[Waste=Food]

I have a tendency to tear apart the documentaries in this class. This one is no exception on the aesthetic end. Poor camera work, poor choice of music, poor editing, etc.

However, the topic was far more fascinating, and much better presented than the past documentaries. Part of this was because of the poor aesthetics: they could not get in the way to make up for lacking content. And there was no need to make up for poor content choices: it was simply full.

At the heart of the documentary is the Cradle to Cradle movement and the two very awkward nerd-partners who envisioned it: William McDonough, an award-winning American architect, and Michael Braungart, a German physicist, Greenpeace advocate, and winner of the Strangest Analogy Award. It was on a New York rooftop that their vision of a better world (along with a delightful bromance) started. Their basis for a better world was a simple yet powerful statement: "Everything that is made from Biology [which is pretty much everything] should be able to safely return to the soil."

This sounds like a hopeless romantic ecologist's daydream, doesn't it? The thing is, it's not. Working with a German cloth manufacturer, Braungart was able to design both fabrics, cloths and dyes that were safe to produce and had no toxic materials in them. Most importantly though, it was just as financially feasible.

The two's work, which now is under the institution of MBDC, includes redesigning factories for Ford, working with Nike to manufacture completely Cradle to Cradle shoes, and even being apart of China's five-year sustainability plan. And while initial costs are great, the innovations often end up saving the company money while also improving work flow and moral.

Take, for instance, the Green Roof at the Ford Motor Plant in Detroit. The Bromancers (as I will lovingly refer to McDonough and Braungart from now on) designed a roof that was made up of grass and plants: a hefty investment that to many business men might seem like a whimsical fantasy expense. However, the roof, because it is growing, will not need to be replaced-only maintained with minimal repair. Re-roofing an entire car plant is a multi-million dollar job that would have to happen every ten-to-twenty years. Along with that, the Green Roof filters and purifies rainwater that would otherwise have to be shipped and chemically processed, saving the company even more money. And then, as icing on the cake, it uses materials that are natural and good for the earth, and even is home to many other creatures.

The power of of The Bromancers is that they take the grand utopian ideas and put them to work in a business-minded way. This is the basis behind Cradle-to-Cradle: putting our stuff to work. Waste becomes food for the earth. Food for innovation. Food for an industry. Or just food in general. Our dreams are put to work making industries not just more green, but more profitable.

"A building should be like a tree," Braungart tells us. It should grow, purify the air, produce fruit, be a home for creatures and produce things. It should respect it's inhabitants as individuals. A building should not just be sustainable; it should be beneficial.  "If someone asked 'how is your relationship with your girlfriend,' and you replied, 'sustainable,' that's not a good answer." In the same way, we don't want a sustainable relationship with the earth, we want a good one. Sustainable is less bad. Less bad is still bad. What we want is good.

So must everything break down into organic waste? Not necessarily right away. In The Bromancer's world, there are two places waste can go: the ecosphere, or biology, or the technoshpere, back to production. Modern recycling takes a stab at this by the re-use of waste, but it fails in one area: recycled products are downcycled until they become waste again. In order for them to benefit the world better, they must be upcycled, or be refined into a better product. This means things should be easily disassembled, and made of plastics that can be refined or chemically altered to a better state. And of course, the end goal being that the plastic can bio-degrade to benefit the earth, and is not toxic to produce.

What The Bromancers are asking of all industries is far more than just sustainability; rather, it is a world where consuming things is beneficial, not harmful, to the world.

It is easy to be swept away by the utopian vision of a completely green world. I believe it is important: I do not believe it is the most important. We are still dealing with extreme poverty, drought, genocide, war, and not to mention the various emotional and physical disabilities we suffer from. A greener society will not fix all our problems. It may in fact, fix fewer than we feel, and will cause more than we think. This is the case with any changes made on this earth. However, I believe it is something important to be pursued on both the corporate level, and the smaller, household level as well.

And good Lord, that bow-tie. Damn classy.

[Design & thinking documentary]

As stated before, I have an issue with documentaries, due to their inability to examine situations with objectivity. This exploitation often takes two forms: the first is that the filmmaker seeks to exploit all of the dramatic moments in order to turn a rather boring situation into a dramatic, two-hour thriller. The second kind of exploitation is the opposite; taking all the good of a situation and never showing the bad, in order to excite or inspire or whatever other bullshit catch-words you might use at a convention.

Design & Thinking, a film by Mui-Ming Tsai, is guilty of the second exploitative technique. The light, bouncy music, shallow depth of field shooting in all, hi-key light filming pretty, happy people. It dances around from scene to scene (each scene presented with a Wes-Anderson-esque futura title card), showing how happy people are at their job, and how much they love design, and God-forbid we ever see these designers try to curse out that piece of plastic that just wont fit.

But this isn't a film review blog, it's a design blog. So now I'll talk about design.

The problem with these sorts of documentaries (besides the fact that they are poor pieces of cinema) is that they rarely show you much about the process itself. All monotony is stripped away, leaving us with just the exciting results. Now you may look at me like I'm stupid, and say "of course you cut out the boring parts-It's a movie." Then I would say you are apparently watching bad movies ('Breathless', 'There Will Be Blood', and 'Hunger' are all excellent films that use the boring parts to their advantage). However, this is simply not fair. To show the exciting parts of design, stripped of blood, sweat and tears is an insult to design and designers themselves.

Some might argue that the purpose of the film is to inspire us to look at design differently. Well, they've failed in that too: it seems they are echoes the same "Design is everywhere!" chant that every other design-based film is echoing as well. As for inspiration, it fails in that area too. Sure, I might get excited the the happy people, and the fun shapes and all the money, but when I actually set down to the nitty gritty, my inspiration high will quickly wear off, leaving me more sad than before.

Not to say that the movie was a complete bore. Talking with the guy who ran the cooking classes was very intriguing.

My biggest problem with the film was the tone. The tone that is so well summed up by a passing quote on a door of one of the design institute: "Every problem has a material solution." The whole tone of the film was that this was true, that design of material things could fix every problem. There is no idea that is more dangerous than this, and this is where I really show my cards as a Christian Mystic. This assumes that every problem is rooted in the material world. That we are no more than a collection of molecules interacting and processing via matter and energy. It assumes that our problems are not based in something far deeper that matter.

This is my problem with design today; we really believe we can fix everything, while we ignore the blatant issue that maybe, just maybe we are the problem.