designswarm thoughts

I like to think that design schools don’t just teach good creative thinking but also good habits that shape you as a professional later on and skills that can influence the profession in general.

I’ve been co-teaching one day a week at the University for the Creative Arts and in a way it’s been quite an education (couldn’t help it ;) ).

These 19-20 year olds spend 6 weeks trying out a different program every week and the practice of design is actually called “3DD” or 3D design. 3DD competes with illustration, animation, fine arts, photography and other such courses for student’s attention and at the end of the 6 weeks they will choose a “pathway” for the next 3-4 years.

All the different professions and opportunities in design such as architecture, product design, interior design, urban design, etc are all dumped into this one unappealing label.
Not only that, but the issue of sustainability doesn’t get mentioned anywhere, making this choice of a course completely removed from the realities of society and the professional environment.

This becomes quite obvious in the totally wasteful ways in which students treat the materials they are provided with. Card, paper, foam, toxic glues and the likes are thrown around. Shapes are cut right in the middle of a piece of paper or card and huge leftovers are simply discarded. Being sensitive to the environmental doesn’t grow on you, it’s taught or even imposed as just another set of constraints that come with being a designer.

If we are to make any kind of change in designer’s expectations of the world, their work and their clients, that’s where it starts: among the doubts and questions of students still working out where they stand in a world they don’t quite know how to master.

As echos of Half-Life 2 from the other room force me into headphones mode, it made me think about the ways in which entertainment likes to make us see the future. Games, comics (hmm, sorry graphic novels) and movies show us a future where things have gone wrong, dystopian, weird and dark.

In design however, we usually design for a better future. Always making things better, more efficient, making people happier, better citizens, better parents, better neighbours…. better better better more more more.

So when it comes to sustainability, we have to be better better better and do more more more even if the future looks grim and apocalyptic. Like the 2 sides of a same coin, we’re asking people to live with 2 different concepts: hope and despair.

Or maybe we’re just better off planning for the worse.

“Sustainable design is not only about environmentalism, even if it is an important part of it. Sustainable design is also very much about timelessness, new materials that push the envelope, storytelling, sensorial experiences and cultural awareness.”

Found here.

At some point we’re going to have to accept that sustainability actually involved limitations, cutbacks and sacrifices. Just like we had to “deal” when the first and second WW came around, we will have to be

- smarter
- do less of a number of things
- stop doing a lot of things
- apply new thinking and not see these things as bad, but just simply better

Definitions like the ones above only serve to make everyone think that we can just go about our daily business, that pumping out new products and services and “new materials”, will somehow make things better. And tying the whole thing up with creatively-soothing-methodology-driven words like “storytelling, sensorial experiences and cultural awareness” is just not good enough anymore.

I just finished working with Dave on a proposal for the second edition of the Muji award, and being designers of course, we waited till the last minute to submit our proposal.

In this particular case, Dave is in Boston, I’m in London and the proposal had to be sent to Japan by Tuesday next week. We were done with everything by Friday afternoon, but that meant that traditional postal services were no longer an option (we also had to get 2 A3 printed etc…)

We turned to the most efficient option, in this case Fedex Kinkos. Trying to figure anything online with these services is a mess but we didn’t have a choice. We thought about it a little and then thought… hey wait a minute! What if we get their Japan-based office to print this out, and they can send the stuff through from there as well! This will not only mean that the proposal will be received on time, but will actually be much greener as it wont have to take a plane to get there!

With all the greenwashing going on, it was refreshing to find a nugget of sustainable opportunity in a clunky service. Only thing is that it seems that Fedex haven’t figured this out yet, because payment online, without a Fedex account, is not possible and transacting between Kinkos and Fedex seemed to involve someone from their office printing it out, calling Dave to arrange payment on the phone (!!) and then being able to send it…

This is when you realise that there are organisational and corporate roadblocks to a seamless and converged service that could otherwise make an experience much more enjoyable (and sustainable).

Ok so we all agree that the planet is in trouble right? Regardless of whether that’s our fault or the neighbors right? Right.

So why on earth have we decided to allow for one of the most polluting industry to take off and become commercially available? Are we that suicidal?

So let’s have a look at the possible sources of pollution of a space shuttle, just for shits and giggles…

1. Energy consumed in the launch (from Madsci Network):

“Space shuttle fuel consumed in a launch: 3.5 million pounds
Gasoline consumed in one day in the US - 2,500 million pounds
In other words, one space shuttle launch is equivalent to about two minutes
of gasoline consumption in the United States.”

