Lecture 8

Ecology of the artificial

Luke talked about sustainability and design.

Before we can work out how to protect nature we have to look at what nature actually is. Luke then narrated a slid show of stunning picture depicting different parts of nature. He then showed a fictitious video about little people living in the Kalahari Desert being compared to the western world. The point was do we change to fit the environment or do we change the environment to fit us.

He then talked about how we live in a limited environment in which everything is conserved. –life is balanced but as humans we effect the balance. For example mining which causes destruction through chemicals, the cutting down of trees, the fossil fuels, acid rain, and bad effects on the wild life.

He then gave the example of Easter Island as a limited environment where they used up all their natural resources making statues when that ran out they turned to cannibalism and effectively destroyed themselves. Is that what we’re doing today but on a larger scale?

Luke then compare the person cutting down the last pine tree to us and excuses that person may have offered for doing so. –it’s my pine tree I can do what I want to it. – They’ll find some technology to fix it. – they’re just paranoid they are too afraid there’s probably some other trees else where they just don’t know about.

Luke then drew some other direct parallels- they had a smaller technology and a smaller population and smaller environment. We have big technology big population and big environment are we going to die out too?

Luke went on to talk about out eco foot prints how that is calculated and at what rate that we are consuming our resources. At the moment if everyone had the eco footprint of the USA then we would be using the resources of 3 earths.

Luke talked about the lithosphere and the biosphere and how we are putting things back in to the wrong places in our environment.

He discussed where our responsibility end is it at the concept or through to the manufacture or do we need to be responsible for the whole product life cycle or even past that point.

Up cycling where the product becomes more valuable as it is reused and recycling where the value is equal or often less than the original product.

He then talked about the transition from green design to the ecological model of the artificial. To stop the throw away culture and move to where products have long-term value. Changing from green design to ecologically sustainable design.

Green design- eg energy saving sleep function – rebound effect people leave the computer on all the time (and often people no longer think they have to be responsible)

Ecologically friendly design- time based products with long life – easy to upgrade and repair (products almost become a service because of their intent to be repaired and upgraded)

He also talked about de constructivist architecture and folded architecture.