Category Archives: Eco Design

Make sustainable products attractive (but still sustainable!)

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Now a days, life seems to be impossible without electronic devices. We need them and want them but if we not change the way we produce and consume them the impact on the environment will be too much for our little planet. As designers we need to make products sustainable in an attractive way to be able to reach the masses.

TDK Designer Solar Panel

The TDK Designer Solar Panel. Picture by Engadget.

A good example is the TDK solar panel design that has different draws and patterns on it. It could be argued that this device may not be as efficient as a normal solar panel but making the solar panels attractive could do a lot to make the adoption of the technology faster; and that’s important. The real potential in this technology is for use in big surfaces (like buildings) and maybe not just as personal devices.

Docomo touch wood telephone made of woodDocomo Touch Wood phone

Many could think that the Docomo Touch Wood phone, made of wood, looks good. As this is avoiding the use of traditional plastic this design could be going in the right direction. In comparison to bio plastics, wood could last longer and, eventually, the case box could be reuse. Can we imagine updating the inner part of a wood phone instead of throwing away the whole thing?

Novothink solar charger for ipodNovothink solar charger for iPod

I am a little bit more skeptic about the greenery of this specific-use gadget. This is yet another gadget and the amount of resources needed to build it is probably big (water, energy, plastic, etc.). This is a big question we should ask ourselves as designers if we design a product to be marketed as “green” or sustainable: with this thing, do we save resources or do we consume more out of the planet?

Samsung phone made of cornThe Samsung phone made of corn

Bio plastics are a very interesting material, still their advantages are questionable. They could be made of different sources, like potatoes and corn, fact that makes them not only less polluting but also morally incorrect (many people would argue). Of course that might depend on the efficiency of the producing of these materials: how many potatoes do we need to produce a kilo of bio-plastic?

The plastic bags battle

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It is already 10 years since I first saw recycled and reusable bags in a supermarket. You buy them for a reasonable price (say, up to 0.50 €), you can use them for a long time and when they break you can exchange them for a new one with no additional cost. A good deal, I would say. But it is 10 years now and we still have an awful lot of plastic bags choking our environment.

plastic_bags_arbel_egger

Picture from Arbel Egger

One of the reasons is that many shops still offer the “normal” one-use bags for free parallel to the recycled ones, so many people save the penny. Many of the customers that do care and buy the recycled bag regularly forget to bring it to the shop, and when they have a collection of 10 recycled bags at home they just don’t care anymore and take the ones that are for free.

Many shops don’t even have the alternative and provide only one-use bags. In fact, my experience shows that in small stores a little conflict takes place when I try to explain to the person behind the counter that I don’t need a bag.

Some people have been thinking about this and have taken action to fight the plastic bag problem:

Compostable plastic bags

You have probably heard about these already but they are now spreading fast in the market. Spain is the first plastic bag producer in Europe and it will forbid non biodegradable plastic bags by 2010, so the whole industry is rushing to adapt to the new situation.

ecovio_aldi_compostable_bag

Aldi compostable bag. Picture from BASF

Aldi Süd, a German Supermarket offers now reusable compostable plastic bags. Alternative to these they offer recycled plastic bags, which cost a quarter of the compostable ones. Still, it is a start. Interesting about this bag in particular is the material it is composed of. “Ecovio” is a blend between a biopolymer made of corn starch and a polymer made petrol. The petrol polymer fraction has been processed so that it is in fact compostable. Petrol made biodegradable, not bad, uh?

Tassenbol

This is my favourite aproach so far to tacle the problem. I first saw it in a supermarket in Amsterdam and found it fabulous. It is just a bowl where customers put the bags they don’t need anymore and where they take them when they need some. Simple, effective.

tassenbol_bagglobesome fictitious examples of tassenbol possibilities. Picture from Tassenbol

The only real drawback I found is, that corporate image issues could interfere with the concept. Including a tassenbol in a shop implies promoting that customers leave the shop wearing any brand in their bags, including those of the competition. After researching a little bit I surprisingly found out that many supermarkets in the Netherlands have already the tassenbol in their subsidiaries, so they must have found enough advantages in it to compensate. Lets hope shops in the rest of the world join!

DMY review: the conferences

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This is the second part of my review of the DMY international design festival 2009 in Berlin. The first part took care of the expositions.

All conferences were planned on a symposium day and the whole event lasted about eight hours. The quality and background of the speakers was as motley as it gets. It started with two so called "institutional presentations" by the Taiwan design Center and the "Metropolitan Design Center of Buenos Aires". Promotional videos of both places, a lot of charts and never ending text on the projector. No real talk about design there, even though they repeated the word until it lost its meaning. I suppose they paid to be there…

Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki at the Symposium

Within the "Alternative strategies" block Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki talked about their "Cybernetic love: future sex project". These people analyze the Japanese society habits from all angles to get to the conclusion that sex practice is integrating elements such as virtual lives and places, electronic pleasure gadgets, robots, etc. till an extent, that a human partner is no longer the preferred alternative. This project is financed by Tenga, a company that develops high quality adult toys. I must say they have a point, check out their promotional video;  if this is not user experience design, I don’t what is!

Ronen Kadushin presented "Open Design" and his way for design to evolve if we really want good design to surround us. We all have seen how open source software gives the best results, now here is a way to do basically the same but with product design.

Ronen Kadushin at the Symposium

Interesting lectures of the block "Sustainability": Ralf Ketelhut from Stoffstromdesign let us know what really happens when products are waste and made us aware how harmful coatings and pigments are in our product. We also saw an example of a very nice nearly 100% environmentally friendly wallpaper. Key to success they said, is to go to the manufacturer, talk to him and find a different way of doing things.

from left to right: the wallpaper designer from eccellence goods, the roll of wallpaper, Ralf Ketelhut

Probably the best example of good innovative design was given by 2012 Architecten. They presented some realized projects in which they rather than recycling they reused material that was considered waste. They identify a source of large quantities of waste material in good conditions and they find a way to use it.

Jan Jongert from 2012 Architecten ans a shot of their Villa Welpeloo

One of their requirements when reusing materials is to take them as they are and add no processing to them when possible, this way it is economically and environmentally worthwhile reusing. Some of these projects are an espresso bar made with used PVC windows and the duchi shoe shop, where car windows make the shelves.

Jurgen Bey gave a nice lecture about how we approach design problems and what could be the role of design in the future. A pity that I didn’t record it… there is a good summary of it in design.nl