BBC's The Today Programme comes to Brighton
Published 11 February 2013
BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme visited the Grand Parade campus to learn more about the University of Brighton's pioneering research into emotional durability and sustainable design.
The BBC's top journalist Evan Davis and his producer spent the morning interviewing Jonathan Chapman, Professor of Sustainable Design in the Faculty of Arts, and speaking to students and graduates in the faculty workshops.
Fall in love with your trainers or become best buddies with your microwave oven is at the heart of the new thinking in design. Professor Chapman, who is leading the research, recently featured in an article on the subject in The Guardian. He believes that the key is to design products that are longer lasting, upgradeable and that are made with materials that last in both a physical and emotional sense.
The aim, he said, is to make people want to keep products longer and to repair them when they break instead of throwing them away and replacing them. He calls this concept 'emotionally durable design', and argues that it will help slow consumerism, combat global warming and conserve scarce resources.
Professor Chapman's research looks at reducing toxic and environmentally-destructive e-waste such as computers, TVs, MP3 players, and mobile phones which are quickly thrown away and replaced and which account for over one million tonnes of poisonous electronic waste per year in the UK alone.
Emma Whiting, studying Design and Craft BA(Hons), who designed a pair of shoes which reveal a hidden pattern when they fade, was interviewed by Evan Davis along with two former students who graduated with MAs in sustainable design in 2011.
Rodrigo Bautista, now working with Forum For The Future, a non-profit sustainable design company, explained his wandular, a multi purpose modular device that evolves over your lifetime, ageing stylishly and staying update, enabling the software to be updated.
Rodrigo Bautista with Evan Davis
Raquel Sereno, now a project manager working with Oliver Heath, the sustainable lifestyle advocate, writer, architecture and interior designer, explained the sustainable design behind a woven fruit bowl made from corn husks and pine needles.
Another example is 'Stain Tea Cups' by University of Brighton graduate Laura Bethan Wood. The cups have been designed to evolve and improve through the passing of time, violating fixed-ideas around the assumption that use, and wear-and-tear, is damaging to a product.
Professor Chapman, leader of the Sustainable Design MA, is currently in talks with Puma regarding ongoing and future sustainability design projects with the university.
He challenges why many people throw products away simply because they are scratched or cracked, and proposed a new ethos: "A lot of my work in terms of emotional durable design is asking how we can design products and experiences in a way that make them last, to extend the longevity of objects, not for ever but for just that little bit extra, to make fairly significant reductions in the consumption and waste of materials and energy, and may be even add a little bit more satisfaction and happiness into this system."
Evan Davis interviewing Professor Jonathan Chapman at Grand Parade
Related article: Learn to love your possessions
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