The first Secret Life of Things animation – Life Pscycle-ology exploring the secret life of a little mobile phone
The first Secret Life of Things team is happy to introduce the first animation in the series called Life Pscycle-ology which explores the secret life of a little mobile phone called Eric.
Watch it here!!
By Dan Rule
Pubished 20/7/10 in The Age Newspaper, Melbourne Life, page 22.
Click here for original source
A new animated film addresses issues of sustainability in design with humour in its heart, writes Dan Rule
Image Source: The Age (Fairfax)
ERIC SUN” is not a happy little mobile phone. In fact, he’s up to his aerial in the gloom of an existential crisis. After little more than 12 months, his owner has abandoned him for a sleek, sexy new model.
Perched uneasily on the edge of the couch in his psychologist’s office, he pauses, gathers his thoughts, bottom lip quivering. ”I just feel really worthless,” he stutters eventually. ”My career has only lasted for one year.
”I need a new life, doc, a new direction! There has to be more to life than being stuck in a drawer.”
// Eric Sun is the chief protagonist of Life Psycle-ology, a short animated film to be launched on Thursday as part of the State of Design Festival broaching issues surrounding eco-design and the life cycle of consumer products. The difference being that the film, which is the first in the series The Secret Life of Things, does so with a smile.
”Eco-design has a PR problem and it’s not being communicated very well,” says Leyla Acaroglu, who developed and directed the film through her eco-design consultancy Eco Innovators. ”We’re trying to use humour to engage people on another level.”
”A lot of the information that is around on sustainability and environmental stuff can be quite depressing and can be quite disempowering,” continues the 27-year-old. ”Explaining all the facts and presenting all the doom and gloom side of things, on the one hand, is important, because we all need to get to a point of understanding about the issues, but we also wanted to empower people about what they can do.”
Originally conceived as an educational resource for design students, the film traces Eric Sun’s emotional journey through past-life regression therapy. He learns of his source materials: gold from South Africa, palladium from Brazil, platinum from Russia, silver from Mexico and nickel from Australia. He recalls the joy of regular use and the dismay of failing memory and shortened battery life, only to learn of the possibilities of disassembly, resource recovery and reuse in other electronic products such as USB flash drives and digital cameras.
The mobile phone – something of a poster child for the new generation of high-turnover, comparatively disposable consumer technology – seemed the perfect hook through which to launch the film series. Indeed, according to a recent global consumer survey by Finnish telecommunications company Nokia, only 3 per cent of mobile users internationally recycle their mobile phones. Other studies have the figure even lower.
”The whole thing is based around the idea of product life cycles and trying to come up with a clever way to sort of portray that,” says animator Nick Kallincos, who originally came up with the Eric Sun character. ”The mobile phone just felt right.”
”This is a thing that we all use all the time and are largely unaware of all the materials and all the hidden things beneath it.”
Acaroglu agrees. ”Here were all these quite complex issues, but when Nick came back with this idea of this sad little mobile phone going to his doctor’s office having this existentialist crisis and past-life regression therapy, you just knew instantly that it was perfect,” she says.
Life Psychle-ology screens at 2pm and 6.30pm daily at the Federation Square Big Screen until July 25.
The first animation Life Pscycle-ology from The Secret Life of Things series had its first public screening today at the internationally renowned Federation Square in Melbourne.
The animation is being played everyday at 2pm and 6.30pm as part of the Victorian state of Design Festival held every year in Melbourne. The animation will be avalibel online from this Thursday the 22 July…
Creator of The Secret Life of Things, Leyla Acaroglu was interviewed by Michael short of The Age newspaper in why design needs to have a ‘fourth pillar’ of social and environmental responsibility.
Watch the video interview here >>
A quick look at Life Cycle Assessment
Picture of the life cycle stages that a product goes through
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a scientific method of calculating the environmental impacts of products over their life. This includes getting raw materials, such as metal ores and agricultural materials out of the ground; making basic products such as metals and plastic; manufacturing them into consumer goods; using them; and finally either throwing them into landfill or recycling them.
By looking at the whole life cycle, we dont make the mistake of making judgements based on only one part of a products life. For example, Nuclear energy, whilst having a low carbon impact during operation, has a large variety of impacts during both the mining and refinement stages of its life cycle, as well as during the decommissioning of the plant and treatment and storage of the nuclear waste.
LCA is defined by ISO 14040 as “Compilation and evaluation of the inputs and outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a product system throughout its life cycle”.
Life cycle assessments should be conducted by experts who have developed their skills over several years. In fact in order to get ISO certification on an LCA a peer review has to be completed which means all the data, assumptions and processes have to be checked by another LCA expert to make sure that the study is up to scratch.
Life Cycle Assessment’s show a complete picture of a product’s environmental impacts, it provides a systematic way of thinking that can help designers, product engineers & developers to differentiate the impacts of comparable materials, processes, products and services and allows them to consider and design around the broader environmental implications of the product & service. Without a life cycle perspective, assumptions about environmental impacts and benefits can result in the generation of un-sustainable products and risk accidental greenwashing.
LCA expert Tim Grant provides an introduction to life cycle assessment
More info…
European Union: General guide for Life Cycle Assessment
Eco Indicator 99 – life cycle impact assessment tool
Pre: Introduction to LCA with Simapro 7 (LCA software)
Eco Design Makes Good Cents
There is a common misconception that creating ‘greener’ products will cost more. In most cases the reality is quite the opposite. And I’m not the only one who thinks that ecodesign makes good cents. According to a recent article on the Click Green website:
“If manufacturers were to adopt simple eco-design principles and re-evaluate the production process of just five staple consumer products (kettle, television, mobile phone, fridge, laptop), the UK would save over 8 million tonnes of C02 each year – the equivalent of eliminating over 19.9 billion road miles.”
