EDITORIAL
Losing Culture
INTERACTIONS
Wear and Tear
DESIGN FOR THE COMING CLIMATE
>Brewing Concern
Gathering Awareness of Climate Change
>Profile of Current Research Projects by Volunteers
IMPACTS OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
>Windows onto Defuturing
Power Management Software and Ubiquitous Computing
>Techno-Typology
Single-digit List Psychologies of Relations to Technology
>Remote Digital
How a Lack of Relational Thinking could save us from Digitalisation
OTHER RELATIONAL NEWS
>Sustainable Spectacle?
Solidarity in Fearing the Ecological Impacts of Fireworks
>IT Flow on Traffic
Better Traffic, not Less Traffic
>Solving the Wrong Problem
Genetically-Modified for Microwaves
>The Endless Paper Trail
Office Workers Clearfell Native Forests
>Dinosaur Packaging
A Not-So-Progressive Design Competition
RECENT EDF THINKWORK
>Case Studies
The more the merrier?
>Chicago Again
An EMP for an Art School
>Design for the Environment Standard
Sustainability by Committee?
>Australian Council for Sustainable Development
Another Committee?
The Twentieth Century managed to convince most of the population of the world that the best, if not the only, form of truth was 'scientific study'. Characterised by replicable measurement, perhaps experimentation and as little theorisation as possible, 'scientific studies' have the monopoly on what passes for fact these days. If it has not yet been 'proved' by one, or preferably two, scientists, then there is little need to take it into account.
Interestingly, the late Twentieth Century saw the strengthening of another way of claiming the status of truth: the business plan. However, as dot.coms slide into worthlessness and major infrastructure projects blowout their budgets again and again, perhaps this speculative form of truth is on the wane.
The history of sustainability has been the history of those with a relational sense of emerging problems fighting those who bark, 'prove it, scientifically!'
The beginning of 2001 may well turn out to be the time when the world started to acknowledge that climate change as result of human greenhouse emissions should now be considered a fact. Over the last month or so, a number of reports by scientists have been released, each receiving considerable media coverage. Many of these reports cite evidence of climate change happening already.
Whilst it is important for this issue to move from the realm of 'feared by a few' to 'accepted by most', the fact that science needs to be the shifter has drawbacks. Climate change may be a physical phenomenon, but its causes and, equally significantly, its effects, are cultural phenomena.
In his briefing paper for EDF's work in this area, Tony Fry points out that cultures can be understood as responses to geographic climates. The way of life that a group of people share will be to a significant extent a series of common responses to a particular pattern of weather.
In retrospect, this is a very obvious point, one that is well documented by anthropologists. But in struggling to get climate change scientifically proven, we tend to overlook this cultural aspect. It is however crucial that we don't. Far greater reductions in the risk of further climate change can be made by behavioural and attitudinal changes than can be made by technological developments. The latter invariably have to make up for their own greenhouse gas emissions before making in-roads on existing emissions; and without cultural changes, are always being outrun by increasingly unsustainable habits.
Obversely, cultures will change to adapt to the new weather conditions: eg dress, building operation, modes of transport. However, if these changes occur ad hoc without careful forethought, they could exacerbate the causes of climate change.
The problem is that the way the Twentieth Centuries privileged science has left us few resources with which to deal with these 'cultural design' problems. In this issue of the Sustainments IE newsletter, many of the items concern scientific negotiations of sustainability. If you step back, what emerges are the symptoms of cultural addiction to scientific discourses. This is most manifest when there is an almost religious faith that science can solve the problems that only science can truly identify and which science in many cases contributed to causing.
But another symptom is our embarrassing reticence to face up to 'cultural design' problems. In the face of a question like, 'what could a sustainable public spectacle be?', we often seek shelter in the marketing-speak of bullet-points. Or else we put out a couple of beta versions of possible solutions that lamely attempt to bolt sustainability onto what are fundamentally unsustainable cultures.
