New Designers Show – 18 July 2008
I went to the New Designers not really knowing what to expect. At first, I was impressed. Designers were considering their audience, inventing new interfaces, making products more user-friendly. There was return to tactile control and interaction. Some projects focused on using their product to create an experience.
But the more I saw, the more I realized that there weren’t many designers working with sustainability in mind. There were a few cool projects addressing global issues – access to drinking water and waste management. There was one close to home looking at Beehive design - I appreciated this as on Cape Cod (MA), many beehives are experiencing Colony Collapse Disorder . Without bees, flowers and crops go unfertilized, food chains are disrupted. Basically it's just bad news. On the other hand, I also saw at least four different designs for deodorant. frankly, I'd rather have my flowers alive and smelling good (no offense to those designers who put a lot of time and effort into creating their deodorant designs).
After a few hours of walking around and talking with designers, I came to the conclusion that most of the designing aimed to satisfying wants rather than needs. It solved trivial problems and was designed for middle class and up. Now don’t get me wrong, there was a spectacular spread of solid 'design', but most of their definitions of design lacked environmental or social concerns. This disappointed greatly. I had done previous interviews and remembered that two people I already interviewed had gone to the Milan furniture design show and been disappointed in the lack of sustainable design.
I guess this proved to be my Milan furniture design show. Fresh with new design ideas, but slightly less hopeful about the planets future, I left the show.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Sunday, September 7, 2008
A Day with David Stovell, Designer
20 June 2008
Invited by David Stovell, product designer, I spent the morning walking through an old coppice wood in Essex County, UK. Coppicing is a sustainable way to grow and harvest trees. You cut a tree at its base and it regrows in multiple shoots. This isn’t as useful for large scale harvesting, as the shoots don’t get too think. That being said, it works great for furniture production, and other small scale wood products.
Much of David Stovell’s work includes recycled goods, such as his newspaper chair. Also, the night before, I went to an Eco-Design and Fashion show, and much of what was going on there included recycled fabrics and other goods. This brought to me the question: can you make these goods from recycled stock with any sort of speed or mass production? Could a system be developed that brings together systems so that this could happen?
He feels design has a big role to play in spreading eco-consciousness: consumption is powerful, and as people consume more and more sustainable goods, they get the ideas in their head. In this way, it’s important to think about what makes a product sell: Is it actual good design? Or is it just because of its eco-friendliness? Does it matter who makes it? If it’s industrialized or not? The influence of design in a consumer world (at least product design) depends on whether or not the product is bought. If no-one wants what your making, even if it’s the most eco-friendly product out there, it won’t make much of a difference in the world.
In an attempt to compete with a market flooded by cheaply made, mass produced furniture, David is showing his buyer with the very thing the mass producer is keeping hidden: the details of the production process. He’s attaching the history of the wood that created his piece, the people who worked on each piece, the methods used to shape the wood, everything down to how far the wood has traveled. He hopes this will establish emotional connections between the user and the furniture. He feels the production process is important and people should know and understand the environmental implications of the furniture their buying.
He’s also doing explorations of ideas, which even if not feasible, are important, as they discuss new viewpoints and point out current problems (see his Flipper project).
He also feels that in bigger productions, the designer loses power in how the product gets made.
A large part of the day was spent discussing materials. Is it better to used recycled materials? Are they sustainable? If our design gets better, won’t scraps eventually be diminished? When you’re working with wood, there’s different was to sustainably forest: selective harvesting, coppicing. Also, he discussed both the benefits of having regulations (like FSC approval). It’s good to have some established point of comparison, but it takes significant sums of money to get certified. This means that while the guy from which he buys his wood couldn’t harvest in a more sustainable manner, but can’t technically claim his wood is sustainably harvested.
Check out David Stovell’s website here.
Invited by David Stovell, product designer, I spent the morning walking through an old coppice wood in Essex County, UK. Coppicing is a sustainable way to grow and harvest trees. You cut a tree at its base and it regrows in multiple shoots. This isn’t as useful for large scale harvesting, as the shoots don’t get too think. That being said, it works great for furniture production, and other small scale wood products.
Much of David Stovell’s work includes recycled goods, such as his newspaper chair. Also, the night before, I went to an Eco-Design and Fashion show, and much of what was going on there included recycled fabrics and other goods. This brought to me the question: can you make these goods from recycled stock with any sort of speed or mass production? Could a system be developed that brings together systems so that this could happen?
He feels design has a big role to play in spreading eco-consciousness: consumption is powerful, and as people consume more and more sustainable goods, they get the ideas in their head. In this way, it’s important to think about what makes a product sell: Is it actual good design? Or is it just because of its eco-friendliness? Does it matter who makes it? If it’s industrialized or not? The influence of design in a consumer world (at least product design) depends on whether or not the product is bought. If no-one wants what your making, even if it’s the most eco-friendly product out there, it won’t make much of a difference in the world.
In an attempt to compete with a market flooded by cheaply made, mass produced furniture, David is showing his buyer with the very thing the mass producer is keeping hidden: the details of the production process. He’s attaching the history of the wood that created his piece, the people who worked on each piece, the methods used to shape the wood, everything down to how far the wood has traveled. He hopes this will establish emotional connections between the user and the furniture. He feels the production process is important and people should know and understand the environmental implications of the furniture their buying.
He’s also doing explorations of ideas, which even if not feasible, are important, as they discuss new viewpoints and point out current problems (see his Flipper project).
He also feels that in bigger productions, the designer loses power in how the product gets made.
A large part of the day was spent discussing materials. Is it better to used recycled materials? Are they sustainable? If our design gets better, won’t scraps eventually be diminished? When you’re working with wood, there’s different was to sustainably forest: selective harvesting, coppicing. Also, he discussed both the benefits of having regulations (like FSC approval). It’s good to have some established point of comparison, but it takes significant sums of money to get certified. This means that while the guy from which he buys his wood couldn’t harvest in a more sustainable manner, but can’t technically claim his wood is sustainably harvested.
Check out David Stovell’s website here.
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