The Future of Industrial Design

"What would happen if...?"

by Collin Dunn

reen-minded, sustainable industrial design is certainly nothing new. Unfortunately, designers have gotten a bad rap from time to time for being unnecessarily wasteful and dreaming up ridiculous ideas and products that have no practical application at all. I think we all remember the Rubix cube; need I say more? The same accusations are true in the fashion industry, certainly, but if anyone out there things that great, green things aren't happening in fashion, go read about Johanna Hofring and eat crow. Industrial design is all around all of us, everywhere, and not all of it good.

But I have seen the future, my friends, and the future is good. I recently had the pleasure of visiting an industrial design class at the University of Washington as they presented their final semester projects. Before I can tell you what I saw there, consider these products: used semi-truck brake pads, last Sunday's New York Times, unused athletic shoe insoles, empty soda cans, and discarded paint chips. All of these things usually have a one-way ticket to either the trash can or the recycle bin, and in both places they eventually add to the collective pile of junk that is waste created by human beings living on this planet. Keep these items in the back of your mind, and ask yourself, "What would happen if...?"

This is the question that each of the design students found themselves answering as they endeavored toward creating something useful from something they found in the garbage can. Professor Louise St. Pierre asks her students to consider alternative prospects for the products they found. "I want my students to be able to look at important questions from very divergent perspectives," she says. She wants her students to be able to harmonize what humans need and what humans want; admittedly, this is not an easy task, but in the end all came up with something that even MacGyver would be proud of. But how?

Bookshelves made from brake pads? Oki-dokey.
Remember those brake pads, newspapers, insoles and cans? They all no longer exist in their original form. The brake pads have been redesigned into "Oki," a bookshelf and a catch-all bowl, the brainchildren of Lauren Saint, Egan Metcalf and Christine Lee. The curve of the pad has been re-imagined and serves as both the edge of the bookcase and the basin for the "catch-all" bowl, a great place for keys, change, cell phones and the like. The simple shape and antiquated look gives the appearance of an artifact found in a New Delhi street market, though in truth, Oki is the most well-traveled bookcase you'll ever find; it just comes by way of the long-haul trucker and not the Third World ceramics-maker.

Recycled newspaper and plaster make up most of the "Rinnova planters."
The newspapers, comics and all, were shredded, mixed with plaster, and molded into planters, complete with drainage holes and a wooden stand. Though not large enough to cultivate a summer watermelon or ear of corn, they are a perfect fit for urban windowsill gardening. A sleek, smooth design gives them a classic look and feel. The foks at IKEA would kill to get their hands on these planters, though team members Dylan Davis, Marcel Blabolil and Jean Lee might first want to come up with a more Swedish-sounding name than "Rinnova planters."

So what happens when the paint store down the street decides to stop carrying "Summer Peach" or "Lipstick Pink?" Usually, all of these paint chips go straight to the garbage or recycling bin, to make way for "Indian Summer Peach" and "Lip Gloss Pink," but Terri Lee, Chuck Ely and Michael Nash turned them into "Hue" lights. With 1001 different color combination options, you can finally have a lamp that perfectly matches your "Canary Yellow" walls.

Recycled pop culture.
The final project showcased an ingenious way to recycle pop culture: coasters made from aluminum soda cans. A flat metal coaster is a little on the thin side, so each coaster was padded with an unused athletic shoe insole, discarded by the hundreds at your local shoe store when people insert their custom insoles. Framed by vinyl tubing to eliminate the dangerously-sharp edge of the cut aluminum, they fit perfectly inside tuna cans for a simple, unique and functional package to a nifty, fun product.

The one common denominator with all of these projects is that aesthetics and the materials and resources used to make them are equally important. Professor St. Pierre stresses the need to view the world from many divergent perspectives; it isn't just about creating a product that is beautiful. She says that beauty is innate, and all human cultures pay attention to beauty, thereby making beauty a human need. She reminded me that Buckminster Fuller once said, "If I look at a design and it isn't beautiful, it doesn't work," so while the beauty paradigm is an important one, industrial design cannot be about beauty for beauty's sake. She wants her students to reach beyond something that is just in good taste today; a product that has "enduring beauty" are ultimately the most successful, and the most sustainable.

Long into the future, as long as human beings traverse the earth, we will need stuff, and people to design this stuff. After seeing what is waiting to be unleashed on the world, there is no limit to the heights that green design can climb. I'm happy to say that, for these students, the future of industrial design is now.

Collin Dunn is Editor-in-Chief of SASS Magazine.






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