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Small enough to knock on the door

You’ll have to put up with as few too many posts from me during the Energy Futures season for RMIT Regenerative Futures Institute whilst trying to retain my ‘two events’ produce one question approach. This time, one went through radio, live coding and electric shocks; the other through mud bricks and streetlights. Both ended up making the same argument: going smaller doesn’t just shrink a things footprint. It changes what the thing is.

The first was the 2nd in the series of the I Brought a Thing seminar series. Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier told the story of Tetsuo Kogawa, who found a loophole in Japanese radio law. Transmitters under one watt, reserved for gadgets like garage door openers, needed no licence, yet in Tokyo they still reached about 500 metres. Broadcasting became narrowcasting, and hundreds of micro stations appeared in the 1980s. You werent speaking to millions; whoever was listening might come and knock on your door. Jan applies the same logic to solar-powered websites that simply go offline when the sun does. Renick Bell, joining from RMIT University Vietnam, argued that energy systems should be designed to improvise and fit their context. His example was fish ladders built for European salmon that fail the Mekongs smaller fish.

In the second, Nadine Samaha introduced the Regenerative Design as an Energy System event, with architect Allen Kong, First Nations Director of Allen Kong Architect‘s who revisited his work on the family therapy units at Odyssey House, built partly by residents in recovery, using mud bricks made on site. The bricks were deliberately small: light enough for a limited workforce, and able to follow curved walls. The making became part of the care. Cristina Hernández Santín then reframed energy as relationships, starting with street lighting. Our need to feel safe at night overrides thousands of species that navigate by moonlight. Her fixes are modest: aim light only where its needed, lower the intensity, warm the colour, add timers.

Side by side, the one-watt transmitter, the hand-sized brick and the dimmed streetlight are doing the same work. Each accepts a limit, and the limit restores relationships that scale had erased. Listeners become neighbours, residents become builders, and the street is shared again with what lives in the dark.

Which leaves a question sitting between a one-watt transmitter and a hand-made brick: what would we build if we judged an energy system not by how far it reaches, but by who can still knock on the door?

Thanks to all of the speakers and participants and Nick Adams who holds these things together for us

#regenerativefutures #energy #energyfutures #RMIT #things