We're human beings.
And human beings are not machines.
Our first response to anything is emotionaI.
Not inteIIectuaI, not functionaI.
It's emotionaI.
It's incumbent upon designers to make the through-fIow of work and communication
as pIeasurabIe as possibIe,
and as emotionaIIy rich as possibIe.
Over the last 30 years,
the world around us has changed.
The crystaI speak even more.
There is a message.
ln an age of abundant consumer choice,
design has shifted focus...
..from serving the collective good...
..to indulging individual desire...
..as designers have devised ever new and more sophisticated ways
to fulfil our personal aspirations...
..and sell us more stuff.
It's not enough that it Iooks weII and works weII.
It has to be fIat and go into a brown box.
(WhistIes)
To Iet the bird sing when the water boiIs makes for the personaIity of this kettIe.
We live in the ultimate designer age.
But is this democracy or decadence?
Can we have too much of a good thing?
And finally,
with the raw materials that have fuelled 200 years of industrial production running out,
where next for design?
The exciting thing about cradIe-to-cradIe
is that things are designed to either go back to soiI safeIy,
or back to industry forever.
And so we can ceIebrate consumption,
instead of as something that destroys the worId as something that enhances it.
I started off designing things and buiIding them.
I'd typicaIIy tend to buiId one or two or three, because that's aII I couId afford.
But I aIways wanted to address mass production.
That kind of is the uItimate goaI for a designer, I think.
Shaping everything from aeroplanes to coat hangers,
Marc Newson is one of the hippest designers on the planet.
An artist reaping the rewards of an age in which the profile of design has never been higher.
And today, seated on Philippe Starck designer chairs,
sipping designer water,
wealthy aficionados are about to do battle to own one of his first works.
Now we come to Lot 72,
Marc Newson,
the rare and important Lockheed Lounge.
And we wiII begin this at £300,000.
300,000 to start this.
I have 320...
I was er...
..23, I think, or 24 when I did that,
when I buiIt that, when I designed it and made it.
480, seated on my right, at 480.
500,000...
I didn't have the money to go and get a manufacturer to do it.
At 750, against you, madam, 750. 780...
It was simpIy buiIding something in my back yard.
At £950,000, then.
SoId. Thank you so much.
(AppIause)
Do not adjust your sets.
That'sjust shy of a million pounds...
for a chair...
..making this probably the most desirable piece of furniture in the world.
But don't panic.
Marc Newson makes high street dish strainers as well as exclusive furniture.
He's the latest in a line of high-profile, influential designers to confront a curious dilemma.
ln the age of the individual,
how can a mass-produced object feel like a desirable one-off?
Theirs is the story of how design got personal.
And it begins with a generation fed up with the dull and dismal world of the 1 970s.
No-one seemed to reaIIy care...
how...mass-produced products Iooked.
And I was interested in having interesting and, in a way, aspirationaI possessions.
And even though this was a four or five pound aIbum,
I didn't see why it had to be in any way Iesser to a Iuxury item.
For Pete Saville, that meant plundering a range of enigmatic and eclectic images
to design record sleeves every bit as desirable as the music they concealed.
I picked up this...
weII, a postcard of this Fantin-Latour painting caIIed Roses.
I picked it up because I Iiked the chintz-Iike quaIity of it.
My friend was with me.
She saw me hoIding the Fantin-Latour postcard,
and said, ''You're not thinking of that, are you?''
And I said, ''No, of course not.''
I was interested in producing things that I wouId own,
and that my audience wouId own.
So not pictures of what other peopIe had, but actuaIIy things.
In my home, in the earIy '80s,
I didn't have a Fantin-Latour.
I had a vase with some fIowers in it each week.
And I quite Iiked the idea of having a Fantin-Latour.
And I saw these, in a way, kind of pop products, as a way of having that.
And it is about acquisition.
It's driven by aspiration and a personaI desire to have some things.
And foIIowing on from centuries of...
..from centuries of peopIe not having things...
It's a wonder of the post-war period that peopIe now have the opportunity to have things.
It's briIIiant.
And if those things make them feeI better about themseIves -
and without a doubt the kind of design object brings with it this sense of seIf-enhancement,
and a sense of knowing more than you did before -
these are aII positive things.
Since the end of the Second World War,
nobody has indulged designers as adoringly as the ltalians.
And nowhere in ltaly more so than here in Milan.
We aIways try to bring a concept...
proposaI, Iike the sofa to work,
Iike the sofa to have sex...
Iike...I don't know what.
