Cradle to Cradle - designing for fun?
Many of you will have read Michael Braungart's notoriously heavy book Cradle to Cradle. Last night Michael spoke at Voices from the Edge on his ideas around materials and products and the need for a new way of thinking about our place within the nutrient cycles of the planet. Braungart tells a good story. His tirade against toxic toys and poisonous products is peppered with humour and absurdly funny but desperately serious commentary on our chemical folly. The key to his arguement is sound - if we are to thrive we must stop thinking of ways to be less bad and start thinking of ways to be good. We must feed the systems that feed us. He argues that to be merely 'sustainable' is not aspirational. That (eco) efficiency is not the right objective (who after all wants to have an 'efficient' dinner or enjoy 'efficient' sex? there is no joy in 'efficiency'). We need to eliminate waste as a concept and we must find ways to be truly proud of what we do. How much more fun can we have designing, making and using products that can be thrown away to feed the soil and fertilize the garden?
Jude | LINK | SUSTAINABILITY | COMMENTS (0)
How Piecemeal Design Approaches Hurt Us
An article from Metropolis......
The obvious question to ask is: "Why are industrial designers and the manufacturers they work for not designing computers that produce less heat?" This question has overtaken my brain; it now has such urgency for me that I am not even trying to tackle such problems as the waste produced by the computer industry--and its designers. I won't even mention the heavy metals and plastics that end up in some recycling dump in China and in our water supply. I'm now focused on the heat produced by computers. And so I ask: Is it possible that industrial designers are unaware of the unintended consequences of their work even after they've had time to assess their designs?
READ MORE..."How Piecemeal Design Approaches Hurt Us"
READ MORE..."How Piecemeal Design Approaches Hurt Us"
Jude | LINK | SUSTAINABILITY | COMMENTS (0)
Motivation for greener behaviour
The National Concumer Council's latest idea in the consumer cause:
a recycling lottery.....
In Norway, a recycling lottery has more than doubled the number of people recycling drink cartons from just 30 per cent to 70 per cent of the population.
All you do is squash your carton, write your name and number on it and pop it into the recycling bin for entry into the prize draw. Or we could use the idea to help tackle Britain's battery mountain. Batteries are toxic and leach chemicals when thrown away, but at present we only recycle one in every twenty five batteries we use.
It was estimated in the research that consumers face up to 500 different pieces of advice on what they should do to be greener. So, instead of the usual penalties and finger-waving, perhaps it is time to engage people in a positive way!
Jude | LINK | SUSTAINABILITY | COMMENTS (0)
Making Individual Political Activity Visible
How political have you been this week, based on acts you have performed? How much of a citizen? Pindices seeks to make individual political activity visible, but not in the ways typically measured by polling agencies or using the normal methods of social science. Rather than looking at political ideologies, institutions, groups or identities, in our project we start with the individual and their acts, and invite participants to make public a reckoning of their everyday political or citizenship activity by creating their own personal political indices during 'Making Things Public'. Somewhere between a public art project and bad social science, Pindices offers ways of thinking about what matters to individuals and how this is made visible.
Set up your own pindex at www.pindices.org
Part of 'Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy', an exhibition curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Karlsruhe, Germany, March 20-August 7, 2005
Jude | LINK | CITIZENSHIP | COMMENTS (0)
