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1000 Words: A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design
Allan Chochinov, WorldChanging
I don’t like the word manifesto. It reeks of dogma and rules-two things I instinctively reject. I do love the way it puts things on the line, but I don’t like lines, or groups. So a manifesto probably isn’t for me. The other thing about manifestos is that they appear (or are written so as to appear) self-evident. This kind of a priori writing is easy, since you simply lay out what seems obviously-even tautologically-true.
Of course, this is the danger of manifestos, but also what makes them fun to read. And fun to write. So I’ll write this manifesto. I just might not sign it.
Anyway, here they are. Exactly 1000 words:
Hippocratic Before Socratic “First do no harm” is a good starting point for everyone, but it’s an especially good starting point for designers. For a group of people who pride themselves on “problem solving” and improving people’s lives, we sure have done our fair share of the converse. We have to remember that industrial design equals mass production, and that every move, every decision, every curve we specify is multiplied-sometimes by the thousands and often by the millions. And that every one of those everys has a price. We think that we’re in the artifact business, but we’re not; we’re in the consequence business.
Stop Making Crap. 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.
Systems Before Artifacts. Before we design anything new, we should examine how we can use what already exists to better ends. We need to think systems before artifacts, services before products, adopting Thackara’s use/not own principles at every step. And when new products are needed, they’ll be obvious and appropriate, and then can we conscientiously pump up fossil fuels and start polymerizing them. Product design should be part of a set of tools we have for solving problems and celebrating life. It is a means, not an end.
(13 April 2007)
Kind Hearts and Climate Collapse
Erik Curren, Conserve Magazine
A Friend of the Earth by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Penguin, paperback, 368 pp., $14.00.
I’ve long been searching for the perfect novel set in a world beset by both advanced climate change and the onset of peak oil. And by perfect I mean entertaining, instructive and likely to stand the test of time.
…So, I was pleased to find that T.C. Boyle, known as much for his wit and postmodern prose as for his interest in contentious political issues such as immigration (he also wrote The Tortilla Curtain in 1996), published a novel which opens in a warming-ravaged California of the year 2025.
A Friend of the Earth came out seven years ago. Perhaps its scene of a world that has suffered the collapse of the biosphere, but remains otherwise much like our own, is more relevant today than when the novel originally came out in 2000, in the final throes of dot-com exhuberance. Now, after years of an alleged economic recovery that has brought little prosperity to the middle class – combined with ecological warnings from Hurricane Katrina, An Inconvenient Truth and the weird weather of the last couple years – American prosperity and its basis in a bountiful Earth seem just a bit more fragile.
In typical postmodern narrative style, Boyle’s narrative jumps back and forth in time, between a future of permanent El Nino, with just two seasons – wet (pounding monsoon rains and gale-force winds) and dry (130-degree sun that dries streams and cracks farm fields) – and the present day, when a few activists try to halt the coming eco-catastrophe through both political action and violence.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Ty Tierwater, the novel’s protagonist, has to decide whether being a friend of the Earth means being an enemy of the people, even when the people are enemies of the Earth. A monkeywrencher in the style of Edward Abbey’s Hayduke and Earth First!, Ty cannot keep himself from an opportunity to pour sand into the gas tank of a bulldozer or set fire to the artifical rows of a timber plantation.
But in the weather-ravaged world of 2025, Ty transforms from destroyer to caretaker.
(15 April 2007
She used to get mad … now she’s getting even: ethical fashion
Lynn Barber, Observer
The fashion world fell out of love with Katharine Hamnett when she started putting ‘green’ before greed. These days they can’t get enough of her
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…suddenly Katharine Hamnett is hot, hot, hot again, which is pretty strange for someone who seemingly disappeared almost 20 years ago.
But the real reason Hamnett is hot is not because of some gruesome Eighties nostalgia but because fashion has finally caught up with her. All those wilderness years when she was out of sight, she was working on the problem of how to make fashion more ethical, more environmentally sound, how to produce clothes that didn’t use petrochemicals or pesticides, that relied entirely on organic and recyclable materials. The fruits can now be seen in Tesco – a range of Katharine Hamnett clothing in organic cotton that is guaranteed not to harm the planet. Or indeed the purse, because it is commendably cheap.
So anyway, Katharine Hamnett is back and I met her in her great white hangar of a studio in Highbury, North London, before galloping down the road to have tea and about a million cigarettes in her favourite Turkish café. She looks rather French, with her long straight dark hair, long thin face and long thin body, and certainly doesn’t look like someone who turns 60 this year. She is enviably svelte in a black V-neck Smedley sweater and black straight skirt – one of her two ‘uniforms’, she says, the other being jeans – except that she is wearing Ugg boots, which she needs, she says, because she is going on a Greenpeace demonstration tonight and might have to swim. Sorry? What? ‘On a boat,’ she exclaims impatiently. But isn’t it rather difficult to swim in sheepskin boots? ‘Well, of course, I’ll kick them off!’
(15 April 2007)
Citified suburbs becoming new model for the Bay Area
John King, SF Chronicle
Lakewood, Colo. — The Bay Area’s suburban centers of tomorrow are being previewed today in this city outside Denver.
Buildings as high as five stories hug the sidewalk, most cloaked in dignified stone but some in crisp modern glass. A movie marquee jabs up like a needle across from a plaza that has a skating rink in winter and a busy pub year-round.
Upstairs are offices, or apartments, or condominiums. And while the shops are the usual suspects — Baby Gap at one end, Victoria’s Secret at another — art studios are tucked around the corner.
It doesn’t feel urban, not really — but it’s nothing like the shopping mall that covered this spot until 2002, or the tract-house neighborhoods that surround it.
What’s emerging instead is a new form of the American Dream — a new type of landscape where the lines between city and suburb blur in ever more complex ways.
The landscape is changing because Americans are changing. An increasing number want lives that offer suburban ease — new homes, free parking, security — but also a hint of urbanity. They want to step out their door and buy a cup of fair trade coffee, or window-shop with friends before strolling to dinner or a movie.
The Bay Area can see the result in spots from Santana Row in San Jose, where restaurants spill out from below brightly colored lofts, north to Windsor in Sonoma County, where an emerging town center contains buildings that recall long-gone local landmarks.
(8 April 2007)
Related from WorldChanging: San Francisco Looks Towards Denver for the Future.
