I found Don Norman's essay "Being Analog" to be incredibly interesting and applicable to the problems of modern life, and particularly human impact on the climate. When I read the paper, I found myself considering the definition of 'efficiency' and how it applied to the now dangerously accelerated consumption of our world's resources. The questions present a new moral dimension to the world of design.
When efficiency is greatly accelerated on one end of a process, it seems to be lost in another part of a greater process. The efficiency lost may be irrelevant when considering only a small part of the life of an object; in this case, production. In the long run this unbalance has revealed itself.
Overproduction of a systematically generated and adaptable product is meant to fit the rigidity technology to the whim-prone, accident-prone, analog nature of human beings. In the United States we can buy and use resources in various wasteful and ridiculous ways, and technology has deliberately made this possible. Incredible efficiency in production, without efficiency in consumption, ends up using the systematic waste of resources as a way to more conveniently interface technology with its human application.
By not designing every product's purpose from start to end, but instead creating standardized, mass produced products, efficiency is gained in production, but it can be lost equally in distribution and consumption.
This puts a responsibility on designers of not only the products and their methods of production, but the designers of the systems of their attainment and distribution. One of our new responsibilities as designers is to consider ways to combat the imbalance of mass production and consumption, and its symptoms.
One solution is to find ways to make our 'artifacts' more valuable, complex, flexible in use, and durable in themselves--relying on making the product more useful to humans rather than 'making-up' for quality with abundance and interchangeability.
No comments:
Post a Comment