Core77

Thackara: Resource Efficiency as Design Opportunity

By Allan Chochinov - January 15, 2007

in design.edu

John Thackara has posted the text of his Global Place lecture in Ann Arbor last week. (Well, he posted it on the internet, of course.) It's a quick, inspiring read, cherry-picking some faves from his book ("eight per cent of the world's total electricity supply is used to cool buildings in the United States" and "flat screens use five times more power than the bulbous ones they replace"), but then he sets up the thesis for the new design opportunity:

There's a truly gigantic design opportunity here. We have to re-design the structures, institutions and processes that drive the economy along. We have to transform material, energy and resource flows that, unchecked, will finish us. In this new design space, the boundaries between infrastructure, content, equipment, software, products, services, space, and place, are blurred. Compared to physical products, or buildings, sustainable services and infrastructures are immaterial. They are adaptive in time and space. So it's a huge opportunity, but a new kind of design practice is needed to exploit it.

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Todd Zerger

17 years ago

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This is a pretty big and relevant idea. Thanks for the post BigElvis.

As designers become more deeply involved in defining problems (in addition to simply finding solutions) it is time for us to flex our generalist, holistic, system oriented, muscles. Thanks in part to Core77 surveys we know we get paid pretty well and enjoy a great deal of creative opportunity. But, is it enough to have those things if they come attached to responsibility for designing and marketing environmental catastrophes like the Hummer? Or the inefficient flat panel monitors John Thackara mentions? Or Ian Gonsherï¿½s furniture rendered useless by embedding it in plastic?

I would be very interested in seeing a survey that tabulates how many in the design fields want to be contributing to a paradigm shift like Thackara describes. How many of us would take the obvious initial risks in an effort to have it all in the long run. And perhaps most importantly, as Thackara suggests the movement is already huge but it is also distributed and disconnected. Is that a weakness or a strength? Lastly, for those of us who decide we are willing to chance changing careers or clients or strategies or whateverï¿½ how do we find each other?

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tr

17 years ago

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"flat screens use five times more power than the bulbous ones they replace"

i'd have to call bs on that one. okay, comparing apples to apples, and the screens were the same size, the tv's were used in the same capacity, and the 'flat screen' is a plasma display, then maybe, just maybe, there is some validity, depending on viewing situations. but replace that plasma in the hypothetical matchup with an LCD, and that statement is wrong.

blanket statements like this are great to get a crowd thinking, but what happens when the crowd is educated enough to know that it is a blanket statement?
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