Designers, Visionaries and Other Stories by Chapman and Gant

This is a great book for anyone wanting to look at ideas surrounding sustainable living and design; getting people involved and interested in the subject.

There are some great quotes in here:

"...a singular ideology should actually be avoided, as this would serve to indoctrinate and stifle an otherwise abundant and free-flowing creative culture of critique and innovation."

I really agree with this statement, as so many people feel as though they are being indoctrinated into a green way of thinking, and this is done by making them feel guilty about their personal impacts on the environment.

BUT, and this is a big but, indoctrination isn't productive or positive!!!

And as designers it does tend to pigeon hole you into A category that limits their creativity before they even start to explore their design capacity.

"Marketing is part of the design process, where sustainable attributes of product outputs are to be identified and celebrated, leading by example to make sustainability the new consumer language of desire and obsession"

This is what I am trying to question in my research, as at the high end of fashion not much thought is given to marketing ploys and overt green design. Rather that the design should primarily speak for itself and the green/sustainable attribute be something that is used where possible.

Into The Wild | This film blew me away.....

Into The Wild

I watched this film for the first time this weekend. The journey that this guy took is 

just phenomenal....I did find it really sad though. He dies on his way to finding love, happiness

and acceptance. Sean Penn captures this story like nothing I have ever seen before.

This is the best and most moving film that I have ever watched....

COOL IT|a great book by Bjorn Llomborg|check it out

" I would like it to be cool to be impassioned about doing the best first for the planet"

"With a language of 'fear terror and disaster' climate change has captured most of our attention. But I say we need to cool it. We want to help the world-great. But is not a given that the best way to help is to cut CO2."

"I hope we can look future generations squarely in the eye and say that we didn't just do what seemed to be fashionably good; we massively and thoroughly changed the world for the better through simple, tested and cool strategies. We didn't just do something that made us feel good; we did something that actually did good."

These are some of the poignant quotes that I pulled out of Llomborg's book. Although he is framed as a climate change sceptic I think he has a clear sense of positive action enabling us to see past fear mongering and find plausible solutions to the world's biggest issues. Although people oppose him to green campaigner Al Gore, I don't think that this is really correct; they both have the same positive goals to achieve but set out to obtain them in very different ways. 

It brings me back to the age old saying "There's more than one way to skin a cat"....

Pluralism of methodology is a great thing and it drives competition and with a positive mindset might achieve different things but to the same end. 

I think you have to acknowledge all the positive things that you do and feed off that energy to carry on... that's what I propose to do.

An Interview with Katherine Poulton Co-Director at The North Circular

The North Circular

http://thenorthcircular.com/index.html

I got to know the team at TNC when I interned for them last summer! They are a great little knitwear company with great grannies and ethics attached....Katherine agreed to have a little chat with me about my dissertation..we like a good eco-powow session to boost our moral! Here are some of the things we discussed in park over lunch!

*Fashion is a celebration of the new and the opposite!Backlash is a part of the fashion cycle, the rebel within us.

*Scepticism is needed for objective design and a pluralist society. Criticism is something that we need to encounter in order to improve our designs.

*TNC focuses on the personal touch rather than the green. Their product labels do not state the wool is 

organic rather who is was made by and registers its process.

*However, if you do not expose the 'green' part of your product to the consumer how will they know any different and register a different way of thinking? This exposure might make people question their consumption habits.

*Green has an unquantifiable nature- does this let the sceptics loose?

*Green certifications are becoming increasingly difficult to attain and it can send companies abroad to India for sourcing wool rather than using the abundance that we have in the British Isles. The Indian product might be more certified than the British one, but is it greener in practice. In this case you have to consider air miles and add this impact to the manufacturing process!What is better?

*Katherine recommended that I watch "Who Killed the Electric Car?". This is a great documentary film which   frames mega corporation ExxonMobil for burying the perfect electric car which was developed in the 90's. They bought out the design and destroyed it leaving not traces. There are obvious motivations for EM to do this, they would loose out massively on oil so they even rigged the media paying them to undermine the electric car until the government intervened to say that the electric car should no longer be produced.

This is corporate corruption rather than plural design for all, and it is limiting in every aspect. It also puts in to question whether what we are exposed to is controlled by big corporations who have plenty of money at their disposal. Is there a fashion equivalent to the electric car?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsJAlrYjGz8

*Retailers such as Primark survive off the back of the fact that it is socially acceptable even for fashionista's to shop there in 'aid' of fashion. 

