Annie Leonard: The story of bottled water

In her, frank and animated fashion Annie Leonard exposes environmentally threatening insights into a product that considerably exploits resources for such nominal outcomes. Industrial design has been able to created this wasteful industry, hence it should be used as a tool to correctly influence societal attitudes and behaviours to alleviate the issues associated with bottled water.

Reuse of bottles could just as easily take place, highlighted with the failure of plastic juice bottles and their market venture with non-removable lids, demonstrating a innately human motivation for reuse. Unfortunately bottled water has addressed core convenience issues in society without thought of consequences, further underlining a need for provisions of practical alternatives.

In understanding the roots of why consumers purchase such a nominal product for more than a nominal price, we can see that a lot of marketing and advertising has displaced more than it's share of energy in creating demand for bottled water.

By realistically approaching this issue with considered design solutions, maybe there will not have to be a cash grab from well established manufacturers, and hence, less backlash to obviously more environmentally friendly alternatives.

We can easily identify bottled water as an extremely wasteful use of resources, but it is still fills half an aisle retail stores. There surely is a better way.

Design for life

An evocative series of situations, Phillipe Starck "bares himself to the world" exposing valid design philosophies pertinent to the way he designs. Cleverly disguised as another reality show, participants and their design values have been collated in such a manner to expose these ideals in which Starck bases his design.

Blunt and very critical, Starck's evaluation of "useless" products exemplified by ipod cases and their irrelevance to real-world issues causes confusion within contestants. This hard hitting design discussion style, however arrogant, becomes highly relevant when words like "slave" are thrown into the discussion highlighting shortcomings of the industrial designer and mass production.

Amid this chaos and harsh exterior, I find ever relevant design philosophies that are carelessly overlooked through marketing based products. Starck has been able to highlight pertinent uses of form study exposing "sculpture" as poor reasoning for design, completely valid in my own thinking, where I believe he reinvents the phrase of form-follows-function in his own way.

All this whilst nurturing minds in order to tackle design problems. Genius. Although he never claims it himself.

Designing for Disasters: REDARROW

redarrow with LED light install

redarrow mounted with cable tie to post

charette: Breville mixer

Pulling stuff apart is fun. And because we didn't have to put it back together and make it work it was even better. Seriously though, work was done and the Professional series mixer was given a thorough rethink in respect to environmental impact.


Disassembling the mixer, as with most things, I was reminded of how much thinking is required to give parts the harmony to become a refined product. However, the shear amount of parts was reasoned to be the largest ecological short fall of the mixer.

Reasoning came about from a still-in-construction design tool "Greenfly" that assisted in categorizing and highlighting material issues in the PCB and multiple ABS housings. Although, cutting down the number of parts and making them work harder was a theory outside the scope of the program.

Essentially, the upper portion of the mixer (stainless steel shell, polycarbonate insert and numerous fixings) was made into a single piece and the most damaging part, the PCB, was replaced with an integral button to eliminate it from the design altogether.

A sketch should make this easier to understand


The reconsidered version of the device scored markedly better then the standard product from the Greenfly tool, highlighting heavily processed parts as something to be avoided in ecological product design.

the eleventh hour

Shockingly confronting, the episode of the human species is exposed as a tumor on the earth's natural complexion. I had never reflected on the cost of my existence and, although I knew that it was environmentally costly, never really did the maths on how much we have "borrowed" from the land.

Irrespective of whether responsibility has not been solely placed in the lap of the designer, there are startling concerns about our impact to society and the environment. Moreover, rising and proven instances of asthma and disease worldwide illustrate a need for urgency in tackling the global environmental crisis.

We have all experienced this depressing picture painted about society and for the most part we have done little about our consumption habits. The eleventh hour demonstrates why change is important, and makes relevant the extent of society's predicament.

Personally, I have seen most of my design theory develop with little input (unless required) of ecology and sustainable design. It has always seemed to take a backseat to aesthetics, semantics and practicality. Change has been a dynamic constant that has followed design through our existence, however I can realize the enormity of the change that must occur to ensure our future.

I believe the stigma of eco design having a prerequisite of 'uncomfortable' and 'unfinished' must be left behind for progression.

"Environmentally superior products are not niche 'eco' or 'green' products but everyday products that have been designed to minimize or eliminate harm to the environment or society" A Year In Design, Autralian International Design Awards 2009

charette: IKEA stefan chair

Fast paced, dynamic and instinct based, one day design challenges force us to rapidly produce feasible alternatives to a failing norm. The Stefan chair is exposed as a design with little tangible and individual features that deviate it from the norm and make it a perfect candidate as an "interim chair," used for an intermediate time frame and inevitably discarded. Below are snapshots of an evolving design process to add visual and tangible design value to the IKEA stefan chair.

Mind mapping determines design flaws in the current product that allow for design opportunities later in the process.

objectified: task one

A culmination of design thought and design intent, the objectified video arouses engagement with the built world and attempts an answer to the question that is design. Inevitably thwarted by substantial differences in design situations, we arrive at many ideologies at how to tackle design problems.

Whimsically defined, "good design is as little as possible" Dieter Rams inextricably captures the continual form study and battle of what it means to give an object purpose and meaning. As designers, we are continually analyzing ways to provoke this purpose and meaning for newer and apparently better objects, however this is fraught with issues of sustainability and ecology that have only just been defined within our lifetime.

Exposed is the reality that designers no longer just work with materials "in a way to expose their best attributes" but have to seriously consider a product "from sourcing materials, to designing, to production to shipping and then eventually designing a way for the products to be disposed of responsibly."

Compounded with creating objects that satisfy the "real audience" of each individual user, objectified forces us to realize the enormity of the task that is design. I now understand the struggle and effort that goes into making our existence meaningful to society.

Attempting to answer questions of usability, manufacture/ disposal, sinectics and visual language my value of design and its societal impacts have been reconsidered as a tool that continually betters our existence.

My Ecological Footprint

Apparently, if everyone lived the way I do we would need a whole lot more earth's then we currently have.