Nevertheless, EDF is very excited by the challenge of 'designing for cultural change'. This is what all our research and education is about. And what we and our students and clients are coming up with as a result, is looking pretty good. If we weren't a non-profit, we could write a truthful business plan on the back of these ideas…
>Wear and Tear
The last newsletter carried an item about the ecological impacts that can be expected from the increase of 24-hour offices. Apart from the energy implications, it was conjectured that the service-life of equipment would at least halve in terms of calendar days as hours per day running times doubled, with no down-time for maintenance.
The story was picked up by an editor of a facilities management magazine who asked EDF to write a more substantial piece for the next issue. As a result EDF tried to find some harder evidence for its initial thoughts about this situation.
This research converged with the Ecological Impact Audit EDF is currently doing of the offices of an Employment and Small Business Services and Training company. Discussions with staff about saving energy by turning IT equipment off after-hours and even at lunch time raised the old resistances about wear and tear on equipment. So one of the first things EDF tried to find was a definitive life cycle assessment of PC service lives.
Initial searches proved fruitless. Partly because the accelerated obsolescence of PC hardware makes questions of full service-life irrelevant, hard facts about wear and tear of PCs is difficult to find. As people and companies begin to upgrade less often, with PCs sales falling respectively, issues of full service-life will come to the fore.
However, what was particularly interesting was how much unsubstantiated personal opinion and rumour surrounded this question. Type into a search engine 'PC wear and tear' and your screen will be flooded with contradictory guides to PC usage by thousands of 'experts'. Spurious logic is everywhere: 'the amount of energy a PC uses is so small, it's really not worth the risk turning them off'; 'since you'll chuck your computer out way before it dies, you may as well save energy by turning them off'. This world of amateur electrical engineers is highly ambivalent about whether computers are physical, mechanical things with finite lives or immaterial, digital things with infinite lives.
What became clear was the extent to which computer literacy was distinct from any understanding of how computers work. In previous centuries, one could only become proficient at the use of a machine through a thorough understanding of its workings. But these days, it doesn't matter what outdated or even superstitious ideas you might have about your tools. Ignorance does not prevent use. It does however prevent sustainable use.
We should say that the consensus certainly is that there is no substantial threat to the use-life of your IT by frequent turning off, and that substantial energy savings, and even wear and tear savings, can be made. Anne-Marie was recently told by a representative of a major Japanese electronics company (that did not want to cited) that the company's ISO 14000 Environmental Management System involved someone wandering around the office at lunch time tallying up the number of computers left on in order to set a target for increased 'computer off' scores the following month.
Needless to say, EDF has requested an extension from the editor so that a foolproof scientific report on these issues can be carried out.
>Brewing Concern
There are signs that the ground upon which the debates on climate change take place are starting to move.
On the downside: the convergence of the election of George W. Bush to the American Presidency with the California energy crisis, and the general growth in energy demand in the developed and developing world, highlighted by increasing fuel prices, is bad news. Not only does Bush intend to further open up oil exploration in Alaska as a concession to irresponsible and greedy economic interests, but the fact that 'the most powerful leader in the free world' seems to know less about global warming than a well informed primary school student is terrifying. Despite his administration's commitment to the Strategic Missile Defence Initiative, his comprehension of the threat to global security posed by 'greenhouse' is even lower. Peter Huck ('Fossil Fuels' in the February issue of the conservative The Australian Financial Review Magazine) notes that the security implications of climate change do not figure at all on the agenda of Bush's strategic advisers.
The most significant recent hit of information on climate change has been the January 2001 release of the Third Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released at the Panel's meeting in Shanghai. It is a long, dense and complex document that has attracted a good deal of media attention and criticism — mostly because of the size of the variations between the lowest and highest predictions. In particular, it has the projected average global surface temperature over the period 1990 to 2100 rising from between 1.4 to 5.8°C. Another variation the report acknowledges is the degree to which regional differences vary from the norm — for instance, the warming of North America, northern and central Asia is expected to be 40% higher than the average. The science is inexact, the shortcomings of climate modelling very apparent, and the figures produced mostly fuzzy. However, the trends are clear and invite serious concern.
