Hasta La Ideas

In design school these days, we’ve gone so far around the ‘sustainability’ bend that it seems like the word might have lost meaning all together. That’s why whenever we see a unique take on the cradle-to-cradle conversation; it’s a breath of fresh air. The most recent addition to the canon of sustainable design comes from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design’s Hannah Dow, in her senior BFA thesis project cleverly entitled, Temp Tools.

I created Temp Tools aiming to stir up the conversation about the complete life cycle of objects; Thinking about where our items go once they leave our house in a garbage bag. I hope that with Temp Tools, I can get people thinking about other things they own that could be designed in a similar way as the tools, with sustainability in mind.

Hannah has been developing the tool line, consisting of a skewer to roast marshmallows or hotdogs, a spatula, and a shovel for nearly 8 months. Each tool in the line can be fitted to a stick to be used as a makeshift handle and will fully degrade in nature leaving only flower seeds in its wake. While sustainable design will never embrace the ‘hey, just toss it out’ mentality, maybe we can still do a little guilt-free littering with our Temp Tools.

We asked Hannah to share with us some insights into both the material exploration and product development leading to Temp Tools:

Core77: How did you develop a composite material strong enough to create a durable ‘temp tool’?

Hannah Dow: The material the tools are made of is what comprised my first four months of the project. After trying to find a man-made, biodegradable, strong material that I could purchase and coming up empty-handed, I realized I needed to do my best at making whatever it was that I wasn’t getting elsewhere. The composite material is completely natural and biodegradable after use and strong and rigid during its role as a tool. If put into production the tools would be made using a 3-4 part mold seeing that the material is a kind of liquid wood mixture.

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This is the fourth article in a series examining the potential of resilient design to improve the way the world works. Join designers, brand strategists, architects, futurists, experts and entrepreneurs at Compostmodern13 to delve more deeply into strategies of sustainablity and design.

The Causes of Social Challenges are Invisible

Complex social challenges originate in a society’s fundamental truths. What does this mean for social change?

It is really a thought that built this portentous war-establishment, and a thought shall also melt it away. —Emerson, “War,” 1909

I’m a partner at Reos Partners, which helps government, business and civil society leaders work on some the planet’s toughest social challenges: war and peace, the future of countries, food and energy systems, and other problems. Our work is to help leaders see their challenge as a complex system, then plan and act together to change their system.

At the heart of our approach, we identify root causes of systemic challenges. Interventions are then designed to address those causes. Some of the causes we discern are the things you might guess—laws, policies, rules, bureaucracies, war machines—but others are less obvious, even invisible. They are “the master-idea[s] reigning in the minds of many persons (Emerson)”—the mindsets or paradigms that shape the rules, laws and bureaucracies.

Working on collective prosperity in Colombia, we hit cultural barriers dividing rich from poor. In Vancouver, we saw fear and discomfort shaping the policies that impact people with disabilities and their families. In Oakland, we learned that confederate slavery is still causing violence, 150 years later. In South Africa, we see the echoes of Apartheid in ongoing police brutality and, more intimately, in the faces of our co-workers and friends.

Systems and their challenges arise from paradigms. That’s where they originate and that is where their causes live.

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This is the first article in a series examining the potential of resilient design to improve the way the world works. Join designers, brand strategists, architects, futurists, experts and entrepreneurs at Compostmodern13 to delve more deeply into strategies of sustainablity and design.

When I began my journey to understand global overfishing, I knew that it was a sprawling and complex tangle of intertwining problems touching the spheres of policy, commerce, environment and livelihood. Now, almost five years in, I see its complexity through the stories of people I’ve met who live in that tangle: The New England fisherman whose house was firebombed when he dared to embrace policy reform. The shark researcher who once used a tag he’d put on a shark’s fin to record its migration pattern to then hunt the poacher who finned the shark and kept the device as a souvenir. The old Chinese fish farmer who, in a trick to trump Pavlov, proudly rang a bell to bring hundreds of tilapia called by its vibration to the surface of a pond to feed.

Each of the players in this system has an incredibly personal stake in how we humans choose to rethink the way we hunt, eat and protect fish. Given that 1 billion people in the world rely on fish as their primary protein, and that 85 percent of the world’s fisheries are currently harvested at or beyond their limits, the cost of failing is unthinkable.

When we were first asked by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation to uncover new market-driven solutions to encouraging responsible fish harvesting, we did not set out to find one solution for all players. But because we intended to design for a system, we couldn’t look for solutions for just one player or user. We had to find openings—stuck points—that once resolved, might prove the giving knot to unwind the tangle. We had to figure out how to design for many.

