Recent events around the world expose the heightened uncertainties of a growing demand for materials that are both precious and in limited supply.
With China exporting as much as 96 percent of the world’s supply of rare earth metals, the country’s drastic reduction in exports sent ripples around the world. Simultaneously, governments such as the United States continue to subsidize biomass for energy, causing domestic shortages and the need to import biomass from other countries.
These trends are particularly disconcerting when viewed in the context of increased use of incineration to create fuel. The practice of incinerating waste for energy, though efficient in the short term, exacerbates the issue of materials shortages. When burning waste for fuel, many valuable and recoverable materials are lost through the smokestack that could otherwise be re-used within new product life cycles.
As governments respond to these materials shortages and imbalances by promoting conventional materials supply strategies such as increased domestic drilling, stockpiling and diversification of supply sources, there is an urgent need to call into question the basic assumption of nature’s limitless supply and to deliver innovative approaches to materials management.
In this conversation with Maren Maier of Catalyst Design Review and Allan Chochinov, Editor-in-Chief of Core77.com, Dr. Michael Braungart, along with the EPEA research team encourages designers to more fully understand material flows and learn how to capture material assets at every part of the life cycle. Design can pioneer the next revolution in business, but it will need to reframe old assumptions and shape desire to the contours of a real and living world.
How can designers shape desire for a new materiality based on the real limits of our real world?
Dr. Braungart: Well, first, the business community does not have enough respect for designers. They are currently at the bottom of the management food chain. Marketing tells them what to do. That doesn’t make any sense.
Designers hold a key to the future, but designers need to understand their role differently and learn to have more self-esteem, ambition and responsibility. For example, why are designers designing desire for toys made of materials that contain dozens of chemicals? Why are designers designing desire for electronics that use our increasingly limited supply of rare minerals?
The role of design does seem to be shifting in business though. There is a perception here in the United States that designers have more of a seat at the table now and are being recognized for their strategic abilities. What is your feeling about this? How do relationships between designers, scientists, business managers and even regulators need to be redefined?
We are beginning to understand that everybody is a designer, because design is the first signal of human intention. The question is: What is the role of the design professional and what are the responsibilities of that role? I believe that design needs to intend, at the beginning, to be good instead of less bad. If design does not do that, we will need more and more legislation just to limit the amount of poison we put in the air or in the water. But legislation is really a sign of design failure.
Designers must consider the consequences of their choice of materials. This is not complex. As scientists, we can alert them to the consequences. We can tell them what happens when certain materials go into the environment. I see myself as the ‘material boy,’ as Madonna would say, for designers. They simply need to say, “I want to use that material, what is the consequence of that?”
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