Direct Action

Designing for a Sustainable Future

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

An Australian industrial designer, Paul Charlwood, has decided that disposable design is a waste. We’ve talked about consumerism here before and how it has a negative effect on the environment, but Charlwood wants to change our mind on that matter by encouraging consumerism to be something that can last.

Once Charlwood turned his mind to sustainability it meant reassessing his design philosophies. He decided he no longer wanted to design throwaway products, which led to him embracing “classic design” – products that you don’t need to, or want to, discard.

Charlwood’s conversion to environmentalism has coincided with what he sees as a “second wave” of environmentalism.

A Good Yarn for the Environment

- Adam Clare

No, this isn’t a long rambiling post kind of yarn, as the OED says that yarn can mean “a long or rambling story, esp. one that is implausible.” I mean yarn as in “a spun thread used for knitting, weaving, or sewing.”

Yes, that’s right, today’s Blog Action Day post is about yarn and how people who are into spinning thread can help the environement too.

The Hook and I blog has a list of ten things that yarn enthusiasts can do, here’s number nine:

9) Use your stash. Not buying new materials is probably the best way to reduce our environmental impact. It’s hard for me to say this–I love yarn companies and the people involved, many of them have strong environmental missions themselves, but it can’t be avoided that lack of consumption is better than consumption when it comes to the environment.

Consumers Can Make a Difference

- Adam Clare

Continuing this week’s focus on the successful Blog Action Day is an editorial from LifeHack. Dustin Wax waxes ecstatic about how the best solution for the environment is for us to buy less, just stop consuming. I agree with his conclusion, but how he gets there is not something I will blindly support. It’s a good read though and I encourage to go read it (and also to buy less).

For most of us, simply dropping out, growing our own food and living off our own labor, is not an option and is hardly desirable even if it were an option. The answer to the dreadful over-consumption that fills our landfills with completely unnecessary crap, pollutes our water sources, kills off species after species (something like 40 a day!), and leaves us in a world of ever-diminishing beauty and diversity can’t be to drop out of consumption entirely, because it’s simply not an option.

But we can change the way we consume, and more importantly lessen the demands we place on consumption to complete us as individuals. This means developing a higher sense of self-reflexivity about what we do buy, and replacing our identities as consumers with identities as part of our families and communities — and maybe even as producers, once again.

The Butterfly Effect and the Environment

- Adam Clare

Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day
There were some really neat posts made around the net about the environment thanks to Blog Action Day yesterday, and so for the rest of the week I’d llike to post at least one Blog Action Day post per day.

The first one is written by Brian Clark at Copy Blogger, he argues that the butterfly effect can save the environment: a lot of people doing small local things can literally make a world of difference.

The corollary of the Butterfly Effect is that tiny changes you make do in fact make a difference. And when those tiny changes are aggregated among millions of people, we can truly make a real difference in how much nature we save for our children, grandchildren, and beyond.

We might even be saving them.

It doesn’t need to be a sacrifice. Why not make changes that simply save you money?

Indeed, Brian provides a list of money-saving things that you can do to help save the planet.

Designers Can Help the Environment Too!

- Adam Clare

Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day There’s a great list of 101 things a designer can do to save the Earth, and it seems appropriate to blog even more about the environment on Blog Action Day.

Here’s a sampling from the list:

85. REPLACE THE CARPET WITH INTERFACEFLOR
70. TELL YOUR PRINTER ABOUT PNEAC
19. SPEC CORN-DERIVATIVE SHOPPING BAGS INSTEAD OF PLASTIC

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