快猫短视频

Jonathan Chapman is telling his audience why he took his hi-fi to a marriage guidance counsellor. It was the usual story: lack of communication. Chapman would come home from work and talk about his day, and the hi-fi would just sit there. Sometimes it would play music, but only if he told it to. Chapman doesn鈥檛 know when it happened, but one morning he woke up and realised he no longer loved his stereo.

This may sound like a stand-up routine, but Chapman was addressing a meeting of top designers in London last year and he was making a serious point. He is fascinated by our relationships with objects, and how these change or fail. 鈥淚 like the term 鈥榓dulterous consumption鈥�,鈥� he says. 鈥淩elating to our material possessions is parallel to the idea of adultery, of making a commitment to one thing and then quickly becoming distracted by a younger model. It鈥檚 so rare now that there鈥檚 anything in life we are tied to forever. Everything is temporary if we want it to be.鈥�

Chapman, a senior lecturer from the University of Brighton, UK, is one of a new breed of 鈥渟ustainable designers鈥�. Like many of us, they are concerned about the huge waste associated with our consumer culture, and the damage this does to the environment. They also stress the urgent need to reconsider how we apportion the Earth鈥檚 limited resources among a growing human population. What sets them apart, however, is their belief that we can design our way out of our profligate ways. Some, like Chapman, aim to design objects we will want to keep rather than discard. Others are working to create more efficient or durable consumer goods, or ones designed with recycling in mind. Their shared goal is nothing less than to redesign society to help us ditch our throwaway culture.

The consequences of our fickle ways can be found in landfills everywhere. Americans use and throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles an hour. The British produce enough garbage to fill the Albert Hall every 2 hours. According to the authors of Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, only 1 per cent of all materials flowing through the US economy ends up in products still being used six months after manufacture. The waste entailed in our fleeting affairs with consumer durables is colossal.

鈥淭he British produce enough garbage to fill the Albert Hall every 2 hours鈥�

Take the average domestic power tool. However much DIY we plan on doing, the truth is we throw these away after using them, on average, for just 10 minutes. Most will serve 鈥渃onscience time鈥�, gathering dust on a shelf in the garage, but the end is inevitable: thousands of years mouldering underground. A power tool consumes many times its own weight of resources in its design, manufacture, packaging, transportation and disposal, all for a shorter active lifespan than that of the adult mayfly.

To understand why we have become so profligate, Chapman believes we should look to the underlying motivation of consumers. 鈥淧eople own things to give expression to who they are and to show what group of people they feel they belong to,鈥� he says. In a world of mass production, however, that symbolism has lost much of its potency. For most of human history we had an intimate relationship with the objects we used or treasured. Often we made them ourselves, or family members passed them on to us. For more specialist objects, we relied on expert manufacturers living close by, whom we would know personally. All this gave objects a history 鈥� a 鈥渘arrative鈥� 鈥� and an emotional connection that today鈥檚 mass-produced goods cannot possibly match. No wonder we are dissatisfied, says Chapman.

Without these personal connections, consumerist culture instead idolises novelty. We know we can鈥檛 buy happiness, but the chance to remake ourselves with glossy, box-fresh products seems irresistible. When the novelty fades we simply renew the excitement by buying more new stuff: what John Thackara of Doors of Perception, a network for sharing ideas about the future of design, calls the 鈥渟chlock of the new鈥�. 鈥淎s a sustainable designer, I was growing frustrated with the wasteful superficiality of design, in its nurturing of endless cycles of desire and disappointment with consumers,鈥� Chapman says. His solution is what he calls 鈥渆motionally durable design鈥�. 鈥淢ost consumer products are like stories that have an incredible opening line but just continue repeating it throughout. Their narrative capabilities are pathetically limited.鈥� He says the challenge for designers is to change this and create things with a 鈥渟ustaining narrative鈥�, things we want to keep.

That may sound like a tall order, but it can be surprisingly straightforward. Think about your favourite old jeans. They just don鈥檛 have the right feel until they have been worn and washed a hundred times, do they? It is like they are sharing your life story. You can fake that look, but it isn鈥檛 the same.

