WEEK 2

In week two, we were also focusing on Sustainability. In the contact class, we discussed three questions about sustainability.

1.Why is it important? Purposes of a product should be sustainable because of we need to reduce pollution, we need to save resources, we should care about our life and social environment.

2.Who does it affect? Sustainable products affect everyone’s life. We are using resource at a continually increasing rate, creating the need to react restore, preserve what little resources we have remaining. We are now reaching a peak of oil consumption and production. Human consume 80.5 million of barrels each day. Demand is increasing 2-3%. When will we reduce our oil dependency? Rain-forests once covered 14% of the planet; there are only 6% of the original forests remaining.


3. How can we design things to be more sustainable? Designer should keep “sustainable” in their mind when they make a new product. Such as they should consider about how to make product lasts longer? People/user should have a good behavior on their daily life. For example: Change all of the light bulbs in your home to compact fluorescent which use a fraction of the energy compared to typical light bulbs. If every household in US converted 5 light bulbs to CFs, the energy saved would almost equal the emissions from nearly 10 million cars.
Separate any recyclable materials out of your trash. Every American consumes nearly 136 pounds of resources each week with 2000 pounds used to support that consumption.
The average individual produces about 4 pounds of trash each day. Nearly 1600 pounds each year.
Replace your shower heads with low floe shower heads; doing so can reduce your water consumption by 50%.

During the workshop class, we had some short presentations about what could we design to improve sustainability. Every group gave a great examples, and Stephen drew a diagram on the whiteboard that is contained all of the good ideas about sustainable products.

Here is the diagram: