We had a talk with Sooraj S S(NID Product Design 2019 Graduate) , who had done his project on “Possessed by Possessions” and a Graduation Project on “Right to Repair”. Talking to him for almost 3 hours gave us some feeling of hope. He gave us a small glimpse of the other side of the whole system. “What if its actually good?” “Maybe Industrialization got the cost down so low that everyone could afford it?”. They looked mainly into the Behavior patterns of the customers and their decision making and buying choices. He told us System is like a “Bag of jigsaw that is shuffled and juggled till it all fits perfectly in each other ”
Useful Insights for us :
- Look for small change- they can create huge ripple effects and can be implemented easily.
- Start connecting dots- think in multiple and parallel lines
- Think of as many keywords as possible
- Think of ways to create Impactful Awareness.
- How to design to make things satisfactory enough
Do look up their amazing work on https://www.behance.net/gallery/59486589/Systems-Design-Possessed-by-possessions
Today we started the day with trying to trace our personal journey to this topic. When did each one of us become so conscious about having so many products and not buying more? Was is always about sustainability, recycling etc…? and after having a walk through our memory lane we realized, it all started with money. As a child we were just made very conscious about spending the money we had.Words such as sustainability and recycling were not in our dictionary then. Recycling was jugaad that we did to save money. It was natural to use broken and thrown away thing to make it into something useful to save the money we had. Maybe this extended on and became a way of life for us. That got me thinking , were kids a good target to concentrate on? “Catch them young?”
Afternoon we attended the talk by Rebecca Reubens (Author of the book Bamboo), who talked about the History of Sustainability. It was refreshing to see words and aspects we were addressing put very well structured and in a linear way. It was an easy story that gave us a good idea about how it all started. While talking to her personally we realized , we had moved so away from our initial topic that now we had no idea where we were. We wanted to know how we can impact the system. Understand buying behaviors, Understand Economics and the capital aspect, and where do we fit in as consumers who are designers.
“What did we want out of this project?” “What to do tomorrow?” and most importantly “What was our topic?”
Design Less; Design Right 