Hasta La Ideas

A few years ago, I became slightly obsessed with embodied energy, which led to a new perspective on both materials and design, in the form of a self-initiated experiment and ultimately a design tool. I wanted to share some of my thoughts from this process to try and pass on a passion for embodied energy.

The whole process started by reading David Mackay’s book “Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air.” His “we need numbers not adjectives” attitude really appealed to me at the time, as I was getting very frustrated with some of the subjectivity and lack of depth in some sustainable design. It was with this mindset that I went searching for embodied energy data. The first time I trawled through a data set, I was pretty intrigued. This was a single number that summarized the intensely complicated journey of a material from digging its ore out of the ground through to the myriad of processes that lead to a usable material. The numbers also varied hugely between materials, revealing energy stories that I was completely unaware of. In a fairly short span of time, this data had completely changed my perspective on a lot of materials that I previously thought I was very familiar with.

What really caught my imagination was the fact that this was physical data. Unlike electricity consumption, where you need to go to great lengths to record and visualize energy, this data told you that the lump of material you’re holding took 10 megajoules of energy to go from earthbound ore to product in hand. I could now define my whole material world in terms of energy—and that’s exactly what I started doing, carrying a screwdriver and a set of scales I started disassembling and weighing products to try and calculate their embodied energy. This quickly escalated to doing an embodied energy calculation for everything I owned.

These calculations were very rough, but gave me an approximate figure for everything, allowing me to compare different elements of my lifestyle. Computers and camera gear, with their exotic circuitboard materials and batteries, far outweighed everything else, while other things, like my bikes, seemed pretty insignificant. This showed me that crunching the numbers, however crudely, will reveal all sorts of insights into the energy stories of our stuff.

At this point, I had gathered a lot of data and started to see the world in a slightly different light but what I was really interested in was how this data would affect the design process. There were various tools for conducting life cycle analysis on finished designs but I wanted to experiment with ways of using embodied energy to drive the design process from the start. I set myself a simple design brief with ambitious energy quotas. To redesign the Anglepoise lamp (which had weighed in at 140 Megajoules) to quotas of one, ten and 20 Megajoules. The idea was to put energy as the driving force at the start of the design process and see what happens.

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Koppillil Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space and Research Organization, holding a model of the Mars orbiter. Altaf Qadri/AP

By Martyn Perks

As contrary as it sounds, in 2014 designers should be more ambitious and less worried about being socially responsible. That way, we will all get to benefit more from their efforts.

Take the reaction to how India launched its probe to Mars in November. No sooner had the Mangalyaan taken off than critics slammed the project for being a huge waste of money, given that much of the Indian population live in abject poverty.

But to criticise the Indian space program is wrong for two reasons. First, it will help bring about many technological benefits that will help improve the lives of millions including the poor. Thanks to India’s ongoing investment in space and weather satellite technology, many thousands of lives were recently saved from a coastal cyclone in October due to early warnings.

The second reason is that, as Samanth Subramanian, the India correspondent for The National, writes in The New Yorker, the project will give many people in India an all-important “spurt of optimism and confidence that can urge people, even for a brief moment, to lift their eyes upward and aim a little higher.”

Such cause for optimism is sorely lacking here in the West, perhaps made worse as China, like India, is beginning to excel in space. China’s Jade Rabbit rover is the first to land on the moon in over 40 years.

There will be much to learn from India and China’s space programmes. The scientific and technological breakthroughs will help bring about many innovations, just as the Kennedy space programme did in the 1960s and 1970s.

All of this should be cause for designers to celebrate. But not so, according to what is now majority opinion in the design community, which holds that design needs to exhibit more humility and less environmental hubris.

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Calvin Chu pitches Palette at the HAXLR8R Demo Day in San Francisco. All event images by the author for Core77.

If you were to take apart the hardware on your computer, you’d see a microcosm of the world. A simple look at a laptop computer on SourceMap, the popular software for sourcing the materials and components of just about any object and where those pieces come form, reveals an incredibly complex trade route: Unlike software, which can be hacked together regardless of location, hardware requires a lot of moving parts, from raw materials to manufacturing to assembly. It’s a process that criss-crosses the globe until the final product arrives in our hands, ready to use.

