98% of all vertebrate mass on the planet is now humans and their livestock – whereas it was only 0.1% before industrialization), the climate crisis will flood low lying coastal areas like Bangladesh (and of course Road Town) causing an expected 200 million refugees, there were 85000 riots in China last year because of resource problems, the Pacific gyre north of Hawaii was dragged for plankton and 6 times as much plastic was found as plankton, we miss the coral in Tortola and the acidification of our sea out there is a nightmare which is only just beginning, BUT:
A wealth of amazing solutions is out there, and the amazing people creating those solutions, which can include you and me, carry an equal if not greater weight.
Which brings me to what can we do, as individuals? What resources to we have?
One great resource is the fact that human cruelty is on the decrease; war, genocide and torture are drastically decreasing. You can easily see this by looking at statistics for this decade, this century and through the last few millennia. Why? Because human empathy is on the increase. It’s this rise in the age of “Service above self” that is going to drive us through to success.
The big three most hopeful resources to me are: Cities, communication technology and children. I’ll explain why:
51% of us now live in cities.
Living on Tortola, it’s a bit hard to imagine, but cities provide hope. Cities get people out of poverty, encourage them to breed less (averting the population crisis), and puts them closer to each other and to resources, which makes the city more sustainable, more exciting and more conducive to innovation, which is exactly what we need.
The rise of the West is over. In seven years, Lagos Nigeria will be the third largest city in the world, after only Mumbai and Tokyo.
We are building the equivalent of a city the size of Seattle every four to seven days. And 200,000 people a day are flooding into those cities.
One sixth of the world is squatting in the slums of the Mega-cities. In 2030 it will be 1 in 4, in 2050, 1 in 3. And here’s the interesting thing: un-restricted by officialdom, they are thriving. Today, well over a billion people live in resourceful slums and vibrant squatter communities, with zero unemployment, full of social and economic prosperity, innovation, and hope.
Add to that the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) organization who are distributing millions of ‘$100’ wi-fi laptops to the world’s poorest children, with staggering results, and what you get is the rise of a new, connected and empowered population.
50% of the entire world already owns a cell phone. AMD plans to connect 50% of world to the internet by 2015. There are villages in Cambodia with no electricity or water but they have broadband internet. The kids only know Skype (they haven’t even heard of telephony).
In São Paulo PC’s are set up in abandoned buildings where a quarter of a million kids learn internet skills for free. There is a mega-city cultural explosion going on. The question is what are we doing about it, how are we making the most of it?
Because we can’t just see the toxins in the air with our eyes (because for thousands of years evolution didn’t need to evolve us to be able to do that), it’s sometimes hard to really feel the emergency. But now there’s less denial, in the new generations, because they are closer to the solutions, they can see how industry and technology can be remodelled. They can get excited about it.
What is every nation’s most valuable natural resource? Children, isn’t it? More than one third of the world is under the age of fifteen. How can we make the most of that?
Over the age of about eight and before puberty, the child’s innovative capacities are boundless. They are not yet educated out of their creativity.
I heard a great story about a little girl who had been sitting in class drawing a picture. When the teacher finally asked her what she was drawing, she said “God”. And when the teacher said “But nobody knows what God looks like”, the little girl said “Well, they will in a minute”.
Nicholas Negraponte form MIT, the vision behind OLPC loves to explain how amazing kids in Africa are with computers. He said they ‘swim through them like fish, and they play them like pianos’.
So those are the exciting changes going on, the resources we all have to drive this thing forward, which brings me finally to my project:
Very quickly, it’s called the TEN Project. Its aim is to distribute a game in 2010 to every single ten-year-old living in the ten most influential mega-cities of the future, to inspire them to create a ten-year plan for redesigning their world into one that would be sustainable and worth inheriting in 2020.
What is this game going to be, and how on Earth am I going to get it distributed to every single ten year old living in Lagos, Mumbai, Karachi, Dhaka, Mexico City, São Paulo, Jakarta, Tokyo, Shanghai, and New York?
Well, scale is going to be the key. This game has to excite its players by empowering them as a connected global network. And I think it’s possible. On new years eve I emailed a brochure describing the idea to five hundred people on my email contact list, about two hundred bounced back because people keep changing their email address (its annoying isn’t it) but within hours I had twelve people signed up to participate (including the heads of some very influential companies). By the end of the year, I predict that list to be in the thousands. This will happen.
So just as Monopoly prepared previous generations for capitalism, this game aims to make lucrative sustainability second nature to the children of a new world, the parents of our future.
We’ve got two years to network and brainstorm a simple game that operates above literacy, possibly works through SMS cell phone texting, as well as the internet and/or by players creating visual clues in their actual urban environment.
Large corporations such as Sony Inc., and successful recruitment organizations (e.g. The Military) could be offered corporate sponsorship or other incentives in exchange for knowledge about how to captivate children’s imaginations. This game has got to be allot of fun.
The most successful ideas to emerge will of course be tested on children, to ensure their appeal.
As for distributing the game: There is a global resource of people who are looking for small ways in which they can make a big difference. You can network very easily on the internet these days. If they could do it in 1975 to eradicate smallpox, we can go further. This could be scaled locally. Possibly half a million volunteers could personally deliver the game to ten million children.
Anyone interested email thetenproject@gmail.com, and join in the fun.
We have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. Another world isn’t just possible – its here, but we need to collaborate and rework it. Orson Welles said ‘better things are under way’ I say yes, but these next ten years are crucial.
Thank you very much.