The Digital Journey: Stories From a Networked Planet Series was produced from 1998 to 2001. Featured were advanced technologies and implementations at that time. The series included technology stories, then on the horizon, and the eventual development thereof, while the consequences which occurred, however unintended, are offered below the original stories on this page. Seen on PBS, TVO Canada, CCTV China, CNN Europe and airport displays in major cities worldwide.
Director Robert Lundahl received a Northern California Emmy® for a compilation of shorts filmed in China, as seen on this page, and other major awards. The Series is hosted by Sun Microsystems, Director of the Science Office, John Gage.
Curitiba: The Smart City
In the City of Curitiba, two million Brazilians have turned their city into a new model for Urban Design. Now hailed as one of the world's first Smart Cities, Curitiba has linked flood control, environmental quality, transportation and economic development through a systemic approach. Written by, videography by Robert Lundahl and editing by Chris Simon. From the Emmy Award® winning series, "Digital Journey: Stories from a Networked Planet," produced by Robert Lundahl & Associates, LLC and underwritten by Sun Microsystems. Contact: robert@studio-rla.com ©Copyright Agence-RLA, LLC
Energy Self Suficiency
Architect William McDonough's building on the Oberlin College campus is a "Net Energy Producer," creating more energy than it consumes. Written by, videography and editing by Robert Lundahl. From the Emmy Award® winning series, "Digital Journey: Stories from a Networked Planet," produced by Robert Lundahl & Associates, LLC and underwritten by Sun Microsystems. Contact: robert@studio-rla.com
The Clock of the Long Now
Danny Hillis has designed a binary mechanical computer that keeps time for 10,000 years. After years making the fastest computing machines on the planet, he and Stewart Brand have created one of the slowest. The Clock of the Long Now is both a myth and a mechanism, designed to teach the future about us. One episode from Sun Microsystems' Emmy® Award winning series "Digital Journey: Stories From a Networked Planet," the segment helps audiences understand computing principles. Contact: robert@studio-rla.com
The long and short of it. (How We Did It).
Digital Journey episodes were conceived as topically relevant studio discussions. Topics were agreed upon and chosen, then researched extensively and written as a media script usually in four parts. These “Roll-Ins” were produced documentary film style with a sincle camera,, on location.. These short subjects were used to brief studio guests for a long form, half–hour show, cutting away to the pre-produced ‘“package.” This high–end PR and film approach by Producer, Lundahl and team also yielded the original shorts, distributed extremely succcessfully to PBS stations and global networks as interstitials.
Learning From Curitiba
Our team had been invited to film at INPE, the Brazilian Space Agency, on behalf of Sun Microsystems, to film networked satellites. Tony Hanna, producer at Robert Lundahl & Associates, brought Curitiba into the conversation, which then Mayor Jaime Lerner, had helped develop into a city of systematic sustainability. This is a thirty minute documentary including studio segments shot at John Gage's house in Berkeley, CA. Alan Jacobs, professor of Urban Design at U.C. Berkeley, and William Mitchell, Dean of the School of Architecture at MIT, and author of several books, including, "City of Bits," are featured, along with Jaime Lerner. former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil and Governor of Parana State.
Building the Hypercar
Strong synergies between ultralight mass, ultralow drag, and hybrid-electric drive can produce attractive designs for superefficient cars (and many other vehicles). A realistic near-term 4–5-passenger “hypercar” can achieve average fuel economy with much room for improvement.
Depending on design details, mature ultralight-hybrid hypercars could achieve 60–120 km/l using virtually any fluid fuel, perhaps ultimately ~250 with fuel cells, while being safer, sportier, more comfortable and durable, cleaner, and probably cheaper than today’s cars. By using recursive design to maximize mass decompounding, optimizing for manufacturing cost can save far more fuel than traditional optimization for fuel savings.
The dozens of technologies required are all demonstrated, but capturing their synergies with radical simplification requires highly integrated whole-system engineering with meticulous attention to detail. Despite the difficulty of this design challenge, market-driven commercialization is proceeding rapidly, with ~$1 billion committed and early entries possible in the late 1990s. The barriers are far more cultural than technical or economic. Implications for a wide range of industries—notably cars, oil, steel, and electricity—could be profound.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center
NOAA's two tsunami warning centers are staffed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The main mission of the warning centers is to help protect life and property from tsunamis. To do this, warning center staff monitor for tsunamis and the earthquakes that may cause them, forecast tsunami impacts, issue tsunami messages, conduct public outreach and coordinate with partners to continually improve warning operations.
The National Tsunami Warning Center serves the continental United States, Alaska and Canada. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center directly serves the Hawaiian Islands, the U.S. Pacific and Caribbean territories and the British Virgin Islands and is the primary international forecast center for the Pacific and Caribbean Basins.
