I came across the following Greenpeace video which paints a bleak picture of the impact of the smart phone revolution over the past 10 years or so. The constant drive to own the latest and greatest smartphone is having a huge impact on resources and the environment, and this\u00a0is unsustainable. The video suggests a solution in the form of circular economies, closed production cycles, where today’s waste is recycled and reused in tomorrow’s products. Within this there are significant design challenges,\u00a0 in developing products that are designed to last, are upgradable and recyclable.\u00a0Requirements of end-of-life recycling, re-use and disposal need to play as important a role in\u00a0the design process as\u00a0in-use requirements.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/greenpeace.international\/videos\/10154685683663300\/<\/p>\n
But the challenge is much greater than that, as illustrated in this second video. Parker is an aspiring designer\/inventor who has undertaken\u00a0the challenge of producing a better cup for Starbucks, a cup which is recyclable. After a long slog she produces a working concept only to have the cup rejected.\u00a0 It’s a bit cheesy, but also highlights an unfortunate\u00a0truth, designing better products is not enough.\u00a0We all\u00a0know that the most\u00a0successful products are rarely the best products, e.g. VHS vs Betamax.\u00a0For a product to be successful it needs to have so much more than a good design of the thing itself. The economic conditions\u00a0have to be right and the social conditions have to be right. At the moment unsustainable products have the upper-hand in both of these, so how can designers change the balance?<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/storyofstuff\/videos\/10156017957830884<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I came across the following Greenpeace video which paints a bleak picture of the impact of the smart phone revolution over the past 10 years or so. The constant drive to own the latest and greatest smartphone is having a huge impact on resources and the environment, and this\u00a0is unsustainable. The video suggests a solution […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-comment","tag-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}