Less ambiguous than the projections is the historical climate data, which add credibility to general trends. It's perhaps useful to draw attention to a few of these.
Global snow cover has decreased by 10% in the last fifty years, Arctic sea-ice thickness has reduced by about 40%. At the same time the heat content of the world's oceans has increased 0.1 - 0.2°C in the 20th century — the resulting expansion being the main factor in currently increasing sea levels. The historical picture of atmospheric concentration of CO2 is dramatic. It has increased between 1750 and 2000 by 31%. During the last 20 years over 75% of these CO2 emissions have come from fossil fuel burning. This concentration is said not to have been exceeded during the past 420,000 years and 'likely not during the past 20 million'. In contrast, and in the same period, concentrations of methane, which is another significant greenhouse gas, have increased by 151% (over half of which is from anthropogenic causes like agriculture, fossil fuel burning and landfills).
The IPCC Draft Report on Australia paints a sobering picture of higher temperatures, more bush fires, longer droughts, more floods and falling agricultural production. The fate of the Murray basin is presented as very bleak with the problem of salinity continuing to worsen. The Sydney Morning Herald reported on February 8 that the Australian Greenhouse Office had spent as little as $100,000 assessing the possible impacts of climate change. The Australian Greenhouse Office has yet to recognise this imperative — unlike the EcoDesign Foundation's current project to create momentum for 'design for a changed climate'. The EDF approach is two-horned: we have to learn how to deal with changing climatic conditions at the same time as reducing the emissions that cause the problems. Most significantly, both 'horns' according to EDF involve cultural responses, changes to our attitudes and behaviours, and not just techno-scientific responses. For an outline of what EDF is doing, see the new Briefing Paper at: www.edf.edu.au/DCC/Briefing.htm
Even if the situation were to be stabilised soon (which is extremely unlikely) climate change will be a factor for several hundred years, as the IPCC Report makes clear: it takes a very long time for mean ocean temperatures to adjust.
Two contributors to the shifting ground of the climate change debate are the property and insurance industries, not least because these industries are directly exposed to threats posed by the coming climate. An article in the February issue of Property Australia picks up on the IPCC Report, noting that global economic losses from 'natural disasters' have increased at a stunning rate of 10% a year for the past four decades. The article also quotes Andrew Dlugolecki, chair of a recent UNEP insurance industry initiative and Director of general insurance development at CGNU, one of the largest insurance groups in the world, who claimed that in the context of increasing extreme weather events 'a 10 percent increase in wind speeds results in a 150 percentage increase in damage'. Against this backdrop Dlugolecki calls for a 60% reduction in GHG emissions. One has to contrast this with the feeble ambitions of governments in this area and the appalling record of the Australian government in particular.
One of the ways in which the action of the insurance industry will start to bite politically is when whole regions become uninsurable — the Sydney hailstorm of 1999 is cited as one of the events that point to this as an eventuality. Of course, so often it is the poorest parts of the world that get hit the hardest by extreme weather events, and these places are mostly totally uninsured.
Anybody who has anything to do with built environment over the coming decades is going to need products and services that lower the risk of damage from wilder weather, providing direct protection and minimising, or preferably reversing, the causes of climatic change. The challenge and opportunities are great and anyone interested in getting a head start should consider being a part of EDF's research projects in this area. Check out the website address above.
>Profile of Current Research Projects by Volunteers
When we launched our two research projects earlier this year we also launched a Distance Volunteer Program to get as many people as possible contributing to thinking through the impacts of information technology and design for climate change.
