A Sustainable Train of Thought

A couple of weeks ago, I received a copy of about time edited by Tim Aldrich and Forum for the Future, and published by GreenLeaf. I’d read about this book on WorldChanging.com and after reading the introduction (PDF) and an excerpt from the book, I decided to order myself a copy. I recently finished reading it, and it didn’t disappoint.

I found plenty of interesting points and insights, such as the idea of cyclical time versus linear time (the predominant sense in Western civilization) and the inseparable relationship between distance and time in some cultures, but the most intriguing part was a reference to the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and the document Exploring Sustainable Development: WBCSD Global Scenarios 2000-2050. (PDF)

This document, a product of the WBCSD Global Scenarios Project, lays out three scenarios for future development:

• FROG! (First Raise Our Growth!)
• GEOpolity (Global Ecosystem Organization)
• Jazz

Of these three scenarios, the last one, Jazz, was striking because of its similarity to the structure I’ve been developing for my thesis. Namely, multiple stakeholders cooperating towards a shared goal of sustainability.

In the world of Jazz, diverse players join in ad hoc alliances to solve social and environmental problems in the most pragmatic possible way. The key note of this scenario is dynamic reciprocity. This is a world of social and technological innovations, experimentation, rapid adaptation, much voluntary interconnectedness, and a powerful and ever-changing global market.

What enables the quick learning and subsequent innovation in Jazz is high transparency—the widespread availability of information about ingredients of products, sources of inputs, company financial, environmental, and social data, government decision-making processes, and almost anything else concerned consumers want to know. Many players are involved, in part because the way information technology lowers barriers to entry allows new actors to step onto the economic stage. And that stage itself is characterised by a global free market, sound legal systems, and a respect for property rights.

What I’ve been working on this summer has been a way of reconciling the traditionally adversarial positions of consumer and corporation: demand and supply. And it just occurred to me the other night, in a conversation with Victor Szilagyi, that what I have been developing is in fact a scenario—Victor used the word futurecasting.

My scenario uses the following train of thought:

Businesses and their stakeholders have an increasing number of incentives to pursue sustainable development. Some considerations include:

• high-risk exposure to volatile price fluctuations in key resources, such as oil, and corresponding decreases in risk as they switch to renewable resources.
• the potential for environmental lawsuits, similar to how McDonald’s is threatened by lawsuits related to health and obesity¹.
• pure profit motives, as sustainable development, energy and material efficiency measures, and steps to eliminate waste have been shown to lower costs and directly increase profits.
• the potential for shareholder lawsuits, as companies which forego the aforementioned sustainability measures could be shown to be negligent if said measures are proven to increase shareholder value for the company.
• pre-emption of laws and regulations which government could eventually place upon industry, such as green fees or legislation to regulate waste.
• increased insurance costs related to environmental considerations levied by insurance companies, as insurance companies begin to realize risk in events such as the recent Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
• increased difficulties securing loans from banks and financial institutions as they raise their standards for investment.

¹ And it’s not just lawsuits, as “a significant proportion of people agree that ‘food companies should be made to pay a levy to the NHS for the cost of treating obesity’.” (Observer – Just Say ‘No’)

So on the one hand, companies currently have or potentially will have quite a push to adopt sustainable measures. However, these same forces can also be seen in a positive light: volatility of oil is a negative factor, but energy autonomy is a positive factor. A company can be pushed into energy autonomy because of legislation, or it can adopt energy autonomy because of the economic and competitive benefits it provides. How can companies achieve these goals? The Natural Step is one blueprint for achieving sustainability goals, and various rating systems (e.g.: LEED and ISO 140001) have evolved to document and recognize various aspects of sustainable development.

I need to comment here that although I was originally pursuing the following as my thesis topic, this is no longer the case because it bends more towards business. Were I working on a sustainable MBA, perhaps this would be an appropriate area to pursue, but my focus is on interaction design because I am in a school for interaction design. So, consider the following an interesting idea which I think is worth exploring.

