Jun 1
2010
The oil economy is a linchpin for Modern Design. Its energy powered the life cycle of 20th century material culture. It made possible every step of the design process from imagining to extraction, processing, production, use, maintenance, and disposal. Underlying the oil economy and the life patterns it supports is the assumption that the Earth is ours for the using with no consequences.
How is the oil debacle in the Gulf of Mexico affecting you professionally and personally?
Clint gave the final word
I think framing is vastly underused. I wonder how many oil spill protesters are driving to their protests… Can we connect things like this Putting a Face on the Gulf Oil Leak to making a business decision or buying a product? Can information visualizations showing the terrifying path of earth’s resources convince the public’s everyday decisions? The frame needs to be widened, in an easily understandable, self-threatening, self-motivating way, to show how everything adds up. I think this could alter the demand and supply, and give designers along with everyone else the dematerialisation instinct.
Friday, June 4 at 10:45pm
The cost of “cheap” is spewing all over us as we witness failure after failure to plug the gushing well, 5000 feet below the surface of the Gulf. Just as Dr. Karl-Henrik Robèrt, the Swedish doctor and cancer scientist who founded The Natural Step, http://www.naturalstep.org, foretold 20 yeas ago, we have hit the inevitable wall marking the end of the oil economy. The field of Ecological Economics, http://www.ecoeco.org/ is a fruitful place to start uncovering the real cost of “cheap”.
And your paper — Interminable design: techné and time in the design of sustainable service systems — is the place to start the transition away from oil-based design: http://www.ub.edu/5ead/PDF/8/Tonkinwise.pdf
“the design of the coming decades, in the name of developing our societies’ sustainability, will involve realising less materials-intensive ways of living and working (dematerialisation). Designing such sustainable product-service systems requires a quite different approach to designing than that which is prevalent today. In this paper, I explore:
1. the extent to which designing, of any specialism, and especially as it is taught in universities, continues to remain wedded to making things, that is, to techné as the know-how of manufacturing finished products;
2. the extent to which ‘dematerialisation design’ involves something that can perhaps no longer be called a techné, less because its output is not a product, than because its output is not something that is never
‘finished’.”
Tuesday, June 1 at 5:15pm
Clint gave the Final Word
Cameron, I read your Interminable design paper and there are some great ideas in there. As a currently enrolled design student I would love to continue past work of my own and from other students. Design education can certainly shift young designers to a dematerialisation approach.
But how often are designers making the big decisions for producing material? Companies compete in a market for consumers who are culturally trained and evolutionarily predisposed to want the new. So companies not only supply to the demand, but increase the demand to increase their supply and profit margins.
These decisions are often informed by the financial departments of companies, and designers are requested to make more material. So should dematerialisation also be taught in business school? How would that fit into a syllabus alongside profit margins?
Materials Intensity Per unit of Service (MIPS, learned this from your paper!) needs to be valued as highly as profit margins for significant change to take place. MIPS needs to be valued as highly as prices for customers. How do we do this? Can government enforce this with their current symbiosis with big companies?
I think framing is vastly underused. I wonder how many oil spill protesters are driving to their protests… Can we connect things like this Putting a Face on the Gulf Oil Leak to making a business decision or buying a product? Can information visualizations showing the terrifying path of earth’s resources convince the public’s everyday decisions? The frame needs to be widened, in an easily understandable, self-threatening, self-motivating way, to show how everything adds up. I think this could alter the demand and supply, and give designers along with everyone else the dematerialisation instinct.
Friday, June 4 at 10:45pm
Keywords
Selected list of words appearing in this and other conversations.
cameron tonkinwise
2
It is fairly common knowledge that there is no such thing as a ‘free lunch’. Every time a company appears to give you something for free, you are paying in other ways; paying by being advertised to, marketing that in the end is factored into some cost somewhere to someone. We mostly all know this.
But we don’t seem to be able to get that common sense into our head about ‘cheap.’ Cheap is always a mirage. Something is only low cost to buy because someone somewhere is paying; an exploited worker, a government subsidy, a depleted ecosystem. To this extent, cheap is always a game: the hope that the real price does not in the end back come to you – that it is being imposed on that person over there or in the future; that what you bought will last, that the operating cost is not too high, that you’ll in the end be able to just chuck it without being responsible for what happens to it after that.
The game is over. Cheap Oil has now gone. Not because a barrel costs more than a hundred bucks, which it sometimes does, pinching everyone so that demand drops, followed shortly after by the price of gas and then a return of demand, etc. But because the real cost of is now apparent.
The real cost is risk. As Ulrich Beck says, the question of risk is not ‘how much?’ Except for weird, math-minded gamblers, it does not matter what the percentage chance of the risk being realized is, especially when what is at risk is devastation. The question of risk is, ‘how do we want to live?’ Do we want to live with those risks at all, no matter what the probability of their happening? Do we want our beaches and those habitats to depend on corporate engineers, and their friendly bureaucrat regulators?
To answer ‘no’ means to be prepared to start to pay. To pay more for things made of oil, which is everything. To pay more tax for higher quality, higher probity, regulators. To pay more for others who can’t afford to pay more. To pay more in time and effort to live with less oil dependence. To pay more politically to shout down those who think cheap is some sort of constitutional right.
Time to transition away from a naive faith in cheap.
Tuesday, June 1 at 3:33pm