This Program has generated a great deal of interest internationally, particularly in response to the Design for Climate Change Project and we now have a number of people working on different research projects that are both urgently needed and personally rewarding. Below is a list of some of these Distance Researchers and their projects. We will update you on their research over the next few months. If you are interested in becoming a Distance Volunteer for either of our Research Projects please email Abby Mellick (Volunteer Program Manager)with a bit of information about yourself and what your interests in this area are. We can then tailor a research project for you.
Sarah Rickard is a graduate of Architecture at Adelaide University and is researching mass housing developments in climatically extreme locations. Warin Nitipaisalkul is in his final year of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UTS and is putting together a picture of climate change in relation to the built environment and infrastructure of Thailand, to which he is returning after graduation.
K. Krrishnamohan is doing a PhD in Industrial Ecology and will be reporting on the climate change impacts on and of a particular industrial ecology proposal.Jennifer Jessen is currently Environmental Coordinator at Seattle University. She is putting together a picture of how on-campus green buildings are recognising and responding to issues of climate change and also investigating lost building techniques that would be relevant to designing more appropriate and sustainable buildings.
Kelly Jones is a third year design student at COFA. She is researching bicycle culture internationally to develop ways to promote and encourage the use of bicycles and also to develop briefs for bicycle related products.
>Windows onto Defuturing
EDF recently undertook a modest computer upgrade, thanks to the generosity of the University of Western Sydney, EDF's partner in the delivery of the Master of Sustainment Design Program. Due to the cost-consciousness of both parties, there was not much choice in the specifications of the new systems, but assurances were given that, as with most new PCs, these would meet Energy Star® guidelines in terms of standby and off-mode wattages.
Indeed, when the new systems were installed, Windows®98 could be easily configured to power-down the monitor and the PC to various levels.
However after a few days, we noticed that Microsoft®Office prevented Windows®98 from putting the system into standby. A trip to Microsoft®'s on-line Knowledge Bank revealed that this was a known bug in Office2000, for which a patch (but no explanation or apology) had been developed, though the patch was part of a full update that took more than 2 hours to download.
After correcting this problem, the systems could now be put into standby by Windows®98 after user-specified periods of inactivity. However, 'waking' the systems up again proved to be another matter. At the end of lunch one day, everyone in the office was madly wiggling mice and tapping (belting) keys, but in vain. Even what some thought were on/off buttons on the front of PC itself had no effect. The only solution was a manual reset: ie pull the plug out of the wall and then put it in again.
Another trip to Microsoft®'s Knowledge Bank revealed that there were indeed many bugs associated with the Windows®98's and Windows®Millenium's power management program. For some there were patches, for others there weren't, and for none were there any even technical accounts of why these problems occur.
Whether it is evidence of Microsoft®'s callous monopoly or the democratic liberalism inherent in the internet, it is now standard practice to release software commercially before it is perfect. Complaints about a program's dysfunctionality get recast as participatory software development by loyal customers.
However, EDF's little experience makes it clear that reducing energy consumption is very much an afterthought in the world of IT, something which it is not essential to get right first time, if ever.
What is significant about this observation is that it does not bode well for the future. Power management is a very tricky thing to engineer since it lies at the very heart of the interaction between the hardware and software of a computer. This means that power management needs to be at the foundation of the architecture of a computer and not just an add-on. Windows® is taking over every aspect of a computer's operation, having now absorbed both DOS and BIOS. However, as EDF has discovered, this imperialism is being carried out for reasons other than making PCs more sustainable.
Microsoft®'s objective is uniquity: to move beyond PCs into all forms of appliances. The dream is to have whole households controlled by a networked PC. Now the stumbling block to this omnipresence is the old manual on/off switch which thankfully most appliances still have. A PC can't tell the toaster to turn on if a circuit has been broken by a physical switch. So Microsoft® needs every appliance to be permanently in standby, and it needs users to get used to leaving everything on all the time.