NOAA’s tsunami program needs strengthening not budget slashing
Lori Dengler, Eureka Times-Standard
–Created: 09 March 2025
Uncertainty is bad for business, bad for research, bad for productivity, and terrible on morale. I am on NOAA’s Tsunami Science and Technology Advisory Panel (it is a volunteer position and I don’t get paid) and I know a number of people fairly high up in the organization. For the last few weeks, I’ve been asking what they know or expect, and the answer is a unanimous “we don’t know.”
The U.S. tsunami program is a very small part of NOAA. It includes the two tsunami warning centers, tsunami research at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and underpins state tsunami hazards reduction programs through the National Tsunami Hazards Mitigation Program (NTHMP). Full disclosure — grants from the NTHMP have funded much of our North Coast tsunami outreach effort, including the newest edition of Living on Shaky Ground.
In the first round of cuts, the tsunami program lost its administrator, the person who coordinates the different pieces of the program, several support personnel, and a newly hired forecaster at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. Two recently approved positions at the International Tsunami Information Center were frozen.
I am far more concerned about what might be happening next. Two years ago, NOAA finally recognized the need to put our two tsunami warning centers on a common operating system truly capable of backing each other up. At present, the centers in Hawaii and Alaska use different hardware and software and operate under separate administrative parts of NOAA. I am worried that budget cutting could set this project back, continuing the current inefficient system.
"Rethinking the Automobile" from Digital Journey: Stories From a Networked Planet, Produced and Directed by Robert Lundahl, Robert Lundahl & Associates, LLC.
in the information age the automobile is going the way of the horse and buggy. On today's Digital Journey, host John Gage joins Amory Lovins, rethinking the automobile. Imagine a car that is lightweight and powerful, safe and energy efficient then link it to a system of smart roads, to the internet, to satellite tracking systems, you're creating a Nomadic Network. This is not science fiction fantasy, this is a practical solution to the world's transportation problems–and it's ready to be built. CINDY AWARD WINNER.
From Grist. https://grist.org/article/future/ For 25 years, energy guru Amory Lovins has been seeing farther and farther into the energy future. He has been labeled a dreamer, but by now he’s accumulated enough of a record to qualify as an oracle. At a recent meeting of the National Hydrogen Association, he (with colleague Brett Williams of Rocky Mountain Institute) put together some new pieces of the energy puzzle to picture an exciting economy, not far out of reach, based on hydrogen.
Imagining the iBot and The Science of Unintended Consequences.
A visit to Deka and Dean Kamen discovers the iBot, predecessor to the Segway for disabled individuals. Sun Microsystems: Digital Journey.
Developed in the early 1990s by DEKA Research and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), with the goal of creating a “wheelchair that walks,” the device was unveiled to great fanfare in 1999. In 2003, it was commercially released under the name iBOT 3000. It was considered a beacon of progress, a symbol of the potential for new tech to improve the lives of millions of people.
The exhibit notes, however, that the iBOT was discontinued after only six years on the market. The reasons given are unexpectedly candid:
“After reading some of the other stories in this museum, you might assume it failed to deliver what it promised or it threw a few too many users down some stairs, but in the end the iBOT failed due to high costs. Insurance companies and national insurance programs refused to cover the cost of £18,000 (about $25,000 USD) per machine. Although the manufacturer did everything they could to lower prices, the technology remained prohibitively expensive.”
In other words, the iBOT wheelchair should have been revolutionary for disabled people but failed, not due to any inherent flaws in the chair itself, but due to capitalism’s gearing of production towards profit and not human need. The problem wasn’t the invention, but the fact that private insurance companies simply didn’t want to pay to provide the chair to patients, and the cost was inaccessible to most working class individuals who couldn’t afford it out of pocket.
The iBOT wheelchair was discontinued in 2009. Johnson & Johnson reported that only 500 units were sold over the course of seven years, though Deliver and delivered over 10 million hours of operating time.
Play
At MIT Media Lab, The Department of Play (DoP) is a working group of researchers, students, and community practitioners who share a common passion: designing appropriate technology and methods to empower youth and their communities.
In particular, the Department of Play initiative aims to develop an easy-to-use, open-source digital toolkit to foster youth participation, social inclusion and local civic engagement. Among other things, we are implementing a multi-channel neighborhood communication system that combines email, SMS and regular touchtone phones to help young people organize and promote block parties, games, performances and other events in the places where they live.
Nation Without Borders
The International Youth Parliament (IYP) is an independent global network founded by world young leaders to foster synergy amongst the youth and youth organizations globally. Built on universally acceptable practices, its membership is open to all and sundary without gender, racial, religious, and political bias.
