Wheres the map dad? Google it.

So what happened to good old maps? We mobilised ’em.

Gone are the days when we whip out the A-Z from under the seat in the car or somehow manage to manoeuvre a Michelin road map the size of Russia in the front seat of a Peugeot 206. Although my good ol Grandpa still has his maps handy, but i don’t know how he does it.

This is a prime example of how our life has been directly affected by mobile technology. Map reading and map drawing is a very complicated task and one which takes alot of time and skill, but it is being driven out of our society by digital maps and Sat Nav systems.

Ok, so there are good points to this, of course. I for one think the digital maps are excellent and provide an easy and simple way to navigate our way around which saves me alot of time on the phone to my girlfriend when she’s lost. However what does worry me is how disconnected it can make us feel from our surroundings. We have got ourselves to the point where you stop noticing the features and the landmarks around us and rely on the little blue dot. When our sense of direction becomes so diluted that following the dot or the triangle becomes our method of navigation, it spells worrying times.

What i feel we need to retain is that natural sense of knowing where your going. Knowing that you just ain’t going the right way and having that confidence and connection to things around you to know how to get yourself out of trouble. Whether that be by the stars, the sun, the earth’s magnetic field or simply taking a punt, then it’s still progress over that reliance on mobile technology to solve all of our problems.

Mobile Revolution

Motorola 4500x

So here we have it, this is where the mobile revolution began. The Motorola 4500x was released late 1980’s, had a terrible battery life and weighed a ton.  If you think of a mobile phone, does this form even cross your mind? If your gran gave you this next christmas, would u take it?

of course not. We all think of the Iphone, HTC, Samsung etc but it’s amazing to see where it all began and where our generation was first defined.

The way we live our lives these days is forever on the internet, forever on Facebook and Twitter but not so long ago people had to carry around these massive boxes just to own a mobile phone, but still, people stuck with it and people kept buying them and hence pushed us into the age of the mobile phone.

But how has this affected our connection with each other, and the world around us, in a physical sense? Have our people skills declined? have our communication skills diminished because of this? Hopefully i can answer these questions in future posts as i dig deeper into the world of mobile technology.

The number of mobile phone activations between 1990 and 2011 rose from from 12.4 million to 5.6 Billion. Personally i find that staggering, and with new products like the Ipad, Blackberry playbook, Smartphones etc this number is set to explode through the roof to the point where i believe every single person on the planet will own a mobile device. And i can see this happening in the very very near future.

One burger king fuelled trip down south …

World's biggest game of pick-up-sticks got out of hand

Recently, we embarked on the thrill ride of a lifetime down to visit the Nissan car manufacturing plant in Sunderland (despite bus drivers questionable ability to stay between the white lines on the motorway ). Death bus and pit stops aside, the trip proved to be rather insightful.

the tour was roughly 4 hours long, and considering we only saw 10% of the production line in that time, you will appreciate the scale of manufacturing going on down there. The question i found myself asking was, who buys Nissans? Now we’re talking the Juke and the Qashqai here, not the GT-R unfortunately. When u consider the fact the staff work around a 3 x 8 hour shift day ( 1 each of course ) we have 24 hour production, with each man on the line given 90s ( i think ) to complete their task which might be welding, fixing, putting in the windshield, putting in the dashboard etc. This results in roughly 440 cars per 8 hour shift, 1300 cars a day and 480 000 cars, Nissans, a year. Who buys them?!

I can honestly say, i haven’t seen that level of Nissan % on our roads in the UK, but there is a good reason for this. 80% of the production output is export meaning that there isn’t 480 000 cars worth of sale price money being pumped back into the UK economy, which i think is unfortunate.

The recent announcement of a new model to be manufactured in Sunderland came the day after we left Nissan. This would provide 2000 new jobs, which is excellent in the current economic climate and double dip recession. Unfortunately this came labelled with a £9.3M grant from the government, which in the case of the tories, is never a good thing. But that debate can wait for another time.

So i guess it was an insightful but slightly disappointing tour, in terms of the financial information we found out. I was amazed to see how many people they have working on the line ( excess of 6000 ) and how each and every one has a part to play in keeping this incredibly daunting, well oiled machine chugging along. But the revelation that most of it goes out as export slightly ruined it for me but i will always remember that moment when i thought the machines were going to turn into transformers and kill us all.

Sustainable?

Ask yourself this question, do you own a product which is sustainable?

This is the question i was faced with, and asked to provide an example of a product i felt was sustainable. So i went with the General Electric FlexAero LM6000-PH natural gas turbine.

The benefits of this engine are:
– Fast power up/power down time
– Can run without water, saving 98 million litres a year, per engine.
– Flexible enough to run on unstable power sources such as wind and solar energy

among many others. So i guess what this identifies is my belief that the way to protect our future and become more ‘sustainable’ is to make changes to existing processes to reduce consumption overall.

However Ian Grout, Product Design Tutor at Glasgow School of Art made the obvious and valid point, how can any product claim to be sustainable? If you see my previous blog ” The future is now ” i have shown that the overall cost of creating these products, far outweighs the gains during use. Just think of the number of components on show in the engine i have shown above.