My position with these rating and certification systems is that I do not believe they are fully valued by the market. That is to say, although some companies pursue these ratings and certifications, the market does not have a way to integrate this information into its decisions. The general public is not yet aware of the nuances of LEED, for example, and this tool remains a tool of the industry and not one of general conversation or everyday transactions. However, if these ratings and certifications could be valued by the market, then this brings some interesting forces to bear on the issue.

First, these ratings and certifications need to be authenticated or endorsed by a third party. Companies may in fact be trustworthy, but a third party certifier adds an element of trust to the scheme which the company by itself is unlikely to achieve. More importantly, certification needs to occur on a broad scale. Within an industry, companies which do not subscribe to sustainable measures can combat certification schemes by starting competing certification schemes, with the goal not of providing real competition but of confusing and devaluing the real certification scheme. A supra-industrial rating system, such as ISO, which is recognized across industries, is much harder to devalue through competing standards because it is more difficult to organize many companies across industries than it is to organize them within a particular industry. So while a certification scheme for wood put forth by lumber companies is susceptible to competing certification schemes created by other lumber companies, a certification scheme that happens to certify wood in addition to certifying automobiles and carpet manufacturers is much more robust because coordination between those industries is difficult and very unlikely.

Secondly, the ratings and certifications are based at worst on objective observation and at best on hard, quantifiable data. This means that they reflect the infrastructure and capital resources and processes of a company. For other companies to compete on this basis, therefore, means they have to compete on substantive data. For one company to get a better rating than another company means that it has to substantively change the way it functions. This is in contrast to subjective changes, such as changing the color of products, or launching PR campaigns (also known as greenwashing).

What this effectively means is that when companies can differentiate themselves in the marketplace along these substantive lines, that differentiation has significant value. To compete in this arena, another company may have to potentially change its whole business model and will at least have to spend time and money on capital and process changes. In this scenario, companies which begin this transition earlier stand to gain hugely on their competition because of the time involved with making these changes. Time becomes, in effect, a barrier against competition and re-imbues “first-mover advantage” with substantive meaning.

The effectiveness of this differentiation relies on two critical points: transparency and communication, the latter in the form of both corporate communication and feedback to the company. Transparency is important because the goal is trust and rapport between customer and business, and it is to the benefit of the company to show how much better they are compared to the competition. Once a company embraces transparency, its competition will be judged based on whether they are transparent as well. If they’re not, then the question could very well become “What do they have to hide?”

Communication is the other important focus because it is the means by which companies can gain maximum value out of their sustainability initiatives, and it enables them to respond to customer needs. Corporate communication will begin to focus on extolling the benefits and virtues of the company’s initiatives and progress—both to help with consumer awareness and to differentiate themselves from the competition. Feedback mechanisms will become important tools for enabling companies to respond to customer needs and desires.

This point of communication and feedback is of particular interest to me, but first, two points.

The first point is that companies are not their products. Companies are something else. To quote “Built to Last”, by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras:

We had to shift from seeing the company as a vehicle for the products to seeing the products as a vehicle for the company. (pp 28)

or, as they in turn quote Thomas J. Watson, Jr., former CEO of IBM:

If an organization is to meet the challenges of a changing world, it must be prepared to change everything about itself except [its basic] beliefs as it moves through corporate life. ... The only sacred cow in an organization should be its basic philosophy of doing business. [emphasis ours] (pp 81)

A basic tenet of service design is that the company’s relationship with people is the core value of the company. A company’s success lies, therefore, on the ability of that company to effectively address the needs and desires of the customer. We see this in the hotel industry, among other service-based fields, where a good hotel is one with good service. This is one kind of service, and we know what good service is on a basic, fundamental level. The catch is that businesses which aren’t traditionally service-based will need to become service-based, which leads to different kinds of services. Car-sharing services, for example, instead of car-rental agencies, for example. But this shift also entails maintaining relationships. So selling a car isn’t about selling that particular car, it’s about forming and maintaining a relationship with the customer. And, in fact, it’s not even about selling cars. It’s about providing customers with transportation solutions which fulfill their needs. We see this with the music industry: music companies are just beginning to understand that they’re in the music business, not the record business.

