week 13

At last! this is the last entry for the blog. Through out the semester I have researched and learnt any things. Also I have changed my views about environmental issues and attempted to change the way I act in everyday life. For example plugging out all the unnecessary powers cords, recycling habits and putting rubbish into a bin. Believe it or not I am actually planning to plant a tree in my backyard too!

 

Time management was the key to this project. Although our team management and my communication on team discussion wasn’t up to standards, I tried my best to keep up with other works such as researches and blog entries. I am actually happy about my blog entries regarding management of time with each entries. The worst thing about myself was the getting my thoughts and opinions across the team members. I was not from English speaking background and my team mates were all speaking fluent English. Although I understand the content and discussion in our team groups, it was hard for me to speak up about my thoughts. If I had another chance to speak up in group project like this one, I would have tried even though my English is not up to standards.

 

Although our whole exploring field was pretty much in same area, we moved variously within that topic area. We started from paper consumption and the effect on environment, recycling issues and systems, wastage and sustainability.

 

Consultation with Blair was critical for our project each week, because our topic was so diverse and it has been introduced many times before, we often got confuse about our directions. However with help from Blair each week, we were able to focus on the core ideas and moving forward with our researches and ideas or choose another alternative path. So thank you again Blair!

week12

When it comes close to the deadline for other courses, the time is our enemy. From the last meeting we realized that there isn’t much time left for our installation outcome. Although the idea was great, but there is an issue of timeline and our final report is more important than the actual finished installation work. Thus we agreed to ourselves to put the final report on our highest priority. So basically each one of us had a part for this essay and I got a chance to write my part on ‘recycling’ topic. It was good to have a very focused team meeting and actually sorting out what we actually have to do for this huge report. From the leadership help from our team member ‘Adelaide’ each one of us got a part from this report and clearly now what we are doing for this week and next week.

 

It would have been great to have the installation work done, but our time management skills wasn’t good enough for that I guess. Hopefully we will get the installation work done after this semester during our time.

week 11

From the very start of this project, we knew that it was huge topic to handle. It is so huge that our audiences are so variety that we cannot simply target on one specific age groups. Also it has been done before so many times that we have already seen the result out of this kind of project concerning environmental issues. The results are always been the same but the interesting thing about it is that, the public’s attention is being slowly focused towards this issue and now it is almost becoming like a trend for market industries as well. From this masses of information available and experiencing other outcomes from this topic. We changed and moved backwards and forwards many times during last several weeks of progress. We started out from paper usage then moved into recycle issues and sustainability and now we are basically looking at the core message and trying to interact with people with powerful contents that actually forces them to think about the issue.

week 10

Due to other projects submission day, I wasn’t able to manage myself to write a blog for week 10 on time.

 

It’s been a suffering week for all of us in team. There was deadline, there was stress about our outcomes for this project sunfish. However when we met up this week, it was refreshing for us to came up with close possible solution for our project. Before I discuss about the outcome, I continued my research on sustainability and came across some interesting products that are made out of useless tires. They were tire swings that came be installed at the backyard for kids. However it wasn’t just an ordinary tire swing. It had shapes of animals like, horse, dinosaurs, dog, dragon and etc. Therefore it is more friendly to kids and overcoming the rough and dull appeal of normal tires. This was very interesting find because, it not only functions the purpose of swing, but it is actually interactive for the kids with features like shapes and safety buckles.

 

For our outcomes it has been decided that we are going to the direction where we do more of an installation piece in the public where people can actually see them. Also we are going to use some ways to shock the public and get the message across clearly with sharp messages. For now this is the brief introduction of our outcome for this project.

 

Reference

 

Vacation Gadgets.com

from Backyard section ‘Tire Swings’

website: http://vacationgadgets.com/productmgmt/results.asp?nCatID=12&nSubCatID=165&sSubCat=Tire+Swings+%2D+You%27ve+never+seen+swings+like+these%2E

week 09

Due to ‘AG Ideas’, it has been awhile since our team had the last meeting. Frankly, I sense that this topic needs to be refreshed with new ideas at the next meeting. However while I was continuing the research, one thing fear factor came across my screen. 

