With this slide, Saul Griffith, inventor, MacArthur Fellow, Ph.D., launches into his presentation at San Francisco’s recent AIGA event, Compostmodern. I saw a re-broadcast of Saul’s speech at AIGA Portland’s event of the same name, that also featured Brian Dougherty from Celery Design. Shortly after showing this provoking slide, Saul is quick to report that he hopes this is not true, he hopes that there is still a chance for design to change the world, and he devotes the remainder of his presentation to showing us how.
First, Saul presents the problem we all face: climate change. He shows how he evaluated his own lifestyle and figured out how much power he required in watts annually. He included not just the typical statistics, the power used in heating/cooling his home, the miles he drove, etc, but also he included all the objects he owned and factored in the power used to bring that product to life. These results were populated in a graph. The largest portion shown on the graph represented all objects that he owned that were designed, and this is the area he challenges the audience to rethink. He calculated the average watts used per person in North America at 11400 Watts, compared to the average European at 5400. Obviously this heavy power use has damaging side effects, as most of our current power sources expel carbon into the atmosphere at a rate of 8 billion tons of carbon every year. Which in turn, scientists now agree, is contributing to global warming and cli...
