Last night I participated in the first of a 4 session meetup through AIGA to discuss the role of the designer in sustainability. The discussion was based around a serious of videos from the 2009 Compostmodern Workshop in San Francisco and the focus of last night’s discussion was scale.
To start off the evening we watched the famous Ray and Charles Eames film,The Powers of Ten (click to watch). If you haven’t seen the short film, it is “a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero”. The film takes you from the comfortable spot on a picnic blanket in Chicago out in intervals of ten to 100 million light years into the darkness of space and back down to 0.000001 angstroms into the tiny nucleus of the atom. While the film may look like a science video at first, makes you very aware of the important issue of scale. When you look at just the one man and woman on the picnic blanket in the scale of the entire universe they are practically nonexistent in size but in the scale of the planet, the country, the city, and down to the park and blanket they occupy, they are increasingly more significant. The speaker referred the issue of global warming and how it stems around just one small molecule. The one small molecule is less of a concern on its own but when you add one to the masses, in a scale of a planet that is too small to hold them, then we face the problem of global warming.
With this consideration of scale, the speaker discussed the need to look beyond what we already know. He quoted Eames:
“In order to be truly secure, we need to be truly secure in change”
One example that was mentioned in the second video, by Allan Chochinov, was of Chris Jordan, who captures the reality and scale of American mass consumption in his photography. Jordan describes the scale of our consumption as invisible because it is divided out across tens of thousands of manufacturing processes and waste streams. To us, we only know the handful of phones that we go through individually , but beyond what we know are millions of other cell phone users who go through an equal or greater number of phones. I found the video above on youtube which talks about several of Jorden’s photographs. One photo in particular has been digitally stitched to show the number of phones that are “retired” in one day; all 426,000 of them!!!
“Designers think they are in the artifact business,
but they are in the consequence business” —Philip Johnson
Be sure to check back next friday with highlights from our next Compostmodern Convergence meet up. Until then, happy Friday and enjoy your holiday weekend!
—EJ
www.orange-element.com
@orange_element
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