（社）日本建築家協会近畿支部環境委員会活動報告

DESIGN WITH MEMORY REMARKS

OSAKA DESIGN CENTER
OSAKA, JAPAN
AUGUST 8, 2000

Thank you for inviting me here today to be with you, it is truly a great honor, and I hope that I may be of some small help to you.
Thank you especially to the Osaka Design Center and to Mr. Tetsuo Kawakami and Mr. Mikio Mankawa who have been instrumental in bringing me here today.
Thank you for your interest in this new field of sustainable design.

I am going to talk a little about the next round of the Design Resource Awards Competition and then talk a little about the concept of Design with Memory, and the current Design with Memory Exhibit which has been travelling here in Japan since last October.

This is the fifth year that we have held the International Design Resource Awards Competition. Our goal in hosting the competition is to help create new, commercially viable products for local production to help improve the local economy and create less impact on the environment.
Our method for encouraging the development of commercially viable examples of sustainably designed products and architecture has been to run the Design Resource Awards Competition. We have collected the Award winners from this competition, now in its fifth year, and have formed them into travelling Exhibits to educate the public and the design community about these new developments in design.
Each of the items in these Exhibits have a story behind them. They have a history, and this is in part why the Exhibit is called Design With Memory. Designing with memory implies recognizing and acknowledging your relationships with others - other people, other materials - where did they come from and where will they go - and this is what is so exciting about the possibilities behind sustainable design. It applies not only to materials, but to people and communities. Sustainable design is building relationships between people, forming new networks, and discovering and using networks which are already in place.

To win an Award, the entry must be a made object, and it had to meet the following criteria:

1. It had to use reprocessed recycled materials, or sustainably harvested or reused materials - the more the better.
2. It had to add value to the commodity used. Nature provides us materials very inexpensively - gathering and reprocessing materials is expensive and time consuming. There are two solutions to this problem - Add a lot of value to the product to make using reprocessed recycled materials commercially viable, and to design the product so that the gathering and reprocessing of the
material is the most efficient. The most potent strategy there is to create products
which are designed to return to their manufacturer to provide the raw material for the next product.
3. Other criteria include designing for disassembly, design for composting, and use of non-toxic materials, and re-use of materials.
4. And that the product was well designed for its use and that is was suitable For commercial production.

When people enter the competition we offer to send them some materials samples just for educational purposes. Designers do not need to use these materials, but they are some examples from around the world that we have found interesting - they are a starting point for the design adventure ahead! Here is a samples kit from the current round of the competition together with some posters, call for entries, and information sheets.

Explanation of some of the materials in the kit.

1. Treeplast - This is a biodegradable injection moulding material from Holland made with wood fibers, corn, and natural resins
2. Small diameter woods - In our forests we have many small trees which will not develop to maturity because of the suppression of forest fires. Can these stunted trees be harvested and turned into useful products and thus help create jobs in depressed timber communities and also help the forest eco-system?
3. Soyworks - A non-toxic and biodegradable plastic sheet from soy protien. This material is thermo-formable

4. TablePak - This board is made from 100% post-consumer recycled Tetra-Pak containers. These are the containers you find in non-refrigerated areas of your supermarket that often contain milk and fruit juices. This product is from Bogota,Colombia. It is re-recyclable and accepts paint and is thermo-formable.

It is not enough to just substitute these new materials into an existing product because it is the entire system which is causing waste to occur, not the material itself.
The Exhibit and this round of the Competition are called Design with Memory because we need to remember where the materials come from and where they will go to next.
We have become too focused on gathering materials and creating objects.
We have become very good at gathering materials from a very wide area and concentrating them into a product, but we forgot to think about what happened after we were finished using the product when we were designing it in the first place.
This is what causes waste to occur. These materials must go back into the wide spread chaos they came from.
You can say that "waste" is when the product or material has no way back to the environment. Without this pathway back to the environment we are left with large amounts of materials which have no apparent use, and at the same time we are creating shortages of these materials in the environment.

I believe that we have some underlying beliefs which make it very hard to change
- we are people who love order, and fear disorder, so we are constantly making new things, and are not thinking about what will happen to that object after it is made - and yet to eliminate waste,
we must understand that there is no order without disorder and decay - we must welcome the disorder part - it is the food for the next generation to come to life - however, this dis-order needs to be tended, just like farming, so that the raw materials and environments we need will be available when they are needed...

This is a great time to be a designer or artist, because it is the creative faculty within each of you that we need to find the new connections and ways of thinking which will allow us to change how we do things to make our lives better and more in harmony with our environment.