Stephen Quilley - 2011 "Innovators in Action" Speaker Series

Open Source Economics Looking for Meaning in a Throwaway World with Stephen Quilley

For two hundred years, people have experienced the flip-side of material prosperity as a loss of meaning – alienation, the loss of a sense of self-sufficiency, the feeling of being a cog in a vast machine. Stephen’s talk explored the significance of this quest for meaning – a meaningful relationship with other people, with our environment and with the products that we make, use and consume. In his talk, he compared “Transition Towns” with the growing popularity of home-schooling, the radical-fringe of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement, the emergence of ‘collaborative’ forms of consumption and a unique Kansas-based experiment in 'Open Source Ecology' (open sourcing the technology of modern material culture for production, maintenance and repair at home).

Main Presentation

About Stephen Quilley

Stephen Quilley worked previously at University College Dublin (1999-2005) and the ESRC Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition in Manchester (1997-1999). A unifying thread in Quilley's academic research is that we have inadvertently created a society in which people work too hard in order to consume too much; that we buy stuff mainly because we don't have time to do anything (even with the stuff we buy); that we are hitting ecological ‘limits to growth’; and that along the way we have high divorce rates, unhappy children, anorexic teenagers, appalling public health problems and crises of social cohesion. Quilley is interested in solving all of these problems and although he doesn't have any answers he likes to hang out with people who do.

About: The Innovators in Action Speaker Series

SiG@Waterloo welcomed four of Canada’s leaders in the field of social innovation to our Innovators in Action speaker series. Topics focused on education, youth social infrastructure, vulnerable populations, social technologies, community resilience and social finance. Each of the keynote speakers shared their experiences in working to identify and address the root causes of intractable social challenges. Each presentation was followed by a discussion with local panel members who will shared their reflections on the ideas and offered their own insights.