Here, design is an important industrial and philosophical affair,
its status upheld by intellectual heavyweights like this guy.
A legend in his lifetime,
Ettore Sottsass was heavily influenced by the free thinking of the '60s counterculture.
But by the end of the '70s,
in an age of increasingly conspicuous consumption,
he argued that it was design'sjob to offer consumer choice, variety and abundance.
And at the opening of an exhibition of furniture in Milan in 1 981,
he delivered - in shocking style.
Welcome to Memphis -
a collective of young designers brought together by Sottsass,
to bring some personality to the production line.
When I saw the drawing of Ettore, of this bookcase,
it was reaIIy Iike to open a totaIIy new worId.
If you put the books... the books, they never stand.
And the books, in any case, they wiII Iie against the waIIs,
to create a piece of furniture to hoId books,
without taking care for the rationaI composition.
The function to have books,
I think was reaIIy the starting point for something,
something that at the time, we didn't know what it was.
But...
it's something that stiII is touching me today,
aImost 30 years after.
Named after a Bob Dylan song,
but also invoking the ancient capital of Egypt,
and the home of Elvis Presley,
Memphis struck an anything-goes attitude
that poured scorn on the traditions of industrial design.
We started just breaking every ruIe.
We wanted to be more exciting, more provocative with coIours, decoration,
unbeIievabIe shapes, unexpected furniture,
unexpected idea of environment.
Something that couId create positive, happy, friendIy reIations
with furniture, environment, technoIogy,
without any conventions, without any possibIe ruIes coming from the past.
From Memphis,
the principles that had underpinned good design throughout the 20th century -
rational, functional, long-lasting -
were a thing of the past.
ln the fashion-driven, free-market, consumer society,
the customer was king.
And if he or she wanted multicoloured wonky shelves in plastic laminate this season,
then they were going to get them.
Sottsass's furniture, for good or for bad,
was perhaps the signaI disruption
of the continuous stream of modernist ideaIism
which had begun with the Bauhaus.
Memphis certainIy meant the end of the hegemony of modernism.
Modernism sought to make the world a better place for all.
Memphis prefigured a new idea,
where the collective good made way for individual desire.
And that meant the rise of a new kind of designed object.
The fIap is the same shape as the bedside tabIe.
It's eIIipticaI.
It has a handIe buiIt into the end.
I'd make more sense of that too.
First thing we want to do...
Michael Graves is one of the world's most successful industrial designers -
shaping everything from salad spoons to hospital wards.
And I need a pIace to put it down.
He made his name first in architecture and then in design...
..with objects like this.
It is a IittIe bit Iike a IittIe tempIe,
but then it isn't, it's a teapot.
ln 1 980, ltalian steel company Alessi
commissioned 1 1 architects to each produce a sterling silver tea and coffee set.
They were intended as exhibition pieces only.
But when Graves sold 30 or so of his set, at around $25,000 a time,
this ''limited edition'' inspired a defining moment in the history of mass-produced design.
AIessi came to us and asked us to make what he caIIed an American pot.
First of aII, he wanted a kettIe that wouId boiI water faster than any other kettIe on the market.
To boiI water faster than others, it's a matter of the sIope of the side,
the coverage over the heating eIement,
the cone shape of the kettIe.
He wanted a kettIe that wouIdn't burn your hand, obviousIy.
So the handIe was going to be here,
so that it's very, very comfortabIe and it's aIso bIue.
Whether one attributes red to hot, and bIue to cooI,
I'm not quite sure, but you're supposed to.
And the bIack knob here was neutraI.
At this point, they've soId about 1 ,700,000.
That's a Iot. That's a Iot of tea kettIes.
This is probably the best-selling kettle of all time -
a design classic that has spawned countless variations and versions.
ln part, its form follows function - just as the modernists insisted.
But that'sjust half the story.
Because this simple kettle pulled off a remarkable trick.
Here was a mass-produced object that felt unique -
a kettle with charisma, that represented a contradiction in terms.
A mass icon.
We didn't want our design objects
to be so sIick and abstract and born onIy out of the industriaI revoIution.
But we wanted to bring us back into it.
Long ago, in a fIea market, I found a kettIe that had a kind of rooster here.
It was very badIy done, it was done by somebody at home,
yet I thought the idea was cIever.
To Iet the bird sing when the water boiIs,
and it makes for the personaIity of this kettIe.
It has created a sense of desire to own it.
(WhistIes)
lmbued with a sense of aspiration,
Graves'kettle defined much of the design of the decade - and beyond.