2. Hydrochloric acid production (from BBC):

“All shuttle launches can nonetheless have damaging impacts on the local environment. […] “The classic example of environmental impact is in Kazakhstan at the Baikonur launch site, where there are reports of quite serious environmental damage.”

For most shuttles, the damage comes from the solid rocket boosters[…]
As a shuttle launches, a “cloud” becomes visible which contains SRB exhaust products, either dissolved or as particles in the water vapour released by the main engines.

Hydrochloric acid formed in this launch cloud leads to acidic deposits in the surrounding area, a phenomenon which may also be observed some distance away if exhausts are carried on prevailing winds.

The scenes of dead fish in Spain could be repeated next to launch sites
John Pike, president of Global Security.org, and an expert on the US space programme says: “The hydrochloric acid can pit the paint on your car if it is too close to the launch site.”

3. Everything else (from a 1997 report on General space tourism):

“A myriad of legal and regulatory aspects of public space travel and tourism must be resolved before viable large scale businesses can emerge. This is especially true of those public agencies with the responsibility to regulate in the interest of public safety. This includes identification of public policies and/or laws that exist or must be enacted to enable business formation, licensing, certification and approval processes for both passengers and vehicles, clearance and over-flight considerations, and environmental and safety issues including atmospheric pollution, solar radiation (flares) and orbital debris.”

I certainly hope that these issues have been dealt with because the “design coating” that’s happening around this industry these days is making me sick.

I will write more extensively about Luminous Green this week and what it feels like to be in a room full of artists, advertisers and cultural types talking about sustainability but for now i’ll concentrate on a smaller anecdote around the event that links nicely to the recent conversations about the use Powerpoint.

In order to make the event more sustainable, the speakers were asked to reduce their reliance on technology ( projector and therefore powerpoint) and several of them found this extremely demanding. Others requested to present in powerpoint anyway as they couldn’t possibly fathom not using their presentation (one of which was from the world of advertising of course). This resulted in weaker presentations as the speakers came unprepared for image-less descriptions of their projects and I found that they were struggling to perhaps mentally remember what their slides said.

This then poses the question: is that intellectually sustainable? If the content that you might have been exposed to relies on the speaker being able to be prompted by some sort of tool, this I suppose says a lot about speaker’s independence. As a member of the audience, you don’t have to prepare, you’re a white sheet of paper that someone either artistically writes on or awkwardly scribbles on with their hand in a cast.

Had the speakers been told in advance of this restriction, I think they probably would have absorbed their talk very differently, brought cue cards and orated like a priest in a church, or politicians did before technology’s presence, just like speakers used to when people just read books. Think Gandhi (who was referenced several times times during the event) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I think our reliance on Powerpoint has ultimately made us poorer speakers and we handhold our audience much more than it needs to. Inspiration doesn’t come served on slides.

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.

——-

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.

Here’s a piece of advice to the webdesign team of Design can change(which I think is a lovely endeavor mind you). If you want to make an idea interesting to designers, don’t use Getty Images stock photography ( and certainly don’t advertise it! ) you’ll get more respect from cranky designers like me : )

I hate to think that with the growing environmental challenges we are facing, the human race is going to sit there arguing whose fault it is that the planet is heating up. It’s a useless conversation that you see in every Hollywood movie, just before the big wave crashes down, the 2 main characters are arguing over who triggered the secret trap door, oblivious to their surroundings.

That global warming is a hoax. Today in Amsterdam:

Last month in Amsterdam:

As soon as I started blogging, a little over a year ago now, I’ve always been interested in how my former life of industrial designer merged with the internet. I went to blogject workshops, read about the “internet of things”, went to “near field interactions” workshop, looked at Matt’s work on Second life, listen to the likes of Ezio Manzini and John Thackara talk about services and the lightness of systems, watched as buzz words like “rapid prototyping”, “user generated content”, “semantic web”,”web 2.0″,”netocracy” fly around and get tagged onto a whole bunch of different virtual businesses. Today was different though. Something weird is happening: the bottom-up approach is gaining industrial design, and this is completely changing the game… Let’s talk about clear examples then:

Article 1: USA today article on Amazon’s new plan to start looking at creating a platform for product development and distribution on a “user- generatable scale”. Their argument is that if we can create platforms for entrepreneurship on a virtual level, why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with products? Why shouldn’t GM be interested in niche markets and production?

