Emotionally Durable Design

Objects, Experiences and Empathy

Jonathan Chapman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317574811
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture General

Emotionally Durable Design presents counterpoints to our 'throwaway society' by developing powerful design tools, methods and frameworks that build resilience into relationships between people and things. The book takes us beyond the sustainable design field's established focus on energy and materials, to engage the underlying psychological phenomena that shape patterns of consumption and waste. In fluid and accessible writing, the author asks: why do we discard products that still work? He then moves forward to define strategies for the design of products that people want to keep for longer. Along the way we are introduced to over twenty examples of emotional durability in smart phones, shoes, chairs, clocks, teacups, toasters, boats and other material experiences. Emotionally Durable Design transcends the prevailing doom and gloom rhetoric of sustainability discourse, to pioneer a more hopeful, meaningful and resilient form of material culture. This second edition features pull-out quotes, illustrated product examples, a running glossary and comprehensive stand firsts; this book can be read cover to cover, or dipped in-and-out of. It is a daring call to arms for professional designers, educators, researchers and students from in a range of disciplines from product design to architecture; framing an alternative genre of design that reduces the consumption and waste of resources by increasing the durability of relationships between people and things.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge a number of individuals for their insight, wisdom and support throughout the development of this book. My friends and colleagues at the University of Brighton: Nick Gant, Professor Jonathan Woodham, Professor Anne Boddington, Professor Bruce Brown and Phil Mills. I would also like to thank the individual designers who have kindly agreed to their work being featured in this book and the team at Routledge, in particular Fran Ford for her essential guidance and input. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Ming Ming and son Jasper for their patience, understanding and support throughout the research, development and writing of this book.

chapter one The progress illusion

DOI: 10.4324/9781315738802-1

Human destruction of the natural world is a crisis of behaviour, not simply of energy and material. It is about people, the choices we make and the dreams we chase.

Ecological awakenings

In 1966, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) delivered to the world the first photographic images of our planet from outer space; and for the first time in human history, we experienced the Earth as a holistic and self-supporting organism, peacefully suspended in the dark silence of space. We witnessed with our own eyes the Earth's protective atmosphere, and we were jolted by the evident fragility of this blue gaseous membrane proportionally similar in depth to ‘a coat of paint around a football’.¹

The Earth's atmosphere is as thick as ‘a coat of paint around a football’.

Astronauts, while viewing the Earth from space, have reported a similar cognitive shift in awareness – an experience known as the ‘overview effect’. Back down on the Earth, the social shockwave that resulted from this uncomplicated revelation – exposed via television, newspapers, cinemas, etc. – gave birth to a new and socially accessible appreciation of the natural environment. The world's largest environmental organization – Friends of the Earth – was founded three years later, closely followed by Greenpeace in 1971. From the early 1970s, the output of environmental legislation and transnational policies also grew, placing increasing pressure on designers and manufacturers to improve their standards.

Today, public consciousness of the human destruction of the natural world is almost tacit, and few would argue that a dramatic reappraisal of developed-world production and consumption methods is imperative. Indeed,

proving that the Earth's climate is changing from human actions is like statistically ‘proving’ the pavement exists after you have jumped out of a 30-storey building. After each floor your analysis would say ‘so far – so good’ and then, at the pavement, all uncertainty is removed.²

Some might refer to the space mission in 1966 as having provided the greatest ecological awakening in modern history. Undoubtedly, it assisted significantly in the societal comprehension of new ecological models and theories, one of these being the Gaia hypothesis – so named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia – which provides an inclusive glance at life on Earth. In Gaia, environmental scientist James Lovelock puts forward the theory that the Earth is a ‘tightly coupled process from which the self-regulation of the environment emerges’.³ His theory, made public in 1968 at a conference regarding the origins of life on Earth, might well be viewed as a logical continuation of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution by natural selection, except that Lovelock classifies animals and inanimate entities within a single category. Gaia theory embeds itself within the correlations between all matter on Earth and, in this respect, resembles ancient Celtic and other holistic, animistic depictions of human situatedness within nature.

Other hypotheses differ greatly in sentiment to Gaia, such as that of Frenchborn American microbiologist, environmentalist and author Rene Dubos, and that of Garret Hardin. Dubos powerfully expresses the concept of man as a ‘steward’ to life on Earth, in governmental symbiosis with it, like a supreme gardener for the entire world.⁴

Mankind acts out a great tragedy which may lead to his own destruction.

Figure 1.1 We are all a part of the same thing

Source: Dominique Falla, 2011

Photograph by Alejandra Ramirez Vidal

Hardin, on the other hand, a highly trained ecologist and microbiologist, sees mankind as acting out a great tragedy that may lead not only to his own destruction but to that of the whole world. In 1968, he described this theory with great detail in an essay entitled ‘The tragedy of the commons’⁵ in which he draws comparison between planet Earth and the village common. This analogy is founded on the basis that they are both ecosystems, each of which must live within certain limits – the tragedy being that each villager who uses the common sees only their own impact and never the overall spatial effects of the village population as a whole.

One does not need to be an ardent environmentalist to see that there is little or no logic to the way we relate to our environment. We clear carbon-absorptive forests to grow methane-producing meat, and we smother vast areas of biodiverse wilderness with ecologically inert urban sprawl, riddled with mazes of oil-dependent highways. Examples like these are commonplace, and one could easily fill an entire chapter with just such horror stories. However many examples you come across, one thing connects them all: they are each the result of an outmoded economic paradigm in which ecological systems are assigned zero monetary value. In the ‘natural capital’ model,⁶ the world's economy is located within the larger economy of natural resources and ecosystem services that sustain all life, including us. This indicates that we should attribute value to things such as hydrocarbons, minerals, trees and microscopic fungi, in addition to human resources, skills, buildings and energy.