Officially inaugurated in February 2017 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the parliament is determined and committed to providing levelled platforms for young leaders and youth organizations to build capacity, share, and project innovations with renewed energy.
In furtherance of the Goals of International organisations like the United Nations, African Union, UNFPA, European Parliamentary Forum On Sexual and Reproductive Health, African Parliamentary Forum On Population Commission, etc, we have positioned ourselves as vanguards in the pursuit of global peace, justice, entrepreneurship, Quality Health and Education, Community Development, corruption free society, etc.
One of 39 episodes of Digital Journey: Stories from a Networked Planet, produced for Sun Microsystems and airing on Public Television, TVO Canada and other international networks including CCTV, China. The series of shorts was filmed around the world, and is densely packaged television.
Episodes were designed to drive traffic to the web and engage multiple topics. The series has been enormously popular. After two years of tracking, segments had aired 3929 times on pubic television stations, comprising 229 hours of airtime, reaching 75,000,000 potential households, 175,000,000 potential viewers (Neilson), 43% of the U.S. broadcast market, 52.64% of the Canada broadcast market, 22,000,000 viewers, China, and 8,277,000 viewers, Europe, and 8,830,000 impressions from global airport displays. Contact: robert@studio-rla.com
Bandwidth and the Small Community
The story of how Nevada, Missouri became the location of America’s first televillage.In today's society, information creates economic opportunity. On this edition of digitaljourney, host John Gage investigates bandwidth and the small community.
Knowledge is power, said Francis Bacon at the beginning of the scientific age. Today,bandwidth is power, power from faster and greater access to digitizedinformation. A rural town in America's heartland,
Nevada, Missouri, is reinventing itself by establishing a state-of-the-art telecommunication center.
Farmers have even learned to sell soybeans on the worldwide web. I'‘m John Gage. Join me for this digital journey into bandwidth democracy.
Nevada, Missouri, population 9,500. This is the story of how one American town became a living laboratory for the networked community of the 21st century.
Alan Kenyon
Behind me is the side of America's first teleknowledge.An inspiration rising from desperate times…
With… A Community Economics Visionary
Michael H. Shuman is an economist, attorney, author, and entrepreneur, and a leading visionary on community economics. He is an Adjunct Professor at Bard Business School in New York City. He is also a Senior Researcher for Council Fire, where he performs economic-development analyses for states, local governments, and businesses around North America.
Peter Schwartz
The art of the really long view
For such a weighty subject there was a lot of guffawing going on in the Seminar Thursday night.
The topic was "The Art of the Really Long View." Peter Schwartz chatted through his slides for tonight's lecture, then the discussion waded in. Present were Danny Hillis, Leighton Read, Angie Thieriot, Ryan Phelan, David Rumsey, Eric Greenberg, Kevin Kelly, Anders Hove, Schwartz, and me.
The event was very well audio and video taped, so we can link you to a fuller version later. For now, here's a few of my notes.
Much of discussion circled around Schwartz's assertion that the most durable and influential of human artifacts are IDEAS. And a distinction worth drawing is between POWERFUL ideas and GOOD ideas. Not all powerful ideas turn out to be good, in the long run. For example, Schwartz proposed that monotheism has been an extremely powerful idea, dominating all kinds of human activity for millennia, but its overall goodness is increasingly questionable.
https://longnow.org/seminars/02003/dec/12/the-art-of-the-really-long-view
The Meaning of Small Things, Miniturization in Japan
Sharp Corporation's history is deeply intertwined with the miniaturization of technology, particularly in electronic devices. They have been at the forefront of developing smaller, more efficient components, leading to innovations in areas like calculators, smartphones, and display technologies.
Here's a more detailed look at Sharp's contributions to miniaturization:
Sharp's early work in calculators, using LCD and CMOS LSI technology, enabled the creation of pocket-sized devices, a major step forward in miniaturization.
Sharp's expertise in component miniaturization, honed through smartphone development, allowed them to create a prototype VR head-mounted display weighing only 175 grams.
Sharp's IGZO technology enables unprecedented transistor miniaturization, contributing to thinner and more efficient circuits in display technology.
Leveraging miniaturization techniques from smartphones, Sharp is developing compact and lightweight electronic steering array antennas for 5G satellite communication, according to Sharp Global.
Sharp has also focused on miniaturizing power sources, like fuel cells, improving power density and lifespan.
Sharp's Space Solar Sheet is a thin, lightweight, and flexible next-generation solar cell module, demonstrating their commitment to efficient and compact energy solutions.
Sharp has been miniaturizing this technology for various applications, including portable air purifiers and products for emerging markets.
