PROJECT 3, PEER COMMENTS

Nielsen, Chelcie
Taouk, Danielle
Chow, Julian
Darmawan, Stanley
El Khouri, Valerie

Upcycling Unwanteds

Materials used for this product:
plastic bags
Cardboard
Leather belts
Cloth
One biscuit can


Did you know?
The plastic bag is an accepted part of Australia’s shopping culture, but it shouldn’t be. Each year we use 3.92 billion new plastic shopping bags, many of which remain in the environment.

_ The average Australian household uses 502 plastic shopping bags every year.
_ Australians dump 7,150 recyclable plastic bags into landfill every minute or 429,000 every hour.
_ It takes 21,540 tonnes of plastic to produce 3.92 billion plastics bags.
_ If 3.92 billion plastic bags were tied together, they would circle the globe 24 times.
_ Plastic shopping bags can be returned to your supermarket for recycling. Currently only approximately 3% of bags are being recycled.

Impact of plastic bags on the environment:
Natural resources
Persistence in the environment
Litter
Clean up costs
Marine life
Landfills
Greenhouse gases

The main purpose of this product is to give a coat to an original biscuit can and make it much more like a vase and can help to slove the problems related to plastic bags.

The weaving part of this vase is totally handmade. It can really add traditional elements to this product and makes this product friendly. The biscuit can inside it is for containing water and when you need to change water, you can take the can off from its ‘cloth’.

Richard Seymour + Dick Powell: Designing dream machines

The video gives me a main idea of how an industrial design company works and the stress of communication makes me to realize the significance of communication.

Not only the communication among our fellow designers is necessary, but also our target market, which means we should always communicate to our fellows to develop our ideas and then communicate our developed ideas to our clients to have a check of whether our ideas can meet the need of our clients or target market to the maximum. Visual communication is also important, we should always combine our hand drawing and computer modeling to better express our ideas.

As an industrial designer, communication can improve our ideas, improve our personal skill, satisfy our target market to the maximum, and attract more clients. I think without communication, our product may like a ‘dead’ thing.

STORY OF STUFF -- ANNIE

Annie Leonard makes some great points about the untenability of running our linear "materials economy" system on our finite planet, and she offers a little hope and a somewhat scattershot sense of direction at the end of her lecture.

The text book says “stuff move through a system: extraction – production – distribution – consumption – disposal.”

Annie spent 10 years travelling the world, tracking where are all the stuff come from and where the go and find what the text book says in not the whole story.

Here are my impressions on each aspect in The Story of Stuff:

EXTRACTION: She mentioned resources are limit to us and we are running out of resources. “Only 4% forest left in the USA, the USA is 5% of global population, but uses 30% of resources.”

PRODUCTION: Annie said “toxic in, toxic out” which means toxic produced in industrial production can result in toxic in home which is quite harmful to our body. Then Annie Leonard raised the freak-out level: We dip our pillows in BFR (brominated flame retardants), a horribly toxic man-made chemical, and we sleep on them! Now, The Story of Stuff said that women in the USA (and Canada, which the video didn’t mention) have the highest amounts of BFAs in their breast milk, compared to other countries.

DISTRIBUTION: A $4.99 radio – how is it so cheap? So many parts and processes to make the radio MUST cost much more than $4.99! What are the true costs of production?

CONSUMPTION: SHOP! We can always keep using 1% of our products and 99% will be trash. More consumer goods leads to less health care, less education, less safe transportation, less sustainability, less justice… People feel like they are in a circle that they always feel the products they currently have are bad and they need to buy some new products after watching so many advertisements on TV, then they go back work, trying to earn more money and go back shopping and watch TV again. I do feel like it is a true phenomenon, I just how silly we are we waste our time and do such a useless thing.

DISPOSAL: We burned some trash or did land fill which lead to the changing of our climate and we had created super toxic at the same time which is dioxin. Recycling is one way to protect the environment, but not enough.

After watching this video, I do realize the relationship between our products and our environment or the relationship between our products and us. In such a rapid developing era, technology is important, pollution is avoidable, but this is not an excuse. We should develop our economy build on how we can do best to protect our environment. Just as what Annie said in her video “people create it, we are people too.” People are smart, but I think we are over smart on this issue, that will be silly. Resources are limited; people’s health is the most important. Without people, money means nothing. Without resources, we will have few materials can be used to produce. If we choose to destroy the relationship between the environment and us and if we always choose to put profit at the first position, do not care people’s health. We must have to face the consequence one day. Everyone has the responsibility.