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John Elkington

John Elkington

A world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development.

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Going 3D

John Elkington · 12 December 2016 · Leave a Comment

Autumnal table at Hill House
Autumnal table and chair at Hill House
View of Eiffel Tower from EcoVadis HQ
View of Eiffel Tower from EcoVadis HQ
My headphones put to good use
My headphones put to good use – the thumb is her father’s
Eduardo Paolozzi's Head of Invention outside the Design Museum
Eduardo Paolozzi’s Head of Invention outside the Design Museum
Brain-dead robot
Brain-dead robot
Eco-exhibit in Love & Fear exhibition
Eco-exhibit in Love & Fear exhibition
3-D printed death mask
3-D printed death mask
A spectrum of iPods
A spectrum of iPods

A delightful visit to see the Elkingtons of Little Rissington on 3-4 December, dropping in to seer the Palmers of Icomb at the same time. Then off to Paris for several days via the Eurostar for a meeting of the EcoVadis Scientific Committee: fascinating. But Paris wreathed in pollution, with alternate number plates banned for the day.

Otherwise the past couple of weeks have been a bit of a blizzard, with a torrent of meetings, flurries of Skype calls, various planning sessions for 2017, the landing by Volans of a very major and wonderful project for next year, the spinning out of a fair few blogs, and a progressive working through of a series of books.

They have included Robert Harris’s Conclave (with a wonderful sting in its tail) and now Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life & Others, which in clues the Story of Your Life story that seeded the new film Arrival, which we saw and I immensely liked last week.

Weirdly, I also enjoyed the new Design Museum a couple of days back, where we had a Volans away evening, though not for the sort of reasons the management presumably had in mind.
Ever since I have since been trying to work out how the Museum could be turned into a truly magnetic draw. The overall feel is passive. Even the gently quivering industrial robot in the Fear & Love Exhibition had suffered a “stroke” and had lost its ability to interact with passers-by. The best idea, at least as far as I was concerned, where the 3-D printed death masks (have been experimenting with a new 3-D OLED TV this week), but somehow they looked like a bunch of things found in Left Luggage.
It’s over 30 years since I visited Paul Watson’s anti-whaling ship Sea Shepherd II in Alexandria, Virginia, so I was pleased to see an exhibit honouring the Seas Shepherds. But again it all seemed a bit of a jumble.
Here’s what the exhibition has to say on the subject: “The graphic designers Metahaven, based in Amsterdam, present a film about the marine wildlife conservation group Sea Shepherd. The film Love Letter to Sea Shepherd, accompanied by a series of highly graphic flags, is a work of advocacy in support of organisation’s anti-whaling activities, but also a meditation on forms of intelligence that we barely understand.”
Having listened to Roger Payne’s hydrographic recordings of whale song for decades, and then the Arrival soundtrack of assorted heptapods last week, I confess the Love Letter would have left me little the wiser had I not known what I was seeing and meant to be experiencing.
After dinner, escaping from the building proved to be quite a challenge, with the main doors shut and nothing to show you had to go through a small door that looked like a staff entrance. Well designed the experience  sadly wasn’t.
Struck me in passing that it is exactly 30 years since we did The Green Designer Exhibition at the Design Centre, where in writing the catalogue I waxed lyrical about the “Green Consumer” – and then decided it might be an idea to do a Green Consumer Guide.
No such inspiration at the Design Museum, yet, but maybe I’ll give it another go in a couple of months. In retrospect, probably the best think of all was watching a pair of young girls in jeans racing along the upper floors and skidding along the polished wood on their knees. Not quite what the designers intended, perhaps, but in the spirit of the right sort of future.

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Introduction

I began this blog with an entry reporting on a visit to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, on 30 September 2003. The blog element of the website has gone through several iterations since, with much of the older material still available.

Like so many things in my life, blog entries blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional. As explained on this site’s Home Page, the website and the blog are part platform for ongoing projects, part autobiography, and part accountability mechanism.

In addition, my blogs have appeared on many sites such as: Chinadialogue, CSRWire, Fast Company, GreenBiz, Guardian Sustainable Business, and the Harvard Business Review.

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About

John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. He is currently Founding Partner and Executive Chairman of Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation movements.

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john@johnelkington.com  |  +44 203 701 7550 | Twitter: @volansjohn

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