The Story of stuff by Annie Leonard

In this video, Annie Leonard talks about the materials economy which is a process that includes extraction to production to distribution to consumption to disposal. People live and work all along the system.

Extraction: in the past three decades alone, one-third of the planet’s natural resources base have been consumed. For example, The U.S has 5% of the world’s population but they’re consuming 30% of the world’s resources and creating 30% of the world’s waste.

Production: there are over 100000 synthetic chemicals in commerce today. As long as we keep putting toxics into our production system, we are going to keep getting toxics in the stuff that we bring into our homes, workplaces schools and our bodies.

Distribution: means selling all this toxic contaminated junk as quickly as possible.

Consumption: is the heart of the system. 99 percent of the stuff we run through this system is trashed within 6 months. The average U.S people now consumes twice as much as they did 50 years ago. Planned obsolescence means they actually make stuff that is designed to be useless as quickly as possible so we will chuck it and buy a new one. Perceives obsolescence convinces us to throw away stuff that is still perfectly useful. Fashion, advertisements and media play a big role in this.

Disposal: She says each of us in the United States makes four and a half pounds of garbage a day. That is twice what we each made thirty years ago. All of this garbage either gets dumped in a landfill or first it’s burned in an incinerator and then dumped in a landfill. Either way, both pollute the air, land, water and change the climate. However, recycling can help to reduce the garbage but not enough. One reason is the waste coming out of our houses is just the tip of the iceberg and another reason is that much of the garbage can not be recycled either because it contains too many toxics or it’s actually designed not recycled in the first place.

It’s a system in crisis, but the good thing is that there are so many points of intervention. People working on saving forests and clean production. Green Chemistry, Zero waste, closed loop production, renewable energy, local living economies are already happening. Annie Leonard recommends people to find a creative new way instead of the old one. In conclusion, going back to industrial design, what designers need to pay attention is that they need to create stuff that not only functional and make people feel happy, but also using right materials which are environmentally friendly. This is very important.

Product Sketching

My Design Career

I am a Year 1 student now studying Industrial design at university. I have already studied for one semester, and I discover I really like my major. This essay will show three aspects that include why I have chosen to study industrial design at UNSW, what stimulated me to consider my design career and what I think my future will be like in design.

Firstly, I would like to talk about my 19 years experience to find out probably some design effects through my life so far. My father is working at a foreign trade company and my mother is working at a tax authority for my country. They are both not interested in my major so I am not gifted from them genetically. However, my grandfather used to be a worker in a factory. Now he is 76 years old and still being employed to design wheel key for a company. I admire him personally.

When I was very young, I am a girl who is very shy and silent. My mother took me to study children’s drawing at an art school. Starting from that time, drawing has walked into my life. I liked colourful pictures because I felt they talked to me beautiful stories. I often held a pencil to draw everything to express my thinking to people instead of speaking. Thus, I had a very happy childhood.

But life cannot always be pleasant since I graduated from primary school. I gave up studying drawing and then focus on academic study because of the important high school entrance exam and university entrance exam in China. Although I didn’t get sufficient art education, my enthusiasm to art are always existent. When I go shopping at weekends, I prefer to find out some creative and beautiful products like exquisite decorations. When I surf on the Internet, I like to search for aesthetic pictures about design products and share them to friends. In addition, as a Gemini girl, I am curious and often observe everything around me carefully. I definitely love life and enjoy life. To sum up, these evidences are the motivations for me to study Industrial design.

I studied science foundation in my hometown and then chose industrial design as my major so that many classmates were very surprised. From my point of view, I am not interested in solving difficult physics and chemistry problems for four years. Drawing is my hobby all the time. As we know, China is one of the biggest manufacturing countries in the world. However, our own countries’ design is not very popular and just be located in an initial stage. I believe Chinese design will be put on a par with Japanese design one day. I am just trying to do something more fun and more meaningful so I go aboard to study and develop design career.

Many people said studying design is very hard and your expenditures far exceed than your income. I sometimes think about what my future will be like. Maybe one day, I am a product designer who designs products for a famous company. Maybe one day, I have a stable other kinds of job and design just becomes my hobby in spare time. Maybe one day, my job is slightly related to my major. Whatever my future will be like, I promise design will never be disappeared from my daily life. I believe design can improve people’s life level and make people feel happy. It’s necessary from past to future. Design teaches me a lot and I will put my enthusiasm into design career through my whole life.

In conclusion, I explained three factors in this essay, which are why I have chosen Industrial design as my undergraduate major, what stimulates me to consider design career and what I think about my future. I am proud of studying Industrial design and I will put my effort on design career continuously.

Design Confusion

Design Excellence

I have finished this poster.My product is Contour GPS Hands-free Video Camera. I learned i should know about and use visual design elements and principles when i analysize a design product.I also should pay attention to the product's form and features. This award winning product told me a lot.

Human centered Design David Kelley

In this video, David Kelley says that product design has become much less about the hardware and more about the user experience. People are now more and more focus on human-centered design, human-centeredness in an approach to design. That really involves designing behaviors and personality into products. Designers used to primarily build 3-D models and 3-D renderings that are shown as communicating their ideas. They get those objects that they’re designing and get them in motion, showing how they’ll be used. It can be seen that this way can make their job more enjoyable. In order to do that they’ve been forming internal video-production groups, in order to make these kinds of experience prototypes that show just what they mean about the man-machine relationship.

To explain this new, broader definition, David Kelley shows some examples of design in products, services and environments. The first and the most interesting one I think in this video is -- Prada New York. They wanted a new kind of store that had a cultural role as well as a retail one. And that meant actually designing custom technology as opposed to just buying things off the shelf and putting them to use.

The staff devices are all around the store. The merchandise that you're interested in -- can be scanned and then can be shown on any screen throughout the store. You can look at color, sizes, and how it appeared on the runway, or whatever. It's taken into the dressing room, and in the dressing room there are scanners so that staff person knows exactly what clothing you have in the dressing room. They can put that up on a touch screen and you can play with that, and get more information about the clothing that you're interested in as you're trying it on. The liquid crystal displays in the changing room is transparent. But if you push the button, the whole wall goes dark. So you can try to get approval, or not, for whatever you're wearing.

One of David Kelley’s favorite features of the technology is the magic mirror, where you put on the clothes. There's a big display in the mirror (plasma screen embedded in mirror for multi- angle viewing), and you can turn around -- but there's a three second delay. So you can see what you look like from the back or all the way around.

Then, David Kelley shows other human centered designs which are the science museum in London, the ultimate cubicle for Dilbert, a pavilion to celebrate the recycling of the water on the Millennium Dome in London, a revolutionary sub aquatic video camera called spyfish and ApproTEC project. Via watching this video, I deeply understand a new word --human-centered design which brings convenience and comfort to people. It’s brilliant. The design product is not just a product; it has emotion, behaviors and personalities, like human.