Video - The 11th Hour

It can get fairly irritating seeing high end celebrities take up the humanity/environmental baton and running with it so that the world doesn't forget them. We've seen Bono at Live Aid Madonna with her adopted African kids, and the endless list of reformed drug and alcohol addicts with their ambassadorial roles for their resolved conditions. While there are tidal wave of examples some do manage to be quite genuine and I was fairly convinced that Leonardo Di Caprio is one of the few.

I'd be lying to say that the information he supplied was new to me but the facts are both shocking and destructive. The sheer volume of nature that we as just one spieces has eradicated is enough to make you feel uncomfortable in the planet we live in. Forests disappear, rubbish mounts up, biosystems are poisoned, another environment is killed. We don't just tear down our surrounds for population growth anymore, we do it to advance our technologies! We kill animals for mobile phones, we pollute the air to mass produce and then throw it out, back in the landfil. In an inexcusable act of vicious irony we digard 2 year old technologies and sentence the land we raped to hold our garbage. We displace nature that have been living for thousands and millions of years for our greed and in a relatively short time later we apply salt to wound and in return for its sacrifice we hand back our trash that will only destroy it further.

As the narration comments humans have mistaken their natural superiority to mean that the rest of nature is inferior to them whereas it should mean to take care of the nature that surrounds us particually since its supports our very existence. As Di Caprio explains our spieces came a lot later in earth's life, and if its life was 1 year we appeared a mere 60 seconds ago. Which means for all the time nature took to give us what it is today, we've permanently destroyed things here and there all over the globe in just a fraction of a second.

The truths are very real and very severe. The solutions can simple. He suggests natural gas cars, alternative energy resources, and building environmentally friendly buildings, but all this is just talk if no one does anything about it. As designers we can have a major impact on the earth's health if we design responsibly. 11th Hour shows how we are being lead down a dark path and it calls us to be brave and courageous against the ecomonic powers, and the greed of our race to help better it and lead us with nature back into the light and create a sustainable earth. But we have to be quick...the clocks ticking.

Video - Design for Life

What an amazing experience!! To be given the opportunity to work under Philippe Starck. Starck's quirky French personality shone through every episode and it was a rather honourable initiative to create his school of design. I dare say it was a learning experience for all; for me as the viewer, for the students interpretting Starck's briefs and designing in a professional environment and for Starck himself as their teacher and mentor as he faced challenges every time the students presented.

For me it was a learning experience seeing how each of the students presented their ideas and working out how I would have approched the problem, and compared myself the other students. Hearing Starck's critisisms was also quite useful to hear as he challenged them to think not only more professionally but to think deeper into the problem and solution and reinforced the idea that all poducts have a story and which should complement the user and the environment.

His unconventional methods were inspiring and challenge me as a designer in the way I appoach a design problem so achieve a fuller idea and to produce a wholistic solution.

Video - The Story of Cap and Trade

An interesting insight into the problems that are facing our planet. While Copenhagen has already happened, it takes a closer glimpse at how the climate change issue came about and how the same mindsets can't be realistically used for its solution.

As a designs we need to keep these things in mind so that we can design sustainable products that havce a low impact on the environment throughout the product's life. There is an instance in this problem where the job as Industrial Designer seems paradoxial as the logical solution is to create less things when our job is to design new things and hence more things. But our own personal challenge as a designer is to use this as inspiration to design for the planet, to draw the line where we are at now and design products that performs a reliable use, to design a lasting product, design sustainably for the market and the natural environment.

Designers may not be politicans and change laws and the way that business works, but we can introduce better materials and processes that lessen the current reliance on material harvesting and energy use and to create objects that change the way we regard objects.