Nico’s Baken’s 7-minute talk at TEDxAmsterdam last year taught us all about holons and holarchies, but the story behind is a tale worth telling in itself.
Nico Baken is both a part-time professor at Delft University of Technology, and a Senior Strategist within the Corporate Strategy department Royal KPN. He is also the embodiment of what happens when theory merges with practice. Whereas his academic interests lie with holons and networks, as he told the world at
TEDxAmsterdam last year, he directly applies these thoughts into his work as a visionary. Nico has teamed up with some like-minded individuals and developed the idea of Smart Living.
Smart Living stimulates network-thinking in the building environment. Instead of creating houses, communities and cities as puzzles with independent pieces, Nico would rather see the notion of collaborative design leading the way. Why would this this kind of thinking be a breakthrough?
Well, Nico’s office at the Faculty of Telecommunications in Delft is packed with books, paper notes and large , colourful posters on both walls. He moves from his desk to the only empty table in the corner of the room to start, as I will later learn, a private lecture on Smart Living.
“It’s getting out of hand”, he tells me. “We have to rearrange the relationship with our environment. We need a revaluation of our Quality of Life.” According to Baken, every crisis passes through four phases. The phase we are currently in is a heavy ‘value-crisis,’ which is usually followed by a period of ‘cognitive dissonance,’ where we ignore the problems and look for ways to get back to business as usual. This leads to panic.
“However, a lot of the people at an organization like TED realize it’s not about returning to business as usual. The greatest vice is indifference, acedia in Latin, and what we need now is exactly the opposite: empathy.”
In his 2009-talk, Baken asked the public to transcend themselves. By this he meant that “it is important to realize that every person, or what I call a holon, is part of a greater entity. Thus, if you pursue your dreams, and find your passion, think of everything and everyone you will come into contact with, and subsequently consider the impact you’ll have on those connections.”
As an example of this call for personal responsibility, he mentions Jim Stolze, the founder of TEDxAmsterdam: “Jim is an example of someone who starts a project with a strong vision on how to succeed, but nevertheless, he probably did not expect to unleash such an amazing energy in the Netherlands with TEDx-events. And currently TEDxAmsterdam is having a tremendous impact, beyond his initial ambitions, touching upon a greater holarchy.”
Baken has looked into how a community can live in line with this new paradigm, based on empathy and ‘co-operation’.
“The way society is currently organized is distressing. Demand and supply are gradually moving away from each other, creating an insurmountable gap. In this asymmetrical system, we have extended our value-chains beyond their flexibility and we increase the risk of things going very wrong. A balanced system should be based on trust, not risk analysis.”
This conclusion led Baken to pledge in favour of network-thinking as the basis for community development, and that’s where his concept of Smart Living comes in. Smart Living is value-sensitive; it aims to combine functional (monetary) and non-functional (value-driven) aspects of living. It is a trans-sectoral way of organizing a community. Conventional communities rely on different vertically distinguished sectors (health, education, energy and transport) to fulfill their needs, but a Smart Living community makes better use of overlapping needs within the community with the help of innovative ICT applications. Baken considers Smart Living to be a feasible solution to our current financial-economic, social and ecological crises.
“We can do this today, if we want to,” he says. “Smart Living is an autonomous means of social cohesion.” After an hour of passionate storytelling in his office on the 19th floor from the highest Faculty at the TU Delft campus, Nico recalls the scene in Zorro where Anthony Hopkins has taught Antonio Banderas all the skills he needs to win a duel between swords, but in which still does not succeed. Hopkins identifies the missing link as ‘charm’, and that is what makes TED, says Nico. Charm.
Relive Nico’s presentation from last year’s TEDxAmsterdam:
TEDxAmsterdam: Nico Baken from TEDxAmsterdam on Vimeo.
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube
Flickr