ERICA PURVIS
OFF-GRID DESIGN IN AN OFF-GRID WORLD
This presentation by the Erica Purvis touched on many different areas in a way that I think is difficult to summarise or reflect on. I did find an initial quote the presentation opened up with very interesting;
“Modern industrial society as we know it is scarcely 300 years old. This shallow history should not suggest to any of us that we have all the answers for all the challenges that will confront us as a species in the coming millenia” - Wade Davis, Wayfinder
In current times we quite often think we have all the answers to every problem, that we know everything we will ever know. I’ll admit that I;m prone to thinking this way sometimes too. Mankind has had periods of rapid innovation during the industrial revolutions with the introduction of machines, the invention of modern transport like cars and aircraft and even space travel. When you think about it, have we truly innovated past this point? We still fly the same planes of 50 years ago just with bigger engines, we drive the same cars just with electric batteries and we haven’t visited the moon since the 70s. This maybe leads us to think that we’ve innovated as much as we possibly can but putting this time into perspective makes us think differently. There’s so much more to come. Who knows what will change in the coming years. The current focus seems to be on sustainability and trying to reduce or undo the harsh consequences of these past few hundred years of innovations.
We were presented with a year, 1935, and asked to guess what happened at this time. The answer was the introduction of the UK’s national grid which was the first of its kind in the world. When you think about it, that’s not that long ago. Obviously it’s hard to comprehend how much time that is as someone who is in their early 20s but there are still people alive today that lived in this country when it didn’t have a power grid. There are people alive today that lived off-grid before the grid was even a thing. I thought this was an interesting insight. Alongside the previous quote it really does highlight how early we are into this age of innovation.