DYB124 Speculative Design Piece
For this speculative design piece, I chose to imagine the world in 50 years after aggressive environmental mitigation in the upcoming years. For the record, I do not think this is a very likely option, but I thought imagining this ideal world, at least in respect to climate change reduction, may create interesting insights for the current world. These insights developed could become a small and positive step towards a more environmentally friendly society.
So the world.
This world consists of major minimalism and re-use.
People live in small to medium sized, mostly self sustaining communities.
A lot of the houses from our current world are still being used and maintained as this saves on pollution created by the house manufacturing process. New houses are minimalistic and made of recycled materials. House decoration is also minimal, with most houses having a very little amount of furniture and entertainment. Plants and trees fill the streets and house lawns are replaced with gardens, creating cleaner air. Limited major leaps in technology have taken place, but the technology from 2021 has been slightly and incrementally improved, but also refined for easier use and less carbon footprint. Travel is either done by walking, or human powered vehicles, including bicycles for medium length trips, and highly efficient and aerodynamic vehicles for longer trips.
There are many jobs available for work, with lots still requiring manual labour as automation would have required increases in manufacturing and demand, and therefore CO2.
Jobs include farm labouring, finance, fabricators, solar and wind power maintenance, clothing, cleaning streets, selling food and more.
There are frequent social gatherings both online and in person, with many activities, from cycling, gaming and book or movie clubs.
Although this is a world which is far from perfect, parts of this world would be great to incorporate into life now. After brainstorming different ways to create this ideal world, various ideas came to mind including ways to increase nature in built environments, sustain a connection to different groups and culture, and also ways to create less waste as people.
After further ideation, I wanted to focus on reducing waste when shopping for food as this would need to be a large change that would happen to get to this world.
My design.
Because of the small communities the new world consists of, the selling of food needs to be done in a vastly different way.
It was found that supermarkets were another weak point of the 2021 society, and needed to be changed to accommodate for a more environmentally friendly world.
The new process can be broken into five steps.
-Food is ordered from a small selection from home via phone/laptop
-The food is cooked in bulk by people within the community
-Depending on the area, food is transported to each house with either a drone or in person delivery
-The food comes in containers that once used, are left out for the delivery service to pick up
-The containers are then cleaned and sanitised, ready to use again
Although there are some drawbacks like a limited choice in food options, this achieves the goal of making food consumption as environmentally friendly as possible.
Firstly, no one use packaging is used, which cuts unnecessary waste and pollution produced during manufacture and after use, and the containers are re-used frequently.
Secondly, food is made in bulk, reducing the waste produced in comparison to everyone individually cooking.
Thirdly, instead of everyone having to make a trip to the grocery store, wasting recourses, only a select few are making the trip to deliver the food.
There are also other benefits. This includes being very convenient for the user, as they do not need to cook food for themselves every day, and they don’t need to clean dishes either. Also, the cooking in bulk reduces the cost to make the food compared to everyone individually cooking the food.
I think something that can be taken from this design that could and should be used in the current world to decrease waste is the normalisation of using package free design for products, and multi-usable bags and containers more frequently. This could be done by incentivising the use of these products via discounts etc.
Throughout this process, I learnt that almost everything we do currently can be improved on from a sustainability and environmental standpoint. Making positive changes will be a gradual process, but there is no perfect world where we do not have an impact on the environment at all.
