Road To Recovery

摘要

Take a look around you. Wherever you are there will almost certainly be something that has been designed. The buying and selling of these objects, the way they are made and the people and raw materials that are involved in the making build economies and develop societies. The design industry is a key part of this loop. With around 11 percent of the UK workforce in our sector, we play a key role in our economy accounting for seven percent of the GVA with a third of this coming from consumer related spending.1 Our role of adding value to products is fundamental to the markets. But sadly, our industry, like many others, is only slowly waking up to some of the negatives impacts of this system; the over-extraction of resource, the exploitation of workforces and growing unnecessary waste streams. Ultimately our decisions at the very beginning stages on material specification or assembly process will determine the environmental impact of the things we design, and our industry seems to have very little understanding of this. Why is this so?