Improving product life cycle

These sheets are from the adobe sustainability site. They talk about how to make a product more sustainable. This can be through making it easier to disassemble, repair, upgrade, recycle and dispose of. Its about closing the loop to eliminate waste, or at least reduce it significantly.

The 11th hour. Reflection, review, blabberings.

The 11^th hour is a documentary which goes in depth into the problems with the worlds environment. The documentary itself is quite dry and boring, and I can understand why so many people can’t take the sustainability issue seriously. There is a lot to understand, it isn’t a simple issue, and this documentary is not going to appeal to those who don’t care about the environment since they repeat the same thing over and over and it just drags on. Also some of the people being interviewed don’t help when they over exaggerate, which will get the denialists scoffing.

However if you are passionate about this topic and don’t have ADD, you should learn a lot from this, and hopefully it should get you to research more about certain topics and learn more about the complexity of ecological and social sustainability,

The most important thing that I’ve always taken from sustainability documentaries/lectures/articles is that the whole capital system we have is wrong. We treat economic capital as the number one thing, with social and environmental below it. It should environmental at the top, social next then finally economic capital.

Consumerism is another topic talked about in the film. The way we consume and just want more. As industrial designers we know this, and we know the problems. But this ties into changing the way that we live. Putting the environment and society ahead of the dollar.

The film also talks about how technology isn’t an issue. It is a people issue. People don’t want to change, and there is too much money for them to lose if they do change. On one hand it says it’s the politicians fault and the leaders of the companies, but then also goes on to say that we as people can change it by the way we live and ‘vote’ by purchasing goods that help the sustainability cause. The governments of the world can definitely help change the way things are done (putting a price on carbon for instance), but at the end it is up to local communities and everyday folk like you and me to change. Don’t blame the government and become apathetic, do something about it.

Industrial designers have a role here. We know the technology is there, and we design the products, these products become waste, and they use up energy and resources. We can try to put more sustainable things into our products, maybe design it so it can be repairable, use less parts, use energy efficient parts. Also try to use our influence to get others to change their ways, instead of just sitting back, doing a job and getting paid.

Amazingly, as in depth as the documentary was, there is still much more to learn about the topic of sustainability. It really is a complex issue, and it can seem overwhelming to try to understand it. But just try learning a bit here and there and it makes perfect sense. You start to see why things are the way they are, and it'll make you sad and angry and frustrated, but also try to focus on the positives and do what you can to change the way things are.

How to go faster and influence people

Awesome documentary on Gordon Murray, the guy did the McLaren F1, and a bunch of other stuff.

GPANL and How its made videos. Reflection.

I made some playlists for the videos just for easynesses sake.
Giving packaging a new life
How its made

Reflection time

The biggest thing I took from the videos was the complexity of recycling and in making packaging that can be recycled but still function effectively. It was pretty amazing seeing how all the different materials are separated using several techniques. There were magnets, spinning things, centrifuges I think, people manually sorting with just their eyes and hands. I wonder how effective it is in doing the sorting though. Surely plenty of pieces would get through and end up contaminating the wrong material. The point though is that recycling is bloody tough and a lot of energy goes into it, and sometimes it just leads to ‘downcycling’, where the original product can’t be used for its original purpose and it becomes an inferior material. Eventually the material will get to a point where it was no use and must be disposed.

So people, remember recyclability is not the be all and end all of sustainability. It’s energy intensive. Rather look for ways to make the products last longer, or just dispose them so they turn into plant food (see cradle to cradle). Also remember that making packaging that can be recycled effectively but still be functional is exceptionally difficult. I was thinking of the tetra-pak, the paper gets recycled into waste paper, the plastic and aluminium go into concrete production, so the plastic and aluminium don’t actually get turned back into plastic and aluminium.

Also imagine these recycling machines in poorer countries, it just wouldn’t happen any time soon. You first need an effective garbage disposal network, then you need the power and water to go into the machines as well as the machines themselves. Also the people would need the education of sorting what can be recycled and what cant, people in Australia don’t even know that let alone in less developed nations. Sometimes I wonder about why we have a trash bin and recycling bin. People put wrong stuff in the recycling bin anyway and it has to be sorted, so why not just pour everything into it, that way stuff in the trash bin that could be recycled will be recycled instead of going into the trash. Im guilty of throwing away stuff that can be recycled in the trash bin, purely due to laziness. Maybe here it is too expensive to have a machine that can handle that? I dunno.

It was good to see that Aluminium cans, Tin cans, glass bottles and PET can all be properly recycled so that they don’t end up becoming inferior products. But for other products there needs to be a better way. Bio polymers could become an important part of packaging. They could be thrown away after use and decompose in landfills, which can then capture gas for electricity production. The bio-polymers are made from renewable sources, so throwing them out wouldn’t be so bad. Its actually exciting for me when I see bio-polymers used in real life, Ive been interested in them for a while, so to see them used in real-life is kinda cool.

Dodge Dart

New ad goes through the development of a car, rather than focussing on the car itself.

Im back blog! Did ya miss me?

Today was the firstest day of uni for the year 2012 semester 2. It was a studio class, studio 3b to be exact. We learned stuff, and some guy from Cormack packaging came over to talk about packaging, and how designers should look into packaging as a field to work in. Mar and Giles gave lectures on stuff as well. Then we did an activity on decoding packaging, it was pretty good. Our group did Tic Tac's and some toilet training thingy, good times.

Good Times, and bad times as well, a lot of bad times....

This blog is unloved, I should look at it more and maybe post stuff. I was looking back on some older posts. Some real shite in here, but also some quality stuff that would make The Queen giggle...Nah not really, its mainly just pooh.