Charlie Humble-Thomas: Conditional longevity
Human creativity is one of the world’s wonders. We’ve been using it tirelessly, trying to improve the quality of our existence for millennia. As much as we are successful by doing so, we tend to ignore the consequences of our creativity. We became the biggest threat to ourselves, and now, more than anytime before, we need to make our decisions more consciously. Charlie Humble-Thomas — an Industrial Designer — explains different factors that may impact a product’s environmental footprint alongside its look and feel.
Becoming Charlie
Tell us please about your path to becoming a designer.
Charlie: I think that when I was younger, I was trying to follow a path of maybe a more traditional academic route to go and study history, French, to try and be involved in books and literature and stuff like that. But as I got closer to go to university, my my mum just reminded me, “Charlie, you’ve been drawing your whole life, been drawing and making things from day one, making things out of Lego, always making things.” She said, “I think you really need to think hard about what what it is you want to do later.” One good way of doing that was to do an art foundation course. So I just said, “I’m going to give it one chance and give it one year.”
I think it was just immediately clear to me that this was what I was meant to do, I was meant to be playful, to use materials. I’m kind of someone who’s always been obsessed with objects, factories and industry, things like that. So it’s just was a natural kind of return to what I actually loved rather than what I thought would be a good career.
The intention
Why did you decide to work on the project?
Charlie: The project is called Conditional longevity. The whole idea behind it was to look at this question “how long should objects last?” Every day we encounter objects that we may use only for a couple of seconds. They do the job, but they’re vastly over-engineered for their purposes. You might use a coffee cup lid and that coffee cup is actually quite hard to recycle. It takes quite a lot of energy to bring it back into the system. The value of the material is actually quite low and we just sort of don’t think about it. We just throw it in the bin.
I wanted to try and understand this idea of longevity a bit better, because it’s something that people, I think, have a general sense of, but perhaps don’t understand fully. I came across the term properly in a project previously with Andu Masebo & Jesse Butterfield, from the Institute of Goodness. So Andu came up with this idea of saying, “if you could calculate all of the sustainable elements, all of the processes, all of the energy, all of the cultural meanings behind an object and what the impact of it is, could you give it a score?”
One part of it was about understanding how long an object should last, what its longevity is. If you make a chair of still and only lasts for a week or two and breaks, that is a huge investment of energy and carbon and materials. But we completely overlook it. I think it’s something that’s stopping people, consumers from moving on. So I wanted to really look into that.
“Conditional longevity”
How did your process look like, what challenges did you face?
Charlie: Partly because of covid I didn’t have access to a workshop. I spent a lot of time modelling things in modelling software. Making CAD models is actually a big part of my process because you don’t need to invest in materials, however much I love prototyping. I find that CAD can allow you to assess ideas that would otherwise be very expensive to prototype. So really early on, I was looking at those kind of more final images and feeling, “is it worth taking this to the next level and starting to develop the actual story behind that?” I started to remove my ego from the process to look to try and go like, “does it do what it should do?” When I decided to choose the umbrella, that was really a decision that was more about the feedback I’ve received, the impression I was making on people and the reactions that I was getting such as “keep it simple, keep it straightforward, by choosing an object allowing the conversation to be much, much more clear cut.” That’s kind of the way that I ended up going towards that.
“Keep it simple, keep it straightforward, by choosing an object allowing the conversation to be much, much more clear cut.”
That process was very nerve racking and taught me a lot about the realities of industrial design. You can sit here and say, “oh, I’ve got an object, I’ve designed something; it’s beautiful, I’ve got renders; but can you actually execute it?” I think the most nerve racking part of industrial design is that commitment, because if you made a single mistake and they spend 20 hours making it, that’s your mistake. I do like a last minute check. For instance, I tested these things just before I sent off for the stuff to be made. I wanted to see what the size of this was, if it was going to be too big on the outside for the fabric. I’m so glad I did it, because when the objects arrived, they were exactly the same scale and it was tested, and I can’t imagine what it’s like working at NASA when you have to get that machining done. It’s going to cost them hundreds thousand pounds and that final sign off is a tough responsibility.
Recyclable umbrella
Early on when I decided on the umbrella I initially wanted to make 6 umbrellas. What I realised quite quickly was that not only was my passion about how people in the industry make things, but also that I wanted to challenge methods that we trust that inherently cause problems. Products that people think are great for the world are quite often not right for the world. People demonise plastic but in my view, plastic is a hero. It’s a material that has probably saved billions of tons of carbon dioxide in some cases.
So the first thing I was the concept that I call a reappraisal of plastic. When you buy an umbrella, it’s got mixed materials. It’s got injection moulded plastic, steel, a fabric, all these different things all mixed into one. When it breaks down after short period of time, it’s very hard to recycle that object because you have to pull all the materials apart. That basically means it goes to the landfill. I wanted to challenge that by creating an umbrella that is made from one material only.
