If products could tell their stories april 18

IF PRODUCTS COULD TELL THEIR STORIES
TOWARDS A MODEL OF SUSTAINABLE DESIGN
JEN VAN DER MEER
NYU ITP
April 18, 2010

RECALLED 4_9_2009

RECALLED 4_7_2010

RECALLED4_6_2010

TODAY’S FOCUS:
Hope. Or at least an optimistic view.
In the form of :
German Works Councils
Cradle to Cradle
Shaping Things.
Planning for final presentations.
LCA practice.

Labor Conditions Reveal Product Backstory in Human Terms

Images: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a labor strike in1913
At the Paterson Silk Mills, NJ. First US labor strike: children, 1835. First law outlawing children at factory work: 1836. Massachusetts. Not the last.

Image: London Matchgirls Strike 1888. 14 hour days and phosphorous.

Homestead/Pinkerton Strike 1892

1902: Shirtwaist Strike

1911: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Silkwood – Norma Rae

Image: National Labor Committee

Image: The Mail: Foxconn factory.

Community Conditions – Impact Felt Beyond the Laborer
Endangered Communities
Disadvantaged Women
Violated Human Rights
Toll on Indigenous Peoples

Image: EarthWorks Action. Protest against the use of cyanide at a potential goldmine site in Argentina

Fair Trade: advocates the payment of a “fair price” and also demands social and environmental standards when purchasing from developing countries.
Focused on handicrafts, coffee, cocoa, sugar, tea, bananas, honey, cotton, wine, fresh fruit, chocolate and flowers.

What’s the argument against Fair Trade?
Where do you stand?

WHY IS GERMANY BEATING THE US?
“If I were teaching a class, I'd put these up on the blackboard and talk about them at the beginning of every class. ‘What do I mean by the German model? I'd like to see hands.’
Consider the Germans
By Thomas Geoghegan
Harper's Magazine
March 2010

THE GERMAN MODEL
No one knows. So I give the answer: "It's the works council, the co-determined board, and the wagesetting institutions.”
Works Council: single place of work, such as a factory, school, or farm, is controlled collectively by the workers of that workplace, through the core principle of temporary and instantly revocable delegates.
Co-Determined Board: half of all board members elected by works council. Chairman breaks ties.
Wagesetting institutions: goal to have everyone receive the same pay in the same region for the same job.

“They have kept a tool-making, engineering culture, which our own entrepreneurs, dreamily buried in their Ayn Rand novels, have gutted. And now, thanks in large part to these smart structural decisions, Germany is not only competitive, it's rich. Although it's unlikely that even the most liberal of American politicians would ever use a phrase like ‘worker control’—much less describe people who work as ‘workers’—it might still be worth at least considering what would be involved in emulating the German model.”

CRADLE TO CRADLE
“People involved in industry, design, environmentalism, and related fields often refer to a product’s ‘life-cycle.’ Of course, very few products are actually living, but in a sense we project our vitality – and our mortality – onto them. They are something like family members to us. We want them to live with us, to belong to us. In Western society, people have graves, and so do products…
What would have happened… if the Industrial Revolution had taken place in societies that emphasize the community over the individual, and where people believed not in a cradle-to-grave life cycle but in reincarnation?”

CRADLE TO CRADLE
“If humans are going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature’s highly effective cradle-to-cradle system of nutrient flow and metabolism, in which the very concept of waste does not exist.
To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems – from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.”

INTERFACE: MISSION ZERO
Interface’s Mission Zero vision - “To be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits — by 2020 — and in doing so we will become restorative through the power of influence.”

CRADLE TO CRADLE
“If humans are going to prosper, we will have to learn to imitate nature’s highly effective cradle-to-cradle system of nutrient flow and metabolism, in which the very concept of waste does not exist.
To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems – from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.”

5 STEPS TO ECO EFFECTIVENESS
Get free of known culprits
Follow informed personal preferences
Creating a passive positive list
Substances actively defined as healthy and safe to use
Activate the positive list
Reinvent
So why is this still so hard?

BACK TO SPIMES…
The project will offer a new way for people to place more value on their own objects in an increasingly disposable economy. As more importance is placed on the objects that are already parts of people’s lives it is hoped that family or friends may find new uses for old objects and encourage people to think twice before throwing something away.
In a world that has relied upon a linear chain of supply and demand between manufacturer and consumer via high street shop, the Internet of Things has the potential to transform how we will treat objects, care about their origin and use them to find other objects.

TALES OF THINGS
If every new object is within reach of a reader, everything is searchable and findable, subsequently the shopping experience may never be the same, and the concept of throwing away objects may become a thing of the past as other people find new uses for old things.
TOTeM is funded through a £1.39 million research grant from the Digital Economy Research Councils UK. The project is a collaboration between Brunel University, Edinburgh College of Art, University College London, University of Dundee and the University of Salford.

SHAPING THINGS
The central line of SPIME development:
First we have the capacity for identity – the code- which is modestly pasted onto the object.
In the second stage, a much thicker and more capable identity is embedded into the object, and that identity is historically traced.
In the third sage, the means of production are re-engineered around the capacity for identity. The object becomes an instantiation of identity. It’s named, and it broadcasts its name, then it can be tracked. That’s a SPIME.

“OTIVION”
“What we really out to fear is not ‘oblivion’ but irretrievable decline. This would be a grim situation in which we all knew that humanity’s best days were behind us, and that none of our efforts, however brilliant or sincere, could redress the mistakes of humankind had already committed.
We need to understand what that threat is: the knowledge that tomorrow will be like today, only certainly worse. Because we ourselves our worse: we’re collaborators in our own corruption. We need to understand that we really don’t want to find ourselves in a world that fits that description.”

WORK
And in order to avoid that fate, we need to work. We need to tear into the world of artifice in the way that our ancestors tore into the natural world. We need to rip root and branch into the previous industrial base and re-invent it, re-build it. While we have the good fortune to be living, we should invent and apply ways of life that expand the options of our descendents rather than causing irrepairable damage to their heritage.

THREE KINDS OF TECHNOLOGY
Technology that can eventually rot and go away by itself.
Monumental. Objects deliberately built to outlast the passage of time.
The last kind of decent technology – SPIME. Fully documented, trackable, searchable technology. It’s a toybox for inventive, meddlesome humankind that can put its own toys neatly and safely away.

FINAL WORDS FROM BRUCE S:
“But it’s not enough to think about that, or even write about. If it’s to be of any use to humankind, it will have to get done.
I hope that you’re the kind of person who can do it.”

STUFF TO GET DONE BY END OF SEMESTER:
. Full Stakeholder analysis (bulk of your midterm presentation)
_Add impacts to worker health if not yet included.
2. Sourcemap showing "where" your product comes from.
3. Lifecycle analysis:
a. Life cycle map of inputs and outputs
b. Referenced academic studies of LCA for your product service system
c. LCA analysis in sustainable minds, including
_ Goal of your study
_ Functional unit you are studying
_ Out put of analysis
And the purpose of your presentation on April 28:
4. Re-visioned product service system, addressing the "greatest lever of change." Told in 7 minutes or less with material that helps you tell your story. Reference your work above to make the case for how your idea re-conceptualizes the product service system for the greatest potential positive impact (or greatest reduction in negative impact).

If products could tell their stories april 18

by Jen van der Meer on Apr 18, 2010

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 48

Statistics

If products could tell their stories april 18 — Presentation Transcript