Chapman says that the gradual unfolding of a relationship like this transforms our interactions with objects into something richer than simple utility. Swiss industrial analyst Walter Stahel, visiting professor at the University of Surrey, UK, calls it the 鈥渢eddy-bear factor鈥�. No matter how ragged and worn a favourite teddy becomes, we don鈥檛 rush out and buy another one. As adults, our teddy bear connects us to our childhoods, and this protects it from obsolescence. Stahel argues that this is what sustainable design needs to do with more products.

It is not simply about making durable items that people will want to keep, though. Sustainable design is also a matter of properly costing the whole process of production, energy use and disposal. 鈥淧eople who are into sustainable design don鈥檛 see themselves simply as product designers any more,鈥� says Tim Cooper from the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. 鈥淭hey are interested in the design of systems, the design of culture.鈥� He thinks sustainable design has been 鈥渟urprisingly slow to take off鈥�, but says looming environmental crisis and resource depletion are now pushing it to the top of the agenda. In 2005, a new product was launched every 3.5 minutes. Given that 80 per cent of the environmental impact of a product, service or system is determined at the design stage, Cooper believes sustainable design deserves far more attention than it has received.

Thackara agrees. For him, the roots of impending environmental collapse can be summarised in two words: weight and speed. We are making more stuff than the planet can sustain and using vast amounts of energy moving more and more of it around ever faster. 鈥淥ur natural, human and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt,鈥� Thackara writes in his new book, In The Bubble. 鈥淟aws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up.鈥� Take, for example, our consumption of fish. With increasingly sophisticated fishing technology we are eating more and more of it even as stocks are disappearing, and regulatory bodies seem incapable of responding.

On the day you read this the same volume of trade will take place as occurred in the whole of 1949. We now make as many phone calls in a day as were made in the whole of 1983. The information age was supposed to lighten our economies and reduce our impact on the environment, but in fact the reverse seems to be happening. We have simply added information technology to the industrial era and speeded up the developed world鈥檚 metabolism, Thackara argues.

鈥淥n the day you read this, as much trade will occur as in the whole of 1949鈥�

Once you grasp that, the cure is hardly rocket science: minimise waste and energy use, stop moving stuff around so much and use people more. Achieving this is not so easy, however. Growing numbers of people may be choosing to opt out by downsizing or embracing the ideology of the 鈥渟low movement鈥�, which seeks to reverse the frenetic pace of living, but a return to pre-industrial ways will never be a global solution. 鈥淲e cannot stop tech,鈥� Thackara says, 鈥渁nd there鈥檚 no reason why we should. It鈥檚 useful. But we need to change the innovation agenda in such a way that people come before tech.鈥�

Ezio Manzini, professor of industrial design at Politecnico di Milano university, Italy, describes the process of moving to a post-throwaway society as like 鈥渃hanging the engine of an aircraft in mid-flight鈥�. Even so, he believes it can be done, and he is not alone. In Natural Capitalism, Hawken and his co-authors write that 鈥�90 to 95 per cent reductions in material and energy flows are possible in developed nations without diminishing the quality of the services people want鈥�. Thackara believes we shouldn鈥檛 be holding out for a technological quick fix 鈥� we already have 95 per cent of the answers. Now we need to design the world around them.

According to Manzini, a crucial step would be to redesign our globalised world into what he calls the 鈥渕ulti-local society鈥�. His vision is that every resource, from food to electricity generation, should as far as possible be sourced and distributed locally. These local hubs would then be connected into national and global networks to allow the most efficient use and flow of materials. Thackara also favours this approach, pointing out that multinational corporations have expanded successfully for years by thinking this way. 鈥淭he same kinds of software and data that enable Wal-Mart to locate its huge stores can be redeployed to optimise local-area service ecologies,鈥� he says.

