Sustainable Design: Design for Minimise Waste

Design for minimise waste is a important concept of sustainable design. In today's lecture, I have learnt lots of designs, which well present the way how designers minimise even zero waste.

A-POC: Kanazawa 2004 [1]

A-POC, A Piece of Cloth, is a fashion collection of Issey Miyake. Those garments were started with one thread or yarn, and became a piece of fabric. Miyake created textures and designs for this fabric without any waste. 

I was really inspired by A-POC. I learnt that the process of deign could be simple but outcomes could be delicate. Sometimes, we were too fast to save the valuable part. It would be better to slow down and consider carefully the wide range of materials and design. I might need to study how to minimise the waste of knitting samples when I was translating them into garments.

As it was mentioned by Alastair Fuad-Luke, slow design is the spiritual, emotional, and mental art of living, emphasizing creativity and experiences. [2] The difficult part is how to show your ideas and minimise waste of materials at the same time. It requires highly sense of skills. 

Laser Food [3]

Food in our daily life always come with sticky labels. We may never think about the harmfulness of those labels, but actually they did harm our environment. 

A Spanish company Laser Food has developed a machine, which can apply laser logos and other information on food. This machine would reduce the use of paper, ink and glue. It is a amazing progress. It meets the requirement of minimising the waste and also enhancing aesthetic value.

I'm not familiar with this design area, but the spirit they tried to express benefit me a lot. Even a small detail of design is worthy to be noticed. A small change might benefit the environment a lot.

References

[1]Marcus, T. (2004) A-POC: Kanazawa. [online image]. Avaiable at: <http://mds.isseymiyake.com/mds/en/collection/> [Accessed 18 October 2014].

[2]Alastair Fuad-Luke (2014). Slow design. Fanayeco 17 Oct [Internet blog]. Available from: <https://fanayeco.wordpress.com/2014/01/13/slow-design/> [Accessed 18 October 2014].

[3]Laser Food. (2013) [online image]. Available at: <http://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/20/laser-tattoos-replace-sticky-labels-on-fruit/> [Accessed 18 October 2014].