Shenzhen is a key focus of HAXLR8R, which bills itself as “a new kind of accelerator program.” Accepting applications twice a year from hardware startups around the world, it provides seed funding of $25,000 (with opportunities to increase that amount through additional funding paths), office space and regular mentorship on a variety of topics, from building products to pitching them. Most importantly, it offers an opportunity to live and work in Shenzhen, interacting directly with manufacturers who have the ability to take the product to scale.

“JDFI also applies to us,” notes the accelerator program’s website, as they list out the services and equipment they provide, including a laser cutter, 3D printer, CNC machine and in-house services like product design and small batch assembly and testing, not to mention the basic tools of business. HAXLR8R is very much a project about doing and making at the highest levels.  And as I explored in my recent column, this intermixing of disciplines and processes undoubtedly makes for better designs.

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A screenshot of the Interaction Design Foundation site

A solid design education is an excellent investment, but as more and more educational institutions move toward offering open courses online, free classes in design remain limited. A quick search on Coursera for graphic design yields zero results, as do results for industrial design, product design and a search for “color theory” yields a class on programming from the University of Colorado (though they do offer this class on film that relates to color and sound). Of the 68 offerings on the popular edX.org, only a few classes relate to design, and they’re focused on architecture. A quick Google search led me to this MOOC from the University of Cincinnati, and MOOC List has a good number of entries, but those remain paltry compared to, say, computer science.

Which is why I was thrilled to learn about a new series of free design books available online from the Denmark-based Interaction Design Foundation. Starting with their popular Encylopedia of Human-Computer Interaction and two other books—Social Design of Technical Systems and Gamification at Work—they plan to release dozens of textbooks on topics like persuasive technology, human-centered design and design anthropology.

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Guest article by Stephany Zoo

E-commerce site Fab.com is making waves in China after Shenzhen-based web giant Tencent recently decided to invest $150 million at a $1 billion valuation. Fab stands apart from other Western e-tail giants like Amazon and eBay, promising the online consumer a sensible selection of tasteful—yet edgy—products for everyday use. It’s a major success in the US, with impressive numbers behind their growth since they (re)launched just two years ago. Given the recent attractiveness of online retail in China, Fab hopes to expand into the Chinese market with Tencent’s support.

However, Tencent’s investment is not necessarily a stamp of success either—as previously shown by Groupon’s failed entry into the Chinese market. How will Fab fare among the existing lean, mean, e-commerce machines of China, led by the most cutthroat of home-grown entrepreneurs?

Taobao reigns supreme

While Fab has seen success in the US, they have pivoted far from its previous incarnation as a gay social network, and even further from the niche ecommerce startup they were originally. By now, they’ve staked a claim to be a curated version of Amazon—much more mass market, with pricepoints accessible to anyone. However, this already exists in China: based on the company’s price range and item selection, the majority of similar products are already available as comparable quality copycat items on Taobao, with entire stores dedicated to emulating Fab. No one can compete with Taobao prices. Fab sells everyday design at what is considered “affordable” prices for US consumers but bear what Chinese consumers would consider to be a substantial premium markup. Fab’s brands will run into the counterfeiting problem already all too familiar for luxury brands but will suffer at an even greater expense. Unlike luxury brands, they don’t benefit from the distinguished status or quality assurance that comes with the big couture names that brand-conscious Chinese consumer are looking for.

Does Fab care about Chinese emerging brands, or just sales in China?

About half a year ago, Fab.com launched a similar marketing campaign in India, partnering with the country’s largest media firm, Times Internet. With huge populations and developing e-commerce markets as common denominators, both India and China make obvious targets for the company’s strategic expansion. However, this calls to question Fab’s interest in Chinese design in particular. Can Fab.com really, truly serve the Chinese designer? Is the company dedicated to creating and honoring the voice of Chinese innovators or promoting Chinese creativity? Or is Fab just a corporate machine focused solely on amassing the world’s most lucrative consumer base?

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