Design and Sustainability

The Sincerest Form of Flattery


- Engineering and industry must take examples from nature's own methods of sustainability.
- Instead of recycling local resources and keeping a certain area stable, humans have the habit of traveling      to a new, energy rich place, therefore expending much of the planet's "lifeblood" over a greater area.
- Coevolutionary Loops are a necessary piece of the bio security problem and human's ability mistreat it.
- The Biomimicry is slowly taking affect, however in order to create a more supporting environment, many more engineers and designers have to realize it's potential.

A Question of Design


- The Industrial Revolution, as progressive as it was, had been poorly designed, or rather not designed at all, it's negative effects had taken place due to environmental unawareness.
- The Industrial Revolution led to the focusing of populations, and the regression in artisan skills.
- The Industrial Revolution also had caused more production and more affordable goods.
- The early industrialists and designers did not take notice of the grander aspect of the actions, therefore failing to provide the highest efficiency possible.
- The failure of these planners to do their jobs completely resulted in "intergenerational remote tyranny."

Speculative Prehistory of Humanity


- Once again, efficiency is not necessarily found in better forms of energy but it can be found in simple physics.
- "Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.
- The greatest engineers of the world must retreat from using their minds for "weaponry" and divert to "livingry."
- Humans have some sort of grudge with technology, however only because they don't understand it as the reason they are able to survive on the planet.

     The third set of readings seemed to focus on design, not in terms of graphics or fashion, but instead, in terms of industrial planning and objective. The running theme in all three articles was, obviously, sustainability, but mostly, how humans have left sustainability out of the blueprints in order to chase profit or for chauvinistic purpose. It seems as the human race develops new technologies, or makes something bigger and better than that of anything previous to it, the engineers and industrial designers behind such great endeavors focus on moving ahead yet again. In "A Question of Design," McDonough and Braugnart state this failure to create sustainability in terms of architecture and engineering. They say that intergenerational remote tyranny, where industry designers and leaders the world over fail to create a proper method of production, which results in serious problems for future generations. For instance, if we had not attempted to clean up our current methods of energy usage, the environment for our succeeding generations would have been an atrocity to the Earth if the state we had received it in had not been bad enough. That is why the Biomimicry preached by Janine Benyus is extremely important and extremely intelligent. It seems, judging by her several examples in the interview, that nature's organisms have superb god-given methods of sustaining their quality of health and with all of the technology we have developed over the years, the cues we can take from mother nature's creations should be easily integrated into our own.