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Dr. Michael Braungart on Material Shortages and Designing a New Material World
The idea of 'beautiful' involving so much more than the aesthetics and the fact that we need "a new kind of industry in place" is good to see written down. We need everyone on board to make the changes though, the bigger the organisation the more they need to be onside.
I totally agree with his approach - that designers must learn about and understand all aspects to their proposed design! Why must engineers learn about "Engineering Ethics" in school, but not designers? To me, usually designers are just a more integrative type of engineer (ie: they must consider more integrative-into-everyday-life aspects, compared to engineers). In that sense, it is almost more important for designers to be aware of the entire life-span of a product: where the materials come from, how the product is manufactured, how (and why) the product is used, end of life of the product, etc.
"For example, in Japan, the designer truly understands the link between total quality and total beauty. It's not beautiful if it is connected to child labor. It's not beautiful if it poisons the oceans. It's not beautiful if it perpetuates conflicts over precious resources. "
This also isn't about rare earth materials only, but actually about all materials out there, including our own outputs (faeces & urine & how to reuse the nutrients contained in those).
If we want to be taken seriously we need to lead more through the processing and management of the right information and less through our image.
"If you think about it, there are few ways to control people to do less bad, but there are millions of ways for design to support people being good."
that's inspiring...