The priorities are clear in Microsoft®'s account of its OnNow® project:
"The OnNow PC platform will be expected to function in these ways:
• The PC is ready to use immediately when the user presses the On button
• The PC is perceived to be off when not in use but is still capable of responding to wake-up events. Wake-up events might be triggered by a device receiving input such as a phone ringing, or by software that has requested the PC to wake at some predetermined time.
• Software adjusts its behavior when the PC's power mode changes. The operating system and applications work together intelligently to operate the PC to deliver effective power management in accordance with the user's current needs and expectations. For example, applications will not inadvertently keep the PC busy when it is not necessary, and instead will pro-actively participate in shutting down the PC to conserve energy and reduce noise." (Quoted in Bruce Nordman, Mary Ann Piette, Kris Kinney, and Carrie Webber User Guide to Power Management for PCs and Monitors [Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California Berkeley; January 1997], 31-2, http://n4e.lbl.gov/)
The priority is control by Windows® of the activation of all things. Power management is a retrospective justification. It is in fact only one — rather dysfunctional, as EDF's experience indicates — strategy.
The other strategy, which is very apparent in this quote, is changing the meaning of 'off'. You used to get a message after Windows® shut down saying, "It is now safe to [manually] turn off your computer." Newer versions of Windows® have removed the need for this physical intervention, shutting the computer down itself — though we must now realise that this means that the computer is never entirely off. Windows® is merely pretending to be off, in a transitional compromise with our old mechanical habits, which it is hoping to quickly delete from the way we live and work.
It will not be long now before children think power switches are antiquated devices from the jurasso-analogic age. The inability of many people to turn-off light-switches already, indicates that this unsustainable future is not far off.
Here then is defuturing at the very heart of contemporary IT developments. Microsoft® and all the other players scrambling toward this future (Intel® 's InstantlyOn, IBM® 's PowerPC, HP® 's MagicPacket, BlueTooth® 's AlwaysOn, etc), are not wilful environmental vandals. It is just that unless sustainability is consciously made the centre of your design thinking, you are going to further unsustainable habits.
>Techno Typology
Future News v6 n1 (February, 2001), the newsletter of the Futures Foundation, reports on research by Francine Toder, a professor of psychological counselling at California State University Sacramento, into the 'ten most common' personality types in terms of how people relate to technology. Resistors avoid high-tech devices; Challengers are hostile to technology; Technophobes are afraid of technology; Procrastinators are only sufficiently techno-competent to get by; Addicts can't get enough technology; Drivers use their techno-addiction to outpace others; Players use technology for diversion; Imposters fake competence by using technology a lot; Dreamers have a faith that technology can do more than it can; and Hermits use technology to avoid personal contact.
'Research', or rather 'market research', like this is a clear sign of technology (in this case automated bullet-pointing in wordprocessing documents) impacting on our ability to think. Toder seems to be more a manifestation of what she is analysing: a Reductivist. Where for instance, would EDF's experiences with its recent IT upgrade put us? In undertaking the upgrade, we weren't resistors, challengers or technophobes. Much as we wished to be procrastinators, the dysfunctionality of the power management program for us to become something between an addict and a hermit. As we became aware that IT does not so much enhance productivity as simply create more work to be done, we at sometimes felt like players, and at other times like dreamers. We are now determined to become drivers, undertaking the Impacts of Information Technology project in order to create a space outside these ridiculous clichés.
It is worth pointing out that more than 50 years ago, Ernst Jünger characterised the essence of technology as typographic, stamping a very restricted number of ways of being onto humans. These days it is referred to as branding.
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>Design for the Environment Standard
Back to Top
>Australian Council for Sustainable Development
The Sustainments Information Ecology Newsletter is produced by the EcoDesign Foundation 8 times a year for members and subscribers. It is edited by Cameron Tonkinwise with contributions also from Anne-Marie Willis, Abby Mellick and Tony Fry. Correspondence and enquiries welcome:
EcoDesign Foundation, PO Box 369 Rozelle, NSW 2039 tel (02)9555
9412 fax (02) 9555 9564 email edf@edf.edu.au.