This overall scenario is therefore predicated on the understanding that successful companies will change their offerings in response to market forces, because those offerings aren’t the company. The company’s success lies in its ability to innovate solutions which address the needs of its customers and in its ability to create discerning customers. As Paul Hawken mentions in The Ecology of Commerce, Japanese car dealerships spoil their customers with such things as door to door service and the amount of detailing they perform. This in turn creates a hurdle for competing companies, because customers now expect at least the level of service provided by the first company.

Therefore, the important point to note is that the rating system rates the company, not the products it offers. The rationale is that, fundamentally, the products aren’t the company, and that rating the company has broader effects than can be achieved simply rating a product. A company can create a single product that’s “good” or “green” but it is not a significant or meaningful change if everything else the company produces is not “green”. However, if a company changes the way it produces and conceives of products, then more than one product line will be affected—perhaps every product it produces is affected.

The second point is that people value this information and will act on it. Currently, the market provides only one piece of supposedly objective information at the point of sale: price. Yet price generally neither encapsulates nor reflects the true cost of things. An example is broccoli in a supermarket. Organic broccoli tends to cost more than conventional broccoli, but that’s because the price of the organic food more accurately reflects the real cost of the food. That is to say, the price of conventional broccoli is artificially low, and does not take into account such costs as runoff from chemical fertilizers and pollution from transportation.

Given more information about a product, specifically the sustainability rating or certification of the company behind the product, people can use this information to make a purchasing decision. The catch is that this information needs to be presented to them in a personally meaningful way. Abstract values such as the amount of carbon NOT released into the atmosphere are interesting, but are not very resonant because they are fundamentally abstract concepts—I am aware of something called CO2, but it’s not something I can see piling up in my backyard. In contrast, appeals to a person’s frugality or status or health (among other motivations), are potentially more resonant. Choosing to purchase one company’s product over another company’s product is a kind of voting, a way of rewarding companies in the marketplace who are proponents of sustainable development practices.

So, this is where my thesis was heading, more or less, until I tweaked it. I still think the above framework is worth exploring in further detail, but doing so is not in the purview of my interaction design coursework. This post was a long time in writing, in part affected by the recently-completed Applied Dreams, and I obviously need to catch things up to my current thesis status. Any comments on the above?

Whew! It’s Sunday, Applied Dreams are over as of last Friday, and my life is finally returning to some semblance of normalcy…or at least what passes for it around here. Guess how much sleep I got between Wednesday and Friday?

Applied Dreams: I was very pleased with how things turned out. Which was a nice change from how I felt after the last presentation. I don’t know if I completely nailed it, because I’ve had my head in this stuff for two weeks and it makes sense to me, but I think I got my message across. Most importantly, the person we most wanted to see my project was able to be in the audience and he “got” it and seemed pretty excited about the concept. Certainly the physical form of my project could be improved (I don’t claim to be an industrial designer), but the core concept is strong.

I worked like a dog, though, to get it into presentation form… Over the weekend I started to have doubts about where things were heading, and I ended up just brushing them aside while I focused on some of the things that people were saying from my crits. This turned out to be the worst thing I could have done.

The biggest lesson I learned from this project is that you have to care about your work. Caring about your work imbues it with quality. (Note: I was surprised to find the complete text of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is available online.)

So on Monday I had to face the facts: my project was “heading towards banality”—not an easy or pleasant thing to hear, but it was true. And it took me the rest of the week to turn things around to the point where I cared about the project. The difference being that I was in control of the project, and I wasn’t just implementing someone else’s suggestions or beliefs.