Dr. Sasaki, a key figure at Sharp, led major accomplishments in the miniaturization and power optimization of small electronics, making LCD technology commercially viable.
Katherine McCoy (born October 12, 1945) is an American graphic designer and educator, best known for her work as the co-chair of the graduate Design program for Cranbrook Academy of Art.
During her extensive career spanning education and professional practice, McCoy worked with groundbreaking design firm Unimark, Chrysler Corporation, and with Muriel Cooper in the early days of MIT Press while at the Boston design firm Omnigraphics. McCoy's career in education was similarly broad, teaching at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, and the Royal College of Art, London. She is also the co-founder of High Ground, a yearly conference created for professional designers.
McCoy was born Katherine Jane Braden in Decatur, Illinois in 1945. As a student, she first studied interior design at Michigan State University but switched to industrial design, in which field she graduated in 1967.[1] A visit of the Museum of Modern Art during a family trip to the New York World's Fair in 1964 had made her aware that her interest was in the power of design.[2]
Shortly after graduation, McCoy joined Unimark International, a design firm led by many key figures in American Modernist graphic design, including Massimo Vignelli, Ralph Eckerstrom of Container Corporation, Jay Doblin and Herbert Bayer. It was at the interdisciplinary Unimark offices where McCoy was exposed to the strict Swiss typographic and design approaches which came to permeate much of American corporate communications through the late 1960s and 70s.[3]
Following Unimark, McCoy worked for a year in the corporate identity offices of the Chrysler Corporation, then joined the Boston design firm Omnigraphics, where she worked on several projects for the MIT Press with Muriel Cooper.[2] Next she joined Designers & Partners, the Detroit advertising design studio where she met the designer - illustrator - cartoonist Edward Fella. Designers & Partners focused solely on working with advertising agencies and had a staff that included a wide variety of graphic arts professionals, including illustrators, cartoonists, and "lettering men" as well as graphic designers. Although McCoy found that ad agency work was not very compatible with design thinking and ethics, the opportunities she was given and connections she made are an important part of her design experience.[4] She also worked with other professional practices including Xerox Education Group, and major advertising agencies.[5]
In 1971 she founded the practice McCoy & McCoy, Inc, with her husband, Michael McCoy.[6]
In fall 1971, McCoy began her career in design education when she was appointed co-chair of the Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate design program with her husband Michael McCoy.[citation needed] While McCoy led the graphic design program, and Michael McCoy led the industrial design program, both 2D and 3D design students shared studios, and explored interdisciplinary approaches towards designing.[citation needed] Katherine describes combining the "objective" typographic approach that she knew through reading and the Unimark experience with an interest in the social and cultural activism that was in the air in the late '60s when creating and reinventing the program.[4] Early conceptual influences on the Cranbrook design approach were Robert Venturi's book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Richard Saul Wurman's publishing on the man-made environment, and McCoy's own interest in social design and design vernacular.[citation needed] The commercial vernacular collages of Edward Fella, the Basel experiments of Wolfgang Weingart and a Yale project by Dan Friedman were visual design influences. Later sources included semiotics, post-structuralism, literary theory and deconstruction; both the students' and McCoy's work experimented with applications of these ideas to communications design. Katherine designed many projects for the Cranbrook Educational Community including quarterly magazines, art catalogs, Art Academy departmental posters and museum exhibitions that she and Michael produced as McCoy & McCoy.
e-Commerce in China
Emmy® Award Winner.
Original RL | A production, Digital Journey: Stories From a Networked Planet. Series for public television.
Directed by Robert Lundahl. Produced by Robert Lundahl & Associates, LLC.
415.205.2381. robert@studio-rla.com
Building e-Commerce in China
Emmy® Award Winner.
Directed by Robert Lundahl. Short Film goes behind the scenes of a college preperatory school in Shanghai, at Fudan University, and with technology recruiters and programmers in Guangdong.
Western Venture Capital in China
Emmy® Award Winner.
Directed by Robert Lundahl. Short Film highlights Venture Capitalist Bo Feng and several startups in Shanghai on the cusp of a new millenium.
https://www.wired.com/1999/02/bofeng/ https://www.newsweek.com/go-east-young-man-141975
“Bo Feng, 32, is an unlikely mogul of the Internet age. He was born in China and didn't use a telephone until he was 14. A decade ago he worked in Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area while studying to be an art-film director. Then, through a friend, he met Silicon Valley power broker Sandy Robertson, cofounder of the investment bank Robertson Stephens. Feng convinced Robertson that despite his lack of business experience, his knowledge of China's culture would make him useful to American moneymen looking for a toehold in the world's most populous market. In the blink of an Internet minute, Feng was transformed from dumpling dispenser to venture capitalist.”
From Newsweek (Link).