Article 2: Teapotters,
a new online community of people who publish and share their 3D models. Not that this didn’t exist before of course, but i guess their web2.0 logo makes them more credible : P

Article 3: Crowdspirit which proposes to make electronic products that are less than 150 euros manufacturable by individuals.
“Our community will have the power for the first time in the history of manufacturing to be actively involved in the design, selection and the sales of highly innovative products. These products will no longer depend on big manufacturers having control over what is made and what isn’t.”

Well the PSS model just went straight out the window didn’t it?

One of a number of issues I see with a lot of this has to do with the discrepancy in perception. There is no such thing as a bad guy in manufacturing, there are large and small companies making products on large or small scale. The large old and dirty media and advertising companies who scew our view of the world aren’t the same. This is not the same battle as the rest of the web2.0 world, its not the same ballpark or the same sport.

The impact of an online services or business is worlds away from real manufacture. At this particular point in time, it costs very little to start an online business, a coffee maker, two to 3 clever people with a good idea, some VC funding, a server or 2, a couple of sleepless nights and voilà, your idea is accessible to all, has little material impact (if you exclude the shwag you’ll be producing to get groupies to promote you at geeky conferences).

Now when we’re talking about product design, architecture, engineering, this is definitely a different world. This is when some of the problems that industrial design always had in defining itself legally are coming back to bite it in the ass. If you’re an engineer or an architect, you are responsible under law for what you design. You have a responsibility and a duty to create and and maintain what you produce. Industrial designers never had that, because their field of work was way too vague and complex… what legal responsibility did you need if you were designing a salt and pepper shaker for Alessi? None. Even if you were designing window sills, you didn’t need to report or feel responsible to anyone. You didn’t even need to feel responsible for the material waste you created by choosing particular materials. Some of that has changed of course in the past 10 years… green became popular and industrial designers started to embrace “eco-design”, looking into reusing materials, offering environmentally-friendly products, etc… This was a small revolution that still takes place consistently in isolated areas of the field…

However, what happens when you put this power of creation in the hands of anyone? Well, that revolution ceases to have an impact on our thinking. As soon as you start putting the power of manufacturing creation on individuals, you stop asking yourselves the important questions, because then manufacturing happens on the basis of “i want one”, and the all important barrier to design: market and scale, ceases to have an impact. Why are these things important? Firstly, because you have to make sure as a business that your potential sales will be worth the tons of investment that you will make in providing the VERY expensive and pollution-heavy tooling. (Let’s also be clear here: making one or making a million is the same tooling if you want to get the quality right.) And then you need to think, where do your unsold item go? Where are the secondary markets?

These act as controls for products which might not stand the test of time. We also know how polluting manufacture is and this is why micro-systems like Etsy and Ebay act as great ways to give used objects a second life. But what happens when manufacture is necessary out of individual whims? It’s all good and well when it’s self directed and done through craft… but do you really want to put together, assemble, plan, spend energy and carbon on tooling for one object at a time?

And please don’t talk to me about rapid prototyping… the golden cow of glory that was supposed to save the world of designers since the mid nineties… it’s always been too costly to run and purchase and doesn’t apply to materials that last. It works as an intermediate step in the overall design process alone, or to make small sculptures of Second Life characters : ) not a cell phone!

There’s already so much that’s been done to encourage large companies to offer green services. We vote more and more with our dollars for the companies whose products we respect. When we wont have any company to identify who will be to blame, who will take responsability? Whose fault will it be when our landfills fill up twice as fast because now we have two models running at the same time: the industrial one, and the individual one?

Maybe I’m being too pessimistic, but I got shivers down my spine today…

There are some days when I just spot things that are completely at odds with each other and make me seriously doubt our ability to make any sense as a species. Ok, maybe that’s too grand a statement, but seriously…

One the one hand we know we should be concerned about sustainability and the earth’s resources, global warming and our general position as a dominating species. Agreed? Ok so why on earth do we let technological advancement go against those concerns? Just because it’s technology, doesn’t mean it has to be dirty!

Projects such as this one, this one, and what was recently revealed are just unimaginative.

The mistake people make is assuming that making something green is hard and not a necessary requirement. Well i think it’s just lazy, irresponsible and short-sighted on the part of anyone who designs these days not to take sustainability in consideration. I mean just think of the marketing around your new product, would you rather be known as “the first green (insert name of product)” or “just another fossil-fuel based (insert name of product)”?