Designer - humanist
"The Republic of Poland [...] ensures environmental protection, guided by the principle of sustainable development."
fragment of Article 5 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland
How many Poles know that the principle of sustainable development is enshrined in the Basic Law? And how many designers, entrepreneurs, and finally decision-makers follow this principle in their activities? A rhetorical question... I think it is worth, at every opportunity, to show examples of activities consistent with the (after all, simple) idea of maintaining the balance of development of three elements - society, environment and economy, in such a way as not to limit the possibility of their continuation by "what comes next" us…".
"The civilizational threat is so justified that it requires a change in the way we think about product design," we read on the website of the People - Innovation - Design Foundation. We subscribe to this statement. The work of a designer educator is (and certainly should be), in principle, as lawyers say, consistent with this idea. After all, we work with young people who will soon shape - literally - our material environment. Probably all product design studios at the design faculties and courses of our universities carry out tasks without forgetting about environmental protection or energy saving. Every departmental exhibition, every review of diploma theses, every design competition shows in the proposals of young designers their awareness of the threats posed by producing an increasing number of new (often unnecessary) products. Added value, understood as a proposal to solve problems, challenges, as a consequence of the rapid changes taking place around us, should be (and is) the goal of contemporary designers. Demonstration and emphasis of these values are visible in many implementations, especially in studio projects.
A good example is the design of a city charger made by students of the Faculty of Architecture and Design of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, Sara Wikieł and Justyna Chodnikiewicz, for a competition organized by the Gdynia Design Center. In addition to interestingly solved functional problems and an original proposal for organizing space, the authors devoted a lot of effort to powering the charger with renewable energy. They made reliable calculations of the power needed and then proposed interesting solutions to obtain it. Due to their large surface area, they placed photovoltaic panels ("solar batteries") on the roof of a nearby building, and also proposed an alternative to energy obtained from the sun in the form of swings installed nearby, equipped with generators that produce electricity during play. An important element of the entire system are colorful pipes illustrating the flow of energy, equipped with indicators signaling its generation. I mentioned this project because usually in such studies we only see a black rectangle "drawn" somewhere on the side, symbolizing a solar battery, which has nothing to do with the energy needs of the designed device.
Another, slightly older but still little-known studio project is Marta Cieślicka's solar flashlight. The designer drew attention to a commonplace - we need artificial light when it's dark, and we can only charge the battery when we don't need a flashlight. So she proposed a clever, effective solution for transforming the "device" by the user so that during the day it is a photovoltaic panel (there is no flashlight in sight) which, when it gets dark, we "scroll" to the other side, creating a convenient handle for the light source. The project was created in the Product Design Studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.
I use these two examples to illustrate our (in this case, educational designers) approach to sustainable development issues. We do not set students theoretical, academic tasks. We expect answers and proposals for solutions that can be implemented (after appropriate refinement) almost immediately. However, always emphasizing, and sometimes clearly emphasizing, the importance of thinking not only about the direct fulfillment of current needs but also about threats to future generations. The cited studies show how interesting it can be to set the condition for using renewable energy to implement a given function.
The attitude of designers to the idea of sustainable development was aptly defined in his statement by Andrzej Śmiałek, creative director of Ergo:design , lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow: "My reflection on the value of sustainable design, i.e. design that meets the needs of the less wealthy, deprived of the opportunity to participate in the "madness" of buying and consumption and takes into account the needs of future generations, refers to many years of experience and results from the need to break the stereotypical thinking of producers, but also designers, about the place of design in the modern world.” And further: "Design refers to the future... Therefore, we should remember that currently emerging ideas and discoveries will be developed and implemented in the coming years, or even decades, and will therefore have an impact on the quality of life and attitude of future generations." (full statement on the website of the Institute of Industrial Design).
"It is not the product but the person who is the goal," noted Moholy Nagy, a lecturer at Bauhaus, the first modern design school, a hundred years ago. No contemporary designer should ever forget this. Humanism is the content, the meaning of our profession. Otherwise, instead of enriching the world with new values, we litter it.