As a designer, I can’t just do what someone tells me. I have to know what my beliefs and values are, and stick to them. Otherwise what I do isn’t really worth doing: if I don’t care about my work, then who will?

So part one was redefining what I wanted to do, and part two was making it happen. And that’s the part that was most painful, seeing as most of the work took place in the last couple of days before the final presentation.

A key part of redefining what I wanted to do was taking control of the situation. Was I going to sit back and try to work with what content I had access to, or was there a way for me to go out and make some content?

I really like the author Harlan Ellison, and someone once made a comment about him that he’s the kind of person you’d want around in an emergency, because he’s the kind of guy who would commandeer a gurney in a hospital, make a racket, get the doctors to look at you… I admire that ability, not because it’s about getting things done your way or being obnoxious, but because it’s about imposing your will on a situation. It’s about getting things done.

There’s definitely a philosophical side to this education for me, because it’s forcing me to confront and define what exactly I believe in, and, more importantly, how to express and communicate those beliefs and values. It’s not easy, but it’s very rewarding.

It’s sort of hard to express my state of mind right now, partly because it’s rushing around at a thousand miles an hour. Anything I try to write doesn’t really capture the essence of what I’m thinking. But here’s a shot, courtesy of Torolab: Propose rather than protest.

Here’s a bit of strange Italian trivia: in certain parts of Italy it’s illegal to turn on the heat before 15 October or after 15 April. This would explain why there’s still no heat in both Talponia and the Blue House, even though the weather’s gotten pretty cold in the last couple of days. Today it was 12C in Torino, with a low of 7C, although I suspect it’s colder in Ivrea as we’re right next to the mountains. On the way back from Milan on Sunday, it started raining and hailing. The weather before Saturday was consistently warm, but ever since Sunday the weather’s ranged from really chilly to cold. I could see my breath while walking home tonight. I can smell winter lurking behind the mountains.

A lot’s been going on lately. I took a trip to Milan on Saturday, stayed overnight, and came back Sunday afternoon. I’ve also been working on the Memory project for the last couple of weeks. It’s been frustrating at times, but I think we’re heading the right direction now. I’m just worried about coding the thing in Processing, as I don’t believe the programming language can express what we want to do.

Aside from schoolwork, I suppose the interesting news is my trip to Milan. This was the first time I’d been outside of the train station in Milan, and I had really no idea what the expect. I was pleasantly surprised. There’s a lot to see, and it’s pretty easy to walk around. A group of us had intended to depart for Milan together early Saturday morning, but I think some people overdid aperitivo the night before and weren’t able to haul themselves out of bed for the 8AM departure time. A group of four of us ended up leaving early, with the intention of meeting up in Milan with the rest of the students later that day. Thank goodness for cell phones!

After arriving in Milan, we decided to walk to the Duomo, which is the third largest cathedral in the world. I needed to find an ATM along the way, but this turned into a very involved process. Let me just say that taking money out from an ATM in Italy is a bit like playing Russian Roulette. The threat of death, of course, isn’t present, but there is a healthy amount of terror at times. For example, after inserting my card into one ATM, it decided to inform me that my card was being withheld and my bank notified. Thirty seconds later, out popped my card. Whew!

Admittedly, not all ATMs have such strongly worded messages, but I have run into my fair share of insufficient or zero balance warnings even though there’s plenty of money in the account. There doesn’t seem to be a particular rationale behind which machines will take my card and which ones won’t, so I inevitably have to visit five or so machines before I can get to my money.

Having successfully wrested money from yet another recalcitrant ATM, we grabbed some sandwiches and continued our trek towards the Duomo. Along the way, we ran across what I believe is the US embassy in Milan, as well as (after a wrong turn) the house of Versace. Or at least that’s what the huge plaque on the building seemed to indicate. After consulting the map in my guidebook, we headed through the fashion district, which, as one might expect, is filled with incredibly expensive things.

