I was a speaker at the IDSA Nat\'l conference in 2008 - the theme was \'Polar Opposites.\' My talk centered around why less is not more, more or less.

1. More is Never Enough
Ivy Chuang | Knoend
Sept. 12 Polar Opposites
IDSA National Conference 2008
More is Never Enough
The environmental mantra quot;Reduce, Recycle, Reusequot; we have all come to know
has a fundamental flaw: it tells us to want less. From the moment we are born, we
are crying for more. More food, more attention, more comfort, more care. In a world
of desires, where everyday we are confronted from every angle, spoken to about
what we need in our lives, what we should have and what others have done, it is
increasingly difficult to want less, use less, consume less. As designers, we are the
voice of needs and wants and it is what we choose to design and create that will
affect the world. As designers, our challenge is to navigate the waters of more and
less to find the right balance. How do we stay motivated on this task? How do we
navigate not just the emotion of design but our emotion as designers?
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2. Jacynoptealistic Philosophy
• Jaded, Cynical, Optimistic, Idealistic
Approach to Design
• How to beat depression with a stick
• Make peace with self-pity and loathing
• Reignite yourself and take responsibility
for your ideas
• Fuel a passion for imagination
• May or May not Save the World
Welcome everyone. Thank you very much for coming to hear my Talk. It’s a great
honor to be presenting at the IDSA national conference, it’s my first conference and
I’m very excited to be sharing my thoughts with everyone this afternoon. The polar
opposites theme is really appropriate for me because dichotomy of more vs. less is
at the core of my design thought process. To give a little background on myself. I
am an ecodesigner. I started my company 2 years ago to focus on sustainably
designed products and projects exclusively. I named the company Knoend –
starting with a K, so it stands for knowledge to no end, to know no end to
imagination. My goal with this talk is to talk openly about the variety of dilemmas
we face as designers when we think about sustainability. There are a lot of experts
here at this conference that are much more qualified to talk about specific
methodologies and processes but I’m here to speak on a personal level about my
struggle with green design. I want to talk about the emotional stresses of identifying
myself as a designer, a lot of people will talk about the emotion of products, I want
to talk about the emotion of us, of me as a designer. I want to be honest with
everybody and share my personal experience and I just hope I can ignite an
intelligent conversation and stir some thought.
So I’ve identified four traits of emotion that continually reoccur in me as I’ve tackled
design projects and through this observation I have crafted a method of coping with
these emotions. Embracing them and turning it into motivation.
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3. Progression Indicator
Eco-Intro Depression Get it together, man
Materiality Tangent Self-Reflection Conclusion
I’ve created a progression indicator so everyone can easily see where I am in this
talk, at any time if your thoughts drift or your attention sways, you can always find
your way back into the topic by looking at where we are in the top right corner of the
screen.
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4. Eco-intro
Global Warming Ready
I saw this ad in Vanity Fair’s first ‘Green Issue’. I love irony, I live for irony. I just
can never buy anything from the brand Diesel again ever in my life. The other ads
were of london underwater, rainforests in Pairs, the great wall of china surrounded
in dessert and all with young beautiful people lounging about in diesel clothes.
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5. Eco-intro
Do Good,Get Rich
In that same year I think just about every major magazine in the US had a ‘green
issue’, I sort of thought all right, things are going to change and I’m going to be a
part of it. Then I saw this cover on inc magazine that had the headline ‘Do good,
get rich’ and it didn’t quite sit well with me – it was followed a month later by this
cover from Business 2.0 – Go green, get rich. It’s not that I want to do good and be
poor, but was this the main strategy to solve the problem of our melting earth? Just
a show of hands - who in the audience here wants to do good? Who wants to get
rich? Not sure?
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6. Eco-intro
I am not a plastic bag
You’ve got eco-chic, ecofabulous, haute green, flip side you have eco-anxiety, eco-
disease, eco-fatigue, there’s now green collar, and green washing, then are these
I’m not a plastic bags everywhere. Every domain possible with ‘green’ in it is now
gone. It’s all starting to hum into a chorus for me and it sounds like “Are we there
yet? Ok are we there yet? How bout now?” At this year’s ICFF, when we tried to
explain the ecosensibility of our products to one women she barked back, oh my
gawd I’m so sick of hearing about that green stuff. And really, I’m pretty sick of
talking about it myself. When eco starts becoming a fashion must-have, it is in
danger of becoming yesterday’s fad.
