The Circle of Life
…and work and culture and design…
Tuesday, 30 July 2019
Hi there!
Long before I saw the animated movie Lion King, I had fallen in love with its musical score. Even today, the circle of life gives me goose bumps.
In the 19th century, the Oak beams in the dining hall of Oxford’s New College developed a beetle infestation and needed to be replaced. Given the sheer size of the beams, the college was worried if they could ever source the right quality of Oak for replacing the beams, and how expensive it might be. It was then that they found out that the College actually had a 500-year old Oak grove on its own property!
Legend has it, that the College knew they will eventually need to replace the Oak beams, and so, had acquired the grove over 400 years earlier.
All circles are not designed equal
In the long run, everything needs to be replaced. The Lion King will eventually grow old. The oak beams will eventually be eaten by beetles.
Businesses recognise this need for sustainability in their internal functioning — grooming their future leaders, re-skilling staff to cope with changing technologies…
Externally though, businesses have largely ignored sustainability — and you could blame that on design decisions aimed at maximising business profit.
For example, Apple, famous for its obsession with design, created brand new screws designed to keep consumers from repairing their iPhones. The company created unibody laptops to make them a fraction of a millimetre thinner, which meant that individual components like batteries could not be replaced. The company also set the trend for most of our smartphones today, that do not have removable batteries.
The circles of our lives are now closer to whirlpools of garbage — where products are created, and then have nowhere to go.
Amid the mounds of humanity’s garbage, businesses profit by promising clean air, water and food.
Reversing Dystopia
Design brought us here, and design can take us out of it.
Apple’s own head office in Cupertino is powered on 100% renewable energy, and the company is actively ensuring that its manufacturing partners across the world do the same.
Over the past several months, I’ve seen a slow rise in sustainability initiatives scattered across the country. A hotel in Dehradun that recycles water, a restaurant in Chennai that offers a discount to patrons who bring their own takeaway containers, and a flea market in Bengaluru that only sells second-hand and up-cycled products…
The wave is slow, and desperately needs to accelerate. But there is hope. There are so many ways to turn this vicious cycle into a virtuous one.
We have a thin window — 18 months — to make a change. We can profit from dystopia in the short run, or take this golden opportunity to stand out as the generation that healed our planet in the long-run.
Sustainability hits close to home, and with social media abuzz with #plasticfreejuly, I wanted to talk about the role that each one of us has to play in the grand scheme of things, in our personal, as well as professional capacity, in making this planet a habitable one for all of us.
Warm Regards,
Kasturika
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