We eventually ended up at the Duomo, the front of which is completely covered in scaffolding. However, the rest of the building is visible, and I was suitably impressed. The building reminded me of the church in Cologne I visited earlier this year with Syd, except that the Duomo was much, much lighter in color. I’m sure they’ve done restorative work on the Duomo, and it’s amazing how different one’s sense of the building is when it’s light-colored instead of dark and sooty.

After checking out the interior of the Duomo, we decided to walk up to the roof. Yes, you can actually walk on the roof of the Duomo, and it sure is amazing. The weather was a little overcast on Saturday, so we weren’t able to see very far (apparently you can see the alps on a clear day), but that didn’t spoil the experience of walking on top of this church. We shunned the elevator and walked up the several flights of narrow stairs. I think we stayed on top of the Duomo for about an hour. I took a bunch of photos and was amused at how some of the steep sections on the roof resembled the trail on Hua San mountain in China. After walking around the entire accessible roof structure, I started to reconsider our decision to walk up and down from the roof instead of taking the elevator!

The Metro stops right in front of the Duomo, but we decided to walk (sensing a trend?) to la Triennale, which is a kind of pavilion or exhibition hall for art, design, and architecture. It hosts a variety of exhibitions during the year, and it just so happens that Marcello’s wife is the curator. Yes, this is the same Marcello from our “30-second Visions” project a couple of weeks ago. We were to all meet him at the museum around 1PM.

On the way from the Duomo to la Triennale, we passed through Castello Sforzesco, one of the landmarks of Milan that houses, among other things, the final, unfinished sculpture of Michelangelo. We didn’t know this until later, however, so we just continued on to la Triennale to meet Marchello and the rest of the students who hadn’t gotten up in time for the earlier train to Milan.

The big exhibit right now at the museum is the Andy Warhol Show. I was suitably impressed by this exhibit, which looked at his work from the perspective of how he developed his art. After reading more about the time period, the processes he used, as well as the points he was trying to make, I think I appreciate his artwork more. I still find some of his work strange and enigmatic, but some of his other pieces make sense now.

The other two exhibits were an architecture exhibit about a competition that solicited new designs for the center of Milan. A bunch of famous architects were involved, and I ended up wondering how one would tell Frank Gehry that his group’s design lost out to the group group with Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind.

The upstairs exhibit was about industrial design, and displayed a selection of winners from this year’s ADI winners. ADI is the Italian Association for Industrial Design, and there were some very interesting exhibits, including a Bertone Birusa, which pretty much stole the show as far as I’m concerned. I managed to take a photo with my phone, but there are much better pictures out there of this beautiful car. On a humorous note, the front-right tire was flat…go figure!

It’s getting late, so I think this is a good place to stop. I’ll finish this story up with another post some other time.

It seems whenever I go out for a walk on the weekends in Ivrea, something’s always going on. Last week it was a foot race of some kind. Today it was some kind of concert. Since I tend to sleep in on Saturdays, I usually catch the end of whatever is going on. Today I was able to take a quick snapshot with my phone-cam:

Slept in this morning, woke up in time to get a couple of errands done. First was to get my cell phone set up. A cell phone in Italy can be called a “telefonino,” or in other words, a small phone. It was a bit of a challenge (think about how many cell phone plans there are in the US!), but I ended up with a Vodafone plan. I know that SMS is 15 cents, but phone calls are something like 50 cents a minute to the USA (!) – I’ll most likely just use it for SMS.

Then it was off to get a haircut. Let me say, trying to explain what you want done with your hair in a foreign language is a true test of your language ability. I failed miserably. They had to haul out the book of pictures, and I pointed to what style I wanted. I now know, however, that “corto” means short. Of course, you can only say “corto” so many times before you’re completely shorn. I think I provided a week’s worth of entertainment for the hairdressers. But in the end my hair was cut and I’m not bald.