The article goes on to discuss how more holistic approaches to integrating sustainability can result in up to 60% savings for manufactures:
“…most consumer goods are capable of having their carbon footprints reduced by as much as 60 per cent, if manufacturers adopt better ecodesign philosophies and commit to improving their supply chains and production methods; processes that could actually save them money”.
Integrating sustainability into the design of consumer goods is not rocket science either. It’s about good decision making based on a sound understating on what life cycle stages a product goes through, what impacts can occur across its life and how to strategically minimise these through the design of the product.
Let’s take a kettle for example, the technical efficiency of boiling water is actually quite good in modern kettles, the main impact occurs through waste, and not at the end of life, during use. Most kettles can hold up to 1.7 litres of water, which if your boiling water for a cup of tea is way too much. But that is what most people do, they fill their kettle up with more water then they need and so they waste lots of energy in the process of getting one cup of tea. Another issue is that there is no reminder or indication that a kettle has boiled so they are often forgotten about, requiring the water to be re-boiled. And let’s not even start on the non-insulated design-to-break versions that are readily available…
So the point is, quickest and easiest way to drastically reduce the environmental impacts of a kettle through the design is to consider how it will be used and design in features that will prevent wastage and remind users that they have boiled the kettle!
Check out the Click Green article here
Paper or plastic – which has the bigger environmental impact? Its not what you might think…
Your at the checkout and you have forgotten you green bag (again) and so you opt for the paper bag assuming that this will absolve you of the plastic bag guilt. It seams obvious that the brown, natural looking paper bag would of course be far better for the environment than the plastic nightmare bag… right?
Wrong. A life cycle assessment (LCA) conducted by leading researchers has shown that paper bags are actually more environmentally damaging then plastic bags when a functional unit comparison is conducted.
The research demonstrated that when all the life cycle stages (extraction of raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, use and end of life) are taken into consideration, then the paper bag has almost 3 times as much impact as the plastic bag.
This is mainly because more raw material (paper) is required to achieve the same function. Its heavier and the process of extracting paper from the natural environment is more damaging then extracting plastic.
The study actually looked at a variety of bag options and found that reusable bags were by far the most environmentally preferable option. But that calico bags actually had a very high water and pesticide impact so the good old green bag is best (even when they took into consideration the increase in bin liner sales).
What this shows us is that whilst we might assume that paper is better than plastic based on our associations of a natural product being environmentally superior, when we actually look at the life cycle implications we discover that this assumption is not correct. SO it’s really important that we investigate impact areas across the entire life of a product or material before making decisions about what has an environmental benefit and what does not.
The report of the plastic bag LCA study can be found here and a video of the researcher, Tim Grant explaining the findings is below.
On a side note it is worth bringing up the fact that it’s actually the method of getting the products home from the shop that has the biggest impact. So if you drive then you better make sure you have you green bags with you to reduce the massive impact of you getting your products home!
Life cycle thinking
Life cycle thinking is the best practice way of understanding the world behind the product so that environmentally preferable solutions can be built into the design.
It’s been said over and over again that up to 80% of a product’s environmental impacts are decided upon by the designer at the design stage. But how on earth is the designer supposed to know what these impacts are and how to reduce them?
Life cycle assessment (referred to a lot as LCA) is a scientific approach to assessing the environmental impact of products, systems and processes. It s supported as a leading approach to environmental impact reduction by the UNEP and is currently our best bet for figuring out how to reduce the burdens placed on natural systems through production and consumption.
But, LCA is costly and time consuming, and almost always needs an expert to conduct a respectable assessment. That’s where life cycle thinking (LCT) steps in. LCT is basically a way of looking at design processes and product development from a holistic systems level which allows for environmental ‘hot spots’ to be identified across the life of a product. Then, design solutions and expertise can be used to design in less impacts and create cost effective and sustainable products for clients.
Life Cycle Stages of a product
Recently Core 77 published a great article on Life Cycle Thinking which provided a fantastic exploration of the key themes, advantages and some of the resources that designers can use to develop their life cycle thinking skills.
Every stage in the product’s life cycle has potential impacts on the environment; LCA gives designers the ability to make informed decisions to reduce those impacts. (Lloyde Hicks – Corr 77)
There is also a really useful website full of Life Cycle links called (funnily enough) LCA Links.
The Powerhouse museum in Sydney has also been active in the Life Cycle ecodeisgn space and developed a series of online resources that can be found here.
The Secret Life of Things animations and resources are designed to explore the concepts of life cycle thinking and encourage designers and product developers to integrate life cycle approaches into their core design practice.
Eco Innovators and Tim Grant from Life Cycle Strategies are running a Life Cycle Thinking masterclass in August in Melbourne, Australia more info here
The Secret Life of Things animation to play on Federation Square Big Screen during State of Design
Between the 19th and 25th Jul The Secret Life of Things animation will be played on the Big Screen at Federation Square in Melbourne. Times to be announced.
Everyday at 2pm and 6.30pm
The screenings are part of the Victorian State of Design Festival.
The Secret life of things first animated video called “Life Psychl-ollogy” will be launched along with a pack of educational resources on the 22nd July 2010 at the Victorian EPA offices as part of the State of Design festivale
When: Wednesday 22nd July 2010
Time: 6pm – 8pm
Addresss: EPA offices, level 4, 200 Victoira Street Carlton, Melbourne
RSVP essential as places are limited
RSVP here
