Task 6: The story of bottled water

Whenever I watch the series of The story of stuff, I learned and realise the problems in our everyday life. I especially wanted to watch 'The story of bottled water' because this is quit relevent issues with what Im doing for marketing subject. When i was in Korea. I rarely buy the bottled water becuase I can access boiled water everywhere. I dont know whether it is true or not, almost all korean think that tap water is not good for their health, so what we normally do is boiling the water and making barley tea. Since I came to Sydney,I know it is different culture, I have seen many poeple buying the bottled water which is almost same price as soft drink. I was really wondering about expensive price of bottled water.

As she said in the vidoe, people in the US buy bottled water more than half billion in every week. It happens same in Australia. The rate of comsumption of bottled water is really high.

The most socking fact is all bottled water comes form tap water. wow! what is the point of we paying for bottled water at the shop! The price which is 2000 times expensive than tap water is not the only problem. The most important problem is disposing of empty bottled water. She also mentioned that 80% of plastic goes to landfill. It means only 20 % are actually recyled. I think we all kind of trashing our world. From now on, we stop buying bottled water and even though we buying the plastic bottled water we better recycled the plastic bottle or reuse to something else.

Design for Disaster (Karry Flashlight)

Task 4: Design for life by Philippe starck

http://www.vimeo.com/ - Design for Life ( watch full episodes! )

First challenge, Studnets will have 100 euros and 1 hour to buy two products. their choices much illustrate one of 3 themes, Function, Ecology and Gender. Function which means finding one product which is useful and another which is useless. Ecology which means finding one product which is environmentally sound and another which is environmentally unsound. The theme of gender is all about finding a product with male qualities and another with female qualities.

Task3 - The 11th Hour

This movie was focused on showing realities of recent environment. Glaciers at North Pole are melting; tress at forest are cutting down and burning. Those scenes were repeated with narration. Actually we all know about this but each of us did not realise how close those problems are facing to us. Thus even all the environmentalists and narration were kept criticizing problems such as human wastes, pollution and world economical structure that is rely on petroleum but they are not actually suggesting any solutions. It means we need to think about problems seriously.
We should start wise purchase. If we assumed that one-year is the time since earth born, we are a point of 11: 57, 31st of December. We (human) appeared 60 seconds ago but we has been destroyed most of environments.

Is a man the lord of the creation? I do not think so.
We have been used our natural resources wastefully. We seemed like we had right to control everything. Indeed, those are not our privilege. I remember one quote in this movie which is ‘when human destroy nature, the thing destroyed is human themselves. That means we are cutting off our noses to split our faces.

So what should we do?
At the end of this movie, they gave us some suggestions how we change our nature sustainably such as natural gas car, environmental friendly buildings and alternative energies (solar power). If we well accept those suggestion we will be extend life of earth alive. Start now! We do not have enough time !

Charrette 1

Task2 : Objectified

When I meet someone new and once introduced myself, the first question I always face with is “what does industrial designers do?” I think average people in this world they do not realize how much design contributes in their daily life and products which is daily used by them. Before I watched this video I was also unclear to define industrial design. But now I find out what to answer.

According to Alice Rawsthorn’s mention, pretty much everything around us and every moment we use are all designed. So, every designed object tells a story. However, most of users are failure to notice about stories behind the product. Andrew Blauvelt talked about hidden story about toothpick. I was impressed by the point which this little object is also considerably designed and represent designers’ cultural context and its functionality.

The designers from ‘Smart Design’ pointed out the method we should focus on when we design something. Understanding people what they need is first thing designer should think about. But the thing is we must look at the extremes not common thing, such as weakest group. The reason is middle group can take care of themselves. The result of design which solves the extreme problems will also satisfy common users need.

One great part of this video was story about Apple. He mentioned about different attributes of the product such as materials or forms connected materials. For example of this is Macbook Air. The designers from Apple were considered how can we product many single parts in just one. That was not about aesthetic issues (we mostly think is design) but processes of design. They put much more effort and time for experimenting with different process and fixtures which is not even obvious.

The common point from various designers was “putting great design into everyday thing without user even knowing it or thinking of it”. I believe design is something we do not realize but we can not live without and without better.

Tsunami Video 2 survivor story