I inquired about a used bike at the bike store, and from what I could tell, new bikes run from 350 Euro and up, but the cheapest bike he had in the store (it was small) was 850 Euro. And it seems that used bikes are sort of potluck in terms of when and what kind he can acquire. Mind you, this is what I think he said.

After all of this, I decided to find a dizionario. As an aside, a librerio is where you buy books, while a biblitoteca is where you borrow them (a library, to use the English word). Luckily, we had gone over the difference in Italian class, so I was spared the confusion. The dizionario was easy enough to buy, but the other book I wanted was a little more difficult to find.

Syd has a book called lo zingarelli, which is an Italian dictionary with a lot of pictures. I wanted one after seeing her copy, but I forgot important things, like the fact that there are two kinds: a big one and a little one. So I went into this bookstore and asked for a “dizionario con disegni”—a dictionary with drawings—because that was the best way I could think of describing the book. After the person behind the counter disappeared into the storage room, I turned around and there it was…lo zingarelli. But this one was huge and came with a CD-ROM, all for the low price of 80 Euro…

After much broken Italian and hand gestures and the like on my part, I was brought into the storage room to speed up the process. And lo-and-behold, they found lo zingarelli minore (the small one), which was just what I wanted. Just to explain, this book doesn’t have a picture for each word, but it does have diagrams of more difficult concepts (such as a volcano) with the various parts described. It’s all in Italian, so I’ll probably be using the regular dizionario (or the internet) in most cases, but this is a good book to have when describing more technical or involved material. I think it will come in handy over the next two years.

My next goal was to find another bike store I’d heard about, but I was unable to locate it. So instead I went to the supermarket and bought some things I had forgotten the other day when I was at the market.

Tonight there was a party in one of the rooms for the students and faculty. Not many professors showed up (I saw two), but then again I was a couple of hours late (a 15-minute nap turned into 3 hours) and they may have already headed home. Now I’m up way past my bedtime courtesy of the same nap.

Just did the dishes, so I think it’s time to turn in. Ciao!

(Apologies for the randomness of this post, but I think it’s a reflection of my thought processes at the moment.)

I hope the lack of posting during projects won’t become a trend, but this week was pretty intense. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we had to make a 30-second video describing what interaction design is for the 30-Second Visions project. We presented our finished product on Friday evening at 17:00.

My mind is still spinning from everything. After all the presentations were finished, I went back upstairs to studio and sat down at my desk, stared at my computer, and slowly realized that I didn’t have to do anything. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel exhausted and tired, as I’d expected to; rather, I felt like I should be doing something—I felt a lack of work. Strange feeling, this is, as I was always so eager to be done with work at my previous jobs. I’m taking this as a good sign for now, but I’ll have to get back to you in December to see if I still feel the same way.

To say that we had to deliver this video by Friday evening at 17:00 doesn’t begin to describe the rest of the scenario:

Italian class from 9:30 to 13:00 every day. Lunch from 13:00 to 14:30. Lecture from 14:30 to about 17:00. Group work and dinner from 17:00 to 21:00. Presentations from our guests from 21:00 to 23:00. So somewhere among all those other things we were supposed to conceive, film, and edit our video.

Let’s just say that we were up until 5:00 on Friday finishing something that we thought (at 20:30 Thursday evening) would take just an hour or so. “Numerous technical issues” just begins to scratch the surface. It’s been a long week, so after the presentations on Friday everyone hustled off to aperitivo. Sadly, the selection of food wasn’t quite up to par with the previous weeks, so I ended up cooking and eating dinner with a couple of people back in Talponia.

It’s a strange setup at Talponia. We each have our own apartment, and the way the building is arranged it’s very hard to get from room to room. But even so, we still manage to get together in groups and cook dinner together or just hang out. While we lose some of the community feel that a dorm provides, it’s also nice to invite people over to your apartment.

I was also pleasantly surprised with how our group dynamic worked in this project. We had four people in our group. Sometimes people can be great to know as friends, but horrible to work with. Since we had gotten to know everyone as friends (and to a very minor degree that’s how the groups formed), it was a bit of an adjustment to working together. And I think there was some stepping around toes at the beginning, but eventually we got comfortable enough to work effectively.

