Cabbage Chair, by Nendo This week, I’m taking part in exciting events all over Copenhagen, as part of the first international Copenhagen Design Week. The new design forum looks like an event to watch in coming years to spot emerging trends and generate new ideas. This year’s ambitious, creative program asks designers, business leaders, systems planners, and consumers, to look at design in terms of sustainability.
What if the cool, desirable things we make and build could also be life-saving, earth-saving, and bio-diversity enriching? Then the phrase, “must-have shoes” (… or bag, phone, chair, car, etc.) might be a profoundly meaningful statement, instead of the fatuous one it now is.
Through dozens of free, open-to-the-public happenings, as well as in-depth seminars and tradeshows targeted to design professionals, Copenhagen Design Week involves the greater community in the discussion. That itself is a ground-breaking approach to talking about design. Put it on the street; make design integrity a topic of discussion among the general public. That, it seems to me, is a vital step towards actualizing sustainable design and business practice.
I’ll be writing about the best design trends I’m seeing at Copenhagen Design Week. In the meantime, here’s a repost that seems right for the moment:
SOFT, NATURAL AND HI-TECH
Throughout human history, luxury has meant expensive, or rare, stuff. But "stuff" has become abundantly, overwhelmingly, common, while things like time, personal space, and true nature, have become rare. In the near future, luxury will be defined less by the stuff we have, and more by the experience we have: personal time, access to pristine nature, purity of environment, health and well-being, and access to information. These are the emerging definitions of luxury.
What's more precious -- the diamond or the cat?
What's desirable about this picture? Is it the clothes or the "landed" lifestyle?
In our late-industrial life we yearn for the natural... perhaps not the actual natural of wilderness (in which we, like other animals, are mostly engaged in basic survival), but the apparent natural of sustainably cultivated nature.
Yearning for natural things is nostalgia for an intact world, when we were just one component striving in an apparently larger, robust, Earth. Or it could be an emotional expression of an actual physiological need – like when you've been eating Cheez Doodles all day, and suddenly a plate of steamed kale seems like the most delicious food possible.
As a designer, if I want to make a meaningfully good contribution at this stage in the human story, I must address the open-ended problem of how to make things that are life-enhancing and pleasing, and which support the integrity of the environment and the well-being of everybody, not just the wealthy.
If, as architect William McDonough has said, a tree is the most perfect design there is – a 'machine' that makes oxygen, eats carbon dioxide, ionizes the air, makes food, supports micro-eco-systems, self-replicates, etc. – the more that man-made designs behave like and resemble trees, the more advanced our technology and the more perfect the design.
A perfect design. Photo: Jen Buley
Another analogy: it is (still) said that the human brain is the most advanced, sophisticated computer that exists. Yet it is soft (inside a hard shell), and integrated into something with myriad, flexible functions (a human). The human brain also has two distinctly different ways of working – one analytical, skeptical and linear (left brain); the other intuitive and sensual (right brain). In their evolution, computers are also becoming soft and flexible, adept in analysis and 'intuition', and integrated into objects with multiple functions.
Is it an infant onesie or a vital signs monitor (and skin moisturizer and transdermal vitamin doser)?
The funny thing is that futurists have traditionally embraced tropes of machined metal: hard forms, smooth-shiny, cold, mechanical, etc, as symbols for hi-tech. But, I think that Philip K. Dick, author of the novel on which the film Blade Runner is based, had a more accurate idea. The most advanced technologies of the future will look and feel totally natural -- and if we get really good as designers and engineers, they will be almost indistinguishable from natural things.
Instead, the technology trends point toward natural, soft, flexible, and biological:
- Technologies and computers becoming so integrated and/or miniscule that they are, for all purposes, “invisible”
- Incorporation of “smart" technologies into previously inert objects (clothing that analyzes body function and self-cleans; walls or roofs that store energy, clean air, regulate temperature, grow food)
- Smart objects that multi-task (consider laptops today, which are typewriter, calculator, world-class library, record player, telephone, television, photo lab, drawing pad, social facilitator, shopping mall, etc, all in one). The days of appliances and objects that do one thing are over. Note that 3D printing also points to the end of manufacturing machines that do only one thing.
- Softness – incorporating flexibility and the ability to morph into different forms for different circumstances (changeable textures, colors and forms, camouflage and metamorphasis)
- Sensing objects that detect changes in their environment and in their user (in terms of health, state, and emotion)
- Natural forms and natural feels
We will be getting somewhere when technology “disappears.” I'm not talking about living like cavemen and cavewomen. I'm talking really hi-tech -- hi-tech that makes our current hi-tech look like the Flintstones.
The most hi-tech things will either be invisible to the naked eye, or will look totally natural. For example, man-made water and air filtration that looks and feels like – and therefore IS -- a grassy field, a forest, a mountain stream.
Mountain stream or grey water waste treatment facility? Photo: Jen Buley
Biomimetics, research that learns from nature, and builds or synthesizes needed man-made things in the images of nature -- in terms of function (photosynthesis, CO2 capture, metamorphosis, camouflage, tissue re-generation, and self-healing), aesthetics (softness, flexibility, color, fragrance, individuality), and total biodegradability -- will be key, if we are to design an equitable future worth living.
(Originally posted in a longer form in November 2008)Check back here soon for the trends in sustainable design from the exciting Copenhagen Design Week program.
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