2/13/13 – Working from “Bigger is Better” to “Less is More”

Interesting factoids given in class today…

Every six hours 1,000,000 plastic cups are used on airline flights. 4,000,000 cups are used a day on airline flights. There are 40 million cups used a day for hot beverages. 400,000 people die every year from smoking.

Wow. Those numbers are shocking… 

I learned, though, that we are in charge of one piece of the solution: Our Own Behavior.

What constitutes need?

This was an interesting question asked by Professor Goldsmith today and it was really well tackled by a TED lecture we watched by Chris Jordan looking at the “accounting of the waste stream”.  All around us is so much waste, so much excess. Food, transportation, housing, automobiles, everything is a spectrum that we out to think about NEED as a third dimension. 

Please see the very interesting video below, I really wanted to share it.

I really like this quote from Chris Jordan “I have this fear that we aren’t feeling enough as a culture right now. We’ve lost our sense of outrage, our anger, and grief about what is going on in our culture right now, what’s going on in our country; the atrocities that are being done in our name around the world.” 

“These feelings have gone missing.” It is so true that our feelings are absent from our culture these days… Not just feelings about the wrongs that are being done to people who are within the environmental injustice sphere, but feelings towards what our kids see on television, feelings towards the rates of diabetes and obesity that are going on in our country… All of it. This video and today’s lecture really opened my eyes to this idea and made me want to do something.

Here’s an interesting quote from class “What people don’t know, they won’t value. And what they don’t value they won’t protect.” 

This quote is really powerful to me because it is so true. If you don’t have any care in the world for people who play sports, you won’t value what they do or how important it is to them, let alone the sport itself. Same goes for all walks of life, all spectrums… I’m learning that we need to work on finding things or ways that we can make people more aware of and that way they will value them more, take care of them more, everything. 

This idea transitioned into our next homework assignment for finding the excess in our lives and a few transition strategies we might be able to implement to cut down with that excess. Basically what would I do to redesign that excess?