This morning I was woken up by the cleaning ladies when they rang my doorbell. I’m not the most lucid person when I first wake up, especially not when having gone to bed just five hours earlier. And the last time they’d rung my doorbell when I’d been home, I wasn’t fast enough to answer and they just walked right into my room. When I heard the doorbell this time, my brain immediately recognized the danger and as a reflex tried to communicate to the cleaning ladies that I was indeed home.

So I began yelling incoherently. Yelling might be too strong a word, perhaps: “speaking loudly” is probably a better choice, retaining the emphasis on “incoherent”. Eventually the “conversation” reached the point of them saying “Lunedi Lunedi” and me saying “Si Si Si,” after which I promptly fell right back to sleep. It had all the characteristics of a bad dream…

When I awoke, it was around noon and I ran off to the market to get some food for the upcoming week. My food supply had begun to dwindle earlier in the week, so when I’d gone over to other people’s rooms for dinner I had very little to offer. At the market, I made sure to get fruit and veggies, and tonight we enjoyed some amazing raspberries and kiwi fruit for dessert along with the pasta we’d had for dinner.

Tonight I learned that “cod” is “bacalhau” in Portuguese.

And with that I think I need to sign off. I’ll write more about my new computer, the challenges of typing on a foreign keyboard, and other exciting things in another post some other time. Right now, I need some sleep.

After we left the castle, we drove to IKEA. This is the only IKEA in the Torino area, and as anyone who has shopped at IKEA before knows, an IKEA store on the weekend can be a madhouse. Now imagine that it’s Italy, and people are parking on the grass medians and generally driving like insane people, and the excitement gets taken up a notch. Add to this mix the fact that the bus driver decided it wasn’t possible for him to drop us off in the parking lot and instead pulled over to the side of a busy, three lane road to drop us off. I had visions of Frogger dancing in my head as we sprinted for the relative safety of the median and then to the sidewalk beyond.

After making it to the entrance safe and sound, we proceeded directly to the Swedish Meatball section (AKA the cafeteria), as nobody had eaten for a while. Sadly, the hot food section was closed down (no meatballs for us), so we were stuck with expresso and sandwiches. Thus sated, we embarked on an epic journey through the halls of IKEA.

The only rule that seemed to be in effect was the general flow of traffic through IKEA, which surprised me. In IKEA, there is a definite path one follows that winds its way through the various sections and delivers you, eventually, to the check-out stands. Strangely, the Italians obeyed this traffic rule. Other than that, all bets were off. Let’s just say that asking people to move can be accomplished in one of two ways:

a) saying “mi scusi.”

b) taking whatever bag or heavy item you have in your possession and leveraging it against any vulnerable or exposed soft-tissue exposed by the party or parties blocking your way.

I caught on rather quickly, and equipped with my messenger bag, a yellow IKEA bag filled with various items, and a comforter wedged under my arm, I became a formidable obstacle, a foe to be reckoned with. People were apologizing to me for getting in my way. It was wonderful.

The original plan was to meet the driver at the same place he dropped us off. None of us had paused to consider the implications of this arrangement at the time, but after we checked out it became obvious that this trip was far from over. Hauling bags of IKEA items across three lanes of traffic in either direction was…an interesting experience.

After we arrived back at Talponia, one unfortunate bag fell out as the driver opened the storage compartment. Inevitably, it was the one full of drinking glasses. I had a lot of fun assembling my lamps and washing the various kitchen implements I’d purchased (a cutting board! a knife! a frying pan!). Aside from the lamp that inexplicably required a wrench, everything was pretty easy to assemble.

At this point, I’ve got just the right amount of stuff: just enough to make things pleasant and comfortable, but not so much that my room becomes cluttered and annoying. Now I just need to have some people over for dinner.