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Sustainable Design – Why It’s Gonna Save the World – According to Lee Barry
Submitted by Charlotte on July 9, 2010 – 6:16 pm 2 Comments
Introducing Lee Barry. Wellington based Lee is our new sustainable design blogger. Check out her inspiring words about advertising, design, stuff and life as it could be …
The year is nineteen ninety something or other. Picture a swagger of bright-eyed seventeen-year-old design students jostling into the tutorial room for our first class with Blair: The Advertising Guy. He is goateed, pony-tailed and tattooed with an attitude to match – the coolest guy you’d never expected to see teaching at a university. We all want to be him. The room is a temple of worship as we wait for the secrets of the über-cool ad-man to be revealed. The class fall under his spell, carried into a world of clever creative tricks to be played on the oh-so-stupid hapless consumer, but I find myself repelled. Repulsed even. I didn’t know why but I knew that my honest handmade square-ish peg was never going to fit into that bright and shiny “buy me” hole.
I can look back now and see that my allergic reaction to advertising class was a symptom of inherently being an anti-consumer.
Might as well get that out there right now. I do not approve of stuff for stuff’s sake. If you hoped this blog would be a round-up of the latest ‘green’ versions of the same old crap that can be bought in exchange for a clear conscience, sorry, think again. As the third generation in my family to train as a designer and artist, rest assured I know and love beautiful things. But not at the expense of all else.
Stuff (and the advertiser who sells it) has a lot to answer for. If you haven’t already, watch this: http://www.storyofstuff.com/ ninety five percent of stuff bought in the USA has a lifespan of less than six months. Not to mention where the raw materials came from, who it was made by under what conditions, and what happens after we throw it out. (Really, watch the video – and show it to your kids). Have you tried to give away an old TV recently? No-one is interested. Ever been to one of those recycling shops near a city landfill? Behold the racks of unwanted electronics. Or attempted to buy a part to repair that slightly-broken-but-years-of-good-service-to-come whatsamagig? No luck. Because products are designed to have ever shorter lifespans and be replaced by new models offering greater fashionability and status.
Society says: we are what we buy. So, do we want to be disposable, toxic, polluting, pillaging and the bringers of human suffering? Or do we want to be enduring, inspired, truly useful, ethically sourced and damn beautiful? I think the latter. And we can be.
I was so stunningly inspired by last year’s Massey University “Blow” exhibition – an entire year’s worth of young design graduates whose collective voice positively screamed “good design is inherently sustainable, you fools!” It wasn’t that they’d been briefed to deliver “green design” – they were just instinctively following principles of less waste, more efficiency, longer lifespan and social benefits to deliver the best possible products – for people and the environment.
That fundamental truth can no longer be swept under the cheap fraying carpet of global demand. Resources are running out. It must make sense to use our huge human brains to produce less stuff more intelligently. I don’t for a moment believe we will kick the stuff habit altogether – I’m not a horse-and-cart, wash-in-the-stream, grind-your-own-flour kind of girl (well, maybe sometimes). But right now, most of the stuff we make and buy is damaging our earth, air, water and ourselves.
I know of some New Zealand businesses and designers out there who get it: Starfish (http://www.starfish.co.nz/), David Trubridge (http://www.davidtrubridge.com), and Kowtow (http://kowtow.co.nz/), for a start. If you don’t know who they are, then that’s exactly my point – truly greendesigns and designers need to be mainstream and I intend to search the backwaters and float them your way.
About Lee Barry
Lee Barry is celebrating 5 years of being a New Zealander after many as an Aussie and less as a pseudo-Scot. Her time has previously been spent as a “cultural support worker” in arts and event management. She now works as a climate change campaigner in Wellington and tries to grow and make her own stuff.
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Tags: green design, sustainable design
lovely new blog! Sums up my current dilemma – like new stuff, but don’t like the idea that I’m shafting the planet in buying new stuff. Or even that I’m being taken in by the advertising crafted by Blair-a-likes who are convincing me I need new stuff to define myself.
As George Orwell was probably misquoted as saying, advertising is the rattle of the stick in the pig swill bucket.
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Nice article Lee. Thanks for the mention! Gosia x
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