Gaaarrgghh!
May 14th, 2008 by AndyIt’s becoming a distressingly common theme here I feel, but “green” design is getting out of control and threatens to take the credibility of the sustainability movement with it (unless it becomes economical FAST). I got sick of trying to learn QuickBasic this afternoon and took a little browse through the posts at Inhabitat, and it made me really angry. While there were many undoubtedly good ideas and really neat concepts, so many of the “sustainable” items they profile seem to miss the entire point of the movement. For example:
That is an outdoor solar panel table, designed to power “all of your electronic gadgets”. And they are serious about it. There is no way the tiny amount of power this thing generates can ever pay off its production debt, let alone the fact that solar panels in the sun get fucking hot and would make a terrible work surface. As Andrew says, “the table is probably catastrophically expensive, too, because it’s a chic-design-y limited-run piece for yuppies.” That is precisely what pisses me off - how much this stuff makes sustainability look like just another fad (note the continued use of apple products to reinforce the trendy nature of this shit). Another example:
Yes, these are doghouses with a green roofs. If the sustainability movement continues to exist by scamming money from yuppies instead of creating truly useful or environmentally friendly products (those wooden box doghouses are shipped around North America from California for some reason), I won’t be able to criticize people who blow it off as a passing fad. And I desperately want these issues to become a permanent part of economic and social discourse. We have to realize that it’s impossible to consume our way to sustainability. Will we ever figure that out?
May 14th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Personally, I think that the idea of a doghouse-planter is actually a pretty elegant one.
But it’s elegant when you make it yourself out of (what appears to be) repurposed materials (like the bench I designed for Andy’s backyard pond that we built out of an old picnic table). It should be a fun DIY project that you can take pride in, not something generic to be shipped all across the continent.
Calling that a “green roof” instead of a planter is also fucking stupid…it’s a parody, is what it is.
May 14th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Sure.. I have no problem with an aesthetically pleasing doghouse (and I really like reusing materials). I have a problem with people who think they need designer doghouses with green roofs.
I’m pretty sure these are made with new cedar, and finished with “low-VOC” paint… and here I always thought the good thing about cedar was it didn’t need finishing.
May 15th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Ugh.
I was recently at the Emily Carr grad show (see ‘website’ link for the ECI page), and I got really frustrated passing through the industrial design section. I can only imagine what you would have thought, Andrew.
So much of the stuff there was all about maintaining function while ALSO being fashionable! (Oh, and of course they’re made with ‘green’ materials.) While thankfully some of these products used ostensibly sustainable materials without making a big deal about it, others emphasised their consumable sustainability.
I think the root of this is that I hate fashion. The products above would count as ‘fashionable’. I hate fashion, because fashion = consumerism. Consumerism is not sustainable, so neither is fashion. (I’m using fashion differently from ’style’ here - which could include wearing the same few clothes you’ve owned for years until they fall off your back because they’re so threadbare.)
May 15th, 2008 at 7:06 pm
I really like your distinction between “fashion” and “style”… for some reason I never got to there in my head, and I think it’s gonna help me figure out my stance on fashion and such (I’m still torn about it in general, though I personally couldn’t care less)