For some, this cultural upgrade was distancing design
from its unique ability to connect form and function -
degrading it into a tool for selling us stuff-
stuff we may want, but may or may not, need.
For others, it was redefining the very notion of function itself.
Here is an object that doesn't actuaIIy perform very weII,
that's been used across the worId to procIaim design modernity...
..in a thousand...a miIIion new homes...
produced by the most seIf-pubIicising,
seIf-branded designer in the history of the universe.
When I make miIIions of pieces which give the right service at the right price,
and the right pIace for peopIe,
I have the right aIso to just make poetry.
The crystaI speak even more.
There is a message.
I have no styIe.
The thing which fits the most with me is the freedom.
For over 30 years,
Philippe Starck has been delighting an adoring audience
who couldn't care less about the old-fashioned notion of ''form follows function''.
It's a Iot of paIaver. It's not pointy enough and the coIIection system is very imperfect.
You shouId have something that coIIects and fiIters out the pips.
That's what matters.
At some point, pips wiII come out and where do you put them?
They go straight in the gIass.
But it's IoveIy fun to watch the Iemon juice trickIing down those reedy, pointy bits.
I am a strict functionaIist,
in the way that functionaIism was in the '20s in Germany.
In the '20s in Germany, the functionaIism was pureIy materiaIistic.
There was, I don't know exactIy, we can set five or six parameters:
the weight, how you bend the tube,
how that foIds and things Iike that.
But since this time there is Sigmund Freud,
there is the French phiIosopher Lacan,
and we know that there is not onIy materiaIistic parameters,
there is immateriaI parameters, Iike poetry, humour, sex and things Iike that.
We can say I am a post-Freudian functionaIist.
But these functions now are more rich than before because we know more about us.
That's the difference.
I am very happy because some peopIe come to me and say, ''Thank you.
Thank you for what you do for us.''
''Oh, yes, thank you, I'm very proud of that and what you do?''
''Oh, you know, I met my wife in one of your hoteI
and we had so good sex in your hoteI guest room.''
''Perfect, thank you very much. Thank you.''
ReaIIy, that touched me, because finaIIy it's the maximum I can do with my job.
We can try to inject so many things - poIiticaI, sexuaI...
But at the end, you just bring a IittIe pIeasure.
Starck's brand of pleasure seeking raised the profile of design.
But many couldn't afford it.
And in Britain, where old habits die hard,
many didn't want it, particularly in the home,
where it took a bunch of subversive Swedes,
and a biting recession,
to make-over the British attitude to design.
On October 1 9th, 1 987,
a stock collapse of unprecedented scale pitched Britain towards recession.
The same month, on an industrial estate near Warrington, a new furniture store opened,
perfectly timed to introduce the British to a revolutionary new retail experience.
To be a designer at IKEA, it's...
it's not enough that it Iooks weII and works weII.
It has to be fIat and go into a brown box.
A giant automated distribution warehouse sits at the heart of lKEA headquarters in rural Sweden.
This is the centre of the most successful global furniture company of all time.
lt has single-handedly transformed the way we consume design.
And it all began 60 years ago, in 1 955, with this -
lKEA's first range of furniture,
followed a year later by this ground-breaking table.
It's a tabIe caIIed Lovet.
ActuaIIy, our first designer who was empIoyed here,
his name was GiIIis Lundgren.
His work was to set up for the cataIogue and the photo shooting.
And he wouId have a Iot of things around him
and then he had to make a photo with Lovet.
And not onIy one Lovet, there shouId be a number of Lovet standing there.
And then suddenIy he reaIised,
when he was finished, where shouId he pIace it?
He has just a very smaII area.
And then he Iooked at it and thought,
''WeII, why don't I just screw off the Iegs?''
And that's how it started.
And from there, we have been obsessed in finding ways in doing our furniture fIat.
During the 1 980s, design had come to mean prestige -
something you paid extra for.
lKEA proposed the opposite.
You could charge less by building a whole process of industrial design
around the economies that flat-pack, self-assembly furniture made possible.
It is a Iot about considering these...
aII these different aspects:
Iow price,
Iong Iasting, sustainabIe,
fIat pack,
you have to somehow soIve to have a good product.
For exampIe, how can you break down things into pieces or segments
or making puzzIes of things?
CouId this be repeated? Yes it couId.
But you don't know exactIy how, what kind of joint or what kind of materiaI.
If you manage to soIve aII the parameters around the probIem,
then you have a good design
and it wiII be most IikeIy competitive among other products.
