Ind-E-Focus

Many thanks to Callum Nash for this article which describes the designers resonsibility: to design a world that is not only comfortable, but most importantly, sustainable;

A human defined through his penmanship.

A human whose work and life lies solely between

a point of nothing (the idea)
and something (the product.)

This creature is designer.

This creature is engineer.

This creature is Artisan.

These are the throwaway terms we use to describe people whose profession lies
“in design”

however, if a design is a pre meditated solution to a problem,
no matter how big or small,
this makes every person commit an act of design several times a day.
By this definition//
Everyone is a designer.

However, I would like to stick to the character who would call himself
a designer.

It is needless to say that he has been busy for the past 100 years,
he has built what we would call the modern world.

I would like you to, if you can,
consider this modern world
one
singular
act of design.

An evolving act of design, clearly, never a panoram, or a finished product,
merely a vast expression of
Our humanity.
Our needs.
Our wants.

And in this way it reflects every product, which evolves and changes long after it has left the factory, and is becomes an expression of its user’s life,
before eventually rotting and returning the earth from where it came.

But clearly this design is not planned consciously as a whole,
it was never sketched and modelled on solid works by Cro-Magnon man in his cave
33,000 years ago.

But for us to assert that each designer does not in some way contribute to the overall designed world would surely be a falsehood.
For even the smallest product has its role and its essential place, and
like every thread on a jumper, it completes the whole.

It is in taking such a wide view on design,
where the designer is but a cog in a machine,
that we begin to understand the context and ideology of ‘sustainability’ and ‘responsible design.’
That it is not a bullet point in a list of U.S.Ps (Unique Selling Points.)
It is not a flight of fancy that a designer can indulge in for a conceptual project.

One might say, that if design is to be suistainable, that the context of the machine, of the industry,
is to have the blanket of ecological responsibility thrown over it,
that every cog, not just a select few, not just 2 or three components that stand out, but the entire machine, its screws, its bolts, even the paint on its casing,
must begin to show a lustre of green.

Otherwise, it remains still a dirty engine, and the idea of sustainable design remains as it stands.
Just an idea.

“But design in this way is impossible right now, we rely and depend on the abundance of oil, of toxic plastics and cheap waste, we are set in our ways!”
I hear the age old rhetoric.

But I believe such an enormous change requires no physical effort,
a shocking statement perhaps, but this is where I would like to go back to the idea of the Subconscious Imperative;
an idea that all of the conscious minds, ideas, and imaginations of all the designers are rolled into one singular mind that in essence shapes what we call The Design Industry, which is visible in the shape of the Modern World.

I feel like quoting John Chris Jones;
“We have chosen the meaning of being numerous”

The battlefield for change is to be fought in the minds of designers,
as much, if not more so than in the conception of manufacturing methods.

As one flourishes in the presence and at the whim of another,
so if the entire Design Community stopped using Vacuum Forming as a process, then there would be no vacuum forming.

I would say the Subconscious Imperative of the design industry has been to use cheap materials and fast processes, And whilst some effort is being made to change by a few individuals, the Design Industry is getting bigger and stronger
day by day, and globalism has given us even cheaper, even more wasteful ways of supplying most our production. (AKA. China.)

Though the Subconscious Imperative points in one direction,
the Subconscious Imperative is just a group of collective minds viewed as one.
So thus, the more of us change, even a little,
the more the shape of the beast changes too.

I won’t humour you with needless advice on how to design sustainably,
we did it quite wonderfully for 33,000 years.
And if it doesn’t spring to your mind naturally, then read Victor Papenak’s Design For The Real World, or get out of design.
Because by not changing, by not even considering it when your designing,
you present the biggest problem of all.

Callum Nash