Greetings everyone, in today’s presentation we will talk about the impact of design. And if you think about the impact of design, you could classify them into three basic categories. The social impact of design, environmental impact of design and the economic impact of design. In addition, we can also think of design impacts as either being positive for people and the planet or as negative for people and the planet as well. In today's presentation we will talk about some of the negative impacts of design. One that comes immediately to mind which is all around us is this problem of pollution, and that is, the pollution of the air that we breathe, the water we drink and the soil that we walk on and use for a range of purposes. To think of air pollution, we have a large number of factories that all around us, we have a number of cars around us and all of these cars and factories have certain number of emissions. And there is a significant amount of work in trying to cut down, minimize these emissions, but these emissions are being spurted out into the environment and there's a significant amount of air pollution that is caused by design, these are factories that are making the products that we use. These are products that have been designed by designers. So this is one really significant negative impact that we need to battle and need to take care of. But there are solutions, things like if they're coal fired power plants. There also are things like solutions with wind energy. So what you see in this image is really interesting. You see pollution being generated in the background, but in the front you see a series of windmills that can hopefully help us minimize some of these problems of pollution. One other form of pollution which is really intense and severe is that of water pollution. What you see in this photograph is essentially a significant amount of plastic, and this is plastic that is from plastic bags and from single use disposable water bottles. So, a large number of these water bottles are tossed out. Many of them end up in the water stream. Many of them end up on shores. And this is one form, of a significant amount of pollution that we have to deal with. You can see that in the some cases some of this plastic actually floats. There are significant parts of the world, significant parts of our oceans, where there are massive amounts of waste, of debris that's collected, and that just continues to float on the oceans and increase problems for all the life that lives in these oceans. And then finally our soil. We don't recognize because we don't pay attention to the soil but the soil is a critical part of our survival. If you look at just maybe two inches underneath the surface of the planet, that soil is critical for survival for all of our species. If that soil gets ruined, we will be in serious trouble for a variety of reasons. We don't see these earthworms that live underneath the soil. And earthworms and other insect, and other insects, and other creatures, and other microbes that live underneath the soil, they play a significant role in keeping the soil in a condition that allows us to grow things on it. So we use our soil to grow plants, to grow vegetables. We use it for the variety of purposes where we grow new things from the soil. And unless we take care of our soil, we'll end up in the situation when none of it is usable for, for the purposes of which we need them. We saw some of this with the pollution but another really, really important part, an important negative impact of design is the problem of waste. What happens when we stop using the products that we buy? We throw them out as waste and in many cases that waste is non-biodegradable. It just sits there for decades, centuries, nothing happens to it, which is different from what happens with nature. Nature also creates waste. If you look at a tree, a tree generates waste on a seasonal basis, on a cycle, right. Every fall, the leaves actually fall down and the tree grows a whole set of new leaves which again fall in the next fall season. However, the waste that a tree generates is actually biodegradable, actually has some value. Either the stuff that falls down is eaten up by the animals or it converts into soil and it becomes a part of the Earth. Not quite so with the waste that we generate as a human species. What you see in this photograph, essentially plastic cups. Like we talked about earlier in this presentation, this is a major problem in terms of water and soil pollution. We need to find ways by which we can create products that degrade if they are to be tossed out. Right now, these polymers, or plastics from which we make these cups, will not degrade for centuries if they sit in a landfill without processing any of any kind. What you see here actually is interesting. So what you see here is metal cans. Now metal and glass, as well glass bottles, are completely recyclable. If you take aluminum for example or you take steel or copper, any of these metals. If you are done using a product that is made from that metal, you can actually melt the metal and reuse it and it's good to go again. We shouldn't be throwing this out as trash. These metal cans and these glass bottles can actually be recycled and can be reused. So we need to have better system by which we institute recycling programs that also minimize the amount of waste that we throw out into the world. Plastic also can be recycled. One of the problems with plastic recycling however, is that not many cities collect the plastic. Second thing, when you recycle plastic and you reuse that plastic, it does not have the same properties as the original plastic. Not the case with metals. With metals, once you melt the metal and reuse it, it has the same properties as the original metal. In case of plastics actually drops in the properties, and so you can still use it, but it has to be used for a different set of purposes. However, plastic also is recyclable, and we should do a much better job of collecting like you see in this case, and recycling that plastic as well. Trash, how do we deal with trash? We, number one, we shouldn't put our heads in the sand and not pay attention to the trash, we shouldn't just throw trash in anything that we see, we should actually spend some time separating our trash. So in this case what you see here is a container for glass, container for plastic, container for paper, a container for metal. If we are able to separate our trash by the kind of material it is made of, it becomes a lot better solution, it doesn't end up as a negative impact on the planet. One of the concepts that I like to talk about, is this concept referred to as unsustainable consumption. Let's talk about these two words. So sustainable essentially means it's something that lasts a long time, that survives and that does well. Consumption essentially means using something up or buying. What we see in this case is this concept of unsustainable consumption. So what happens when we keep throwing out new products into the world? What happens when you keep promoting these products, what happened when you keep marketing them and urging people to buy? There's new sales, there's new products, new things that you can acquire. Well, it creates a cycle where people start consuming more and more and more, and it creates a situation where you have end up with more and more and more waste. So one of the things that designers need to be careful of and design in general needs to think about is, are we promoting too much buying, too much spending of money on things, and therefore too much waste, just by creating new products, just by designing new products all the time? Design also plays a role in creating product desire. If I'm designing something new, I want to design it in a certain way that it creates a certain desire that makes people want to buy it. There could be a positive side to this, because as people buy somethings, it actually addresses a certain need for them, it solves a problem and that helps with solving the problem. In some cases, one also wonders about wanting more and more. because desire is seen as something that is difficult to satisfy. The minute you buy one product, you're attracted to the next product which is better version, and then another version. So one of the critiques of this notion of product desire is that it is impossible to satisfy it. And therefore once you get people hooked on buying new products, buying fancy gadgets, it gets more and more intense, it gets worse and worse. So, not everyone can afford to buy a home like this. Not everyone can afford to buy a large diamonds. And more of the things that design can do in some cases, it creates the desire that cannot be satisfied. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Another connected concept to this, we've talked about unsustainable consumption, this is conspicuous consumption, and this is a concept that was introduced by an American sociologist by the name of Thorstein Veblen. He talked about conspicuous consumption in this way. He says conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. Let's unpack the statement a bit. What does this mean? So when you buy something, you buy a product, it is actually seen by other people. It is conspicuous to other people. It is visible to other people. And what it does, is it says something about who you are as an individual. It sends a certain message to the people who see you buying and using these things. For example, if you run a fancy car, if you own a fancy car, if you're driving a Lamborghini, for example, it says something about who you are as a person. Number one, that you can afford to buy a vehicle like this, number two, that you like fast cars, number three that you have a certain kind of style right? So these products that we buy, say something about who we are. This is a Bugatti Veron it's considered to be one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive car in the world. So if you are an owner of this vehicle or a driver of this car it says something about how you consume, on what you want people to think of you. On the other hand, this is probably this is the Tata Nano, it's one of the most inexpensive cars on the planet, costs about $2,000. And so when we buy things, these things that we buy very conspicuously say things about who we are and what we do, right. So this is something that has to be kept in mind, and one of the negative impacts of design, is this desire to keep buying more and more to make yourself more conspicuous in the world. One of the other things that Thorstein Veblen talked about also was along with conspicuous consumption comes conspicuous waste. You can also know what someone is by seeing what they throw away. So if I throw away expensive things, it means that I'm a person of extreme wealth and I fucking afford to throw expensive things. So it can send some really strange messages about who we are as conspicuous consumers and conspicuous wasters. What are things that we worry about as designers is, does design lead to income inequities? Does it create a world in which we have more and more people who have more and more wealth, less and less people have more and more wealth, and more and more people who have less amount of wealth? So we all know this, that a very, very small percentage of people in the world own a very, very high amount of income. Is about 3 to 5% of the world that owns more than 50% of the wealth on the planet. Does design play a role in doing this? Does design create an environment where the wealthy have the good stuff and the people who can't afford the good stuff get left with the bad stuff? That's an important thing to think about. If you look at this map, this shows poverty levels, right, this shows how in the Western world, these are the blue areas, people are fairly well off, they're fairly wealthy. But if you look at certain sections, the red and the brown sections in Africa or in India, people get by with very little. Are we by design, creating a world in which these income inequities and these separation between the haves and the have nots is getting worse? It's getting worse. So if you look at this map again, it says, this is the percentage of population living on less than $1 a day. And you see that very high amount of Africa and India are in this pocket whereas the rest of the world is not. Another example this is, this deals with food. The percentage of people who are undernourished, who do not have enough food. There also as you see in this case, portions of Africa, portions of South America and portions of India are in this of famine. So, what are the things that design can do, it's not doing enough of is to focus on these kinds of problems. Can we by design make sure that we address this income inequities, and malnourishment that we face all around the planet today? We often do not know where our products come from that we use everyday, who makes them, and in what kinds of conditions these products are made. So this term, sweat shop, essentially comes from a situation where people in these factories and in these workshops were spending very long hours working on lower jobs, low paying jobs and working in extremely difficult conditions to create the process that we need. Very often you see scenarios like these where you have tons of people working on creating garments, creating shoes, creating mobile phones. In some situations the conditions in which they work are good, but in some cases they are extremely poor conditions. They are unsafe. The people are not paid fair wages. And so one dirty secret of design is that while it creates a really fantastic, fashionable, incredible new products, very often the conditions from which they emerge, the conditions where they are made, are not really good for the people who make these products. Poor working conditions, right. We see examples like this. This is a scenario where cruise ships and large tankers and other ships that have lived their life, have done the work that they've done, get broken down. Very often this happens off of the coast of India, the coast of Africa. And these big ships are taken apart manually. Very often there are men who drag some of the large components off the beaches. So this sort of breakdown of these ships happened in very poor conditions. It also ends up in creating lots of really terrible pollution in the place where it's done. So these conditions in which these products can be used like this cruise ships, for leisure, are then broken down by people in very poor condition and that's something that has to be addressed. Fair wages. Very often students and people who work in factories, people who work in sweatshop kind of conditions are underpaid. Often the argument that companies is that well, we are creating these products for a global market, and if they work in our factories, they still make better living than they would otherwise. Which in some cases is true. However, one thing to keep in mind is that work should not be exploitative. Work should be such that it empowers people. Very often, people who work in these factories, who work on assembly lines, don't have the chances of moving up. Again, something to keep in mind that these amazing products that we use on a daily basis that are really beautifully designed often come from conditions that are not so beautiful. So, it's a problem for design to solve. So, what we talked about today is some of the impact of design and we focused on some of the negative impacts of design. And these impacts can be environmental, where it creates pollution on the planet. They can be economic, where it puts income equities into the world. Where it makes a few people richer, and lot of people poorer. And it also could have social impact like the kind of working conditions in which we see lots of people creating these products. Thank you.
