ALL ART BURNS

On the first day of one of my classes (“Human Experience in Design”), the instructor asked us to complete this sentence in 15 words or less:

“I want to be a designer because …”

He read aloud some of the answers people gave and he challenged us to answer the question every year and see how our answers changed during school and during our careers. I think this is a useful excercise no matter what your discipline, you should try answering this yourself and checking back every year.

In keeping with the original spirit, I’m going to keep my answer down to 15 words or less. I’m going to append five rules for acheiving the answer to my question and see how those change over time as well as the answer to the question.

I want to be a designer because I want to make things that people can use to improve their lives.

Five personal rules for acheiving that goal:

• Always remember that improving a person’s life is easy.
• Every project I work on should improve at least one person’s life, even if it simply entertains them.
• Never work on a product that a person will have to send to a landfill.
• Never attempt to convince someone to buy a product they do not actually need.
• Leave the world in a better place than it was in when I entered.

Technorati Tags: design, personal goals

The other day the mail carrier dropped off a 19″ x 16″ padded plastic envelope. The return address said “Sears”, but I couldn’t think of anything I’d recently ordered from them.

I opened it up and discovered that it contained four, 14″ x 12″ padded plastic envelopes.

After opening the first envelope, I remembered that weeks earlier I’d ordered the service and install manuals for the stove that was already in the house when we moved in.

One of the envelopes contained only a single sheet of paper: a schematic for the stove.

At this point I’m pretty peeved. I’ve got five envelopes made of plastic that I can’t recycle or reuse.

Then I got to noticing that the stack of paper I had was pretty light, possibly lighter than the weight of the packaging itself. I don’t know what the postage charge was, but the thought of paying to have stuff shipped to me that I can’t use or recycle really makes me cranky.

So I broke out the postal scale.

Stove documentation, 6.5oz:

Packaging, 7.5oz:

That’s 7.5 oz of plastic mailers to protect 6.5 oz of paper. I paid twice the postage for unnecessary packaging that will end up in some landfill.

Thanks, Sears!

Technorati Tags: overpackaging, Sears, sustainable design, waste