world Changing Response 6 Pete

World Changing Response #6

Chinese Cities of the Future pg. 271

This was a very eye-opening article for me after a semester of evil, environmental China. It was interesting to see a China that knows that they have a problem and are actively moving to fix this problem. They have seen immense economic growth over the past 3 decades (the “Chinese Miracle”) and this rapid growth has come at a huge ecological cost. The Chinese have achieved their growth with outdated technologies, over consuming of materials and poor management of materials. This has lead to ecological issues that transcend simple quality-of-life issues; pollution kills people and slows the economic growth of Chinese cities. China has produced so much pollution that it has effectively called its economic vitality into question.

But China has seemed to recognize this and is actively moving to curb the flow of pollution. For example, on average Chinese buildings use 2 to 3 times as much energy per square foot as equivalent buildings in the Western world. But many Chinese ministers are trying to change this. Qiu Baoxing, China’s Construction Minister has proposed the worlds strictest green building standards. Buildings now being built are required to save 65% more energy than previous standards of building. China also is investing in model green cities with help from Western design firms which strive to build local for the area (using local renewable resources) and operate on a closed loop energy system.

All this growth is of course powered by largely economic concerns, James Carville’s adage “It’s the economy, stupid” certainly applies. China realizes that a nation that does not wisely control its resources can never succeed over a long period of time and that inefficiency is expensive. They are actively moving to repair their economy, even if the steps are small at first, and this was quite a change from the China that is ruining the world and does not care about it that we had learned from lecture. I believe that it is very beneficial to see two sides of an issue and I am glad that I read this article to get a glimpse of the side not offered in lecture.

World Changing Response 5 Pete

World Changing Response #5

Producer Responsibility pg. 119

Producer Responsibility was an interesting article for me as a design student, especially designing for disassembly and design for repair. It’s challenging to think about putting together as much as taking apart and I found it interesting that designs that are easy to take apart, are the easiest to put together. Things that dissemble easily are designed for two purposes, which accounts not only for the time an object spends occupying our lives but also for the time it takes to remove that object and return it to a little pile of metal and plastics, full of potential and waiting for the next step in its life.

Designing for repair was interesting to me as both a creative person who loves to work with his hands and as a bicycle mechanic. It actually reminds me of the repair manifesto, repairing before discarding. Everything is always going to break at some point in its life, you have to not only design to make this happen as little as possible, but so that when it does eventually happen, design to make parts repairable so that the object is not lost by one piece failing.

World Changing Response 4 Pete

World Changing Response #4

Open Source pg. 127

Ah, open source. I really only have ever thought of it in as relation to software. Programs such as Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, Audacity, Open Office, and the operating systems Linux all come to mind when thinking about free, open source software. Open source software is, at its core, free access to the source code, the base code of a program, and the freedom to do with it as you please. It was interesting to me to have this principle applied outside of the software world, cultural and intellectual ‘goods’ are increasingly easily applied to the open source world. That is, they are free or they will show you how to make it yourself. An example in the article was the open-journal movement. The profit oriented scientific journal requires high fee’s be paid by the academics who write the content. Recently, there has been a push for open, free online venues funded with small percentages of their research funds. Once this research has been published in the free online journal world, it’s free for anyone to use or read. The author excellently points out that is makes quite a bit of sense considering that most research is publicly funded in the first place.

Personally, the open source movement draws parallels to the Do It Yourself movement and websites such as Instructables.com and diynetwork.com. These sites have large catalogues of tutorials for how to make or do almost anything yourself. For instance, diynetwork.com has a large catalogue of home improvement how to and related projects and instructables.com caters to the hands-on maker. These sites, and their related movements are just physical extensions of the software open source world.