Because calling on people to consume less is important but not enough. A cultural shift is needed, and design can play a fundamental role in transforming our approach to plastics.
Use the smart ones, make them last and design an aesthetic future for their end of life too. This could be the opening statement that sums up the role the world of design is trying to take on in support of the cultural shift needed to reduce the social and environmental impacts that the irresponsible use of certain plastics has caused over the years.
The role of design in addressing the plastics crisis
But design can do a great deal in terms of quality, giving rise to innovative projects that favour eco-conscious materials, raise questions about their environmental value, and encourage new attitudes in everyday use.
The ability to suggest new behaviours is the role design has always played, often starting from new materials, as plastics were in the 1960s. When Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper designed the first children's chair made entirely in polyethylene (the most common of all plastics) for Italian furniture brand Kartell — the first object of its kind in that new material — it was 1964, and plastics still had a credibility to establish. Design's answer was an intelligent, stackable, single-material object, built well enough to remain in the catalogue for over twenty years (it would eventually be discontinued only because the ergonomic dimensions of young children had in the meantime changed), passing from generation to generation, still valid and perfectly functional today in many homes, fifty years on.
Design's response to the environmental drift of plastics still operates at the level of behaviours, though today it seeks, above all, to restore a social dignity to these materials, so that we can all be aware of the choices we make. This is a widespread phenomenon that goes beyond plastics alone. Daphne Stylianou, a design researcher who has worked with Material Driven, a British platform where designers and startups can showcase their material innovations, has called this growing attention that the design community pays to materials' social role "the anthropology of materials." That is to say, their capacity to influence behaviour, and to encourage users towards respect and care — as opposed to the denial of dignity we too often reserve for everyday objects.
A growing number of innovative material design projects across Europe are exploring new sustainable perspectives for plastic, with the aim of transforming unused waste streams into aesthetic materials and bringing bioplastics into design strategies for the production of durable goods. On both fronts, the driving force is producing beauty, in the conviction that design materials can bear witness to the value of making conscious product choices.
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Plastics: waste or resource? Design steps in for intelligent (re)use
Culture & lifestyle — di Frida Doveil
Because calling on people to consume less is important but not enough. A cultural shift is needed, and design can play a fundamental role in transforming our approach to plastics.
