What if at some point a trigger point was reached, which made a minor experiment like Openwear suddenly have a massive impact? The concept of the trigger point is used in several contexts linked to sustainability and ecological understanding. The British organisationTipping Point (http://www.tippingpoint.org.uk/) call it a tipping point, indicating the issue of the vicarious balance between a change going in one direction and a movement reversing this change. The latter is initiated by locating the tipping point possibilities; in the case of Tipping Point by ”energising the creative response to climate change” and making the work of artists and others more visible, more audible. Others, like the American eco-artist Aviva Rahmani (http://www.ghostnets.com/ghostnets.html) speak of trigger points in her search for orientation points in a context of events or situations, points which may contain the leverage point for making a difference, and eventually, become the root of a change process. One such element could be seen in the COP15 context, when the arrival of a group of ”climate pirates” on a sailing ship to the harbour of Copenhagen attracted such press attention that plans were changed for Denmark’s largest energy company. To pursue the example, the effect of this event was pretty limited to that particular effect, so one could not in this case speak of a major tipping point or trigger point event, bringing in large change processes.
The other aspect of this is that major change processes are rarely linear. They move in a series of directions and contain many different strings of events that do not necessarily show a direct connection when you first observe them.
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