It was a pretty eye-opening point during the first part of the last class how much effect we as designers will actually have on the environment. To think about it in a way that more than just affecting our immediate surroundings is a new way of thinking for me. I have thought of aesthetics and sustainability in the past as two seperate and equally desirable things. But his example of having to cut down a rainforest to put in a hardwood floor gives them a new and very interconnected meaning. What we have to do for the aesthetics we desire needs to be considered on a world wide basis before we can just go ahead. I believe this is the real problem of our time that we are not aware of a lot of our own mistakes because they are “away” from us. But as has been mentioned in our ecology and design class before in nature there is no away. It is part of a bigger system that we effect in everything we do. The other thing in that lecture I liked was when he talked about how we are trying to make human solutions for natural problems and how it does not work. We need to reconnect with nature in an extreme way to understand the world we have “created”.
- Beth
