It was doing a couple of things that caught my eye and ear.
One was the kind of 21st century industrial designer-y thing of trying to associate the work with the world.
“As designers, we ask ourselves: can we deliver good design in a sustainable way?”
And there was also this in a nice heavy type, maybe it’s Helvetica, I dunno:
A product must be A product must be useful A product must be beautiful A product must be sustainable
As if to say, designers (whoever and whatever that means) we love to make stuff but can we make stuff that sustains something, presumably, like…what? What’s the thing to be sustained?
Goodness?
A sense that ‘we’ are not doing anything that could have deliterious impacts on, like..maybe — the planet?
The predicament faced is that there is an implicit relationship between two things: this ‘sustain’ vibe; and the desire to create.
This ‘sustain’ vibe — a kind of ecological sensitivity that many designers feel compelled to assert, probably comes from a sensibiity baked into a particular sort of empathy that becomes associated with creativity and the creative consciousness. Maybe it is derived from the kind of empathy for ‘the user’ that is necessary to imagine things in a world of ‘users.’
And then design for industry means the designer is compelled to create for a kind of structure that, generally speaking and as evidenced throughout the industrial era (whatever that is) has less empathy for ‘the user’ insofar as industry is in service to the creation of more fungible value; that is, industry has to create more stuff.
And industry has found that ‘design’ (whatever that is) is a useful capability to create more stuff. And especially nowadays (whenever I mean by that) design has been put in the service of creating basically the same thing year on year, only this year it’s in a different ‘colorway’ (these polite terms can become excrutiating veneers) or with a new nomenclature assigned to imply invigorated capabilities or promise of better stovetop performance.
Someone the other day pointed to a report that said, just for the U.K., in order to meet the 2050 goals of 100% EVs on their (U.K.) roads, they’d need to import more of the raw materials necessary to produce such E.V.s than current global levels of extraction and excavation of these raw materials. Nuts.
