This video was recommended to me and it could not have come at a more perfect time. I have had an internal debate about my role as a designer for some time now, and “The Story of Stuff” by Annie Leonard brought my internal struggle into the limelight. If taken at face value, the video can be a good source for discussion and exploration.
As a product designer, I am constantly thinking about how I love design and problem solving but am not a fan of ultra consumerism, wasted resources, planned obsolescence, ecological degradation and the list goes on and on. The big question is, what should designers do?
I would love to hear some stories about the positive impacts that designers make which outweigh the negative.
Please go to the http://www.storyofstuff.com/ to learn more….
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
A designer is a creative. It’s easy to say “this is bad ! We need to make better !” yes it’s easy, but what are proposals ?
As a designer I’m creative, I work to find solutions even it’s not easy. Critical doesn’t interest me.
In my country in west of France, called Bretagne we say : “il y a les commandous et les faisous” (there are poeple who says, and people who makes)
I want to be a Faisou.
I hope a gave you a part of answer. do not boycott a career in design, make it in a good way.
Sorry if my english is not so good.
Laurent
If you have connected to this post from LinkedIn, please comment on this site directly. I want to make sure that my blog readers can also benefit from the value that you are adding to this issue.
Thank you,
Adam
I have seen this video before. But to see the comments posted in Linkedin, i was sad. it is so difficult for designers to take critisism. or change in fundamental thinking. most of us take the stand that we understand this much before you tell me so this entire presentation is fit for only kids. BTW to understand my comment one should visit the Linkedin ID grouop discussion. Why cant we just accept that we all part of the screw up.
The bit about “Extraction” (wiping out natural resources) is overblown BS (timecode: 2:37). I could write a book on the rebuttal to that biased broad stroke of “people are evil”.
After watching this leftist/socialist Anti-American anti-capitalism diatribe of lies, and after taking three pages of notes regarding the gross propagandizing, I am left wondering how to counter it so that the brains of those who might even for a minute consider this collection of clap-trap as factual, might be prevented from allowing their head to become even more mushy in our apocoyliptic post industrialized world. In considering this, I ran across an article regarding dioxins which according to the video are the “most toxic man made substance known”. I think I could do this for ever point made by comrade Leonard, but hopefully this will make the point sufficiently:
[Following the EPA’s announcement of its tentative conclusions, the environmental activist group Center for Health, Environment and Justice placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times picturing a breakfast and pointing to all the foods containing dioxin, including an omelet’s eggs and cheese, bacon, sausage, cream, milk and butter. The ad states that dioxin is “the most toxic man-made substance on earth... And you had some for breakfast. And you’ll have some for lunch. And for dinner...”
Scary stuff, certainly. And what’s a consumer to do? The only health effect that scientists agree dioxin may cause is severe but temporary acne from very high exposures — as occurred in some of the population surrounding a chemical facility in Seveso, Italy that exploded in 1976. Still, the EPA and the environmentalists press their case that dioxin is far more dangerous.
That’s where Ben & Jerry’s ice cream comes to the rescue.
As I was enjoying some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream at one of their “scoop shops” last summer, I noticed a Ben & Jerry’s marketing brochure titled “Our Thoughts on Dioxin.” The brochure stated, “Dioxin is known to cause cancer, genetic and reproductive defects and learning disabilities... The only safe level of dioxin exposure is no exposure at all.” Knowing that dioxin is in virtually all food, Dr. Michael Gough and I put Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to the test. Gough is a former government scientist who chaired the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services advisory panel on the effects of dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange on U.S. Air Force personnel in Vietnam and served as one of EPA’s science advisers in the 1994 review of dioxin.
We measured the level of dioxin in a sample of Ben & Jerry’s “World’s Best Vanilla” ice cream. We presented the results at the Dioxin 2000 scientific conference held this week in Monterrey, California.
Two independent laboratories using different methodologies reported a single serving of the ice cream contained about 200 times the level of dioxin the EPA says is safe — according to the existing EPA standard. Under the new EPA standard, a serving of Ben & Jerry’s would exceed the EPA’s safe level by a whopping 2,000 times. The level would be about 7,400 times what the EPA says is safe for a 40-pound child.
If dioxin is so dangerous — as Ben & Jerry’s and Greenpeace, the ice cream-maker’s science adviser, seem to think it is — then how can Ben & Jerry’s sell its ice cream? Doesn’t the company care about “the children?” — a segment of the population continually exploited to promote the political and social agendas of the EPA and environmental activists.
The answer, of course, is that the low-levels of dioxin in our food and the environment are not dangerous.
The story gets better.