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7. Eco-intro
Recycle, reduce, reuse
So here’s the mantra - recycle reduce reuse. I think recycle reduce reuse is a
wonderful mantra to break kids in. We don’t want to doom them when while they’re
too young. What I don’t think is ok that designers use that as a basis and call it a
day. What I see this mantra doing is that it’s creating a loophole for us - Hey my
product is recycled or recyclable material, it uses less material to manufacture, you
can use it more than once! Oh my job is done. Let me stop thinking about where or
how it was made and how it impacts the markets that it penetrates into - let me not
think beyond why I created yet another product that pretty much does the same
exact thing as the next one except somehow my mine its better. What this mantra
is telling us is that it’s all about consumption - and if you stick to these rules in our
capitalist society, its all good - we’re being responsible, we’re doing our part! It’s
much more complex than that.
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8. Material Tangents
Artisan waters
Just a week ago when I visited IDSA’s website the poll topic was something along
the lines of ‘Are we going green because of our guilt or do we actually believe it is
better?” The two answers were - my guilt weighs a ton, and the second was that
green is actually better. About a third of the responses were of guilt. Guilt shouldn’t
be the driving force for sustainability - there’s this mindblock for people a cognitive
dissonance because we’re at a point where the media has been reporting steadily
on this climate crisis, there’e little doubt that it’s the “right” thing to do but has the
way we live really changed much? Are all the products around us all green?
Absolutely not. Where do we go from here? For all the people who are thinking -
my guilt weighs a ton - and can’t I just buy this bottled water and forget about it?!
No really you can’t. We have to think more, think til it hurts. Think until we’re
broken and get back to the fact of what it is that drives us to be designers. We are
problem solvers, at least that’s my understanding of it. We have this a really big
problem and it isn’t called consumption, it is called denial. We’ve all inherited this
earth in its current form, we’re going to leave it off when we go, and I think if you’ve
chosen design as your path, you’re obligated to consider what you do while you’re
here. So now that I’ve had my little moment with that thought - I really do want to
ask ‘why can’t I just buy this bottled water and forget about it? Globally, bottled
water accounts for as many as 1.5 million tons of plastic waste annually, according
to the Sierra Club. Making the plastic in the bottles requires 47 million gallons of oil
annually. And that doesn’t include the jet fuel and gasoline required to transport the
bottles—sometimes halfway around the world. Only about 20% ever get recycled,
according to the Container Recycling Institute. In 2007, the manufacturers of plastic
water bottles generated more than 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and
required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil, according to the Pacific
Institute.Americans drank more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water last
year 8

9. Material Tangents
Material World
Ukita Family and their posessions – Material World
Photograph © 2004 Peter Menzel/menzelphoto.com
Some of you may have seen these photos by Peter Menzel that created a series of
photos of families around the world and all their possessions. If you look through
these photographs you’ll find a starck contrast between commercialized countries
and developing nations - the contrast is in stuff. When I first looked at this photo of
a Japanese family of four, I was thinking whoa - that’s a lot of stuff! But then you
look closer and you see that this is not a family of excess. They don’t live in a
mcmansion, they don’t have mountains of possessions, you could even say that
they are modest. There’s nothing that this family owns that is extravagant. It still
does seem like it’s a lot though. So I’ve brought here today, a few objects from my
house that I purchased after consideration - I remember looking at it in the store,
thinking about it, then purchasing it. These objects that I have never used, a couple
I’ve never opened, What’s the point of this illustration? It’s that we live in a very
complex world with products from every direction - addressing every little niche
desire. Why do we want to make more? Don’t we have too much?
