designswarm thoughts

As a consumer, what if every time I wanted to buy something that wasn’t related to food or public transportation, I would have to fill in a form explaining why I would buy x, y, z? I think Id stop buying anything other than books. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

“The most revolutionary products, the things you “never knew you wanted but can’t live without”, only catch on when people are able to move quickly from trying to experiencing.””
- Christopher Fahley on Graph paper.

“I believe in general that my job is absolutely useless”
- Philippe Stark, TEDtalks

“And that means that we have to stop making crap. It’s really as simple as that. We are suffocating, drowning, and poisoning ourselves with the stuff we produce, abrading, out-gassing, and seeping into our air, our water, our land, our food—and basically those are the only things we have to look after before there’s no we in that sentence. It gets into our bodies, of course, and it certainly gets into our minds. And designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about it, this is kind of grotesque. “Consumer” isn’t a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be.”
- Allan Chochinov on Core77.

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So many contradicting messages are floating around. It’s hard to make up your mind whether you should get up in the morning, not move an inch, never practice or produce a thing but instead turn to “the screen” and do stuff online which only hurts the planet indirectly (server space, wires, heat production, heavy and dangerous chemical usage).

One of the ways in which this seems unfair however is the way that for some reason, it all ends up in our lap. This general mea culpa that people are getting into frightens me because we perhaps forget to address solutions. One of the things I ask myself is how will I still get to do what I want to do as a creative person without polluting the world with “crap” and still making a living. As a professional living on my ability to sell my creativity by the hour, this is a tremendous challenge. If I decide to stop and never make/design a single thing again, then engineers will go back to doing that as they had before we came into the field at the beginning of the last century and all the added values of design like “ease of use”, “user centered design” “biomimicry”, “cultural sculpting” (that’s my own expression at the moment, trying it out) will all go down the drain again.

So what is happening? Well i’ll take the example of a friend of mine, R. who is a successful furniture designer and now is, in his own words : “looking to do more user centred / research / interactive / service design-esque work”
See? We’re latching on to the buzz words that seem to be more attractive and PC at the moment. Is making a gadget for a user-centered project somehow not making crap? I think not. But it sounds better.

The climate change message needs to stop being focused on making the design industry the root of all evil because at the end of the day, we might actually be the first ones to start providing solutions. The answer lies I think, in radically changing the educational model so that people who are creative, can still be so but with the added constraints and demands of a greener world. If you make that the norm, noone will even notice the change, it might actually make it even more attractive to individuals who want to make a difference. But this designer generation’s morose and “défaitiste” attitude won’t get us anywhere.