A Jonathan Chapman, a senior
lecturer from the University of Brighton, UK, is one of a new breed of
"sustainable designers". Like many of us, they are concerned about the huge
waste associated with our consumer culture, and the damage this does to the
environment. They also stress the urgent need to reconsider how we apportion the
Earth's limited resources among a growing human population. What sets them
apart, however, is their belief that we can design our way out of our profligate
ways. Some, like Chapman, aim to design objects we will want to keep rather than
discard. Others are working to create more efficient or durable consumer goods,
or goods designed with recycling in mind. Their shared goal is nothing less than
to redesign society to help us ditch our throwaway culture.
B The consequences of our fickle ways can be found in landfills
everywhere. Americans use and throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles an hour.
The British produce enough garbage to fill the Albert Hall every 2 hours.
According to the authors of "Natural Capitalism", Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and
Hunter Lovins, only one per cent of all materials flowing through the US economy
end up in products still being used six months after manufacture. The waste
entailed in our fleeting affairs with consumer durables is colossal.
C Take the average domestic power tool. However much DIY we plan on
doing, the truth is we throw these away after using them, on average, for just
10 minutes. Most will serve "conscience time", gathering dust on a shelf in the
garage. We use them for a very short time and keep them to justify buying them,
but the end is inevitable: thousands of years mouldering underground. A power
tool consumes many times its own weight of resources in its design, manufacture,
packaging, transportation and disposal, all for a shorter active lifespan than
that of the adult mayfly. D For most of human history we
had an intimate relationship with the objects we used or treasured. Often we
made them ourselves, or family members passed them on to us. For more specialist
objects, we relied on expert manufacturers living close by, whom we would know
personally. All this gave objects a history—a "narrative"—and an emotional
connection that today's mass-produced goods cannot possibly match. "No wonder we
are dissatisfied," says Chapman. E Without these personal
connections, consumerist culture instead idolizes novelty. We know we can't buy
happiness, but the chance to remake ourselves with glossy, box-fresh products
seems irresistible. When the novelty fades we simply renew the excitement by
buying more new stuff: what John Thackara of Doors of Perception, a network for
sharing ideas about the future of design, calls the "schlock of the new". "As a
sustainable designer, I was growing frustrated with the wasteful superficiality
of design, in its nurturing of endless cycles of desire and disappointment with
consumers," Chapman says. His solution is what he calls "emotionally durable
design", creating things we want to keep. F That may
sound like a tall order, but it can be surprisingly straightforward. Think about
your favourite old jeans. They just don't have the right feel until they have
been worn and washed a hundred times, do they? It is like they are sharing your
life story. You can fake that look, but it isn't the same. G
Chapman says that the gradual unfolding of a relationship like this transforms
our interactions with objects into something richer than simple utility. Swiss
industrial analyst Walter Stahel, visiting professor at the University of
Surrey, UK, calls it the "teddy bear factor". No matter how ragged and worn a
favourite teddy becomes, we don't rush out and buy another one. As adults, our
teddy bear connects us to our childhoods, and this protects it from
obsolescence. Stahel argues that this is what sustainable design needs to do
with more products. H It is not simply about making durable
items that people will want to keep, though. Sustainable design is also a matter
of properly costing the whole process of production, energy use and disposal.
"People who are into sustainable design don't see themselves simply as product
designers any more," says Tim Cooper, from the Centre for Sustainable
Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. "They are interested in
the design of systems, the design of culture." He thinks sustainable design has
been "surprisingly slow to take off", but says looming environmental crisis and
resource depletion are now pushing it to the top of the agenda. Last year, a new
product was launched every 3.5 minutes. Given that 80 per cent of the
environmental impact of a product, service or system is determined at the design
stage, Cooper believes sustainable design deserves far more attention than it
has received. I Thackara agrees. For him, the roots of
impending environmental collapse can be summarized in two words: weight and
speed. We are making more stuff than the planet can sustain and using vast
amounts of energy moving more and more of it around ever faster. "Our natural,
human and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt,"
Thackara writes. "Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these
flows have not been able to keep up." J On the day you
read this the same volume of trade will take place as occurred in the whole of
1949. We now make as many phone calls in a day as were made in the whole of
1983. The information age was supposed to lighten our economies and reduce our
impact on the environment, but in fact the reverse seems to be happening. We
have simply added information technology to the industrial era and speeded up
the developed world's metabolism, Thackara argues. K Once you
grasp that, the cure is hardly rocket science: minimize waste and energy use,
stop moving stuff around so much and use people more. Achieving this is not so
easy, however. Growing numbers of people may be choosing to opt out by
downsizing or embracing the ideology of the "slow movement", which seeks to
reverse the frenetic pace of living, but a return to pre-industrial ways will
never be a global solution. "We cannot stop tech," Thackara says, "and there's
no reason why we should. It's useful. But we need to change the innovation
agenda in such a way that people come before tech." Questions
28-33 Look at statements 28-33 and the list of
people. Match each statement with the correct person.
Write your answers in boxes 28-33 on your answer sheet.
N.B. You may use any person more than once. Chapman
Hawken, A. Lovins and H. Lovins Thackara
Cooper Stahel
填空题
The importance of sustainable design should be much more widely recognized.
填空题
Design should encourage the kind of relationship with possessions that children have with their toys.
填空题
Most of the materials used in production in the US become waste within half a year.
填空题
Electronic communications have not had the predicted beneficial effect on the environment.
填空题
Globally there is overproduction, and too much produce is travelling too quickly.
填空题
People nowadays are bound to feel that possessions lack personal significance to them.