These are just a few of the topics that we covered in our chat. Katherine thinks that being ethical and to a large extent green has benefitted TNC massively as consumers see it is a positive alternative.If you have any comments on the content of our discussion I would be open to anyone's opinion! The more the merrier!!!

Thanks to Katherine for a great chat....may the sessions continue!

Tony Fry - Design Futuring....a new approach to design

                
Tony Fry - Design Futuring is a great book for any practitioners in design that want to consider a different approach to the way we design to make it more efficient and sustainable.
It is philosophical in text and not the easiest read but has great concepts and an honesty about it which is quite inspiring. Some of the more poignant quotes that I have taken from it are:

"Design as such cannot be disaggregated from the world around us and presented as a thing-in-itself."


"Design has to be understand anthropologically. It names our ability to prefigure what we create before the act of creation..."


"Our species auto-destructive mode of being is neither fundamentally recognised nor redirectively engaged. Myopically, the guiding forces of the status-quo continue to sacrifice the future to sustain the excesses of the present."


"To name and face the situation as briefly outlined is not 'doomsaying' but realism. Problems cannot be solved unless they are confronted and if they are to be solved it will not be by chance, but by design."


I think these statements are really poignant. For any designer this is a vote of confidence in your ability to reflect on what you do and how you could maybe do things differently. It's a can-do mentality and a challenge for the next generation of designers. I think Fry wants to prompt a new era in design.....do you think it will happen?

Lucy Seigle - another eco-commentator worth knowing...

Seigle works at the guardian newspaper writing about all the quanderies that we might face contemplate as green consumers...Above is her new book 'To Die For' all about what is fashion costing the earth. Her recent article in the guardian,

Why fast fashion is slow death for the planet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/08/fast-fashion-death-for-planet

took my interest! It displays our consumer habits and how these have changed over the past decade. This particular excerpt grabbed my attention...

"Our ways of buying fashion and our relationship with the garments we own started changing in the mid-1980s. By 2005, academic research was picking up on the salient points. Louise R Morgan and Grete Birtwistle set up eight consumer focus groups, surveying 71 women about their purchasing habits. Nearly all confessed to spending more than they used to, but what's really notable is that they had absolutely no plan as to how long they intended to keep any of their purchases. They also admitted that when "cheap" fashion tore or became stained, its likely destination was not the washbasket, but the rubbish bin. The old way of buying clothes, in harmony with one's income and the seasons, the way people wore, washed carefully and darned, has nothing in common with the way we now consume."

I think it is really important to recognise this difference in our consumption habits so that we can actually evaluate what we are spending our money on. As a designer I do take pride in what I buy and wear and quality and therefore longevity is something that I strive for in every purchase. I was taught, 'A bargain isn't a bargain if you aren't going to get any wear out of it.'... Some say that us northerners are very good at being frugal with our money but in any case I think this is a really valuable lesson to swallow, digest and learn from....

Money isn't something that is always knocking about these days for many people and 'acheiving a look' isn't a top priority, rather looking nice and feeling confident in something that you know you will wear over and over again!

Take a look at the rest of her article at 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/08/fast-fashion-death-for-planet

www.monbiot.com - something to ponder...

I am currently on my dissertation reading and research week and I came across George Monbiot's site. He's a great commentator on environmental issues and things surrounding all the issues. Here's a small snipit of one of his articles called 'Power Trips',

"It also encourages the superman myth: that a few powerful people can save the planet. In reality, only big social movements, emphasising solidarity and collective effort, are likely to be effective. Those who are rich and powerful already will frame their environmentalism in terms that reinforce their wealth and power, ensuring that the system which has rewarded them so lavishly remains unchallenged. I doubt that anyone who works for the Observer believes the superman myth, but they pretend to do so, because power lists – like every other species of celebrity trivia – are popular and easy to read.

Worst of all, it represents another attempt to tame and package this movement. As Paul Kingsnorth puts it:

“Capitalism, always so effective at absorbing and defanging dissenters, is transforming an existential challenge into yet another opportunity for shopping.”

Environmentalism is one of the last hold-outs against celebrity culture. It’s not untainted by this plague, but more resistant to it than any other sector. If the papers have their way, they will trivialise and capture us, just as they have done to everything else that once had substance." (http://www.monbiot.com/2011/01/18/power-trips/)

This is a really poignant excerpt I think! He gets straight to the point. On how this relates to me, I have to say that it would discourage me to use celebrity for personal gain....but would that aid me as a designer in this time and space?