CURRENT To speak of sustainability means to speak of a renegotiation of the way that we live on the earth: a dramatic reduction of our resource and energy consumption. It is about social change. HUMIDITY & PERSPIRATION = BODY FAT OCEAN HEAT STORES MENSTRUATION LOCAL HIGH TIDE BODY TEMPERATURE & OCEAN TEMPERATURE HEART BEAT & WAVE FREQUENCY Figure 1. Lisa Bolton's proposal, In Deep, viscerally connects urban dwellers with the ocean, shifting the Quantified Self movement to the Sensing Self future. travel and also increases the potential for neighbourly encounters when harvesting lettuce for dinner. This exemplifies what Man- zini refers to as a small, local, open, and connected system (SLOC). The small greenhouse is positioned very close to home, open to any members, and interconnected via an information system that can monitor membership, use and maintenance. Scaling up the Gro-Mo can mean replicating a local community solution in another location, with small shifts to allow for the local context. Itis more like scaling out than scaling up. CREATIVE RECOMBINING OF EXISTING ASSETS The principle of recombining what already exists is foundational to lowering resource intensity. This is what you want to do when you want to innovate without increasing consumer volume. Planet Chefis a web based game whereby participants compete to prepare food using the least energy and resources. All factors are considered in the scoring, from how the food was grown, where it was purchased, how far it travelled to get toits destination, and how much energy was used in the preparation. The scoring also includes points in the categories food competitions are known for: visual appeal, taste, mouth feel. The culmination is a shared low energy meal at aneighborhood potluck. This design innovates social engagement by recombining existing assets: the web, food data, and friends. New social moments, educational opportunities, and networks are created without building new artifacts. Who is social? This Emily Carr DESIS initiative researches social relations with more than humans. A more integrated relationship between people and the natural world is essential to developing priorities and values necessary for sustainability. Lisa Bolton's pro- posal, In Deep, viscerally connects urban dwellers with the ocean. Drawing on existing oceanography databases, Bolton developed a smart phone app that correlates data about our bodies with data about the oceans. (See figure 1.) For this project the Quantified Self movement and the numerous apps that chart biometric data are existing assets. The new In Deep app recombines with exist- ing sensors and adds information about how one's body relates to live ocean data at that moment. Bolton’s app correlates body tem- perature to ocean temperature, heartbeat to wave frequency, body fat to ocean heat stores, and menstruation to local high tide. An entirely new social relationship is created from existing assets. Recombining existing assets forces creativity of a different sort: re-forming what already exists to create new and socially reward- ing experiences. This is a lean efficiency that can bring enormous design satisfaction as well as social innovation. REDUNDANCY Redundancy is a principle adapted from the study of resilient eco- systems. A resilient ecosystem contains many species that are able to perform similar functions. This allows the ecosystem to more easily adapt to shocks and changes, because another plant or ani- mal can step in and fill the role previously taken by another species [4]. In social innovation contexts, a diverse resource pool of small businesses allows for replacement, updating and upgrading, and constant evolution in response to a community’s changing needs. Redundancy also supports shared responsibility in a community, and together with scale, allows customization to specific contexts. For example, DESIS Emily Carr collaborated with Village Van- couver to design seed libraries to support the practice of seed sharing in the lower mainland. Village Vancouver is a Transition