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10. Material Tangents
Age of Excess
Is it too much? There’s more overweight people in the world than there are people
that are underweight. Obesity is now a worldwide problem recognized by the World
Health Organization. This is an image intended to invoke the Greek God of wine
Dionysus. He was an inspirer of ritual madness and revelry,his mission was to
bring an end to worry and care. There’s something about this photo that looks
simultaneously really uncomfortable yet really satisfyingly lazy.
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11. Material Tangents
One too many is
ordinary…
Illustration by Lily Lin – Cut & Paste Competition San Francisco 2007
Its precisely a feeling of eating too much, there’s something seriously uncomfortable
about it, yet immensely satisfying - there’s terms for this - food coma, the itus - food
baby –We’re in an era of beyond necessity and one too many is ordinary and
endearing.
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12. Material Tangents
Solutions with
having too little
How about too little? We apparently need something for that too.
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13. Material Tangents
With no budget (or taste)
Is a lifesize replica of yourself in a wedding cake too much? Or is this really going
to insure that your wedding guests will never forget your wedding?
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14. Material Tangents
Chingdogu - rare
tools for life
Too little - chin do gu movement in japan – we’re looking at mirrored tableware for
diet purposes – you might wonder at this point wow is this really a talk about
sustainability? Yes, I’m trying to illustrate that there are all these motivations to
create products for every function, every occasion, every excuse – designers are
driven to fulfill needs and in this complex word, there seems to be room for creation
to fulfill infinite variations for specific niches, but when do we ever get to ‘too much?’
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15. Depression
Adding weight to a sinking ship
Jay Directo / AFP / Getty Images
This is really what too much looks like - this is a garbage scavenger rowing in the
sea in the phillipines. There are people who live among garbage and it is a way of
life that is based on the debris of mine. I visited the San Francisco waste disposal
and recycling facilities and what I experienced when I left was not a sense of
urgency but of a disconnect. I felt like it was literally too big a mound of trash to feel
like I could be a part of it. This is how cognitive dissonance and denial happens.
So I went back to my life and did what I did, and you forget, but not very long.
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16. Depression
Out of Sight – Out of Mind
Because it gets worse. Maybe a lot of people know this but I only found out this
year that there are two Pacific Garbage Gyres about twice the size of Texas floating
in the ocean. Now the actual size of the area is still undetermined but it’s enormous
– and it’s not garbage you can see just by looking at the water – it’s a microplastic
soup just under the surface comprised on billions of plastic pieces decomposing and
breaking into smaller plastic pieces. In fact, you can’t see the gyre from satellite
pictures, but its there, and its entering our food stream through the birds and fish
and other marine life feeding from it. Our bloodstream now contains traces of the
same chemicals found in these oceans. So really, why add to the matrix of stuff
when this is what has happened, this is where we are now?
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17. Depression
Fuck Design
Fuck Design
Jimmy Jane Virbrator for Citizen Citizen
I just want to say that a week ago I almost wanted to change the whole topic of my
talk to ‘I don’t want to be a freaking designer anymore’. I don’t want to design for
consumption, I don’t want to design for industrial replication. I don’t want to make
more for less, pay less get more, use less, recycle more. I’ve had it, nothing more!
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18. Depression
The glory of the golden arches
Let’s just give into it. The glory of the golden arches. Let’s all go get happy meals -
On the swing of my defeatist attitude I wrote a 12 step program on how to quit being
a designer. To face who I really am and surrender to it.
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19. Depression
12 Step Program to Successfully Quit Design
1. We admit we are powerless over
design—that our lives have become
unmanageable.
2. Come to believe that a Power greater
Give our
than ourselves could restore us to
sanity.
souls to
3. Make a decision to turn our will and
google
our lives over to the care of Google.
4. Make a searching and fearless moral
inventory of ourselves.
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20. Depression
12 Step Program to Successfully Quit Design
5. Admit to a German Magazine, to
ourselves, and to another human being
Burn it
the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Become entirely ready to stop
After burn
passing judgment on other design.
7. Clear emotional attachment and
reactions to material possessions and
objects.
8. Make a list of all ideas we ever had,
and relinquish all of them.
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21. Depression
12 Step Program to Successfully Quit Design
9. Make direct amends to such people
wherever possible who had experienced
our ideas.
