March 11 - The Language of Things

On By Design today Alan Saunders interviewed Deyan Sudjic, the director of London's Design Museum, about his book " The language of Things".

Deyan writes about what things say and how and why they say it. He was driven to write the book to make some sense of the sheer number of useless things in our lives today. He says we buy, collect and consume a great number of things and do so sometimes without really knowing why. People have never before been more burdened with things than they are now.

The idea of consumption started after the Depression when it became the duty of advertising to convince us to buy more stuff to get the economy going. Objects made by crafts people were moved to mass production and this was when design first appeared. Deyan refers to design as a "curious artful thing" that is trying to make world a better place.

Designers have become so important in our consumer environment that we have pursuaded ourselves that some things are very special because of the person whose name is on them.

Design speaks of the culture that produced it. When the Russian and US space rockets were next to each other it was obvious to which country they belonged. The US one was not just functional but streamlined to look good at the same time.

Some things have become archetypes of design. For example the symbol that we use to denote a telephone is still the image of an original handset, the sign used to mark a train crossing is that of a steam train, and a speed camera sign is of a bellows and lens camera.

In the 1980's and 90's design was more flamboyant and that's been replaced by a much quieter style. The original definition of luxury was about things being handmade in small quantities, but now the idea of luxury includes objects made in an industrial process. eg mobiles being studded with diamonds. These days objects have a much shorter life span so we tend not to build a relationship with them.

With these current economic times we may be on the verge of a trend against consumerism, which I think is not such a bad thing.

March 7 - Habits

I listened to a podcast of By Design with Alan Saunders. He was speaking with Elizabeth Shove who is a Professor of Sociology, University of Lancaster and Visiting Professor, RMIT and Swinbourne, Melbourne.

They were discussing life choice changes that are necessary to accommodate climate change and asking the question “How are our habits standing in the way of real change?”

We acquire habits from observing other people and adopt shared conventions in terms of our habits and these show themselves in our daily practises. These conventions dictate our daily rituals and show up in the processes we follow, from getting out of bed in the morning to eating, work and social habits and bedtime rituals.

Our choices are constrained by the infrastructure design of our cities which tend to dictate that we generally have to live in one area and work away from home. This design hardwiring resists the sort of changes and choices that might address climate change considerations. While infrastructure design is a more difficult thing to change there are still many things that can be changed and that are already changing.

There is a greater awareness of the need to live a life that responds to the seasons. This involves the knowledge about living in a particular house: when to open and close the curtains; insulation and shading; which native plants to have; the best building materials to use; and efficient resource use. The international standard of setting air-conditioning systems to 22 degrees everywhere means the seasons have gone for many people’s lives so they have to relearn how to adapt best at home.

Alan mentioned that Harold Magee in the US pointed out that people in the US could save energy just by cooking their pasta in less water. This infers that many small changes by lots of people can potentially influence things in a big way.

I believe that the best way to bring about change is for everyone to make better, more informed choices about lifestyle issues. As consumers, we are powerful directors of the decisions that governments and manufacturers make. If, for example, we decided only to buy goods in environmentally-friendly packaging then the companies not doing this would have to change or go out of business.

What outcome do you want and what decisions are you making?