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