The whole thing was presented in series of photograph taken by a photographer called Chris Jordan. Basically the main contents were the endless stacks of garbages and unwanted goods that some were even bigger that a small building. For me it was just frightening experience to see how quick we produce unwanted goods. For example, 426,000 mobile phones are being thrown away in United States everyday. I have to say, it is actually SCARY to think about how much the whole world can produce these kind of unwanted goods. The fact that these photographs are just introducing what’s happening in U.S, it actually strongly appealed to me. Next time when I’m using stuffs, I will try to think about that photographs. Who knows these could change the world.

 

Reference

 

Chris Jordon

from ‘Running the Numbers – An American Self-Portrait’

website: http://www.chrisjordan.com

week 08

 

Based on the word ‘reuse’. I found some information on wikipedia that inspired me to dig in more deeper. One distinctive example was the idea of ‘refill packs’. As long as I can remember, many corporations started using this ‘refill’ system few years ago. In my personal opinion, this is one of the few perfect system with packaging. It is friendly to both companies and consumers. For the companies, they use less money and resources to redesign and reproduce packages which can be covered with the reusable package kept by the consumers. For consumers, they can keep the package and purchase the refill pack with less price, thus impacting less on the environment with less pollution. If the system can be refined and developed further, it could play a huge role on reducing pollution and could possibly change the way we think about packaging.

 

However there are some disadvantages with reusing items. Reusing often requires cleaning or transport, which have environmental costs. Also some of the items costs more during the reusable process and this process often takes time, which is very inconvenient for consumers and companies.

 

After doing some research on this particular issue, the one thing that came up to my mind was that I should at least try to make difference and most importantly, train my kids in the future from the very start. Therefore they could be living an ‘environmental friendly life style’ without even thinking about it. I’m pretty sure this is already happening to other people across the globe.

 

Oh here is the video we shot last week. Check it out!

 

Reference

 

Wikipedia

from the definition and information on ‘reuse’

website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reuse

 

week 07

This post was delayed because our team had huge night filming our video on Sunday. It was a long progress due to the characteristic of ’stop-motion’. We started shooting around at 5PM and we finished about at 11PM. This session was a valuable experience for all of our team member. We realized how much a single person can make garbages in certain amount of time which was stunning. For myself as an example, I started collecting garbage a week before shooting our video and although I don’t have the mathematical figures for this, but it was the size of a small travel baggage.

 

Moving on from the video shooting, our team discussed constantly about the final outcome during the session. Most of the time many opinions of installation of an art work or some kind of public installation of outcome came across between team members.  These ideas would get more specific when we have our next team meeting. I am very looking forward for this projects outcome as well as the video presentation on Wednesday.

week 06

This Tuesday all the team members gathered for the meeting and consultation. It was good to have thoughts about where we are actually going and how we going to end this project with what kind of outcome. Although at the end of discussion we didn’t gain a very distinctive answers for it, but it was great to clean up some unnecessary thoughts and narrow our way to the project aim. 

 

We are now focusing more in to different kinds of recycling, not just paper recycling. Also digging deep more about how we can reinvent, re-use, remake, recreate, re-do or re-imagine out of wastes that we are making from everyday life. This also gave us the freshest idea for our video presentation. It will be revealed when the day comes.

 

This week I researched based on the ‘re’ words and came across with a designer’s website who recreates a beer cup out of beer bottle. This designer collected large ‘heineken’ beer bottles and produced a cup. This cup is actually the perfect size for a smaller sized beer. These can be re-used again after washing them and also the design is quiet simple and elegant so it is very appealing to drinkers.

