Reflection on “On the road to sustainability”

The article is about a Sustainability Street

program is promoting to the residents in Carlton, North Melbourne and Parkville, the aim is about ‘develop environmentally sustainable ideas’ and ‘new social links between participants and strengthen existing community groups’. The program is divided into different area, such as swapping ‘inefficient incandescent light bulbs for energy-saving compact fluorescent globes’ in Carlton; ‘workshops on water, energy and waste, showerhead exchange’ in North Melbourne Street’; ‘toughest plants in Parkville to save water in the garden’.

Government is now taking actions to save the world. Like the workshop in Carlton, it starts to educate kids to reduce waste and litter. It’s always true to educate the next generation as they will accept easier than what adults or teenagers do. However, this kind of problem should be organized by the other organizations rather than designers. It could be due to these kinds of workshops or programs can be organized by anyone as they are kinds of regular and common event. If designers work on something like this, I’m sure designers are going to lose their jobs as soon as possible as there are no challenges and difficulties for them, which is not creativity. Education is needed, but the “education” created by designers should be different from something like workshops. What we should do is to create some unexpected ideas to punch into audiences’ heart. Although it’s hard to do, we still need to try. It is because audiences are equal to our clients, if they don’t buy or can’t attract them, we are going to unemployed. So we should base on different audience then create different interesting ideas to be suitable to them.

However, I understand designers are getting harder and harder to create something unique as there are so many unique designs have been created in the past. At least, what I believe is to find a way to communicate to our audience, although it’s hard to be something unexpected. As designer sometimes is not just seeking unique, their main responsibilities are to convey message to public.

 

Reference: 2007, ‘On the road to sustainability’, Melbourne news, May, p5.