Now each single component was manufactured in a factory. Each component will have been created by other machines, whether they be robotic or static, there is still an enormous amount of residual energy in the manufacture. Beyond that, the machines were created by men for example, but the materials were extracted from ore’s which takes an enormous amount of energy … and you can see where i am going with this. Even when u consider the smallest of products, the manufacture has still amassed to huge amounts of energy used to produce them.

So each and every product we see, each piece of design and technology comes with the guilt of knowing that although it may claim to be environmentally friendly, energy efficient or just “green”, it isn’t. It simple can’t be.

Therefore this puts me in a difficult position because i have been championing the Product Design Engineer and our ability to protect future generations through purposeful and essential design, but how can i deal with the knowledge that what i am doing can potentially cause more harm than good? Well the only option i have is to ensure every part and every design i create has the smallest possible negative impact on the planet.

Hopefully this period of sustainability blogs hasn’t put you off and it makes sense to you reading it! I would love to hear any opinions anyone has on the matter wether it be in agreement of disagreement of my view.

The future is K

I swear, this isn’t a sustainability blog, but it’s beginning to sound that way. 

I was recently enlightened to the demise of the human race. Predicted to occur around 2030 based on the limits to growth info graphic shown. Having previously been completely ignorant towards this prediction, it came as quite a shock to me as i hope it will for anyone reading this. Recent predictions also show that we are on course for this demise, with no signs of slowing up. But with everything i have mentioned, aswell as consistently shocking headlines about the topic of a sustainable future, why haven’t things changed? Why are we still so irresponsible when it comes to protecting our future? 

we are not alchemists. We cannot create gold from steel and we cannot, just now at least, produce oil and resources from nothing. Everything has an inherent cost and everything takes time and effort, particularly oil, as we all know. This points to a blatant fact about the way we live, our system of economics isn’t working and has to change. 

This does not mean we cut all of our habits cold turkey and change over night, but the question is ” can we descend to paradise rather than climb into hell? “. This can be achieved if we change our economic ways and alter our levels of consumption but this can be a gradual change. 

To take lead from previous posts, i believe we as design engineers have a key role to play in this. But can we infact prove that we are the K species after all. This theory states that the R species come along and use the land to the point of overshoot. The K species then move in to fill the niches and live more sustainably by learning from the mistakes.  

So, can we become the K series? can we ADJUST our ways to live more sustainably or will we just use the earth to the point of destruction? I think design engineers can be the pioneers of this way of living and by attempting to adopt a new form of economics early in our careers, we can open up possibilites for future generations. Although we may not be able to design with the same freedom as we experience today, our designs can actually enrich the experience of those who need the product. 

The Future is Now

The issue of “ sustainability ” is one in the forefront of the world greatest minds and constantly being thrust into the public domain. Wether this is to raise awareness and force us into a state of change or simply a means of control by some higher powers, remains to be seen.

When we talk about sustainability everyone jumps to carbon footprints, cutting down trees, leaving lights on, not recycling etc etc. But what does all this actually mean? HOW are our lives unsustainable? what do we need to do in order to save the world and prevent a barren future for younger generations? and more importantly, the conservation of energy law states that “ Energy cannot be created or destroyed but simple converted from one form to another ”. So how are we running out?!

Let’s make a quick comparison:

our phone chargers use 1 watt of power. By using this for 24 hours, we use 86400J of energy. A car has a power rating of 90 kilowatts. So in theory, if we left our charger OFF for 24 hours, this energy is used by a car which travels 20 metres. Therefore when we think that by not charging our phones all day and turn it off when not needed, what’s the point? Some wee ned in his Corsa has just driven away from the lights at 70 Mph and wrecked all your effort? To make matters worse, this compares to having 90 gas cooker burners on at once, and furthermore, a flight to Bangkok return will use 20,000,000,000 J of energy.
So when we take all of these figures on board, does it really seem like turning off your charger or your lights will make any difference in the scale of things?

I think, if enough people can change, it will make a difference. But we are simply fighting a losing battle. When a power station (coal/oil) is running, only 35% of the energy it produces actually makes it onto the grid power, with the other 65% expelled into the surrounding air as heat, hence the change in energy form and hence why we are running out of energy since so much is wasted. This means that in order to successfully change our ways in order to preserve our planet temperature, we must compensate through other means, be it wind, solar, wave or nuclear energy, but they all come with their own opposition. Not only that, but in order to produce enough energy to provide the UK alone, we would require a wind turbine 3.6 km in every direction over the entire land mass of the UK. Is this a viable option? what about solar power in the desert you ask, well if the land is covered by big mirrors, the heat that would once have heated the land we call desert, is now being transferred elsewhere, so what of the effects this would have on the ‘desert‘ land?

The problem seems to be, we simply don’t have the answer … yet.

Our entire existence could be threatened if we don’t drastically change our ways, not only as individuals but as a collective working towards the same goals, but unfortunately at this moment, no one is politically prepared to face these harsh truths.

Then again, the Earth heated up by the same amount as Mars and the Moon last year, so we could just be in a warm part of the universe for the time being …….