The EPA and a California-based activist group, Communities for a Better Environment, are attacking a San Francisco-area gasoline refinery operated by the Tosco Corp for its discharges of dioxin into San Francisco Bay. Tosco’s wastewater is permitted by the EPA to contain 0.14 trillionths of a gram of dioxin per liter. Last November, the EPA moved to reduce this level to zero.
But based on our testing, a single serving of Ben & Jerry’s contains about 2,285 times more dioxin than an 8-ounce “serving” of gasoline refinery wastewater at the permitted level.
None of this is to say that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is dangerous. But here’s the conundrum for the pushers of dioxin hysteria, including their ally and financial backer Ben & Jerry’s.
If dioxin was so dangerous, it is unlikely that Ben & Jerry’s would be selling ice cream. Certainly, an appropriate new flavor would be “Tasty Toxics.”
But since Ben & Jerry’s intends to continue selling its “dioxin-laden” ice cream, that can only mean that dioxin is not dangerous — in which case an appropriate new flavor might be “World’s Best Hypocrisy.”
Despite our tests, the Greens and others will likely persist in fearmongering about dioxin. Why? The answer is simple — politics and money.
Promoting the dioxin scare is an effective fund-raising strategy for environmental activists. Forcing lower emissions of dioxin on industry provides the EPA with greater regulatory power. Vietnam veterans have already bullied the federal government into compensating them for a variety of illnesses allegedly due to Agent Orange. Now they want a monument to supposed “casualties” of Agent Orange.
Researchers have enjoyed over $1 billion in federal funds over the last 20 years. University of Texas researcher Arnold Schecter, who also has worked with the activists at the Environmental Defense Fund, wants money to investigate alleged Agent Orange-associated health effects among the Vietnamese population. Conceivably, Vietnam may be working through U.S. environmental activists to extort “compensation” from the U.S.
Ben & Jerry’s isn’t the only business trying to exploit the dioxin scare for profit. Two firms, Toronto-based Bio Business International and a Denver-based Natracare LLC, are marketing dioxin-free tampons in the midst of an “anonymously” started e-mail scare campaign that even the Food and Drug Administration has decried as a hoax.]
You see, you wouldn’t think so, but there are even right wing, ultra-conservative, imperialistic crazies amongst industrial designers. Or perhaps Craig is the CEO of FMC, or Monsanto or Dow or Dupont… and the list goes onnnnnn. I guess every profession, every area of society and culture have every socio-political type there is mixed right in. Because of that, each of us can only do what we ourselves find possible. There always have been and there will always be “Craigs” to balance the equation to the negative.
The problem with all of this is the concept of “career”. If you find yourself working for “the man,” who wants you to design crap and stuff that you know will end up in the food chain or elsewhere harmful to the ecosystem (and you’re sufficiently talented to have a choice), then don’t work for him. You don’t have to give up design; just who you design with and what you design.
That “with” is the keyword in the sentence. If you have a job as an employee and find yourself designing stuff “for” your employer and about which you have ambivalent feelings, then get a different job or become a consultant. Ours is a collaborative profession and will only work successfully to the benefit of all in a concurrently collaborative way. If you can look at how you work and feel that you are working “with” people and parameters to make things better, then you’re on the right track. If you feel you’re working “for” (at the behest of) someone or some faceless, nameless conglomerate, then leave and do something more rewarding for all, including yourself and your family. And if you’re doing whatever you’re doing, “just for the money” then definitely find another path!
“Career” does not mean having a job and being upwardly mobile within the organization, as it did when our parents were working. It includes elements of happiness and satisfaction with your work and, as designers, with your creations and their impact on your world.
For those of you who are NOT “Craig-like”, read “World Without Us” by Alan Weisman. It’ll open your mind. http://www.worldwithoutus.com/about_book.html
Oh, and Craig, WOW! man, you’ve got to do something about all that rage.
amusing
JD,
funny that your reaction to Craig is to insult him. I guess because he doesn’t agree with your politics, it’s okay.
After all, right wing, ultra-conservative, imperialistic crazies don’t deserve respect. They aren’t people or anything….
Frankly, this film is politically biased.
JD –
I just looked at your Weisman book and I guess we all should just kill ourselves to save the planet huh? Well – you go first , and then I’ll consider it.
And as for who I might work for, I won’t say — just don’t bother applying for a job.
Not necessary. The point was “cause and effect”. If we don’t do something to change our ways, lifestyles, inputs, outputs, etc. drastically, dramatically and soon, Mother Nature will take care of the problem without any proactivity on our parts. The real shame will be that those of us who made every effort to change and/or succeeded will reap the whirlwind right along with the deserving majority. I expect there’ll be no ark this time.