At every stage of our work—through four distinct project teams, three sponsoring organizations and multiple iterations—we made some right calls and some mistakes. Here’s a brief look at some of the insights we gleaned along that path.

Who’s the user?

Our process included two components: 1) pattern recognition to identify which problems in the system received ample attention from existing strategies and which were unaddressed, and 2) a “design thinking” process that included sending teams of anthropologists into the field to observe.

The first phase of that process identified the middle of the seafood supply chain as a ripe area to explore; most solutions targeted fishermen or retailers at either end of the supply chain, leaving processors and distributors out of the conversation. The next phase was initially puzzling. Given a target as broad as the middle of a global supply chain, what should we observe? Who was our user? What did we need to see to guide our design? We thrashed about for a bit and sought guidance from some of the most experienced practitioners in the design world. They counseled our team to, “go with your gut.”

Since I have the gut of a trained journalist, my instincts told me to go where the conflict was. I offered to my co-lead in the project that the front line of our problem seemed to be transactions—whenever fish traded hands. What did those conversations and negotiations look like? What unspoken context shaped those outcomes? We ultimately dispatched teams of anthropologists to eight sites in four countries, looking for examples of distributors and processors buying and selling fish?

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There are people who want to own a truck, and people who need to own a truck. I’m of the opinion that you can get rid of the former, but not the latter; while American truck sales are slowing down for the first time in years, either due to the high cost of gas or the stigma of owning an environmentally-unfriendly vehicle, my theory is that the wannabes are simply being weeded out while the need-to-bes are standing firm. If you work in one of the trades, or feed your family by doing something that requires you have a strong back, chances are you need a truck. The green movement is not going to sway you and you just curse more at the gas pump.

Since the trades aren’t going away (God willing), how can we resolve environmental responsibility with the need to drive big-ass vehicles? One promising answer comes from Via Motors, a sort of automotive co-developer that takes Detroit’s existing machines and renders them, through technical wizardry, electrified.

Because Via modifies existing trucks, that means you can get the big-ass Silverado with the Crew Cab, or a GMC Suburban if you need to haul enclosed loads, or a GMC cargo van if you need to abduct shrill environmentalists, and still clock about 100 miles per gallon. Via vehicles will go for 40 miles before the gas engine even kicks in, making it the perfect local runabout; should you need to travel further distances, the gas engine will carry you another 300 miles before you need to tank up.

As for power, Via’s Vtrux (the hacked Silverado) produces 402 horsepower, so you can throw both Little Sal and Big Sal in the crew cab while still hauling a half-ton in the bed. But here’s the real killer app: For those working in remote locations without electricity–you’ve undoubtedly seen utility trucks hauling those wheeled generators behind them–the vehicle doubles as a generator. That means you can leave the gennie in the garage and plug your power tools directly into the truck. You can also, in a blackout, use the vehicle to power your house.

The only thing that will prevent individuals from jumping on the Via bandwagon right away is the asking price, which is estimated to start at 79 large. You can make that up in fuel savings over time, depending on how much you drive, but that’s a big nut for a lone tradesperson to cover. I’m hoping Via sets up a financing branch with attractive rates, at least until their manufacturing costs come down enough for the regular Joe to buy in.

In the meantime they’re targeting the people who can cover the nut and will realize the long-term savings: Fleet owners.

Via is currently taking pre-orders for $1,000 a pop. Deliveries are estimated for mid-2013.

Here’s a look at their vehicles (and a test drive) taken by Jay Leno and featuring Via CEO Bob Lutz, of GM and Chrysler fame:

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Garth Johnson runs the irreverent ExtremeCraft website, “A compendium of Art masquerading as Craft, Craft masquerading as Art & Craft extending its middle finger.” He’s also the author of 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse: Remake, Restyle, Recycle, Renew. And in his TED Talk entitled “Recycling Sucks! The History of Creative Reuse” Garth points out that recycling is the last of the three R’s (the first two being “reduce” and “reuse,” of course) and ought be done as a last resort only.

To be clear, Garth’s not anti-recycling, but we’ve all seen just how resource-intensive and inefficient recycling can be, in no small part due to human behavior (an unwillingness to pre-separate recycleables, for instance). Despite the sensationalist title, the point of Garth’s talk is to show examples of creative reuse throughout world history, going way back to the Romans and coming up to present day.

This is one of your longer TED Talks at nearly 20 minutes, but it’s worth sticking with; you’re bound to get a chuckle out of some of the re-carved statues in his slideshow, and I guarantee you’ll learn a thing or two.

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