Disadvantage and Design

No, but I’ve got a dark brown overcoat…

The latest adverts for super-light, super-green laptops shine a very interesting light on the question of disadvantage and design.

All adverts are designs. They are intended to both cause and remove anxiety.

1. Cause. The manufacturer wants you to feel dissatisfied with your existing product

2. Remove. They want you to feel that replacing it would be a positive step, even to the extent of making the world a better place. 

Examples abound. For instance, those plug in devices that spray perfume into the air every half hour are intended to distress and upset by making you wonder if your house smells. Having it ‘refresh’ (ie pollute) every half hour is presented as a way of providing a nice welcoming environment for family and guests.

But Apple’s latest offering really does take some beating. It is a concious and deliberate attempt to deceive buyers into thinking there is something wrong with their existing model, and that replacing it would help to save the world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bb8Wvw0LCo&eurl=http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=new%20advert%20for%20green%20Mac%20laptop&rls=com.microsoft:*:IE&feature=player_embedded

Some years ago, I was asked by the MD of a large freight company what he could do to reduce his impact on the environment. Should he replace the fleet with a new ‘green’ alternative? No, I answered, he should keep on using the existing fleet until they fall apart. The reason for that is to do with the cost of replacement, which is basically another way of saying that being green means reducing your additional impact on the environment.

According to a friend who works at Arup (a global technology and engineering company), the cost of replacement of a single laptop is a huge multiple of its actual cost and weight. The CPU in a new ‘green’ laptop (like all computers) will be made by creating vast silicon mines; the plastic in the keyboard by drilling into the oceans; the case by melting rocks to extract aluminium. If you include all the materials that were destroyed in manufacturing your light-as-air laptop, it would actually weigh around 100 tonnes. 

If that is how much damage a laptop does, then imagine how much goes into manufacture of a fleet of lorries. Adverts such as the one above systematically make no mention of the environmental cost of purchasing. It is certainly the case that sticking with your existing laptop - no matter how inefficient it is - is better for the environment than scrapping it and building a new one. And note that Apple’s laptop is described as ‘recyclable’ not ‘recycled’.

Adverts such as this are intended to delude people into feeling good about environmental destruction. They lead to the paradox whereby people building a green school will buy new ‘green’ laptops for 1000 children, unaware that they have created a hole in the ground big enough to take 100,000 tonnes of desolation. And that is just for the laptops.

The cost of manufacturer is also a multiple of its sale price - because someone else has to pay to clean up the mines, the smoke plumes, the landfill and the airborn toxins created by the manufacturing process. So when I see an advert describing its product as ‘light’, ‘recyclable’ (not recycled), and free from ‘many’ of the toxins, I don’t see green - I see red.

Before you buy your next laptop please consider the following points:

• All laptops built in the last five years are capable of running any and all office programs.
• New memory costs £20. New batteries cost £30. New hard disks cost £40.
• In order to deliver the laptop at a price of x, costs of several times x will have been transfered to another person or sector of the economy. For instance, manufacturing will be transfered to a country where employees are not entitled to healthcare, and the cost of cleaning up the toxic damage will be transfered to governments or simply ignored.
• Your laptop will have been deliberately designed to look out of date within 12 months. Before replacing it, think about how you use it rather than what it looks like. Wouldn’t it be good if people made old laptops their badge of eco-credibility?

 If you are still reading this I would like to point you towards The Story of Stuff. This amazing and compelling 20 minute video will hold you in its grip and have you squirming as it explains, in simple and elegant ways, just how destructive we have become. It is a truly brilliant basis for teaching about the environment and may help you to see how we create systems that hide the consequences of our actions.

February 24th, 2009 | Category: Design methods, Design on the cheap, Environment, School Technology, Technology | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL