Cradle-to-cradle design
I’ve blogged about this before but I saw a blog post and had to blog about it again. There’s a book out called Cradle-to-Cradle, surprisingly enough, that talks about the whole design philosophy. Here it is: People are afraid that with the looming energy crisis and global warming, etc., we’ll have to start living in tiny houses and not using cars.
We can design things as big or small as we’d like. We can have our honking big Hummer’s. The key is, we have to design things like nature does, where nothing is wasted and there’s a renewable cycle to reuse everything. Think of it this way — trees don’t grow small to save resources. They grow huge, fall down, decay, and are re-entered into the “product cyle.”
From the authors’ website:
In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart argue that the conflict between industry and the environment is not an indictment of commerce but an outgrowth of purely opportunistic design. The design of products and manufacturing systems growing out of the Industrial Revolution reflected the spirit of the day-and yielded a host of unintended yet tragic consequences.
Today, with our growing knowledge of the living earth, design can reflect a new spirit. In fact, the authors write, when designers employ the intelligence of natural systemsâ€â€the effectiveness of nutrient cycling, the abundance of the sun’s energyâ€â€they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist.
All in all, an interesting, post-industrial take on design.
