Ming's musings, March 6, 2009

Thinking about the framework of the inhabitation of the environment in our design process (from Chris Rose’s article) – how is it that we view the problem, how we decide on what we want in the material, how we want it to act…
It is true that how the fabrication of materials run counter to the way the environment interacts with other members of the living nature family. That harm to the environment is not calculated/considered at all in the numbers of the industrial revolution – that it is only several years after the fact, that industries are forced to find alternative for a more eco-sensitive way to do what it is that they do (i.e. do not dump your toxic waste into the river). But how much of that kind of impetus pushes for a new material to emerge? How much of those big industries with their tried and true product really investigate for a new material (process and product). I wonder how much emphasis should be spent on the new eco-sensitive material investigation when in fact that arena is insignificant compared to the production of existing materials – that perhaps our focus is not so much on the new, undiscovered, uninvented but rather toward a modification of the existing harmful, inconsiderate products available on the market. The huge elephant industries needs to change in order to make a significant positive impact on the environment in line with all the little mouse industries – I guess, I feel that clean-up is a major concern in the environment, that it is not enough to be pushing for new frontiers. So much of the environmental problems facing us now are pressing and that it is all about just trying to get the water out of the boat as fast as possible instead of thinking about a new motor.
Biomimicry is a rather exciting field in that science and technology are looking to what was around us all this time, to learn how to design things that can do things more efficiently. Indigenous crafts and technology is so fascinating in that sense, in that there is this high level of sensitivity to the system that is the environment (a pause to look around) so that their products retain draw upon that. I think a lot of our products have no sensitivity to how it works with other products, that it lacks that integration to what surrounds us so much. That there is in mind, this cycle, of birth and death and rebirth, that there is none of this synthetic, cooked materials that cannot be put back into the ground.