Sustainability, Opinion, Apology,

Recently, there's been a noticeable increase in the interest of sustainability (within my peers). This could be due to a combination of a number of things, the fact that in our Design Studies classes we are discussing the book Cradle to Cradle, or that last semester our fellow student Chris McNichol created the quite outstanding "Cardboard Radio", which seemed to get people thinking about how their products could be sustainable.

Anyway this is drifting from my point, it being that with this added interest in going green, it seems to have caused a slight rift in the harmony of the class.

This came to my attention on Thursday, after we had been given a pretty damn interesting talk from 4th year Product Designers Fergus, Matthew and Tom. Within it, I felt there was a really valid and critical point made by Tom. He simply stated that sustainability is currently a fashion statement.

Personally, I couldn't agree more with this, but don't get me wrong, I am all for sustainable living and thinking, I just think some people are going about it in the completely wrong way. Currently we seem to have a really critical system in place, where everything is valued on economical viability. Now some people agree with this, and state that without thinking this way, how else are we going to save the planet? Others think this over-analyzation is ridiculous. It doesn't take a genius to see that these views conflict.

My personal opinion? I agree that we need to think about sustainability, it's an exciting area and holds so many amazing possibilities; especially biomimicry. However, I feel I need to stress that I think people are jumping on this sustainability bandwagon, and forcing it upon themselves. It feels like it's the flavour of the month and people are simply talking about it because it's popular.

Which brings me to my next point, in our presentation a couple of Mondays ago, we mentioned sustainability. We at Unbox know this didn't go smoothly with our presentation, and know it looked like a rush job added in at the last minute. I found out a couple of days ago, that presentation seemed to have dented our popularity amongst our peers, for the very reason I just mentioned. The "flavour of the month" thought, coupled with the less-than-smooth addition to our presentation led people to believe it was a crude addition in order to gain a little extra credit. All I can say is that it wasn't, but we apologise if it appeared that way.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on what's been written here.

PS. This was not a dig at sustainability thinking, just the way it's portrayed. I would like to get that point across!

ah.