Too often our society equates quality of life with quantity of energy consumption. Something I discovered as I learned of how to prepare for the future was that I longed for a life not of monster televisions and fast cars, but of abundant nature and slow community. Through most of my life I believed the opposite: that true happiness would be found with vast riches and endless energy. I have yet to see anyone articulate my own internal feelings on this as clearly as Jeff Vail in his recent post entitled "The Design Imperative".
Vail works to quantify the meaning of "quality of life" as a measure independent from energy, although often enhanced by it. As he says, quality of life is demonstrably improved by things such as localized food production, self-sufficiency, indigenous architecture, and strong community. From the article:
Allow me now to suggest a new term, borrowing (loosely) from Jacques Ellul: Technics. While “technology” converts work into any product, “technics” is a more specific term that I am using to denote the design process of converting work into human quality of life.
It seems axiomatic that the goal of humanity is to optimize quality of life. There are nearly endless debates that can begin here—how is quality of life defined, do we measure the mean, median, mode, or selfish-individual level, etc.—but I think that we can all agree that IF we can answer the question “what is quality of life,” then we all share the goal of optimizing it.
This leaves us with a simple equation: Quality of Life = Work * Technics
In pursuing the goal of optimizing quality of life, there are two (non mutually-exclusive) options: improve the availability of work, or improve technics.
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