>
dialogue |
participants: Allan Chochinov, Pratt Institute and core77.com John Houshmand, organic furniture Carolyn F. Strauss, slowLab
other dialogues: 09 Dec 03 (Bangalore, India) >
|
> dialogue 24 April 2003 ... AC: Maybe as part of the ‘slow manifesto’ this idea of how you learn and grow has a place, in terms of what you anticipate and what your expectations are, how you feel about your entitlements in this world and in this life, when it occurs to you that things aren’t fair… JH: and also the environmental perceptions that you find … I remember growing up with lots of tropical nature, and chopping chickens heads off for dinner… we grew up very close to nature. AC: Again, raw materials and process and waste. I don’t think that it’s different. I mean, (pointing to the mic) you got that microphone at the expense of lots of things, but you don’t know what they are. You don’t know what the labor was like that put that microphone together, you don’t know how many bathroom breaks they were allowed. All these crazy hidden costs that become so abstracted from the product when they wrap it in pretty paper and put it in Circuit City. If you knew about those, how would you feel? CS: This is one of the ways I liken slow design to the slow food movement. That it enables designers to be in more intimate contact with the source materials and processes of design, and end-users to trace those in terms of the products they’re using. ... AC: I often talk about cooking as an industrial design process: you have the ingredients and you have the processes and you have the final product, which can be beautiful or not beautiful or tasty or not and all these other criteria that you might judge products by… form and function… and then you have the solid waste. It’s industrial design. It really may be this disconnect between the raw materials, the process and the products that may start on the farm… If we principally consume light, but we also consume food and water, and if those,our first lessons, have become abstracted… we don’t know where the stuff comes from, and we don’t understand the sacrifice of a slaughter, and we don’t know that you don’t plant the same crops in the same spot all the time if you don’t want to end up with bad crops and pests, etc. JH: Have you read Biomimicry? Doesn't she touch on that stuff? AC: I always had all these teachers who said ‘Learn from Nature.’ If you want to design, biomimic. This isn’t a new thing, but it’s very persuasive, and it may be close to the truth. In terms of design iterations and making stuff over time, there’s no better example than evolution. It gives rise to the thing that fits the context the best. And as an overriding principle of design, it would be hard to find a better definition or a better goal. It isn’t necessarily about introducing something new to the world that wasn’t there anymore. It’s not about being visionary as [is the crux of] many design pursuits, but rather about building something that is sustainable, that is really sensitive to its context, evolution is tough to beat. JH: Is there, in the slow design doctrine, is there something that states or implies the question ‘Do we really need that at all?” -- the thing that one is designing? One of the things that blows me away is I’ll see something in a 99 cent store and I’ll go ‘Look at this thing! It’s not needed. It’s going to be trash. And people go to work in the morning and make these things. There are raw materials and there’s the whole process of making it, and you know that it’s going to be trash the minute it’s made. CS: That kind of usability issue is one of the precepts of green design. … thinking about longevity... JH: Doesn’t that threaten so much of what’s going on in the world? So much of what we’ve talked about in these dialogues is how much it would ‘improve’ things, and yet there are probably a lot of people out there who would feel threatened by that fact because it wouldn’t improve anything for them because they’d lose their jobs! Because we wouldn’t need so much crap in the world. CS: They might lose their jobs anyway with where the economy’s going… You know, it’s like what was said last time about people starting to make things for themselves. I think that barter is going to be on the rise, with people making things and trading them with each other, because, yeah, it’s only 99 cents—well, there’s something almost perverse about 99 cents… AC: …you can’t afford not to buy it. When it gets to the point where people can’t afford not to consume the things you’re making, then you’ve pulled off a trick from a marketing perspective. JH: Forget about 99 cents—I say, ‘I can’t believe its’ only 19.99!’ AC: 19.99 is the new 0.99! JH: But, you know, when you take all that stuff out of the milieu of our lives, it actually gives you all the space and quiet to live focused, appreciate and emote, all the things that they’ve taken away from us. CS: There’s a thing that I found that Li Edelkoort said, There are people who are not just out of work, they are choosing not to work as much. They’ve decided that the size of their wallets is not as important as having quality of life. JH: the result of the recession is that people are saying “I don’t have any work. And I’m enjoying not having any work.” ... CS: Being in Milan (at the Salone del Mobile), there was a repetition of form and material that is ridiculous. The designers I met with there said that they don’t have the access to the materials knowledge and resources. Maybe Material ConneXion begins to change that for designers, but I don’t know if it really does. Even if you have access to those resources, does Material ConneXion provide the support to actually say, ‘OK, I’m creating a chair and the manufacturer is using a machine that can only handle PVC—is there another material that’s similar enough to PVC that I can use it instead? AC: Same as your airplane problem, you’re going to run into legacy systems—‘this is the way we make it. It becomes a deal-breaker. Unless your willing and able to change the production methods down the line, you’re caught. And no change in design that’s going to influence that. JH: is it a real deal-breaker in economic terms? Or is it just pattern-set? AC: I think it’s both. ‘That’s the way we do it” equals “that’s the way we know how to do it,” and they don’t want to make mistakes and lose money and not have return. CS: Also process- re-engineering is a huge thing. AC: Hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars… CS: I was working on a mass-customization project a few years ago, investigating what it takes to introduce these new processes into existing industries, and it’s an enormous undertaking. In fact, it’s nearly impossible in large companies, because you have to re-educate the entire work force around even a relatively simple change in production cycle. AC: it’s a money-losing proposition in the short term. Any sort of change is. And on the belief that it’s going to save money in the medium term and long term, especially in tough economic times, you’ve got to make it irresistible to them. I went to the car show last night, and when you see these cars that are hybrids, they just are so horrible. The detailing and the whole visceral and emotional hit you get from them is just not right. I was saying to the guy I was with that these cars should be just so “What is that?! I want that!” They should bethe most awesome thing you’ve ever seen. And the person selling it says “Oh, and it’s an electric car.” And the buyer says, “Great. How do I get that?” It’s all about desire-ability. CS: This was one of the main premises of the green design thing I was working on. What I found was that when you talk about ‘green’ people’s eyes glaze over. AC: That’s what I told my thesis student—that he had to remove the word ‘sustainable’ from this thesis, because people discount it. CS: … And it will remain on the periphery of design practice until really beautiful and compelling forms emerge. Well, there actually is ‘green beauty,’ as Cristina Morozzi calls it, but people aren’t aware that there are some beautiful objects which are also ecologically friendly. AC: it’s not that it’s inherently bad or that people blew it. Its taken on some connotations that are tough to overcome. People assume that things are more expensive if they’re green. That’s a pretty pervasive perception, and it does a lot of harm. ... AC: So the question is, what is the really the problem to go after? For example, the insulation on that [microphone] wire, does that really need to be addressed? Or is it the reactor that’s powered for electricity to light that bulb? Leave the wire alone. Even coming up with what the real problem is to solve can be very messy. There are some cute examples, but sometimes it’s not so cute. You don’t know where the big evil is that you should concentrate your efforts on. And again, I think that it’s not often the materials themselves. JH: I would agree. When you look around New York City, 80% of the wire that goes into the building gets salvaged on the way out of the building. The greatest thing I would do to create sustainability in the construction business would be to create a conduit for third world countries to send emissaries to the first world to take the salvage back out again. Some of that is happening, but sometimes I look around at all the waste and I say, ‘God, if I were in Mexico right now, everything would be taken…’ AC: … and used quite well. JH: That was one of the advantages of growing up in third world countries was really seeing a different perspective on all this stuff. If the wire gets used over and over again and then ultimately melted down and then still used over and over again, then there wasn’t a hell of a lot wrong with that wire. AC: That does get down to the McDonough thing about ‘waste=food,’ where the waste of one system becomes the food of the next system. And that’s such a beautiful idea… if you can close the system. That’s the whole thing in my sophomore class: ‘Did you close the system? Is the system closeable?” Like the whole thing about McDonald’s and Styrofoam packaging 15 or 20 years ago when this whole thing exploded in a negative connotation of polystyrene… when it turns out that these are actually miracle containers: they weigh nothing, they’re magic to produce, they have great thermal properties, they’re unbelievably recyclable, apparently—you put them in and get the same thing out again with very little degradation, is my understanding. But, they became this bad poster-boy for waste and McDonald’s changed their packaging as a result. The killer was that the loop wasn’t closed. People were taking these things out of the McDonald’s system and putting them in their cars and tossing them on the highway and throwing them away at home. Whereas if you could get them back before they left the McDonald’s parking lot you would have this miracle material. That’s an interesting case study of a public perception of something being completely the opposite of the reality if the system were closed. Which, if it’s not, then everything’s bad, unless you can get it back… The metaphor I guess is the moisture going up and coming back as rain. CS: It’s interesting, this issue of public perception and people’s awareness… On one hand, I think it’s great if people have a greater awareness through recycling, for example. I mean, the difference between someone throwing something away and recycling, even if they’re not thinking about the fact that they’re using water to wash them, is significant. Again, Dick van Hoff’s machines get people to stop and think. After Doors of Perception 7-- where by the way only one of the speakers raised the question of how we're going to power this mobile lifestyle we're all talking about--I bought this little device that has a crank for manually recharging my cell phone, which most people haven’t seen, and it’s kind of great… Although it very specifically says, ‘Do not wind more than 3 minutes,’ so I don’t know if you go over 3 minutes what happens to your phone… AC: … or to your wrist! CS: The idea that you actually think about it when you turn on a light switch when you’ve been using these machines… the fact that it creates some awareness, even if it’s not exactly addressing the root of the problem, … you have to start somewhere. In countries like Mexico, you’ve got people who have a greater awareness of the value of that waste we were talking about. JH: Right—you don’t have to legislate recycling or anything. AC: And part of that is scarcity—you appreciate something much more when you don’t have it. It’s not complicated. Take it way, and people go, ‘Woah, I guess I really wanted that.’ As soon as you lose any of these things that matter, you think, ‘Hmm, maybe I should care about that more, or appreciate it more.’ So in a way, that part of the equation is kind of simple. ... |