It feels like a lifetime ago when I would sit late at night pondering the future of design at my keyboard on Mason Street in San Francisco’s Nob Hill. Besides, the wench is dead, I’m tempted to quip. My world changed when I took the deliberate and considered decision to move to the Nordics – Finland in particular – for a host of PESTEL reasons but most importantly because living a sustainable lifestyle with a smaller footprint did not come with a premium pricetag.
I rejoiced two years ago when Helsinki considered its prototype testing of adding plastic waste as an additional bin to our already large well filled sheds of pre-sorted waste bins – metal and glass, cartons and paper, biowaste and general throway – each of these 6 were already de rigeur when the pilot program for plastic was announced for general rollout. Woo hoo! I said and I gleefully fill my separate bag full of umpteen thousand plastic wrappers. Once plastic is removed from the equation my general bin, which includes the organic which I do not separate for various reasons, is never quite full enough when its time to throw out the bag.
I wrote on the roots of this particular decision on this very website – the blog has changed look and feel in the intervening years since August 2007 but I have kept my own name as the domain. I replicate here those questions that kept me awake 16 years ago for they bring home to me my wide angled perspective to see ahead beyond the blue event horizon.
“There’s a sense of something much bigger than just design or a product or material or whatever here. Its almost as though we – the global we of humanity – are poised at an inflection point. Is it a precipice sloping down towards utter disaster as some might argue and there is no point doing anything about it? Or are we instead reaching some a point on a natural trend curve that signals the end of an era – one based on massive growth, consumption and the pinnacle of the industrial revolution? Either way, it leaves me feeling like an ant contemplating the proverbial brickwall.” (Niti Bhan August 2007)
Prescient isn’t the word, given the world we’re in these days.
“While intellectually aware of the problems facing the environment, the issues of poverty and quality of life at the bottom of the pyramid and the link between design and a sustainable future – all topics I’d written extensively about – I’d never been exposed to an entire way of life based on these principles – in a developed country.” (Niti Bhan August 2007)
I was referring to the 3 weeks I’d spent in North Yorkshire not far away from Thirsk, where Herriot lived and worked and wrote All Things Bright and Beautiful. I have the pix to prove it, as we tend to say on the interwebz. I knew I couldn’t move to the UK, but I also knew then and there that I must leave San Francisco. Less than a month after I wrote this I flew to Finland for the very first time on a mission. There, I was to learn about the systems-centric Finnish design sensibilities that I was able to pick up from immersion in Helsinki for less than 3 full days. I wrote on that for the Cox Europe Mission blog but it may be lost in the ethers now. However, I am reminded of those few short hours by the very next sentence I presciently wrote right after the snippet above.
“That fact was crucial in opening my eyes to the extent that the design of systems play a part in the challenges facing the earth’s future.” (Niti Bhan August 2007)
It was on 13th September 2007, on what I now know to be Hameentie, sitting in a taxivan with the group, that I suddenly felt a strong sensation that I would one day be living in Helsinki. I remember telling my colleagues about that sudden sense of knowing I would return to Finland and I would be in Helsinki again and it would be to stay. That is, the vision was that of a feeling of belongingness with Helsinki. How long, I could not tell. That has been communicated to me by time. I am Finndian now and very much a part of the system that captured my imagination. Let me go and drop this piece of plastic in the right container now. The system will ensure that far less of it will reach the ocean.
Back to the point of the clickbait title you’ve been grumbling about as I circumlocute loquaciously in a manner I haven’t until the recent floodgates of tens of thousands of words opened up for me.
“…this new awareness that suddenly opened my eyes to the systems around me. You could call it the global industrial ecosystem, but basically its all that goes into producing, making, creating and doing to support and sustain our lives in the manner to which we are accustomed – those of us who can afford it. It was a system designed for consumption, and to a certain degree, waste. It is a system based on the principle of abundance. Availability. Choice. It is a system whose future is untenable at most, precarious at best.” (Niti Bhan August 2007)
This was the system I was then living in, whether it was San Fransisco as it was at the time of this revelation in March 2007 or whether it was Chicago or Pittsburgh where I’d lived previously. It was a system that made it cheaper and easier to throwaway and replace than to repair and reuse. I can trace my current ability in think in terms of entire systems of complexity such as the Euro-Western academy and its scientific method aka the Western Knowledge System as compared to Indigenous Knowledge Systems such as those of the first peoples of the continent called Australia or the one called North America to this moment of insight and clarity.
“The environmental impact of the capacity of a system to shape and influence our choices is far greater than that of the capacity of industrial design to shape and influence the choice of materials, manufacturing processes, energy consumption or other related factors that contribute to a product’s footprint on the environment.” (Niti Bhan August 2023)
I researched and wrote on this as well back in August 2007. “It is recognized that a significant proportion (ranging from 70% to 90%) of any given product’s ecological footprint can be addressed at the design stage” I said.
Implications for the future
European market forces such as Ecodesign, consumer choices and ecolabels are beginning to change the practice of design at the most fundamental levels. It is no more just a matter of a greener product or choosing a less toxic component or material. It requires an understanding of the entire production process, distribution and marketing system on a global scale, and the way that systems are being redesigned to meet these criteria. These trends also imply sea changes in the way businesses are organized and the way they function.
Ecodesign, Ecolabels and the Environment: How Europe is redesigning our footprint on earth Niti Bhan Core77 August 2007
Here I simply change the colour of the words I wrote 16 years ago, give or take a week or two. This predates the concept of circular design and subsumes its circularity within a larger whole. Holistically speaking, this need for transformation has long been recognized by scholars steeped in the subject. I can’t find the blogpost in my archives introducing the systems transformation diagram by Hans Brezet that shows that a full systems change requires at minimum 20 years to effect. In the past 16, one can say the move towards circularity in industrial processes and systems is one indication of such efforts but cognitive dissonance with marketing, advertising, stock markets and business journalism remains. You would think the narrative campaign marketing machine was working overtime to ensure we continue life consuming and wasting as mindlessly as usual. I was innocent back then, at barely 41 years of age, of the politics of full systems change.
Anyway, where, at this point, do I see any answers for design’s future? In the past. As this retrospective journey on this post shows, I have inklings of the feeling that we might need to go back in order to go forward. I’ll stop here. Today’s writing and review informs me that when my spidey sense is tingling the way it is right now, it is better to let it settle down and take some form before attempting to shape it with words. It might just be I’ll need to look back at these thoughts some decades ahead in the future. I’d better be careful what I say right now.