So...
Was that cIear? Yeah?
Sounds simple. But there's a twist.
They give you functional design, with just enough colour, pattern and humour
to satisfy the individual in you.
Standardised but personal,
mass-produced but homely.
Modernism meets Memphis, for the price of peanuts.
- 1 60 cIicks. - Nice.
But you have to scour the in-store warehouse,
find, fetch, carry and even build it yourself.
But loathe it or love it,
it's curious that in the age of the individual,
such a depersonalised consumer experience should become so successful -
particularly when another field of design was heading in entirely the opposite direction -
shrinking the ultimate industrial machine into an essential consumer product.
40 years ago, computers were vast, expensive, intimidating machines,
owned by governments, corporations and military institutions.
The stuff of science fiction.
But in 1 984, a new machine was unveiled,
as the world of computing got personal.
It was Iaunched with a huge amount of hoopIa in 1 984,
with a famous RidIey Scott, I think, commerciaI, based on, you know, the idea of 1 984
and how we were aII subject to the tyranny
of the IBM computer and its duIIness
and the command Iine of CPM, as it then was.
It said ''heIIo'' on it in Iarge friendIy Ietters,
to quote DougIas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The GaIaxy.
Those Iarge friendIy Ietters were not insignificant.
There was a keyboard, and this mouse, this extraordinary mouse!
It was just so revoIutionary. It was amazing!
Boasting a revolutionary user interface,
the Apple Mac would set the bar for a new kind of digital design.
This was the dawn of a new age
in which the words ''personal'' and ''computer'' were no longer anathema.
When we're presented with an object that is compIex,
it can be intimidating.
It certainIy can give you the sense that we don't understand it.
We are often intimidated, aren't we, by objects and products that we don't understand?
And so cIarity and simpIicity are, I think, criticaIIy important
for us to be abIe to understand a product and enjoy using it.
Making design user-friendly has become essential
to making once unimaginably complex technology part of the fabric of everyday life.
But Apple wasn't the first outfit to preach the benefits
of this revolutionary new approach to design.
Almost 20 years before the launch of the Mac,
in December 1 968, a research team, funded by the American military,
and headed by a young electrical engineer called Doug Engelbart,
staged a startling presentation.
(AppIause)
I hope you'II go aIong with this rather unusuaI setting
and the fact that I remain seated when I get introduced,
and the fact that I'm going to come to you mostIy through this medium here
for the rest of the show.
The research program that I'm going to describe to you
is quickIy characterisabIe by saying,
if, in your office, you as an inteIIectuaI worker were suppIied with a computer dispIay,
backed up by a computer that was aIive for you aII day,
how much vaIue couId you derive from that?
Computers were big and expensive,
and onIy very speciaI peopIe got to use them.
The demo showed peopIe that computers...
..couId be usefuI for everyday activities for everyday peopIe.
Let me go to a fiIe that I prepared just after my wife caIIed me and said,
''On the way home, wouId you do a IittIe shopping for me?''
As soon as she said that, I got my system...
(BIeeping)
..organised...
..and made a shopping Iist.
RULIFSON: Doug's reaI interest was in...
designing some sort of a computer system at that point,
that wouId aIIow us to manipuIate text,
to store our documents and manipuIate our documents.
..I say after bananas it's more IikeIy that I'II...
..take the carrots there, and so carrots move right up behind bananas.
And aspirin doesn't reaIIy beIong there. I think aspirin goes after paper toweIs.
PeopIe that we couId get to the Iab to see it couId understand it.
But peopIe that didn't see it and experience it,
just couIdn't imagine what it was because computers were for computing.
You put cards or paper tape in and you got numbers out and that's what you did with them.
The idea of using them to write documents and write programs
and dynamicaIIy communicate with one another...
they just couIdn't understand it.
It was just outside their frame of reference.
ln an analogue age of black and white television and vinyl records,
Engelbart's boffins prophesised a digital future of personal computers,
controlled simply through what the user saw on the screen.
And they built their vision around a new wooden device,
as revolutionary then as it is commonplace today.
It has two wheeIs here.
And the idea is that you hoId it on a tabIe.
And the wheeIs have a IittIe device inside
that can then teII the computer how fast they're rotating
and the computer figured out how to then have a spot move across the screen.
It had a wire coming out of it...
from the wrong end -
actuaIIy, today they come out the other end -
and the wire became known as the ''taiI'' and the device then became known as the ''mouse''.
This is the one that I buiIt in 1 963.
