11th hour

Human are selfish that we take everything for granted by wasting out nature resources cutting downing trees, and never consider of the serious consequences behind it. The recourses that we have on earth are very limited, if we waste it all then have we ever thought about what going to be left over for our future generations?

Many of us are familiar with the term ‘global warming’ but how many of us really understand the serious impact behind it when increase average temperature of air leads to the melting of ice in North Pole. Can we picture ourselves living under ice water? Many of us choose to avoid this question because they don’t know how close this are is heading towards us. The documentary video suggest many species has extinct in the world due to the inconsiderable human behavior, however if we still continue our way of treating earth humans will be facing distinctions as well. Because we are not the special case, when comes punishment by the nature no one is escapable.

I was very glad to see many designers are very much aware of the global warming issues. Looking around my house I can see solar power has been introduce, eco friendly bag, and natural gas car is another invention. All of those invention help to extend the life of earth but it’s barely enough.

Designers should be under a lot of pressured in protecting the earth. Designer should only design superior products that dose the minimum damage to the environment. When product designing always double question the product come comes, whether is eco friendly? Recyclable? Have I pushed to extend the life span as much as I could? ect, an irresponsible design is when a product waste more materials than it should, short usage and this is another way to increase a level of pollutions.

We are very lucky that we got the concept of ‘sustainability’ nailed in to our brain. I believe every one of us should understand the philosophy indeed and use every knowledge we learnt in university and embraces it to our future product.

Design for Disaster peers comments

1. Alfred Boyadgis http://alfredboyadgis.blogspot.com/2011/04/designing-for-disasters.html?showComment=1302938297427#c7500580823271298574 2. Julian Chow http://julianides.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post.html?showComment=1302937123314#c3090063688206972876 3. Wang FanRu http://fanruwang.blogspot.com/2011/04/project-one-lifebuoy.html?showComment=1302937667415#c6435994241378460674 4. Gleb Labazine http://gleblabazine.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post.html?showComment=1302939651116#c928242410860428738 5. Marco Tallarida http://marcotallarida.blogspot.com/2011/04/windheat-turbine.html?showComment=1302938927770#c8011685056680152041

Design for Blizzard China

Stuff: Bottled Water + Cosmetics

After watching two short videos of ‘story of cosmetics’ and ‘story of bottled water’ has educated me in acknowledging a different aspect in the product industries such as consumer’s behavior, manufacturing demand, the power of advertising, the broken legal system and so on. Every Single year by releasing hundreds tons of plastic bottles into underground, and Daily cosmetic products contains toxic chemicals, all of our human behavior are constantly damaging and affecting our earth and trashing our own body health system.

As a 3rd year industrial design student I think it’s particularly important to cover the awareness of what is happening around the world and around us. Good designers should take the responsibility in inserting green and healthy philosophy into products. By doing this the fundamental key is to understand the situation and then turn problems into sustainable solutions. I was very angered against the bottle company, not only because of their actions of false and misleading advertising to increase their manufacturing demand, but what causes it has lead to a disaster of environment life cycle. I believe designer have the power in improving and reducing the level of pollutions that has been done. By mass producing bottled water is certainly not the most efficient way in satisfying the consumer’s need. Instead of relying on manufacturing plastic bottles, we can avoid these by introducing product for example clean water filter for each households or eco-fountain for the outdoors.

Story of cosmetics highlights the broken system of the cosmetic industries. Talking about selfish and irresponsible products, down on the marketing side they do make profit but question, do we really want to put toxic chemicals onto our skin and into our body? Video shows an average America women uses 12 bottle of chemical products per day, as my daily cosmetic products excides over 17. As Annie Leonard have motioned those ingredients because many harmful symptom even cancer and most importantly our new born baby can even get pre-polluted. All of the above facts encourage designers to gain more considerations in human health impact in selecting their materials. Therefore we need to understand the true meaning behind the words ‘natural’ and ‘organic’, By research and experiment on materials and ingredients that brings minimum side effects to consumers, because not only saving them we are also saving our planet and our next generation.

Video Reflection: Recycling

Everyone would like to make a sustainable earth, but how many of us took the action of recycling seriously? Although many companies are starting to gain more awareness of the ecological impact of the environment but is it enough to save our planet against great amount of wastage of 750kg per human every year? This is a very considerable question that we should input in our mind before designing products, to make a sustainable design.

The video ‘Giving Packaging a New Life’ has gained me great insight in the demonstration of recycling. The basic definition of ‘Recycling’ is reducing the level of pollution, energy usage and human resource by turning already used material into something new. I think it’s a brilliant concept of giving a product life a second chance and also lowering the demand of dumping more rubbish into our landfills.

We are very lucky as we are all highly influenced by the education system in Australia about ‘Recycling’. Studying Industrial Design at university we already have the ‘recycling issue’ in our mind, every one of us are desire to come up with the most eco-porduct, but how can we achieve this? The key term to its concept is firstly fully understand about the product lifecycle, even though recycling makes a huge contribution, but can we extend the product lifespan as long as it can?

A solution to a purely ‘green’ product is not only the definitions of using ecological material, what makes it green is process of a product’s life after death. Moving with the fast paste moving society, nowadays we can witness the improvement of the reclining progress. Designers tend to reducing recycling effort by using less different materials for one product, for example instead of have three different types of plastics, now we only uses one. Many packaging has replaced using paper sticker with a simple print on, this achieves the purity of material and also reduced energy usage by separating the sticky paper away from its material.

However I believe keeping a sustainable earth is not only a designer’s job. The media should also conduct propaganda about cycling knowledge as much as it can to the public, because many people are not aware of the significance of the issue. Everyone should play an important role in protecting our planet. So why not start recycling today?

My Ecological Footprint

After taking the 'My Ecological Footprint' quizzes. I was fairly shocked at the results i received, and didn't realize how much negative impact that was caused by me to our only earth. I personally think the website uses a very clever idea by using numbers of earth to gain people's responsiveness. Ecological Footprint has made me gain the awareness of the importance of training our daliy habits of saving resoutces. For example i can start with cutting down my shower time or reduces using private transport. I honestly hope not everyone's result is as bad as mine. :(

eco