>Remote Digital
From comments on the current tribulations of the introduction of digital television in New Scientist (3 Feb 2001), it is becoming more and more apparent that those attempting to force the conversion from analogue to digital television have no relational understanding of what they are doing.
We have previously pointed out the defuturing mindset that is behind this mass junking of perfectly functioning devices in favour of others with much higher energy consumption. It now seems though that this mass junking is not going to happen any time soon.
The lifestyle or world-view designed by television, that is, the inertial state in which you expect everything to come to you without ever needing to move, is now proving to be precisely the thing that is holding up the arrival of digital television. People aren't signing up for digital television because they can't be bothered buying a new television or installing a set-top box. The UK government is now contemplating giving away millions of digital converters.
However, another problem is now arising. To change channels requires a remote because of course, the idea of getting up and changing the channel manually is not, and can never again be, part of what it means to use a television. However, set-top boxes, which control the channel, will have their own remote, separate from the one that controls the television (sound, picture quality, on/off). Since having two remote controls is also almost no longer tolerable by television watchers, the government is going to need a team of engineers to go to each individual's house and reconfigure the digital remote so that it can also change the sound or picture levels on obsolete televisions. Only then, when everything comes for free in an all-in-one, will viewers consider conversion.
The cultural impacts designed by analogue television just might save us from the even higher impacting and more embedded cultural impacts of digital television.
In the related area of 3G mobile telephony, which proposes video-on-the-move, New Scientist (10 Feb 2001) reports that it has been estimated that this new service will require 100,000 new antenna masts in the UK. Since the 3G system requires higher frequencies, which can't travel as far as the frequencies used by the GSM network, telcos will need 3 times as many antennas in urban areas and 2 times as many in rural areas. New Scientist points out that increasing concern about the electromagnetic radiation from this infrastructure is making a return on the fortune that telcos paid for 3G licences look a long way off.
OTHER RELATIONAL NEWS
>Sustainable Spectacle?
Please excuse the following, but when we find others independently voicing the same unpopular concerns as us, solidarity needs to be affirmed. This is a letter to Engineers Australia (v73 n1, Jan 2001, 8):
"I would like to comment on the article about the Olympic firework display, with particular respect to the ethics involved in helping to stage one of the biggest pollution events in Sydney…The article takes no account of the fact that the air over Sydney Harbour had to cope with tonnes of the products of chemicals like sulfur, potassium, iron, strontium, barium, aluminium, copper, zinc and magnesium, to name but a few of the common ingredients. Most fireworks use chlorides, sulfates and arsenates in many forms, most of which are extremely toxic, so obviously are really good substances to add to our food chain and logically help to promote clean air to breathe. The substances are bound together with resins and other hyrdocarbon-based binders, which add to the general pollution. It is often difficult for professional engineers to balance ethical consideration with the need to earn an income… However it would be good to think that we could persuade both the general public and the event promoters that this form of display is no longer acceptable…Do we really need this sort of event and could we not find a better way to spend the money for the benefit of mankind?"
The question is, given that public events are important parts of human societies, what could a more sustainable form of spectacle or ritual be?
>IT Flow on Traffic
As with many countries Australia has been suffering hikes in the price of petrol and politicians have been under pressure to lower fuel taxes. The conservative Australian Federal Government has so far resisted, though for reasons of short-term 'good economic management', rather than any commitment to long-term ecological sustainability. Proof lies in the fact that, to placate voters, the government has found A$2.1billion for improving roads around Australia.
A recent paper by Prof. Phil Charles from Queensland University's Centre for Transport Strategy, reported in Building Australia (February, 2001) suggests that improved roads will make possible a 20% increase in vehicle carrying capacity. So far from using increasing petrol prices as a mechanism for lowering private vehicle usage, the Government is pursuing a policy that actively seeks to increase vehicle usage.
This policy should not even be justified as good economic management since, as Prof. Charles makes clear, capital city road congestion currently costs the nation more than $5billion per year.
