COMMUNITY 2013

Today my blog is about "design activism" and I was inspired this week by the KONY2012 video of a few weeks ago.  The video was extremely inspiring and effective.  One thing I couldn't believe is that the video itself was almost 30 minutes long!  It had over 100 million views in the span of a week.  In this day and age, to have my generation watch a 30 minute video is unreal.  This shows that targeted, quality videography will work.  Youtube, combined with the various social media outlets are an extremely effective social activism engine.  It is a shame that the claims were rather shallow and outdated, and the company has questionable financials.  What if the cause had been legit?  What if it was something of integrity?
My solution is just that.  My cause is to fight suburbia.  My cause is to fight loneliness and isolation.  My cause is to conserve resources and fight overconsumption.  After the soldiers came home from the war, they came home to a world that would never be the same.  Before, they would walk to get a few groceries from the store, get a haircut, or get a drink at the local establishment.  But after the war, they got in their car to get anything.  They were progressively disconnected from family, friends, and strangers.  They bought in to the facade of a suburban "community".  Fast forward 50 years, and that community no longer exists.  Neighbors don't know each others' names.  Families are broken.  Our population is the most obese in the world.  We lost millions of acres of open space, forests, and prime farm lands.  The suburban ideal was dead on arrival.
What we need is to go back to the communities that worked just fine for thousands of years.  True communities are based on experiences, not on products, according to the Fuad Luke article.  In order to have these experiences, we must live in close proximity to other people!  We need to know, on a first name basis, who lives around us.  And in order to do that, we must talk to them!  It is so strange that my generation will say anything online, but when it comes to face to face interaction, they have nothing to say!  We wouldn't need facebook, at least as often, to keep up with our friends, because in the community I describe, we would see them on a daily basis.  Walking home, at the grocery store, in the coffee shop, at the local drinking establishment, sitting on the porch, these interactions would happen in any number of places.
How to achieve this, you may ask?  First off, smaller houses and lots are a must!  Most people don't have the family size to justify the house size anymore.  Heck, most people can't clean and maintain their houses and yards anymore.  They hire out.  Imagine how much you would save in owning a smaller house.  Less to maintain.  Less to clean.  Less to heat and cool.  Less time sitting in traffic.  Now, it's not less in amenities.  Now, since the lots are smaller, you can be closer to other things, like a park or school or work.  Or, imagine if you lived above the local eatery or office.  With today's building techniques, we no longer have to worry about noise problems from what is going on above and below us.  Insulation has come a long way.  What it really means is more time with your family.  More time to spend with your neighbors.  More time to enjoy the fruits of your labors.  More time to relax.
All of this requires for people to come together and decide how these thing will work for them.  An example of this is out of the Faud Luke article.  It described a "Design of the Time" project in the UK.  They spent a year showing the community what a sustainable community looks like.  They did this through community projects, events and exhibitions.  It was a successful operation of bringing people of all backgrounds together to become more aware of the world around them.  More aware of the affects of our actions.  If only we really knew what the suburban "community" really did to our earth and our lives.  This is why we should believe in COMMUNITY 2013.


One thing that I have learned about in this course is how the sustainable solution is truly a multidisciplinary one.  We are all in this together.  It doesn't matter who screwed up to make our current position, because if we spend all of our time pointing fingers and blaming, we will never get anything done.  When we work together, we can accomplish so much more than what we could on our own.  So what I plan to do with this new knowledge is work collaboratively.  I plan to get involved in my community.  I have made a more focused effort to support my local community with my dollars.  One thing I would like to know more about, having taken this course, is how to garden, using compostable materials.

A Magic Carpet Ride

My blog this week will be a continuation of the topic last week, just using the other kind of food value category: technical.  A technical nutrient as defined by the cradle to cradle system is one that can be used perpetually in the marketplace.  It is the truly recyclable item that can be reused infinitely.  My idea is to make a bathmat that is produced from a technical material.

My choice of a bathmat is because they are a commonly replaced item, due to its direct contact with lots of moisture.  Because of this, it is prone to mold and mildew.  If the mat is made from a material meant to breakdown, the moisture might accelerate the process to one that it might break down the mat prematurely.  The second reason to make this from a synthetic material is exactly because it is in contact with lots of water.  The product would not absorb much of the water, which would then evaporate.  The mat could be washed or dried more easily.  At the end of its use, it would be melted down and turned back into a new bathmat.

Now, in order for this to happen, the factory needs to control its supply chain, as well as the consumer market for the material.  Currently, there is not much set up in the way of clothing recycling.  A good way to do this would be for the retailers to have a special bin just for the bath mats. Users would receive store credit for their deposit of the old mat.  On the supply end of this, the producers would need to make sure that one, the old material is being used, and two, the virgin material is being sourced and dyed in a way that does not affect the recyclability of the product.  This would include not using any of the chemicals listed on the x list or the gray list.