Take Action: For Less Waste and Healthier Oceans

Change.org is currently heading an initiative for reducing plastic waste and in that sense to protect our oceans and its animals. For some in-depth information (in German), have a look at this. It’s simple to take action: Sign here for a ban on single-use plastic bags. It’s easy to say no to plastic bags and it’s just as easy to choose re-usable or recyclable bags for shopping – for a healthier environment!

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Nomad on Planet Earth

For all my photography work, as well as some inspiring quotes, I set up a new blog: nomadonplanetearth.tumblr.com
Have a look and enjoy!

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Salone di Mobile 2013

Actually I was planning to write a detailed review about my four-day visit to the Salone di Mobile – but I am terribly busy at the moment. So for now, I will leave you with a few pictures of things I particularly liked.

























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Review: MCBW

The Munich Creative Business Week is nearly over, so I thought it’s about time for a personal review. I’ve had the chance to visit about a dozen of exhibitions, talks and event such as “7kg Aluminium”, “Rejected”, “toca me”, “Creative Mornings”, “Creativity and Sustainability at Puma” and the “Design Night with Karim Habib” and participated in a co-design workshop at INDEED. I had the chance to meet many interesting people, all working in the fields of design or similar disciplines. I appreciated the broad variety of projects and ideas that were showcased: Visual Art, Motion Graphics, Commercials, Product Design, Technology and Architecture, just to name a few. I truly enjoyed the high quality of graphic design (such as shown by Mirko Borsche) or the impressive visual art (such as shown by Memo Akten at toca me). BMW unveiled an impressive showcar, the 4 Series Coupé and I was amazed by the new lamp designs shown at the Ingo Maurer showroom, including a beautifully technoid LED candle.

This was all beautiful but at the same time left me with the feeling that the event was too much flooded with rather short-lived product design; things that are nice and shiny and cool but at the same time  ignore the underlying challenges that design and designers are currently facing: During a workshop a fellow industrial designer told me how the certainty that nearly everything that we create will ultimately end up in landfill (or worse, in our oceans) made him question his own profession for a long time. Many designers told me how they find it difficult to find meaning in their job when working in big companies where sense of purpose has become quite elusive. Some talks addressed the power of Design Thinking and supported the notion that design is not an object but an action – but mostly explaining what Design Thinking is and not showing how it can be put to work successfully and effectively.

I think the MCBW missed a great chance to address some of the big questions: How can we design for successful business but in a way where we also support a healthy society and environment? (Respectively: How can we create Shared Value through design?) How can we build products and services that are desirable and at the same time transform user behavior to be more sustainable and ecologically aware? How can we bring together people from different disciplines and fields to work cooperatively on a daily basis in order to solve increasingly complex problems? How can we encourage out-of-the-box thinking in disciplines other than design (such as engineering or accounting). What business models worked or failed in trying to achieve all this? And how can we instill the understanding that system-level design is extremely powerful for business in companies and corporations?

Puma showed, in a 45 minute talk, how they approached some of these challenges: They started to build a massive database containing efficiency ratings, energy use, land use, pollution data, water consumption and waste data of every single step of their supply chain. At the same time they evaluated the social side of their supply chain. While I would consider all this a hygiene factor that every company has to address today, Puma went one step further and built a comprehensive tool where designers can easily understand the impact of each and every material that goes into a product – empowering them to deliberately create greener products.

To sum it up: I think the MCBW lived up to its title “Meet the Builders of Quality” and did a good job in showcasing high quality design to the general public. But I believe that it failed, at the same time, to bring together people from all areas of business to engage in serious discussions about today’s big questions at the intersection of business, society and ecology. It also failed (to some extent) to foster the understanding that design is a unique tool set that has huge potential to find compelling answers to some of these questions. For the next MCBW I would hope to see more bold ideas, more radical approaches, more scientific research, less success stories and more personal in-depth insights in things that went wrong: To inspire everyone to build stuff that’s not only of quality and beauty but also of meaning and responsibility.

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The Electric Future

I have to admit it: I used to be sceptical of the electric car. I love my now fourteen year old BMW 3 series and I’m a big fan of a good friend’s classic V8 from the late sixties. I like the spirit that these old cars carry within. For me, the smell of burnt fuel and oil and the sound of a powerful engine seems to tell a story of a past that was simpler, more radical and emotional than the world today. This story was engineered and fueled by the charismatic pioneers who were bold enough to believe that the internal combustion engine will define the future of transport. It evolved through daring race drives and created a culture around the notion that owning a car means ultimate freedom. Today, with climate change, scarce resources and increasing ecological awareness this story is not as compelling anymore as it used to be.

Nonetheless, in my view, car companies widely fail to push the story of the car forward towards a positive, emotional yet responsible future. Most of what is being done in terms of electric mobility is the result of tightening environmental laws rather than being done out of a commitment to innovation. – Electric cars and hybrids that are already on the market feel like the good advice that teachers gave you at school: Deep down you know that there’s sense in it, but you feel perfectly comfortable to fully ignore that for a good amount of time (and take pride in doing the exact opposite). When I talked to Renault salespeople the other week, they felt perfectly comfortable in telling me that they are not in the least responsible for suitable urban charging solutions: “It’s the government that needs to act!”

I believe car makers will have to commit to the electric car on a whole different level to bring electric solutions to the market that are aspirational and literally charged with emotion: Product worlds that tell a unique and fresh story that gives you an understanding of why they need to be in your life (other than just providing rational functionality). Only with the commitment of the big auto companies will customers believe that e-mobility is the future and will feel fine to switch.

While electric vehicles still have their weak spots (battery production and recycling, range, temperature sensibility, production footprint etc.) the technology feels vastly superior to the fuel powered car: It integrates beautifully into an intelligent renewable energy grid, it eradicates pollution in cities and it will eventually make cars more agile, efficient and exciting to drive. While many car companies are sticking to combustion engines as their core competence (hoping that electic vehicles are a fad that will soon pass) companies like Siemens, Bosch and ZF are building an impressive knowledge base for electric drive trains. So I wonder what the USP of car companies will be, when the EV takes over.

Last year in Le Mans, I witnessed the staggering performance of two R18 E-Trons that were (despite actually being hybrids) noise-free and had the performance characteristics of an electric car (due to two electric engines on the front axle). To see these silent race cars beat their ear-deafening competition so effortlessly pushed the perception of these cars to a level where they felt like a whole new generation and left everything else to appear like steam-age technology. For me, this was the tipping point where I started to think that noise- and emission-free cars can and hopefully will be the future. Not only because of their functional advantages, but also due to their emotional qualities. The challenge will be to let loose the numbing reactionism that has made EVs so terribly unsexy and move towards product worlds that are radical, meaningful and bold enough to convince users that the electric car IS the future.

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