So I started with polypropylene. The idea is that every single part is made from the same undyed white polypropylene plastic. The canopy is made from recycled non-woven Polypropylene fabric. The idea is that all of the mechanisms are made from one material. It’s a huge challenge and I think it’s really why we’re in the situation we’re in. Metal is very strong, fabric is stretchy, you use them in the right scenario but what you end up with is a lot of landfilled or objects that are incredibly complicated to recycle. So the idea behind this is that you may own an umbrella for a short period of time, you use it a few times, that’s kind of normal behaviour. But when it dies it may go straight into recycling as one, it’ll just be melted down. Less landfill. Careless & realistic behaviours catered for.
Repairable umbrella
This repairable umbrella is trying to get sort of understand whether or not repairability is actually what we want, whether it’s the right thing to do, what are the downsides of it. It’s really interesting because actually an umbrella is an object that when it breaks, we don’t really have the tools to fix it.
The basics of an umbrella, say the hub and handle, all of the arms, the pivot points, I tried to make it like Lego or Meccano. Each hub has ‘a tooth’. Each tooth then has the pivot point and you have a pin that sits in there that is all using Allen Keys. I wanted every single part to be approachable. The idea then is that you have standardised components at this base, all the parts, and they’re the same as the ones in the top.
So if you are going to make things repairable, standardise them, make them more approachable, make them using fasteners that people look at and they are familiar with. Because as soon as a part isn’t standardised it can’t be fixed. So they just end up in the bin. I think we have to try to create a dialogue with people, “hey, look, you know these machines, they’re actually quite approachable.”
So they have screws on the front, they have bolts. It’s almost like saying, “hey, fix me if you want to.” And I think that’s really what this umbrella was trying to do. What’s super interesting is that when you make something repairable, you inherently make it more complicated.
Indestructible umbrella
So the final umbrella is the indestructible umbrella, but I realised that this was a bit of a problematic thing, because if you tell people things are indestructible, what’s the first thing they try and do? They try to destroy it or they try to test it to the extreme. I think any object can’t really be described as indestructible, but ultra durable was the idea I was going with.
I always love very hard core objects that are made in extreme ways. From when I was younger, my dad was in the army and he had a lot of objects that he’d bring back to the house. In the army, if you have a water flask, it has to be made from aluminium thus it’s very unlikely to break. I became very used to objects like that. I wanted to challenge this idea that those objects are inherently good and positive. We quite often think that we should get the metal drink holder rather than the plastic one, because the metal ones are going to last longer. What’s interesting is people automatically think this is good. What I found when I made it was essentially that the whole umbrella was incredibly heavy. The idea is that all of the structures are made from stainless steel. So obviously, it doesn’t rust very easily. The struts are then made of carbon fibre, which is super durable whilst remaining flexible.
What I found is that basically that these durable objects, they are sold so often likely to be made from higher energy processes. The Durable umbrella would need to be used 16 times to be the same equivalent efficiency as a single use of the Polypropylene umbrella. Let’s say you take it out 16 times. That’s already like an umbrella that you’ve used quite a lot. We find it quite hard to calculate this is because we assume that we’ve used our umbrella 40 or 50 times, when in actual fact we may only end up using it 10 or 15 times. I was trying to come to this conclusion of the ratio of an object’s negative impact from production to how often it’s being use. If you’re just purely thinking about carbon, for instance, the objects that we surround ourselves with, are they appropriate for what we’re using them for? It’s like, is the cost worth it? I think it’s a really hard question that no one wants to answer, because the answer is often no. We are using objects that are far over-engineered for their purpose. That was hard for me to accept because I love these ‘hardcore objects.’ What we don’t realise is the amount of energy going into which is quite a lot. It’s not proportionate to what that object is.
Takeways
What had you learnt during the course of the project?
Charlie: I think what this project’s been for me is an opportunity to go very deep into strategy around product design. It’s been an amazing way to teach myself about how things are made. So that’s one lesson. In terms of it being a philosophical project, I think that’s what I’ve really enjoyed about it, is that these objects really make me try to have a dialogue about this problem. I wanted to try and start a conversation in a bit more of a productive and more reflective way. I want to change industry both inside and out, through the projects I’m involved in but also through healthy debate.
“I wanted to try and start a conversation in a bit more of a productive and more reflective way.”
The dream project
If you had unlimited capabilities, what would you work on?
Charlie: I’ve got a pretty big fear of ecosystem collapse from climate change. It’s so intimidating to me and so frightening because the natural world is just the most incredible thing that we have and it keeps us alive. I would probably invent something that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a pace that we’ve never seen before. Not saying that I want to control nature, but just to slow down global warming rapidly. If we could solve that, I think we could focus on other problems making people live happy and long lives or have better health care.
“The natural world is just the most incredible thing that we have and it keeps us alive.”
Chapeau bas!
Thank you Charlie very much indeed for sharing the details on the not-obvious, ever so relevant side of Product Design. The more aware and considerate we are, the better future we can create.
If you want to stay in touch with Charlie you may follow him at:
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