Thoughts on Research and Destroy and The Consumer: A Republic of Fat

Research and Destory

There are better things we can spend our time on as designers than what a lot of us are currently doing. It’s important for us as designers to look for problems to solve. You don’t have to work in an agency making ads for businesses that are ruining the environment, economy, world, etc. It’s sort of similar to the work I do at the newspaper. I don’t ABSOLUTELY LOVE designing a newspaper. It’s not very exciting work and there’s only so much room to move around in terms of design, but it pays me money that I need to buy food and pay rent. I think a lot of what I’ve been hearing from my professors and professionals lately is that you can do that crappy day job that pays you money, but have something you’re passionate about that is really making a change that you can do, too. Maybe it even becomes your day job that pays you money. There’s a thing called Passion Projects that’s kind of devoted to things like that (Jessica Hische’s is really good).

“I’m a designer” seems to be a synonym for “I am creative and cool.” The article says, “Designers often consider themselves very noble in their through-thick-and-thin work ethic, their noblesse oblige.” I think a designer can be so many things. We’ve added words before designer like “interactive,” “industrial,” “user experience,” “user interface,” so is it important to determine what kind of designer you are? The whole article is about designers redesigning themselves, so does that mean specifying with these words? Isn’t it good to keep an open mind into other forms of “design”?

I love that the article tells us to do some of our own reading and writing. I think it’s cool how we’re doing writing projects in this class and that we have to read and research. I think it really helps you get passionate about a project once you start researching it.

“In the future, design might have to assume the role of ‘developer’ if it wants to be taken seriously.” I think we’re already doing this. Today when you go for a graphic design position they want you to know how to do front-end development. From my experience, “developers” are thought of as being smarter and cooler than the designer. That’s a basic example, but in other areas I think it’s really important to know not only how to design what you’re doing, but also how to make it.

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Republic of Fat (Excerpt)

My first thought for this article was that we start eating crappy foods at such a young age that we now have to ween ourselves off of sugar and fat. And I don’t think that’s entirely our faults or our parents’. I don’t think they really understood the consequences at the time, but I think we know them now, so our children will grow up healthier (for what we know now, but hey we could have it all wrong, too).

I come from a pretty agricultural community. It’s a town of 25,000 people and I bet everyone at least knows someone who knows someone who is a farmer. Because I grew up there, I know how important corn is to farmers and I want them to be able to continue. My family owned some farm land back in the day that someone else farmed. My best friend’s grandpa owns a farm in Kansas. Farming is important and we can’t just tell farmers to stop producing as much. They don’t make that much money in the first place.

In fifth grade we took a field trip. We were learning about the Ogallala aquifer. We got on the back of a bus in early September with no air conditioning. It was so hot I almost got sick. We went out to a farm that’s above the aquifer and they explained to us how important the aquifer is. We walked around a field for a while, but it wasn’t a corn field. It was soybeans. I was interested that his article mentioned that. We’ve been focusing on corn, but there’s a runner-up in the category of foods ruining our lives. But that’s the crazy part. This whole trip was about telling us how awesome soybeans were and everything that we can make with soybeans. We never had the conversation about corn and how overproduced both plants are let alone how bad for us they are when they’re converted into other things. It’s sort of propagandist, but that’s the community I grew up in and I’ve always thought corn was so great for everyone, so this is an interesting new idea to me.

I watched a Roger Thurow’s Ted Talk a couple days ago and something he said was that it doesn’t work to just send people in poor countries the extra food we have. It’s almost like our way of controlling the poor people and keeping them poor. When you just give them food, they don’t learn to sustain themselves. The economy collapses for the farmers there because everyone just got free food. The important thing is to help them farm for themselves. You know the old saying. So maybe if we just cut back how much we make, the prices might even themselves out. But then what about all the companies making products for farmers to make all this money? We already have enough jobless people. Yes, they can become businesses that help the world rather than hurt it, but people are still motivated by money. We have to make the idea of making the world a better place seem more lucrative than making millions of dollars. I think we have to come up with a way to persuade their attitudes and have a good idea for them before we can force them to stop what they are doing.

We design things to make our lives easier, but it’s almost like we’re making them too easy. People are lazy and we aren’t burning the calories we’re consuming. iPhones are beautiful and make our lives so much easier, but they’re ruining communication. I think we need to think of the consequences of the “benefit” of a new product or system before we make it.