Further Contacts

I sent another message to Julia Hailes who is an author of the New Green Consumer Guide, which I find extremely interesting and helpful. I have emailed her and keep my fingers crossed to recive an answer.

As my email to Energy Saving Trust bounced back I have tried another way of getting there, I finally get response to check their website carefully and look at their resources online. I sent a thank you email.

Also another thing is liftshare.org which I am investigating.

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little" Edmund Burke

OWN STORY 1.
Ages ago, I heard how bad the dispossable nappies are for the environment, and straight away decided that when I will have a child I will use a terry nappies and not add to this massive rubbish production. So when I become a mother I did as planned. It was hard, but could have been easier if I would get more support from my new family. I got a WEIRDO LABEL and people laughed at me behind my back.
I needed a community of people who would be supportive.

OWN STORY 2.
The other day, I met a guy in my part time job, and started a conversation about a plastic bags and the attitude towards geting one or not. He said that he doesn't care and called me a eco warrior. It was not an argument but a discussion about a difference between convinence and a need.

I disliked both experiences and the placement in the eco warriors movement.

I need to use a facility like facebook or a very good emailing system because I want people to create a community within which they could feel that there is more to the issue than their own standby DVD player. I need a website which will gather information and links for organizations which promote not only energy issues but are beginning to be a gate for other Eco friendly initiatives. The system should involve money as that is a key for creating further investment and creating events. It should be speaking to a broader audience than families with children as I guess we are on the same boat.

And also I want to make it less eco looking, more engaging and more interactive. I llive in a society which wants a quick solution, and a very quick result. Laptops have to be finner, internet connection faster, and games more real. I wonder if there is a way of creating a virtual environment constantly showing our future environment, concentrating on a place we live. Your own garden and flat/house.

Creating a connection 1.
1. Poster promoting a new royal mail stamp.
2. Stamp leads to a website where a user can register. Each stamp should have a code which will be used to register on the website and also give them a free gift/envelope or an extra stamp voucher.
3. User is promped to create a profile and answer some questions.
4. Users will also enter their postcode and be able to locate themselves on a map.
5. They would also be told what is the energy effieciency in their neirbourhood. That would be done annonysmouly.
6. There would be a prompt to find users which would agree on that to connect them on facebook and other social sites.

I need to look into Facebook facilities and look into other sites like my space and so on to see how easy is to connect between different platforms.

In CHARGE

So today it was better. Shower took me 7 minutes, and I didn't leave my bathroom door expect one short spell for couple of minutes. So I am doing better and I am able to see the progress.

I also did some serious thinking about CABLES AND PLUGS. I have realized by my dotty experiment that a main reason of me in some cases wasting energy is not a bad will but the forgetfulness. Why do I forget? Because plugs, cables and even the way most appliances look like designed to be invisible. It is a fact. Even if they are in a big lump like this one underneath my desk, they blend into each other and are looking exactly the same. Colour is either GRAY, WHITE, OR BLACK, they are all tangled up together and therefore no matter if together or separate are just not recognizable. I guess from a product designer point of view it is exactly what needs to happen. The product is a star, not a cable for it. The missed thing is that A CABLE AND A PRODUCT ARE THE SAME. You cannot differ them and hide one from another. Part of a new eco designed products expect of having an A grade should have on them a Standby information.

The other thing I realized that some of the appliances DO NOT HAVE SWITCH OFF BUTTON. I knew that before, but never was that strict with my energy usage as this week, and realized how unhelpful that is.

ENVIRONMENTAL OBSERVATION
1. Organizing your cables is confusing but important for the energy efficiency.
2. As a cable is just a cable it never grows to be an important task to sort out and because of that is usually left behind at the bottom of the to do list
3. Design of our appliances makes this issue invisible and not important from a visual point of view.
4. If you make it visible in any way, you are more likely to improve on energy efficiency.
5. Outdated product designs are in a way responsible for our mistakes, so it is also important to bring to public attention, that we should influence the future product designs to be more in charge of what we are getting on a shop shelves.

BEHAVIORAL OBSERVATION:
1. I guess that it is relatively easy to create a new habit rather than stopping the old one.
2. Once you get some success on the way of your habit change it is easier to get the next one.
3. Some of the issues could be solved by making them more visually visible. So for example today I tested leaving my bathroom door open all the time expect the time when it was used and that made me not leave the light on.

Science of Survival

Half term you can recognize by the length of a queues on the Exhibition Road, but I managed to endure it and got inside the Science Museum. I met there my course mates and we looked at some energy associated exhibitions. Especially exposition about plastic was really interesting. I find these statistics very interesting, so I asked a fellow student to take those photos for me as I forgot my camera SILLY ME!





Then I decided to visit a great event in there: THE SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL, which is a project/exhibition dedicated to promoting sustainable living. I recommend it to anybody who is interested in science, living, and future. It was a great experience!
Simplicity of statistics and information was amazing. It was explained in a very understandable way. Overall I really enjoyed it and was also positively surprised that my little one was also thought about and could equally enjoy the interactivity of that place. SO...
I have contacted the director of the Science of... projects and ... I got a response that he is willing to meet. I am excited! I expect to learn from him not only about energy efficiency issues but also to know what was most important for them whilst creating that amazing project. I guess that this is a place when design and life meet, and influence on each other. The important information are being processed by designers of many sorts and then they meet a public eye which takes them on board or not. I guess that what depends on those designers is if the subject was understood read properly. SO WHAT THIS MEETING MAY GIVE ME IS ALSO A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF MY AUDIENCE AND THEIR DESIGN NEEDS/LITERACY. Which I think my project and my design, will really benefit from.

Still Tuesday

So, my score for today is: about 70%. I did not put my microwave on unless it was used, the same with TV and my machine. So what went wrong? BLOODY BATHROOM LIGHT!!!!!

HaBit Rabbit/ annoying words...

If you battling an annoying habit it is important to reward yourself. As you need to recognize your achievements and make it valuable. Also that makes a learning curve more enjoyable and fun. My daughter uses one and it works for her. Tomorrow I will make one for myself and will make an effort signing in my 'well done' and 'accidents'. ENERGY POTTY TRAINING And my reward would be a coffee morning in a nearby cafe!

Dygression No. 1 - Making Big look Small and WHY?

I find ecological problems not being treated seriously because of difficulty in finding clear measurement system to bring the issues closer to people. Ecology basically says: if you are not going to be energy efficient, you and your families are going to face catastrophe. But being serious, the weakness of science in here, is that it is completely vague. It predicted that the climate would change, and it is, but shifting a responsibility of that, on a personal DVD player, is probably looking as an over dramatic attitude. But that in turn is connected to SHARED RESPONSIBILITY ISSUES, which I know quite well from from the culture of communist country which I grew up in. Everything then was owned by state, it belonged to everybody - meant nobody.
It is similar with the environmentalists movement. Our Planet is strictly too BIG to be owned by somebody, and the responsibility of keeping it alive spreads over too many people. I think that stressing this is not a way froward. The question arising here for me is: How to show to somebody that the planet belongs to them? How to make the planet, look small and reachable, so to make these issues more personal and important?