So what will post-throwaway consumerism look like? For a start, we will increasingly buy sustainably designed products. This might be as simple as installing energy-saving light bulbs, more efficient washing machines, or choosing locally produced groceries with less packaging. In general we will spend less on material goods and more on services. Instead of buying a second car, for example, we might buy into a car-sharing network. We will also buy less and rent a whole lot more: why own things that you hardly use, especially things that are likely to be updated all the time?

Consumer durables will increasingly be sold with plans already in place for their disposal 鈥� electronic goods will be designed to be recyclable, with the extra cost added onto the retail price as prepayment (see 鈥淛apan鈥檚 WEEEcycling鈥�). Following Chapman鈥檚 notion of emotionally durable design, there is likely to be a move away from mass production and towards tailor-made articles, and products designed and manufactured with greater craftsmanship. Companies will replace profit from bulk sales by servicing and repairing products chosen because we want them to last 鈥� just like grandma used to do.

Chapman acknowledges that it will be a major challenge to persuade us to buy fewer goods, and ones that we intend to keep. At the moment, price competition between retailers makes it cheaper for consumers to replace rather than repair. Products designed to be durable and emotionally satisfying are likely to be more expensive, so how will we be persuaded to abandon the tat and choose sustainability instead? Cooper points out that many of us are already happy to pay a premium for quality, and that we also tend to value and care more for expensive goods. Even now, he says, quality, durability and energy efficiency are important considerations when we buy furnishings and white goods, and there is no reason why this kind of thinking shouldn鈥檛 extend to other areas such as clothes and toys. Chapman is also positive: 鈥淧eople are ready to keep things for longer,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he problem is a lot of industries don鈥檛 know how to do that.鈥�

Less waste, more profit

Things are changing, however. As consumers become increasingly concerned about the environment, many big businesses are eagerly adopting sustainable design and brushing up their green credentials to please their customers and stay one step ahead of the competition. The fact that BP, rightly or wrongly, is thrashing ExxonMobil in the PR stakes, despite selling essentially the same product, is evidence that green messages make commercial sense. Now other firms want a slice of the action.

King of suburban sprawl Wal-Mart is encouraging its suppliers to embrace sustainable design and manufacture. It also has ambitious plans to redesign its own operations, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent, doubling its truck fleet鈥檚 fuel efficiency and making its stores 30 per cent more fuel efficient, all by 2012. Meanwhile Google is putting pressure on the computer industry to design PCs that run on a uniform 12-volt internal power supply rather than the multi-voltage system that is standard at present. This would be a far more energy-efficient way of converting mains alternating current into direct current to power the PC.

Even industrial heavyweight General Electric is catching the wave. Its Ecomagination campaign is all about sustainable design. In an attempt to lessen GE鈥檚 environmental footprint on a range of products from light bulbs to power stations, the company鈥檚 investment in designing cleaner technologies will leap from around $700 million in 2004 to $1.5 billion in 2010. Given that GE currently produces more greenhouse gases than most US cities, the move has transfixed US industry and environmentalists alike.

Some analysts are sceptical that things will really change, however, pointing to Ford鈥檚 recent backsliding on its commitment to design more fuel-efficient SUVs. Business analysts fear that Wal-Mart鈥檚 鈥済reen conscience鈥� is hitting profits and such an ambitious plan cannot sustain share value. Others complain that much of the greening of consumer goods is just another way to increase profits. But is that such a bad thing? GE鈥檚 CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is upfront when he says that his environmental agenda is 鈥渘ot about being trendy or moral. It鈥檚 about accelerating economic growth.鈥� Quite simply, the company can sell more washing machines if they save consumers money on increasingly expensive energy. Better still, businesses such as GE can initiate a virtuous circle by spurring competitors to design greener products: Ford may have ditched more fuel-efficient SUVs, but General Motors recently unveiled a plug-in electric SUV at the Los Angeles motor show.

Chapman believes that whatever the motivation, sustainable design is here to stay. 鈥淭he halcyon days when large corporations were in a position to choose whether to jump on the sustainability bandwagon or not are finally coming to an end,鈥� he says. Whether this is also the beginning of the end of the throwaway society remains to be seen.