“Ethos: a new voice in design” Lecture

In response to last night’s lecture “Ethos: a new voice in design”:

How come it is all of a sudden now, this year, that sustainability is an issue we need to address at Swinburne, when we have known about the need to become sustainable for many years? Why didn’t we start being active as the design community in sustainability 10 years ago? Was the fact that we could still water our gardens and think it was ok to waste resources because there wasn’t that much in the media telling us otherwise meant that we didn’t worry about how design affects sustainability, because it didn’t seem a big enough issue? How come it’s taken until the panic button is hit to do something?

Denise Meredyth in the panel yesterday called sustainability “trendy”, and then I wonder if we’re doing this for all of the wrong reasons? Sustainability shouldn’t be about being “cool”, it’s about survival and living. Dumbing it down to “trendy” bothers me. It makes me wonder if Swinburne is just latching onto the new trend of being sustainable because it sounds good.

It doesn’t surprise me that much really. The “Australian” ethos seems to run in a leader-follower fashion, where we are reactive, rather than proactive; we won’t do something until an issue reaches breaking point and directly affects our own livelihood. Otherwise we seem to have this crazy notion that someone else will fix it, a “she’ll be ‘right” mentality. We’ve turned our heads away and closed our eyes on sustainability for so long, and now it’s shoved in our faces, we have to apparently do something. Hmm. I don’t blame anybody for this, it’s a tough thing becoming proactive, and needs knowledge to make it happen. And sustainability doesn’t seem to be the most trustworthy media issue either with often clashing findings, which isn’t helping the skepticism surrounding the issue.

Maybe I’m half the problem in my own argument. I am frustrated at Swinburne taking on sustainability and forcing it onto us later and not sooner, because I’ve been brought up in a family who has always taught me to live as sustainable as possible. It’s always been a part of my life, and it used to shock me when I first came to Swinburne how wasteful so many people can be. I ended up shrugging it off and saying “well that’s them and this is me”. Yes, I’m possibly just as ignorant as everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s fantastic we are given projects where we can concentrate on sustainability, and I hope this year we will be able to expand on sustainability in design – whether through educating the public, creating new systems, or even improving existing products, and I’m very excited at the prospects – however I don’t believe it’s taken until now for sustainability to become a “real” issue we need to address at Swinburne.