We clear carbon-absorptive forests to grow methane-producing meat.

Pressure on resources

Many practitioners claim that our destructive and unsustainable harvesting of this planet's limited reserve of natural resources is due to an escalating human population, founded on the simple premise that more people – essentially – need more materials to support their existence. This is not actually the case: ‘over the last 50 years the world's population has increased by over 50 per cent; but our resource utilization has increased by more than 1,000 per cent for the same period’.⁷ These statistics demonstrate that increased population is not so directly coupled with increased resource consumption, as is often assumed. It would be more accurate to say that, although an increase in human population will bring an obvious increase in resource consumption, the mess we are in today is more likely to be a result of unsustainable developments in the way we design, manufacture and consume objects in the modern world. It is therefore short-sighted to blame the demise of natural resources simply on a rise in population, when it is so evidently not the case.

Pressure and competition for space upon the Earth is in constant flux; an ebb and flow of populations – animal, vegetable and mineral – wash in and out of space the moment an opportunity arises. The rules of spatial pressure operate in this way by placing uneven pressure on the immediate environment, which forces vast tides of biomass to surge and boil in reaction to disharmony. As discussed earlier in Gaia, this eternal struggle has always been in progress and always will be – this is the way of the natural world. French librarian and writer Georges Bataille, when speaking of such pressure, states that any life form will always expand in number, or size, to fill the space that it has, and only when critical mass has been reached will growth level off. He illustrates this theory with the microorganism duckweed: ‘It has a drive to cover any pond with a green film, after which it remains in equilibrium.’⁸ The only change likely to occur will happen when an outside factor affects the equation, such as a tree falling into the pond or heavy rainfall that doubles its surface area. Life is opportunist and may proliferate under the most obscure circumstances; in the words of Bataille, ‘life occupies all the available space’.⁹

Life is opportunist, pushing out into available space.

Never static, ecological systems are flux-spaces that adapt and morph in response to shifts in environmental condition. They strive toward stasis – a state of stability in which all forces are equal and opposing, and therefore they cancel each other out. For example, when atmospheric levels of CO₂ rise in a particular region, vegetation grows more quickly; yet as this vegetation thrives, it absorbs more CO₂ and, consequently, atmospheric levels of this trace gas fall. These cybernetic processes, consisting of sensory, comparative and activating components, are central to understanding the way dynamic systems establish, automate and change over time. In seeing ourselves as beyond this ‘ecological consciousness’, we have broken partnership with the biosphere, developing alien practices, processes, materials and lifestyles that far exceed the Earth's regenerative capacities.

We have severed partnership with the ecological systems that support all life.

Owing to the broad range of extreme conditions that can be found on this small planet, most humans do not actually occupy all available space. Vast expanses of the globe are currently uninhabited due to inhospitable conditions, such as the altitudinal excesses found in the upper Himalayan regions of Nepal or, perhaps, the geological instability of the sulphurous lava plains of the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland. However, even in places that are considered to be so inhospitable, there are usually a few well-dressed scientific researchers to be found. For example, Vostok, Antarctica, is the home of some of the coldest temperatures recorded on Earth, sometimes reaching a bitter −89° Celsius (C); there is an inhabited Russian research base there, where it is reported that the temperature regularly dips below −60°C.

Human population currently stands at 6.13 billion persons and is growing at 1.33 per cent per year, or an annual net addition of 78 million people. It is further projected that world population will reach 9 billion in 2050:

According to US Census Bureau estimates, [w]orld population hit the 6 billion mark in June 1999. This figure is over 3.5 times the size of the Earth's population at the beginning of the 20th century and roughly double its size in 1960. The time required for global population to grow from 5 to 6 billion – 12 years – was shorter than the interval between any of the previous billions.¹⁰

A tremendous change occurred with the Industrial Revolution:

Whereas it had taken all of human history until around 1800 for world population to reach one billion, the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in less than 30 years (1959), the fourth billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years (1987).¹¹

These statistics demonstrate that human population is not only growing but also gathering considerable speed along the way. In a study that Rem Koolhaas – hailed by many as one of the most influential architects of our time – conducted with students at Harvard University, it was discovered that the city of Shenzhen near Hong Kong is growing at a rate of 2 square kilometres per year: at ‘this pace an architect can afford only two days to design an entire skyscraper’.¹² Population growth alone is not a problem for planet Earth; there are vast expanses of uninhabited land that excess population could spread to. However, the growth of a species whose presence has negative impacts on all other life must be seen as a potential ecological crisis. Excess pressure on resources is one of the lamentable side effects of overpopulation.

Population growth alone is not the problem.

We lead a resource-hungry existence, taking out a great deal more from the Earth than we put back:

Even bearing in mind a very loose definition of development, the anthropocentric bias of the statement springs to mind; it is not the preservation of nature's dignity which is on the international agenda, but to extend human-centred utilitarianism to posterity.¹³

Resources – as we like to call matter for which we have a commercial use – are being transformed at a speed far beyond the natural self-renewing rate of the biosphere. Consequently, reserves of useful matter are running low, and many will soon have vanished or, more likely, become so scarce that it is no longer cost-effective to extract them from the earth. ‘The human race was fortunate enough to inherit a 3.8 billion-year-old reserve of natural capital.’¹⁴ At present rates of consumption, it is predicted as unlikely that there will be much of it left by the end of this century. ‘Since the mid 18th century, more of nature has been destroyed than in all prior history.’¹⁵ During the past 50 years alone...