Chapter One
"A Question of Design"
- The Titanic as both a product of and a metaphor for the
Industrial Revolution in the U.S.and the industrial
infrastructure that revolution created.It attempts to work
by its own rules, which are contrary to the laws of
nature.
- Mental Exercise: Imagine you have been given the
assignment of designing the Industrial Revolution -
retrospectively: The barely regulated, large - scale,
widespread pollution of the planet/an economy that
becomes dependent upon finite resource depletion.
- Industrialists, engineers, and designers tried to solve
problems and to take advantage of what they
considered to be opportunities in an unprecedented
period of massive and rapid change.
- Quick succession of new technologies: Wheel - spun
thread, rise of mechanized equipment, the exporting
of textiles revolutionized by the railroad and the
steamship - more, more, more - jobs, people, products,
factories, businesses, markets - a paradigm shift.
- Resistance to the shift by those put out of work (cottage
workers, Luddites, Romantics, artists, and aesthetes -
John Ruskin and William Morris) - concern over loss
of work and the reshaping of aesthetic sensibilities by
materialistic designs.
- Spirit of the early industrialists was one of optimism
and faith - emergence of other institutions:
commercial banks, stock exchanges, and the
commercial press - emergence of a middle class and
a tightening social network revolving around economic
growth - HOWEVER, at bottom, the Industrial
Revolution was an economic revolution driven
by the acquisition of capital. This spurned a shift
from a system of manual labor to one of efficient
mechanization.
- CARS as an example of this - Henry Ford, the
assembly line.
- Many industrialists, designers, and engineers did
not see their designs as part of a larger system,
outside of an economic one.
"Those Essences Unchanged by Man"
"essences unchanged by man; space, the air the
river, the leaf." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Reliance on a seemingly endless supply of
natural "capital."
- The Western view of nature as a dangerous,
brutish force to be civilized and subdued.
- The industrial infrastructure we have today is linear:
it is focused on making a product and getting it to a
customer quickly and cheaply without considering
much else.
- Higher standards of living were created, but there
were fundamental flaws in the "design" of the
Industrial Revolution - crucial omissions and
devastating consequences have been handed down
to us.
From Cradle to Grave
- Landfills filled with products that required effort
to extract and make, billions of dollars worth of
material assets - the ultimate products of an
industrial system designed in a linear, one-way
cradle to grave model.
- More than 90 percent of materials extracted to make
durable goods in the United States become waste
almost immediately.
- Most products, as we see them, represent only 5
percent of the raw materials involved in the process
of making and delivering them.
One Size Fits All
- Last century's push to achieve universal design
solutions - in the field of architecture, The
International Style - Mies, Gropius, Le Corbusier
reacting against Victorian-era styles sought to
GLOBALLY replace unsanitary and inequitable
housing - an underlying intention to convey
hope in the "brotherhood" of humankind
became distilled down to use of the style
because it is easy and cheap and makes
architecture uniform in many settings.
- In product design, soap designed to be universal and
mass - produced with complete disregard for
variation in water qualities and community needs -
design for the largest possible market or for a
worst-case scenario. The product operates with
maximum efficacy regardless of context - belies a
peculiar relationship to the natural world
through the implied assumption that nature is the
enemy.
Brute Force
- "If brute doesn't work you're not using enough of it."
- Nature's industry relies on energy from the sun, humans
extract and burn fossil fuels such as coal and
petrochemicals that have been deposited deep below
the earth's surface, supplementing them with energy
produced through waste-incineration processes and
nuclear reactors that create additional problems -
little attention to harnessing and maximizing
local natural energy flows - "If too hot or too cold,
just add more fossil fuels." Global warming as well
as microscopic, airborne particles of soot and other
pollutants create respiratory and other health
problems.
- Fossil fuels are finite, humans could be accruing
a great deal of solar income, of which there is
plenty - thousands of times the energy needed to
fuel human activities hits the surface of the planet
daily.
A Culture of Monoculture
- Natural diversity treated as a hostile force and a
threat to design goals - heavy environmental
impact of McMansion-type through their design,
construction, and operation - scraping and
digging of the landscape for foundations,
homogenous, pesticide saturated lawns, etc.
- Conventional agriculture similarly
disruptive to the natural world - specialized,
hybridized, genetically modified species of corn
and subsequent removal of most or all other
species from the natural ecosystem result
in soil erosion - brute force of herbicides and
pesticides.
Activity Equals Prosperity
- The Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound
increased Alaska's GDP through the jobs
created by the clean-up effort - example of the
one-dimensionality of measuring progress
solely through economic activity - compare to
the economic activity generated by car
accidents, hospital visits, illnesses, etc. In the race
for economic progress, social activity, ecological
impact, cultural activity and long term effects can
be overlooked.
Crude Products
- Products not designed particularly for human
and ecological health are unintelligent and
inelegant - crude products - Examples: polyester
clothing, typical water bottle both contain
antimony, a heavy metal linked to cancer.
The clothing and the bottle represent "products
plus": the product itself plus harmful additives.
- Other examples: computer mouse, electric shaver
handheld video game, hair dryer, portable CD
player - discovered that they all off-gassed
teratogenic and/or carcinogenic compounds -
substances known to have a role in causing birth
defects and cancer. This problem intensifies when
parts from numerous countries are assembled into
one product, as is often the case with high-tech
items such as electronic equipment and appliances.
- Crude products effects: poor indoor air quality -
allergies, asthma, "sick building syndrome."
- Another offender: PVC, which is contained in items
such as children's swim wings has shown, under
analysis, to off-gass, under heat, substances such
as hydrochloric acid, plasticizing phthalates.
- Another effect of some industrial chemicals:
weakening of the immune system, cancer,
endocrine disruption.
- Of the approximately eighty thousand defined
chemical substances and technical mixes that are
produced and used by industries today (each of which
has five or more by-products), only about three
thousand so far have been studied for their effects on
living systems.
A Strategy of Tragedy or a Strategy of Change?
- Existing industrial infrastructure chasing economic
growth at the expense of other vital concerns:
human and ecological health, cultural and natural
richness, and even enjoyment and delight -
industrialists, engineers, designers, and developers
of the past and those who perpetuate the same
paradigms today not intending to damage the
world/not doing something morally wrong so much
as they're the product of outdated and
unintelligent design. The damage that
results continues, however, and perpetuates
what we call "intergenerational remote
tyranny" - tyranny over future generations
through the effects of our actions today.
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