The Swine Flu outbreak provides a teachable moment for everyone, but perhaps most directly for industrial designers, that our world has boundaries, and that the purpose of design is not to try to overcome them through technology.
The purpose of design is not to overcome the limitations provided by our environment, by nature. Rather, design should interpret the limits of nature as clues guiding them to the sustainable design of a product or process that makes money in the medium and long terms.
Case in point: In 1965, there were 53 million US hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million US hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities, according to The Guardian. This jump in operational efficiency was achieved by industrial designers at agribusiness giants like Smithfield (the largest provider of pork in the world) who figured out interesting, but ultimately unsustainable, methods for managing the rampant spreading of disease that occurs when thousands of hogs are shoved together like sardines. Nicholas Kristof wrote in the New York Times 6 weeks before the Swine Flu outbreak about "the insane overuse" of antibiotics on industrial hog farms, including rampant preventitive use of antibiotics, which results of superbugs such as drug-resistant MRSA.
But it looks like rampant superbugs spreading amongs swine aren't the source of Swine Flu - no, all evidence points to the manure lagoons designed by industrial pork companies. When there were 1 million hog farms in 1965, the sustainable amount of animal waste naturally fertilized surrounding farmland. Large-scale industrial hog pens would produce too much waste and overwhelm the surrounding farmland. Industrial hog farm designers solved this problem with huge manure lagoons that collect and store tons of waste. This solution didn't work, though, because the massive pools of feces emitted by overmedicated hogs fouled the air with pollutants that poisoned neighboring communities and ultimately produced new diseases, such as Swine Flu. Mexican newspaper La Marcha reported on April 15 of the "fetid odors" and flies hovering over waste lagoons that neighbors of hog farms run by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Smithfield, complained about for years. 30% of these neighbors now have Swine Flu.
The point of this, though, isn't to go off on Smithfield. (If you're intested in industrial hog farming, you can learn more here.) The point is to reorient the direction of modern design and technology. The purpose of design is not to overcome the limitations provided by our environment, by nature. Rather, design should interpret the limits of nature as clues guiding them to the sustainable design of a product or process that makes money in the medium and long terms. That's why it's essential that good designers also be environmentalists, because we live and breath in an environment that has limits and naturally designed processes that operate optimally within those limits. Why not begin design by learning, mimicing and even having some wonder about these natural limits and processes? This has to be the starting point of any design that will work for the long term.
Is this naive? Only if creating shareholder value is naive, because Smithfield's shareholder value has plummeted from $30 per share a year ago to $8 today.
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