Unfortunately, Professor Charles believes that the solution to the impending increase in traffic is not the simplest one — reduce the number of cars on the road — but IT, or rather, ITS, Intelligent Transport Systems — complex computer infrastructures and services that can play the game of spreading grid-lock around.
>Solving the Wrong Problem
New Scientist (17 Feb 2001) reports on a patent for a solution to a very pressing problem. When frozen chicken nuggets are microwaved, they tend to go soggy as the moisture in the chicken is driven out into the batter but the air in the microwave isn't hot enough to boil it off. So Aventis has genetically engineered potatoes to produce a starch that can be used to make a batter for chicken nuggets that retains crispness when microwaved!?
>The Endless Paper Trail
Public servants in NSW, Australia, are ploughing through and throwing away office paper and other 'expendable' products at alarming rates according to a recent report by the NSW EPA (Sydney Morning Herald 16/2/01). More than 55 kilograms of paper is bought each year for every public servant and the State government is sending almost 22 million kilograms of paper to landfill each year. Only 6.2 percent of the A4 paper and 12 percent of the miscellaneous paper has any recycled content.
It would be safe to assume the situation is much worse in the private sector. In fact over the last three years most NSW government departments and authorities (with some interesting exceptions such as the TAB) have been required to prepare and implement Waste Management and Purchasing Policies (WRAPPs) aimed at reducing waste and applying environmental criteria for purchases. Ironically it is perhaps the data gathered in order to set the reduction target that has been seized on by the press to use as a stick to beat public servants.
Setting waste reduction targets is all well and good, but these have to be backed up with workplace education to assist people to understand the causes of wasteful practices. The ludicrously low cost of paper is one crucial factor. The price starts out artificially low because of government-sanctioned access to eucalypt forests (mainly in Victoria). It then stays down because many big office suppliers use paper as a 'loss leader' to attract account customers, who they then lock into propriety ordering systems — usually on-line — for all their products (an instance of e-commerce increasing, not reducing, material consumption and waste generation).
One of the things EDF found out when researching the environmental impacts of office products for the Inner Sydney Waste Board is that many technologies unwittingly (though we suspect often deliberately) push their users to ever-higher levels of material consumption. This happens in many ways: the ubiquitous print command; the availability of low cost black and white laser printers and now, super cheap colour inkjet printers; colour printers that require special difficult-to-recycle paper; short life inkjet cartridges; and more subtly, via a panoply of easy to achieve special effects that encourage gratuitous experimentation (and thus many drafts) on run-of-the-mill documents in the name of creativity. Office (and increasingly, home) printers need to be seen for what they are: machines that primarily drive the harvesting of forests and to a lesser extent, the mining of the earth and the refining of petrochemicals.
Coming from the opposite value position, this is exactly how the paper industry sees it. On its web page, Reflex (Australia's largest selling brand of office paper) boasts about the non-arrival of the paperless office, while its associated company PaperLinX cites the 'rapid uptake of new printing technologies' as a growth driver for the paper industry.
EDF's research into office products resulted in a booklet for the Inner Sydney Waste Board (printed on paper made mainly of sugar cane waste). It focuses on understanding the specific nature of the unsustainability of different types of office products along with advice on how to reduce impacts through purchasing (or not purchasing) and introducing appropriate work practices (which often means consciously working against the inclinations of particular products and technologies). It's called Office Products: A Guide to Sustainable Purchasing and Use. Free copies are available from the Inner Sydney Waste Board, email: iswb@wasteboard.nsw.gov.au phone 02 9261 2777, fax 02 9261 2577.
>Dinosaur Packaging
The themes for the Southern Cross Packaging Design Awards for 2001 have just been released. For this student design competition organised by the Packaging Council of Australia, there are twelve briefs, each with a different sponsor. The briefs range from the mainly gratuitous through to a couple with some sustainment potential.