 

This reveals to me that a simple kind of manipulation actually can make huge benefits and differences. The counter plan doesn’t always has to be big and complicated. It can be simple as ‘abc’ we just have to keep on digging it in our brains. I have a feeling that this kind of act could influence a lot on our final outcome.

 

Reference

 

Haelan Kim

from work section ‘fill it up! (heineken cup)’

website:http://www.haelankim.com/main.html

 

Studi-oh!

website:http://www.studi-oh.com/

week 05

From last weeks journal, I mentioned about the bag that made out of cargo container material. I actually tracked down the documentary that I saw and found out that it was a brand called ‘Freitag’. This brand actually produces variety kinds of bag out of truck tarps (it wasn’t from the airport after all). Considering the strength and performance of tarpaulins materials, these bags are extremely heavy quality and creative design attracts many young people in Europe and spreading all across the globe.

 

Moving on from the Freitag bags, our team met up this Tuesday and talked about the reality of recycling in our minds and the future of recycling. During the meeting we came across with the theory that all this ‘fuss’ and worries about our recycling consciousness will eventually evolve and develop as the time goes on. Thinking about back in the 70’s and 80’s we can clearly see that there has been changes or at least an attempt to make changes. We thought that this ‘evolution pattern’ will grow and our understanding and the view of recycling will become more mature. Thus, by the time of our children which is roughly 20 years from now, people will actually have recycling habits in their conscious. The only problem that if this was true is whether our Earth will make it until the time comes.

 

Then, we questioned that how can humanity speed up this evolution. Well the problem was very clear. It’s either our laziness or the lack of impact on recycling campaign. We thought most of the recycling campaign became boring and even annoying sometimes. This gave us the another brief introduction of outcome direction.

 

The current issue of Earth Hour made me research about the result after the Earth Hour. According to Wikipedia, it turns out to be that Ireland had a reduction in electricity use of about 1.5% for the evening. In three hours period, they saved about 50 megawatts, saving roughly 6 tones of carbon dioxide. Melbourne also saved about 10.1% of electricity. The point is that these kinds of attempt were very new to public and it actually worked to get the message across around the world. Although the attempt wasn’t fully global, I think that if these kinds of campaign keeps on and it will actually evolve in to a solution that might be very effective.

 

Reference

 

Wikipedia

from the definition of tarpaulin

website:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpaulin

 

Wikipedia

frome the definition of Earth Hour

website:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Hour

 

Freitag

from ‘Tarps Resourcing’ and ‘Production’

website:http://www.freitag.ch/shop/FREITAG/page/tarps_sourcing/detail.jsf

website:http://www.freitag.ch/shop/FREITAG/page/production_page/detail.jsf

 

Earth Hour

website:http://www.earthhour.org/

week o4

 

 

Moving on from ‘The Green Dot’ system, our team had a brief meeting on this Friday (28th). The main discussion in our meeting was that recycling wastes into whole new kind of products. For example collecting something that are not usable and renew those materials or products into brand new product. This could be related to previous purpose of material or product or it could something totally different. This could be a functional item or it could be a piece of art. Therefore this points made it clear about our research directions. An art form that is made out of all kinds of wastes could move publics mind and think about the reality of our consumption.

 

Having said about the renewing solutions, one time I saw a documentary about font ‘helvatica’ in other lecture. Through the documentary some company uses the font ‘helvatica’ on their products. The interesting thing about this product is that it is a messenger bag that can be easily purchase by public. However the material that is being used to manufacture these messenger bags were the heavy vinyl materials from huge bags that has been used at the airport(I can’t exactly remember the name of brand and the name of this documentary I saw). I will post it as soon as possible when I do more research on that messenger bag brand. Nevertheless these kind of process is quiet friendly to consumers, because it is a bag with extreme hard quality and also it is very fashionable with particular colours and fonts that were once on the previous product. This gives us a hint that it is much effective for us to approach to the public with consumer or public-friendly outcomes.