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.

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.

some 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!

Elderly person talking on the phone. Picture by Deutsche Telekom.

Telephones are always a problem

Elderly people seem to be perfect victims for most home telephones and cellphones. They are difficult to use and they offer a lot of functions that many don’t understand how to find. But telephones are devices with a lot of importance to people, specially during emergencies.

Some companies have been designing telephones for the elderly, for example Doro. Big buttons and limited functions make the following phone a hit for those looking for simplicity. I find the possibility of writing the names on the same phone a great improvement for the older ones.

Doro phone for the elderly. Picture by Doro.

Digital menus

Navigating through menus on a tiny screen is a problem for a lot of people. Many get lost and don’t understand how to select, scroll or go back to the beginning. Interaction designers at Emporia, like at Doro, have been having this in mind and add a memory help notebook directly on the phone. Note that the notebook is all the time facing the user (and not in the back of the headset like in many home phones).

Emporia Time phone for the elderly. Picture by Emporia.

Functionality over style?

Designs for the elderly tend to be ugly: huge buttons, huge letters on a huge screen and terrible colors. But designing for the elderly is designing for all and if the designer is able to produce something appealing to everybody the product could be probably sold to a larger number of people.

The Deutsche Telekom released a home telephone that was initially thought to target the elderly. Not surprisingly a lot of young families are buying the phone. It has big numbers but they still look nice, it has fast dialing buttons and a paper notebook on the charging base.

Again, less digital menus

Something that people are requesting is to have more physical buttons. The Deutsche Telekom placed the answering machine controls on the charging station to make the listening of new messages easier.

Sinus A210 phone designed for the elderly and everybody. Picture be Deutsche Telekom.

That need for adding features

This telephone is including a flashlight and a radio, each function with its own button. Design research might have been revealed that those are important features for elderly people. But they also seem to be there just because it was possible to add something else. A dedicated button for a radio, do we really need that on a cell phone? Is that going to improve the user experience?

Doro phone with radio. Picture by Doro.

Design for the public space

City sign design seems to be a very localized field, traveling around I discovered that signs vary from country to country and often from city to city. I have an example of how a concept or sign could be differently interpreted.

Traveling in Argentina I saw the following sign… 

Public space sign designs in Buenos Aires (Argentina) are, in my opinion, pretty well done. The sign used to indicate the name of a plaza is not an exception but it is very localized. It’s clear for Argentineans that plazas have always trees and that’s why this sign works so good there. 

In Europe the plaza sign from Buenos Aires might not always be understood. In the old continent most plazas don’t have trees. 

Why this example?

This is to show why localization of designs are important. This example is about a design in the public space but it could be applied to software, web and product design. If you want to sell your product oversees you should take care of the meaning sign, symbols, icons and colors could have there; a good designer should think about localization and what signs or icons could potentially mean in another culture.

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

I must say I was in general rather dissapointed with the expositions. It is sad to find out that desing and styling are still so often confused even within the so called design comunity.

A lot of hand made furniture, loads of lamps, but very little of nice really creative design proposals. Since we all have enough expamples of boring/usesless design, I am going to focus on the things I liked.

Shelves:

Wooden shelf and Piegato metal shelf

A metal one from the Matthias Ries design office. When you order this shelf you receive it already precut and lacked, and you fold it yourself. I liked the fact that the more you load this shelf, the more stable it gets.

A wooden one from the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg. To fix the books on this shelf you’d just pull up the loose plank and the tension created held the books. The system got unstable when the weigh of the books was too high, but it is a quite new approach.

Waschhaus presented their concept Colo, a dishwasher reduced to its very basics.

All you need to have in your kitchen is a second tap (for the water supply), a connection for the water waste and a power supply . The dishwasher itself consists of a transparent cover with the conventional washing mechanism inside. It fits into the sink and seals so that the water doesn’t come out. once the washing is finished the cover is pulled and it hangs somewhere up where it doesn’t disturb. It could be a good product now that apartments get smaller an kitchens even more. I particularly like the multisize-fitting tray.

dishwasher Colo

The Hochschule für Kunst und Design Halle had set up probably the nicest stand in the exposition and it had mostly very creative furniture in it. The best pieces were probably form the collection "7 für die ecke". Since I have no good fotos from it have al look at the designer’s website.

Last but not least a new lemon juicer form the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee. It is always interesting to see how we find new solutions to hte verey basic design problems. This is a very aesthetical attempt that also plays with the gravity force. We didn’have the chance to see it working, though.

 Lemontile

Kodak cameras are not silly apparatuses

The sudden appearance of digital cameras made Kodak lost big amounts of money, from one day to the other a network of services around the picture development business was gone. So Kodak started thinking outside the camera again but this time in the digital world: they developed Easyshare, a software bundled to cameras that makes photo printing, storing and sharing easy. Easyshare is actually not just another software, it is the revival of that old good Kodak service. I find important the fact that Kodak is now the number one digital camera brand. 

The Kindle should be the new iPod

Let’s say it, the first Amazon Kindle was, judged from the physical point of view, a poorly designed device. So why it was such a success? Amazon did to Sony what also Apple did to Sony; they practically stole the market through the offering of something that is more than just a device; Amazon and Apple designed whole service ecosystems around the Kindle and iPod. Of course, Apple designed beautiful iPods and Amazon had to redesigned the way the Kindle hardware looked in order to make it more appealing and usable, but the new concept here is that physical design, software interface and service design are all very important.