10. Continue to take personal inventory
and when we were wrong promptly
deny it.
11. Seek through prayer and meditation
Hello kitty is
to relinquish our obsession with
material, form and function.
toast
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as
the result of these steps, we try to carry
this message to all designers, and to
practice these principles in all our
affairs.
So this is where the pendulum swings for the jacynoptealistic approach. If you
wallow forever then you really will quit, give up and lose meaning. If you are in fact
meant to be a designer it becomes apparent that you can’t succeed in the 12 step
program even if google does owns your life. So how do you overcome the sense of
hopelessness?
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22. Self-reflection
A knife cuts
Whenever I hit a rock bottom low I take it back to when I first learned about design –
I thought it was wonderous that people could think in such detail about interaction,
shape, form, and function. I was fascinated that people could make a profession
out of aesthetic manipulation and efficiency optimization. And I thought it was a
beautiful way to communicate, to have a conversation with all sorts of different
people without speaking, without physically meeting them! I take it back to thinking
about what sort of thing really delights me - my favorite object in the world is a good
knife, don’t worry - a good Cooking knife. Because not only does it simplify
function, it’s an appropriate use of material that is set to achieve that function, and
the form beckons the user to perform that action, communicates that is its purpose.
all the sensations come to me when I examine a good cooking knife, the sensation
of in my wrists can be guessed by the weight of the knife, I can almost smell and
taste the food I would like to cook.
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23. Self-reflection
The glass has water in it
and then think of my other motivation which is emotional resonance. The happiest
moment in my life was back in 2000. On no particular day - I had been living a
prolonged bliss for months. In San Francisco, my first job, sense of freedom, good
friends, a great amount of energy, not any one reason, but feeling that I had a good
life. I remember speaking to my mother on the phone one day and she asked how I
was and I told her incredibly happy and laughed in delight. She was like, “what do
you mean?” and so I tried to explain it, I’m holding this glass of water in my hand as
I’m speaking to you on the phone, and I look at the water and I think, “I am going to
drink this water in a moment, and it is going to be so good. And then I do, and it is
soooo good. Then she responded ‘what’s wrong with your head?” I think of this
moment and I don’t necessary equate it to design but it becomes my motivation - I
don’t remember what kind of cup it was except that it was glass, but I was able to
put water in it and drink it and experience pure joy, and if I could recreate something
like that for anybody in an experience, it’ll be like we shared that moment together.
It doesn’t matter who designed the cup and made it, who installed the tap and sink,
the infrastructure that brings water to the tap – all these elements of other people’s
ideas fit together to form our lives. When you read a book in a chair, there’s an
author and a furniture maker involved, when you jog, there’s a city planner, shoe,
clothing designer involved. A designer’s ideas are intricately weaved into this fabric
of interrelationship.
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24. Get it together, man
Be a proud (not-so proud) parent
Our ideas are like our children, if we go through the trouble to introduce them into
the world, it should be a cognitive decision. We should have a plan for them. It’s
simply irresponsible to make things only because a client demands it. Most of us
will be in a situation where we execute an idea that goes against our grain, we take
on projects that are completely separate from anything we would actually want to
do. But then we own it, we face our downfalls and compromises and keep aiming
for our ideals. I’ve purposely put in a lot of humor and fun into this presentation
because getting out of the depression stage actually took me four years. I got my
Master’s degree in Design in 2002, and it wasn’t until 2006 that I decided that I
really wanted to be a designer again. The world’s problems pushed me into
depression and Ecodesign was my ticket out of it. When I realized that I wanted to
create meaningful products that were good for people and planet I discovered there
weren’t that many jobs out there – pretty close to zero design jobs, so I created one.
When I started my company I didn’t have a clue – just a thought that I wanted to do
green design and could go in any direction and it would still be in an improvement to
the status quo. I didn’t have any experience out of school in Industrial Design, I
didn’t have savings, I wrote a business plan and though I remember there was a
strategy section in there, but really, I didn’t have any kind of concrete plan, I didn’t
have a product! But I did the paperwork, formed an LLC, rented myself an office,
and 9 months later introduced my first product to market.
