The plus­mi­nusten pri­vate open­ing recep­tion took place last night and finally I saw my entry printed and on dis­play at The Gallery (Old School). Ten design­ers in Sin­ga­pore were invited to design a poster for each of Dieter Ram’s ten good design com­mand­ments. I ended up with “Good design is environmentally-friendly”.

I had a chance to meet other par­tic­i­pat­ing design­ers like Abdul Basit Khan for the first time. Among the famil­iar faces are Jonathan and Ron­nie. Dar­ryl who is a Lik­ables user was also there. Then there are also the usual groups of phonies which at least helped make the venue lively.

Some of the the works on dis­play are quite out­stand­ing such as Daniel Koh’s clever Letraset con­cept. Oth­ers were taste­less and while right on topic are philo­soph­i­cally shal­low and aes­thet­i­cally irrel­e­vant to any­thing Dieter Rams.

Good design is long-lasting – Daniel Koh

Good design is environmentally-friendly

My poster was sec­ond on the alpha­bet­i­cal dis­play after Abdul Basit Khan’s. Mine was one of the only two black posters is prob­a­bly the sim­plest among all.

Good design is environmentally-friendly (photo by Clarence Aw)

I did my research around prod­uct design and the envi­ron­ment. I’ve looked at how mate­r­ial selec­tion impacts the envi­ron­ment. So it turns out that much of the effort to reduce envi­ron­men­tal impact is around reduc­ing one’s car­bon foot­print by reduc­ing energy con­sump­tion – in man­u­fac­tur­ing, trans­port and prod­uct use. Take for exam­ple Apple. Apple designs slim and light-weight com­put­ers that use less mate­r­ial and there­fore less energy in the trans­porta­tion of these mate­ri­als. Besides using less mate­r­ial, they’ve cho­sen mate­ri­als with lesser toxic sub­stances which harms the envi­ron­ment. They’ve also reduce the size of prod­uct pack­ag­ing so each plane can carry more.

And there’s also the thing about planned obso­les­cence. Today’s prod­ucts are made with a lim­ited lifes­pan so peo­ple will keep buy­ing new… obso­lete things. Vitsœ’s phi­los­o­phy is the oppo­site of that because they make fur­ni­ture that last a life­time. Vitsœ’s 606 mod­u­lar shelv­ing sys­tem designed by Dieter Rams in the 60s is still widely used today and is a per­fect exam­ple of sus­tain­able design.

Pro­por­tions

So in my poster design I incor­po­rated these two con­cepts. Black rep­re­sents car­bon and the neg­a­tive impact on the envi­ron­ment. The white Vitsœ cab­i­net unit is used as a minus char­ac­ter to rep­re­sent both reduc­tion and sus­tain­abil­ity. It’s a very sim­ple design.

The exhi­bi­tion will run from 11 to 24 Novem­ber at The Gallery (Old School). Thank you Felix and Ger­maine for the great event and exhibition.