Nokia makes the best cell phones

Any doubt about the previous statement? Well, technically, it is true. I still remember using my Nokia smartphone and being able to connect everywhere and getting a fantastic speaking quality; physically, Nokia telephones are great. But Nokia was in the past not able to successfully design a proper ecosystem around those smartphones, I still remember how complicated loading music or installing applications on the phone was… Oh, and I won’t forget that time when I did an update of the phone’s OS and all my information was deleted.

Connecting to the environment could add glamor to a brand: Fiat

Fiat’s eco:Drive connects cars to computers offering customers the possibility of checking how they drive and offering customized advice on how to drive more efficiently to reduce emissions and save money. Plug the car to the computer to get extra services.

The connected patient

A highly probable success will be the connection of medical devices to systems outside the devices themselves. An example is the asthma inhaler designed by Cambridge Consultants that connects to an online personal health care application to send relevant health information to monitor progress and to make it available to the care specialist. A traditional "lonely" device like an inhaler is now connected to a bigger system to provide a better user experience.

Conclusion

At Design vs Art we believe that in the future devices will be even more connected, not only to the Internet but they should also start talking among them. In order to offer a better user experience and a better service, devices should start connecting and talking to the bigger system they belong to.

Strategy:

It is an extreme case of design reduced to what is strictly essential; we have seen this in notebooks and other electronics already. Having a look at the features it includes, helps us picture the scene:

On the cheapest version the driver’s seat is the only seat which can be adjusted.

There is no power steering and various “luxuries”, such as air conditioning, fog lamps, front power windows or central locking are only available on pricier models. I don’t know about you, but I could do without  front power windows if that would mean reducing the price of the car. For us, the ones that see the car as a big tool that helps us get from A to B, there is a big difference in the value of real functionality, such as power steering, and commodities that allow you to get lazy such as central locking.

It is a nice example of targeted design: rather than competing directly with the next cheapest car, it aims to substitute scooters and small motorbikes, with a price of Rs. 100,000 (around $2000).

Safety on the road – the Nano has a point here. Image from Joe Athialy

To meet all economical and quality requirements a good bit of innovation has been required. It is estimated that at least 35 patents associated with the vehicle have been registered.

Environmental issues:

This is one of hottest aspects of the Nano; on the one hand it is a car and it pumps out twice the CO2 as a scooter. On the other hand it has a 4-stroke engine and a crude catalytic converter which appears to reduce most pollutants by about 80 percent and which scooters lack of.

It also meets Euro-IV and Bharat Stage-III compliant, European emissions standards.

From my point of view, the problem here is not the Nano. Of course it will have a terrible effect on the already highly polluted cities in India, when the 50 million orders already placed for the car are delivered. But this is just the consequence of a barely existing public transport system in cities.

Now 50 million can… Image from Jaaziel

Indian cities are extensive and saturated with traffic, and on top of it most of the families can’t afford their own vehicle. This is cry for a well planed and far reaching public transport. If there are no measures taking in this direction, India will probably soon assume the car centred transport system, similar to the US, and then it will be really difficult to change things.

One: reduce waste by not designing it.

my contribution to paper waste

This week I came across a very nice piece of crafts made out of the core of toilet paper rolls. Then I stopped to think about it and realised that we can found very often coreless paper rolls in public places. I suggest, let’s not take things for granted and question why are they the way they are. Paper rolls were initially conceived with a core, because at the time the technology wasn’t able to do it otherwise.

Marriott Hotels are introducing coreless paper rolls by the end of 2009, they have a brief comment about it on their website.

Two: design reusable rather than disposable.

A significant fraction of our domestic waste is just disposable products. Reusable products minimize waste an costs. A good example for this is my last acquisition: the menstrual cup, a gem. It is a silicone device that substitutes sanitary towels an tampons. Since I have it I have saved money and literally stopped creating waste. 

 Image by Kellybelly

Three:  consider the whole material chain your product will go through.

One of my favourite design classics is the moulded pulp egg tray. Made of recycled material, reusable, recyclable, cost effective, resistant.

eggs from the supermarket

Moulding technology keeps improving and now it is not only about egg trays but any kind of protective packaging.

Drink packaging can go from the most economic even minimalistic Asian design approach, in which all we have is a bag and a straw, to the becoming-standard western wax coated paper cup. These are replacing the plastic cups not because of economical reasons but because of environmental issues. That is also why we rarely see warm takeaways in expandable polystyrene containers.

So, if we do are starting to design thinking of environmentally friendly products, why not go a step forward and change disposable cups for permanent ones? After all, the really effective solution to reduce waste is to avoid its production. On top of it there is the significant amount of energy saved in the whole process chain. Through a good product design strategy we can find a new solution for an old problem.

Refund systems have always been around; bars still return empty bottles and cases to the provider. Public transport systems in some cities don´t provide paper tickets, but magnetic cards that are returned after use to be reused.

Germany has succeeded in establishing a standardized refund system for plastic and glass bottles and has almost eliminated the use of cans for beverage in the German market.

Big fast food chains are in fact a very suitable environment for a cup refund system; a titanic number of cups used every day, efficient sharing of resources to reduce costs, multiple branches to return the used cups. In the mid term, it would even be a cheaper solution than disposable cups, not to mention the positive impact on the image of the brand betting on such an initiative.

Design vs Art proposes a cup refund system, integrating collection, washing and handling of cups. Its user oriented design provides easy and time-saving handling and attractive integration in large fast food restaurant chains.

Visit http://designvsart.com/reCups.html for more information.