ActuaIIy, the first mouse that was ever buiIt.
Doug had a sketch in one of his pocket notebooks
about something Iike this with two wheeIs.
He gave it to me and I thought, ''That Iooks good.''
And that was reaIIy the first one.
The mouse, and the interface it controlled, quite simply changed everything.
And Engelbart's demo represented nothing short of a design revolution -
the democratisation of computing -
a liberating and lucrative prospect
for the entrepreneurial young designers of Silicon Valley.
In other discipIines,
designers have aIways considered the peopIe who are gonna be using the products.
In the computer industry, the designers aIways consider them.
It's just that they were aII computer peopIe untiI this point in time,
then they were just reguIar peopIe off the street who were gonna be using the product.
This shift changed the rules of design.
lf computers were going to be used by ordinary people,
it suggested... why not ask them what they wanted?
And when asked to design a computer editing system for a publishing company,
that's exactly what this guy did.
So we had just hired a secretary and the day after she started,
I put her in front of a bIank screen and I said,
''Imagine there's a page on the screen
and here's a page of mark-ups,
IittIe proofreaders' marks of what needs to be changed.
Imagine that you had a way to point at the screen and a keyboard.
TeII me what you wouId do.''
And she said, ''WeII, I have to deIete that.
I wouId point at it and cross it out.
I have to insert some text.
I wouId point at the pIace I want it to go and I wouId type it.''
She made it up as she went aIong, what was intuitive to her.
The result was an intuitive, user-friendly system,
based around the graphic layout and editing features
that still dominate personal computing today -
all held together by another iconic piece of design.
I'm sitting in a bar one evening, waiting for a friend to show up
and I'm doodIing on this napkin.
And what I came up with was a desk.
And it was on the desk that the typewriter was and the editing happened,
and the in/out trays for handIing the maiI.
Separate from that, there was an icon that represented a printer
and another one that represented a fiIe cabinet,
and one that represented a trash can.
And what I saw in this was the abiIity for peopIe to...
..to basicaIIy manipuIate objects in a... aImost in a physicaI way.
The majority of things we controI, we controI physicaIIy.
You know, you drive a car, you pick up a pen.
So what we were Iooking for was an anaIogue
to the way we controIIed a Iot of other tooIs and a Iot of other devices in our Iives.
The user interface developed at Xerox PARC
brought together the mouse and the desktop,
and directly inspired the team behind the Apple Mac,
as its designers became obsessed with how to make a personal computer not just functional,
but friendly.
We'd been struggIing with having menus on the top of a window.
So I said, ''Look, if we put the menu at the top of the whoIe screen,
then we aIways have the fuII width, we aIways have the fuII height,
and every menu wiII feeI Iike it has a kinaesthetic pIace on the screen.
The fiIe menu's aIways over here,
and you can actuaIIy reach for the edit menu and be haIf way down it
before you've even thought about that it was ''cut'' you were going for.
By having these things fIutter aIong, it feeIs Iike they're aII there, but they're not,
they're overIapping quite a bit, but it feeIs Iike they're aII there at any time.
These guys could go on all night.
That's what designers do -
obsess about the details, so that you don't have to.
So, to cut a long story short,
the principles of user-centred design...
..have made some of the most complex consumer products man has ever made
an essential part of our everyday world,
through design that aims to be all but invisible.
I mean, we're trying to define products that in a sense seem so inevitabIe and so naturaI,
that, in an odd way, you don't aImost think of them as being designed.
You know, they just soIve a probIem,
but in soIving that probIem, they're not reminding you of the compIexity
of this terribIe chaIIenge that you faced as a designer.
And as a user, I don't want to be reminded about,
''WeII, you know, this was a tough probIem to soIve,'' cos you know, that's your job.
I want this product to be about what this product is supposed to do for me.
I think those sorts of preoccupations Iead to...
..or can Iead to a product Iike the iPod.
Digital devices have become so commonplace,
it's difficult to imagine how we lived without them.
But they have also prompted a profound shift in our relationship with the world around us.
And that may or may not be for the good.
So direct has our connection between this device we have in our pocket
and our sense of our seIf become,
that we aImost stop thinking about other peopIe around us.
And that - Iove these things as I do -
seems to me to be positiveIy dangerous or maIignant as an infIuence on society.
A genie has been Iet out of the bottIe
and we have to decide whether or not we understand that genie
or we understand our behaviour.
Can we can compare it to when the motorcar changed the worId
or the teIephone or print?
I don't know, exactIy.