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25. Get it together, man
Lite2go lamp
2008 Bronze IDEA
My company’s first product was the lite2go lamp, a lamp in which the packaging
became the lampshade in assembly – thus eliminating the need to have packaging
in the first place. It’s a really simple concept, but when you look around you,
integrated packaging design is an anomaly. Most products come in the box that it
came in. This application doesn’t make sense for all products out there but it
worked for this lamp and what’s interesting is that the packaging doesn’t serve
another function – like a tin can u can reuse after you purchase tea – it is actually
vital to the product’s function. It’s a product that I am really proud of and received
an IDEA award from IDSA and Businessweek this year in the ecodesign category.
25

26. Get it together, man
Lite2go lamp
Starting from zero
Like I mentioned previously when I first started my company, I didn’t have a product,
nor an idea of a product – I just jumped in knowing that green design was it, I knew I
wanted to design home products. I’m going to take you through the abbreviated
version of the product’s development, but essentially, we decided to make a lamp,
and the first thing we did was examine all the environmental shortcomings of
existing lamps – there were so many things wrong with them. Fused materials that
could never be disassembled for recycling, use of toxic materials, excess material,
and on and on. What we saw as a common thread to all of them was packaging –
every lamp had packaging and sometimes a grotesque amount of it – so this is
where we zeroed our focus into. How could we make this the central focus of a
product and still have it be interesting? With 251 million tons of garbage going into
our waste stream each year (*EPA MSW Report 2006), it is simply irresponsible to
design products with planned obsolescence, and without environmental concern
beyond delivery to market. packaging accounts for 80 million tons, which is twice
the amount of durable goods at 40 million tons.
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27. Get it together, man
Lite2go lamp
Inspired Form
We made a lot of iterations of different paper models to try to find interesting forms -
we took inspiration cues from Le Klint lamps george nelson’s bubble lamps and so
on.
27

28. Get it together, man
Lite2go lamp
Inside-Outside
And we tried to explore the notion of delight – like a jack in the box – if we connect
with a user through action. We were envisioning something that would be very
unexpected that you would open it and in a few steps it would turn into something
entirely different. So our models continued for quite some time after this and we
were really at a standstill and then our breakthrough moment happened.
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29. Get it together, man
Lite2go lamp
Golden Moment
And we gave into the golden arches. The apple pie packaging – simple to make, is
an interesting shape, protects, presents – and the pie is pretty damn tasty. We
didn’t think something exactly the shape a apple pie would be fitting for a lamp so
we shortened the length and it started to look a bit like a modern lampshade.
29

30. Get it together, man
Lite2go lamp
Prototypes
We went back to the inside outside inspiration and created a relationship between
the contents of the lamp and its exterior. And at the end of the day we had a really
interesting geometric shape that was really hard to describe.
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31. Get it together, man
Lite2go Lamp
Production File
So here’s the cut file for our lamp, it’s the packaging and the product, and it’s a lot
simpler than a lot of molds made just for the packaging. 4 years after getting my
master’s degree in Design, after going through a bout of not wanting to ever “make”
anything, I got it together and created a company that would stand for everything
that made sense to me about design and the first product that I made for the world
made a lot of sense, and it wasn’t that hard to design. This meant that my work had
just begun.
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32. Get it together, man
Jacynoptealistic Philosophy
• Jaded, Cynical, Optimistic, Idealistic
Approach to Design
• How to beat depression with a stick
• Make peace with self-pity and loathing
• Reignite yourself and take responsibility
for your ideas
• Fuel a passion for imagination
• May or May not Save the World
Let’s tie it back to the Jacynoptealistic philosophy, it’s ok to be at odds at yourself all
the time. Take a stab at depression with coveted moments in your life, accept
imperfections in your pursuits as long as you strive, take ownership of your ideas -
and be what you’re meant to be - a problem solver. And we have a really really big
problem right now, so start anywhere.
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33. Conclusion
What the world needs is not another product, another slight variation of an object, it
needs more thought, more intellect, more passion, more energy. But far far most
importantly more imagination. Thanks everyone, enjoy the rest of the conference!
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