Lab Journal (use weedy plants to make water colors)

A guest speaker called Ellie Irons came to show us how to make watercolors from weedy plants in this class. These plants are ‘useless’ because they are not edible as some of them are poisonous, they don’t make the environment look very aesthetically pleasing and they are taking up so much space. Instead of burning theses plants down (producing carbon dioxide), the artist found out that we could make watercolors from these plants as they have the same effects as the real watercolors. This is very sustainable as there are no more harmful chemicals produced that causes water pollution.

Equipments:

 

Colors that could be made from these plants:

Process:

In my opinion, I think that this new way of making colors could be used in the fashion industry as well, designers could possibly dye their fabrics with these colors. I think that this will provide more job opportunities as well because more labour is needed for harvesting these weedy plants and producing colors.

Lab Journal (Systems Mapping)

Systems mapping points out the different actors and elements and states their relationships with each other. It allows designers to explore a system in depth as it helps them to identify knowledge gaps. This links to sustainable design because systems mapping allows an individual too see a bigger and fuller picture of a particular topic and helps them identify the advantages and disadvantages of it that helps them to develop new and innovative design ideas. It also helps because once a designer sees the bigger picture, they will be able to prioritize the issues and solve them in order of importance.

Lab Journal (Fuel cell lab and Urban Energy Systems)

 

With rapid development in cities, many issues such as overcrowds and immensely increased need for electricity started to burst. When there are too many people living in the city, sanitation could become a problem because the amount of sewage is increased by a large amount. Especially that many countries such as China are paying more attentions to the environment, creating environment related policies such as not allowing countries to dump their sewage inside their land anymore, United States would have too much sewage to handle and be treated correctly. The environmentalists and designers had to think of some innovative ways to treat the sewage,therefore, they came up with the idea of turning sewage into energy. This process could definitely be used within NYC because this land already have way too much sewage to handle. But one of the problems is that there are still many people who are not discarding their trash properly as they sometimes are lazy to recycle the trash. The one question that I have about this urban energy is that how much does it cost for this process to be done if this is used to generate electricty throughout NYC?

Lab Journal (UN Trip)

We had a field trip to the United Nations headquarter to listen to speeches given by speakers such as Joel Towers, who is a Dutch Ambassador and here to give speeches on Sustainable Dutch Designs. Some of the characteristics of Dutch Design are that they are minimalistic, innovative and experimental. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Dutch Design as it doesn’t always look that aesthetically pleasing to me. On the other hand, the most memorable talk to me was the one given by an Indian girl who used dance moves to embody the status of global warming. I never thought that you could use our own body to translate climatic phenomenon before seeing her dance. I really liked this innovative idea because if we think closely, our body is very closely linked to nature. We drink and eat from resources provided by nature and we will eventually biodegrade like other objects after we pass away and become a part of this land that provides nutritions and other resources to other animals and humans.

Lab Journal(Sustainable Design and LCA)

This is the basic concept of a product life cycle, everything that we produce is inseparable from the diagram above. Everything on this planet will obsolete one day, it just depends on the life span that the manufacturer and designer decided to give to the product. It ranges from just a few seconds to many years. In order to increase profit, the idea of planned obsolescence is introduced. I completely understand the purpose of this action, however I am against this action because it not only takes advantages of customers, it also harms our environment as planned obsolescence helps to produce more trash. We are already running out of land to store our trash, this only worsen the problem. Also, sometimes the product might contains poisonous elements, if these poison stuffs leaks to rivers, it will pollute the water and make animals and people sick if they drink it and possibly creates waterborne diseases. In addition, planned obsolescence means constant replacement of products, which means factories need to manufactures more than before, which damages our environment as it increases deforestation and extraction of natural materials, which will have great impacts on our environment. I really think companies and designers need to be more ethical when they design and produce products, it will help them to have better brand image and raise their reputation as well, so why not?

 

Lab Journal (Climate Change and Cities)

Reflection

Rapid urbanization is negatively impacting our environment, the pollution produced from urbanization causes climate change, in which could lead to severe issues such as rising sea levels, but the good thing is more and more people are aware of how terrible our environment is right now. Individuals decided to move to nearby urban areas to seek job opportunities that could improve their lifestyle and living conditions for themselves and their offsprings as urban areas tend to have better education systems. However, rapid urbanization could make a place overcrowded, everything will be more competitive and the lack of available space forces organizations to develop more lands which then will lead to loss of habitat and natural resources.

Personally, as a person who grew up in a city (Beijing and Hong Kong), I witnessed a lot of social and environmental changes caused by urbanization. Beijing, being the Capital of China, is a ‘dream comes true’ place for many individuals from undeveloped areas in China as they think that big cities like Beijing will have a lot of job opportunities. Therefore, most of them migrated to the city causing Beijing becoming overcrowded and needs to constantly develop new areas to fit all of these people. Also, the non-locals and their children are competing with locals for education and jobs, and have greater chance to lose their jobs, forcing many locals to immigrate to other places. Overcrowding led to sanitation issues, with my experience, the streets in Beijing are getting dirtier because it is harder for the government to control and these non-locals are not that well educated, which means they would throw rubbish wherever they want. On the environmental side, urbanization did made many people wealthier and made them own at least one car, the air quality has decreased dramatically due to the carbon emissions from vehicles. Carbon is one of the greenhouse gases that helps forming global warming. In addition, expansion of lands cannot be done without deforestation, which means that the natural habitat are being disrupted, e.g. water source, forcing many wild animals to ‘migrate’ or become extinct as they cannot find food source anymore.

I feel like urbanization is like fashion trends, there is a cycle to it, e.g. building sustainable environment –>creating opportunies–> people move in–> overcrowded–> becomes not as good as it used to be–> people move out–> redevelops. 

Lab Journal (Mycelium “Mushroom” Kit)

 

Result

The mycelium turned white after day 7, which means it successfully absorbed the flour mixture and was ready to be used. However, only the outer part of the mycelium turned white, the mixture didn’t really change on the inner part. In addition, the mixture became a solid and it was really hard to break it apart. I tried to crumble them up so that I could begin making the product that was on my mind but the entire thing was too dry, which it couldn’t hold the shapes that I was trying to form.

Reflection

I was quite disappointed with the result as I was unable to make anything from the mycelium. As for the reason, I think it was mainly because my kit was overexposed to sunlight, making it drying faster than expected. If I have the chance to regrow some mycelium, I would place it somewhere that has access to both sunlight and moisture. After researching about mycelium, I found out that this particular material is strong and fire resistant, therefore I began to think about other ways to use this material instead of using it in packaging. In order to produce products that could be use for a long time or even permanently, I started questioning how long will it take for mycelium to decay? the lifespan of mycelium? I think its fire resistant characteristic opened up more opportunities for it, maybe it could be incorporated into a house someday.