Perhaps design has got so carried away with what it couId do for us,
it's forgotten to ask whether it shouId.
Surely it's design'sjob to shield us from, as well as connect us to,
technology that is changing what it means to be human?
These are issues yet to be fully explored.
Lucky then, that designers may find themselves with time on their hands...
..because digital devices are also shrinking the world of industrial design.
If an object has aII this in-bred interactivity in it,
what are industriaI designers supposed to do with objects? Suffer.
MP3s do not require racks.
AII this ingenuity that was invented, in CD racks,
teIephone answering machines,
fax machines, music pIayers of aII kinds, pocket caIendars,
tape pIayers, cassette pIayers, video pIayers, cameras, video cameras...
It's as if they were designing magic Iantern sIides.
It's just pIain gone.
The history of industrial design
is the story of how capitalism's primal urge to make more for less...
..transformed the natural into a designed world, full of stuff.
But with landfill sites bulging,
and oil slowly but surely running out,
it seems that the age of conspicuous consumption may have come to an end.
Or maybe not.
(AppIause)
These are astonishing times,
and I'd Iike to taIk this morning on the theme of Greener By Design,
as a ceIebration of abundance.
This looks like an ordinary office, with ordinary desks and ordinary chairs.
But what you're looking at is a radical design response to a global crisis.
This Iooks Iike it's just an office chair, but it's not.
A typicaI chair is not designed for future generations of materiaIs.
Often it creates what we caII hybrids of materiaIs,
so that pIastics are attached to metaIs,
different pIastics are fused and gIued together.
They can't come apart.
AII the eIements of this chair - the pIastics, the metaIs, the wires, the fabrics,
are aII designed to be safe for human and ecoIogicaI systems.
And it can go back, in its parts, to industriaI materiaIs
that can go back to becoming new industriaI products.
VoiIa.
Oftentimes when things are, quote, ''recycIed'',
they're actuaIIy down-cycIed, they're actuaIIy Iosing quaIity on the way.
So you might take a miIk jug or a piece of cIear pIastic
and then recycIe it into something that's dark pIastic
that is an amaIgam, a sort of meIange of materiaIs.
It's what we caII down-cycIing.
In the case of this chair, we're Iooking at true recycIing.
Everything here is designed to stay at its IeveI of quaIity as it goes through the recycIing
and not get mixed up into a park bench or a speed bump or a fIower pot,
but to actuaIIy be avaiIabIe to industry at the highest IeveI of quaIity.
So it's what we caII cradIe-to-cradIe design.
The Think Chair is the world's first fully-certified cradle-to-cradle product.
lts components and materials, all of which are entirely non-toxic,
are designed to be infinitely reused.
lf all products were made this way,
our whole world could be produced and reproduced over and over
without the need for any new raw materials -
from mass-produced objects to the ground beneath our feet.
This is something as simpIe as a piece of carpet,
but the materiaIs it's made out of are designed to be infiniteIy reusabIe.
So this carpet has been fuIIy defined as a ''technicaI nutrient carpet'' in our Ianguage.
So this is a poIymer that makes the face fibre...
..and this is the backing.
So the tops are designed to be separated from the backs when it comes back for reuse,
and then the top becomes caproIactam once again and becomes the face fibre,
and the bottom becomes this thermopIastic poIyoIefin,
it gets remade into a new carpet and out it goes.
There's about two biIIion kiIos of carpet waste in the United States every year...
..and so you can imagine if these carpets couId become carpets again forever,
we couId take this giant poIymer bank of two biIIion kiIos
and turn it into our carpet for the United States ad infinitum.
I think with environmentaIism, a Iot of peopIe think we have to cut back.
The exciting thing about cradIe-to-cradIe
is that things are designed to either go back to soiI safeIy or back to industry forever.
And so we can ceIebrate consumption,
instead of as something that destroys the worId, as something that enhances the worId.
Edible carpets and reusable chairs may, or may not,
be the answer to the crisis facing industrial design.
But it is a characteristically creative response to a human problem-
another bold attempt to reshape, improve, and make sense of our world.
(WhistIes)
That's what design does.
And that's why we need it now, perhaps more than ever.
This abiIity to sort of back away from the materiaI worId and think about it
in methods which are wiser, deeper, better considered,
that's what differentiates design from aII the craftwork
that's been going on ever since we were pre-human.
It's deep.
It's not a superficiaI practice.
It's not about gIamour or branding or typography.
It reaIIy is about mankind and what mankind has created.
And that's... That's a big issue.