So I’m sitting here in a tidy room, bag packed, passport ready. I leave for Hong Kong in 5 hours and will be in the East for almost 4 months. I’ll be working at Mattel for 3 months with onward journeys to Thailand and Japan. I won’t kid you around, I’m pretty dam excited. This is going to be an adventure and an experience that I hope I can share with everyone I know and don’t know.
A few days ago I watched a bunch of TED Talks that had piled up in my Podcast page in iTunes and among them where 2 talks I thought showed the duality of design at the moment in our society. The first were actually two talks: on one side by Ideo Founder David Kelley, the other by British “brand guru” and fellow Ideo employee, Paul Benett, and on the other end of the scale was a talk given by Alex Steffen of worldchanging.com. Now, as much as I liked both sides of talks I found myself getting increasingly angry by the guys at Ideo. They were very pleased with having a design approach that was human centered and with that I agreed wholeheartedly. They are tapping into what it means to design based on the experience the user has with an object as discussed by Peter Merholz over at his Core77 article, but that was it. They stopped short of looking at a products life span and sustainability. This came as a sharp contrast to Alex’s talk about sustainability and the importance of not just thinking of ourselves but our environment around us. Now I admit I’m grossly over exaggerating Ideo’s reluctance to look at sustainability as first of all they did some great work with the people in sub-Saharan Africa with a water pump, and secondly the time difference between the talks should be taken into account, but the biggest and most important consultancy in the world should be taking the lead here, they should be really pushing for sustainability in everything that they do.
So what’s this got to do with me going to Hong Kong? Well I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability recently and what it will mean to what I will be doing in Hong Kong for Mattel. How does sustainability fit into toy design? What is its future? Sooner of later toy companies will have to come over to the side of sustainable design. Toys exist to educate our children so surely we should teach by example. I’ll be keeping this in mind once I start working. Should be interesting to see how my view of things change. See you on the other side.
One Comment
Interesting points Mac. I would say that you are making the argument a little black and white (Or Black and Blum?). Sustainability is all very well, but I think you are using the term to describe the physical sustainability that is the design buzz word at the moment. Of course if we are to look at this aspect to sustainability then there are plenty of smaller toy companies that make well crafted simple wooden toys from sustainable sources, and these little shops do well for themselves in their own spheres of influence. But these shops are small and globally insignificant I suppose, which is a shame. Sustainability in this format suggests to me a backwards world without money, where the village society reigns supreme and artisans and craftsmen serve their own small communities. Of course this utopia would also see wide-spread disease and poverty because you can’t make decent hypodermic needles out of tree bark and animal skins. I think I’m being facetious, but luckily I enjoy being so. Anyway, I think their is another kind of sustainability. Emotional sustainability. Toys are not products, the toy industry is not an industry. Toys are encapsulated memory, bubbles of hope and dreams and mystery, full of games and play and personal identity. The toy industry merely manufactures lumps of malleable imagination. A toy carefully placed into a child’s development can catch hold in their memory and represent key times and experiences. That way a memory is preserved, distilled if you like, into a a shell. I think another issue to consider, therfore, is not just about manufacturing toys that are physically sustainable (although undoubtedly this will be the natural progression of the industry whether conscious or not) but about designing products made of fine cheese-cloth imagination-netting for catching dreams. Er…yep.