In the former category is a 'promotional item for a desk top', which gives the impression that what is wanted is some kind of flat delivered item that bored office workers can unfold or slot together into a 3-D object to place on their desks to promote the sender's message! In the latter category (i.e., a potential sustainment) is a 'city lunch box kit' a brief for a product that recognises that GST on café meals and take away food is driving the return of 'home packed lunch'. The sponsor, EcoRecycle Victoria, has specified that the kit must be made of recyclable materials and more importantly, that 'the intention is that it will be kept for many years' (in which case one would have thought durable rather than recyclable materials would be more important). Recyclability is specified in only three of the ten briefs, and the use of recycled materials in only two (unsurprisingly one sponsored by Amcor Cartonboard, which uses a high percentage of recycled material in its products and the other, for a drink container that could be re-used as a picnic cup, by Coca Cola Amatil which routinely uses recycled PET resin).
Not one brief asks students to consider the possibility of extended producer responsibility, which would seem to suggest that the local packaging industry feels safe from this ever happening in Australia (perhaps they know something we don't?). If you are a design student at an Australian educational institution and are interested in entering go to http://www.packcoun.com.au) or you can request an entry pack (complete with silly foldout poster) from Jane Rulla on 03 9690 1955. Entry forms due by 29 June, entries by 6 August.
RECENT EDF THINKWORK
>Case Studies Update
EDF's case studies of Buxton Public School and Thurgoona Campus, Charles Sturt University as energy efficient and environmentally designed buildings are now on the ABEC website: http://www.abec.com.au
The credit for EDF's work will be included soon we're told. ABEC have been getting good feedback on the studies, and Anne-Marie is in the process of doing another on Shenton College, Western Australia. New studies will be posted over the next few months by a range of independent consultants (no-one will be writing up their own project!) to total of 39. The aim is to cover a range of building types in all Australian climatic zones. Meanwhile, the BDP Environment Design Guide have invited us to write a case study on Millennium Parklands.
>Chicago Again
Tony Fry again travelled to Chicago as part of his work with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A component of his work there involves setting up an Environmental Management Plan for the School.
Buildings in Chicago would clearly have large ecological impacts merely associated with winter heating. However, as an Art School, there are also a number of more direct impacts not dissimilar from a manufacturing plant. All the equipment and chemicals involved in art-making have large resource consumption implications and, perhaps more significantly, waste and even hazardous waste management implications.
Tony's work with the School goes beyond merely creating ways of minimising the ecological impacts associated with teaching art practice. It aims to ask: what might a sustainable art practice be?, and how might art be a driver in the creation of more sustainable cultural futures?
EDF was invited by Standards Australia to participate in the international working group developing a Design for the Environment technical report as part of the suite of ISO 14000 Environmental Management standards. Anne-Marie attended the Sydney meeting in which thirty people from government and industry from many nations worked on a 20 page document generated at a previous Toronto meeting along with 90 pages of comments!
Those involved attempted to create a consensus across a gulf of incommensurable and frequently unstated difference, not least of which was cultural. The final outcome, she fears, will be a document so general, as to be of very little use. Its final title has not been agreed upon, except that it won't be called 'Design for the Environment' because 'nobody designs just for the environment' she was told by an attendee at Toronto where that decision was made.
On a more positive note, John Henry (Director, Environment at Standards Australia) told us that ISO do have a high level committee looking at the implications of climate change, and who would be interested in reading our briefing paper on design for climate change ( http://www.edf.edu.au/DCC/Briefing.htm).
Tony Fry has been invited onto the initial steering committee of this embryonic body which is based around the Earth Charter. Other members include Don Henry of ACF, Ian Lowe of Griffith Uni, Brendan Mackey of ANU, Steve Lawrence of Work Ventures, Virginia Young of the Wilderness Society, plus other representative from government, industry, social welfare and indigenous groups. We will report any developments of interest in next issue.
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| Last Updated August 2003