The results of the focus group are as follows.
Issues:
- Straw too short
- Lid needs tamper seal
- Lid could pop open in bag
- Lid too large for bottle
- Change material of bottle
- Graphics could be a problem to apply
Posters:
- Tech drawing confusing
- Show how foil pack is made
- Target market is missing
- How does the product fit in a lunch box
- Use smaller images
- Use more written explanations
Improvements:
- Add age and target market
- State material and manufactoring processes
- Redesign lid
- Incorporate foil seal for freshness
- List advantages of the product on the posters
The Project was to disassemble an appliance and work out how improvements could be made.
The three areas we looked into were, how to increase durability, how to make reparable and upgradable, and finally how to improve dissassembly so that the parts can be reused and recycled.
The photos below show our progress.
The 11th hour
(2007) is a documentary produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, directed by
Leila and Nadia Conners. The film interviews many independent environmental
experts about climate change, what the causes are, what can be done and why
humans are so slow to react. An early quote from Stephen Schneider sets the
scene, “As we destroy nature, we will be destroyed in the process.”
Several of the experts state
that the human brain is the key to our survival, stating that humans are the
only species able to think of the future.
The somewhat typical binary of human-vs-nature
is an underlying rubric to the argument flow of the documentary narrative,
subverting the arguments of economic rationalism with quantitative research
attesting the finite nature of Earth's resources. Conners' argument asserts
that change began with the industrial revolution and the lessening
of sunlight to survive, going on to explore our dependency on fossil fuels
and an increasing dependency on globalised mass farming.
The documentary rings home
with all the radical changes in climate such as the floods, droughts, extreme
hurricanes, highest average temperatures on record. A worst-case scenario for
the future as stated by Stephen Hawking is that earth could become like its
sister planet Venus, where the temperature is 250˚C and it rains sulphuric
acid.
The earth is being radically
changed in a short period of time, and our appetite for consumer goods that
rely heavily on natural resources continues to grow. We are essentially
poisoning the planet.
The argument is compounded
with, typically for infotainment, one of hope. We have a chance to fix this. We
need to reconnect with nature. We have existing technologies to create green
buildings and to retro fit pre 1950’s buildings that could reduce our carbon
footprint by 90%. We need to redesign design. We need to change the thinking of
products from cradle to grave, to cradle to cradle. In nature there is no
waste. We need to have a passion for where you live.
Documentaries
like this serve perhaps as the exact type of passive project, ambitious of some
mythical kind of proto-stimulation in the field that they criticise in
their argument - basically a lot of rich people made this as a feel good
product - placing the importance of human agency squarely on a working class
who will probably never see this documentary.
99.9999% of species are
extinct. Humans can become part of that statistic. The earth will survive. Will
we still be on it?
Image
Video Link
