The New Designer by Manuel Lima

Author:Manuel Lima [Lima, Manuel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Design thinking; design ethics; design impact; responsible design; design for good; good design; design strategy; designer; design practice; 21st century design; Manuel Lima; The Book of Trees; Visual Complexity; The Book of Circles; TED
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2023-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

Environmental Impact

7

Design is for humans

You have to demand the type of future that you want to recognize.

—Julia Watson1

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.

—Stewart Brand2

In 1992, architect Michael Brill was commissioned with an unusual brief. He and his team had to come up with a solution that could express danger to generations thousands of years into the future. Effectively communicating with other people living six or eight thousand years from now is no small feat. What symbol or graphical representation could be used to guarantee the successful decoding of the message, particularly if no modern-day written language is likely to last that long? Is there a universal, enduring metaphor for hazard? The unusual brief came from Sandia National Laboratories, which invited artists, designers, and architects to help them communicate the location of a new underground nuclear waste facility in Carlsbad, New Mexico. In operation since 1999, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is a deep geological repository that stores radioactive waste in a salt formation 2,150 feet (660 meters) underground. The plant is licensed to store the waste from the production of US nuclear weapons from twenty-two generator sites for up to ten thousand years. This waste can remain radioactive for at least 100,000 years.

This might be one of the most extraordinary design challenges of all time, and it has long occupied my mind, in part because of the thrill of creating a unique means of communicating with unknown future individuals, possibly even nonhuman individuals, and the monumental consequences of failure. The range of design concepts produced for the design challenge was remarkable. Out of the many ideas that didn't rely on the use of written language, such as pictograms of humans faces experiencing pain or a depiction of Edvard Munch's painting The Scream, was the riveting proposal by Brill and his team. Titled “Landscape of Thorns,” the plan featured massive granite thorns poking up from the ground as a threatening sign to future generations that this was not a welcoming place. The fact that we all have an innate fear of sharp objects in nature and associate them with danger could work in favor of Brill's solution. Think of the thorns of a plant or the cutting edge of a rock. We have developed an instinctive aversion to them because they can really hurt us. Perhaps if future generations were to see such a frightening landscape permeated by granite thorns they will perceive it as something threatening and worth avoiding. We can only hope.

This design challenge also puts into perspective how long our stuff lasts. Not only have our cities and large structures had an undeniable impact on the planet over the past ten thousand years, but even if we stopped all that we are doing today—if we simply vanished suddenly—our stuff would still be around for thousands of years with the potential for inflicting further harm. One way of taking accountability for this is to expand our concept of the present. A similar approach has been pursued by the Long Now Foundation.

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