I’m just going to quote the Howies blog for this- It really puts into words how I’m feeling right now… I think this is a lead on, though an antithesis to my riversimple post, for me it shows a genuine helplessness- how the hell are we ever going to get ‘the power’ back to make people take responsibility for their actions. It’s a very sad and impossible state of affairs to be in.
There are some swear words in this. I tried not to.
Why are we not getting better at the bad stuff?
We invented the plane and have streamlined systems to fly people all over the world, but cannot get them home when there is ash in the sky.
Leaves stop trains.
We create power from uranium, but have no great plan for it when it’s spent but still highly dangerous.
And when 5000 barrels of oil a day flood onto the oceans it will take another 90 days to drill another well into the oil field to release the gas to stop the flow. So by the time they stop it between 1-5 million barrels will have leaked into a fragile ocean.
And this is the third time in 5 years BP have fucked up like this. Why should shareholders and the company benefit when the world has paid the price?
Governments, business, people need to make the companies that are making big big money from high risk stuff prove that they are prepared for the big fuck up’s before they start.
Really prove it.
They must stand up in front of a huge room of children who will come up with all those madcap ideas that may happen. And if they can prove they are prepared, the next question from the kids will be “why”?
And if after all this they fuck up, then the company management is sacked after they have gone out and cleaned up their mess.
When it’s big stuff like this, companies have got to be good at the bad stuff.
The worst part of it is, these companies are asking designers everyday to make them look a certain way (BP especially)- to give the impressions of care, alluding to ‘greeness’; and the designers say YES!
I came across this company in the UK who are releasing an open source hydrogen fuel cell car, while researching alternative fuels. I wanted to share a couple of quotes… The car doesn’t interest me so much as the business model: they recognise that most people don’t necessarily want an object (the car) that simply depreciates, they just want to be able to move around. Thus, they are moving away from the idea of car ownership- they say “Car manufacturers make money from selling cars and parts- which rewards obsolescence and high running costs”- they want to move towards leasing vehicles- which “rewards longevity and low running costs”- the car manufacturers take responsibility for the car, it’s fuel, and fixing it up.
They go onto say:
“we can never achieve a sustainable system whilst the interests of one stakeholder group, such as shareholders legally trumps the interests of society or the environment.”
Nail on the head I think- the interests of the highest earners dictates our overall direction, (as opposed to what a society wants) the desirable direction, for those high earners being to earn even more. Thus we have a never ending cycle.
This is an interesting talk by James Howard Kunstler, about his concerns of what will happen to American’s Suburbia, and what needs to be done to change them for a sustainable future.
I just got back from the RCA/MADE Bicycle design summer course. It was an interesting couple of days, I met some amazing designers, and feel like I learned a lot from them. We were basically asked to ‘de-construct’ the bicycle, not literally but the concept of a bicycle, as a method of transport, and start to think of the problems associated with the bicycle. It seems the area most people were interested in was how we can get more people to cycle- specifically cycling to work and so on.
The idea was that we were to ‘innovate’ and create something new. It seemed that most people (including my own group) were intent on making an object which essentially combined the functions of two other objects. This is something i was disappointed with and most of the ideas that came about were gimmicky objects that could easily be marketed, and sold, but did not really do much to answer the main question proposed- how to get more people to cycle. I started to see that there are hundreds of product designers still doing this all over the world, which upset me a bit. I find it hard to believe that people are still being taught to think in this way; where the designer is making things for people to want for the sake of having.
On Friday I was lucky enough to have the chance to go to aconference about materials in the design of bicycles at theInstitute of Materials. Again I was slightly disappointed in what was discussed, I don’t think the issue of sustainable materials in bicycle design was was raised once. The common theme for discussion was how composites could make bicycles lighter and faster. This is obviously an interesting area to study, but what about starting to design for people who just want to ride to work, surely that is just as, if not more important.
In my opinion there is a problem which i proposed to Mike Burrows in making carbon fibre a ‘fashionable material’ for use in the ‘general consumer’s bicycle’, which was discussed at large with several other designers and materials experts. Although carbon fibre can be simply ‘patched up’ and in some cases can be separated for recycling (by using a lot of energy to seperate it) it is not a sustainable material and I feel we will be facing a problem in a few years when people are consuming carbon fibre wheels which only last a few hundred miles on London’s pot-hole ridden streets. What’s wrong with a spoke wheel that can be re-trued, or re-spoked etc. when it fails, I think that the designers working for the large bicycle manufacturers need to think before they start to put these ‘performance’ parts on general consumer bicycles.
