Designing Social Change During the 1990s-2000 Essay

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Design ideologies have in the past listening carefully to the foundation of the technical and methodical rules of the delivery process. Certainly, good contribution engineering design involves many parameters in the lead that the success of the project depends on, each of which has its own subset of laws, standards, practices, codes and conventions.

Nevertheless, basically all these more specialized constraints and directives are principles that are even more fundamental associated with the original decision-making process, which provide the full framework for good design. These ideologies may be well known to experienced designers, but may not have been communicated to students, yet understanding them is essential if design decisions are to produce desirable results. They are not the simply scientific, obvious principles, such as the laws of static or thermodynamics, which are already part of the engineering curriculum, but obtain more from experience, practice or pragmatism.

Therefore, they are the very substance of professional engineering judgment. The period selected for analysis in the 1990s-2000. this period was marked by a unique change in technology and sustainable design parameters applied to all social and business spheres.

No one can deny that in order to make environmentally friendly products, everyone involved in the product developing process has to consider the environmental aspects. Therefore, there are other aspects such as economics, function, quality etc. the environmental issue has to be implemented all through the whole process. Moreover, it is very significant to assist the designers to make decisions that ultimately lead to environmentally sound products. It is clear that the core of decision-making in any technical project is the design strategy. It is the essential creative process of engineering different from science, which calls for imagination, application of technical expertise and experience, and skillful use of materials.

Paradoxically, however, because engineers are so good at delivering the given necessities of the project, they are often not involved in the design element of the process, which is seen as part of the development of decisions made by others. On the other hand, this means that engineers are not participating in primary decision-making as usefully as they could. It is significant that practicing engineers and engineering students understand the synergy between engineering design and high-level decision-making. Consequently, it is mainly important that the general and interdisciplinary aspects of design be demonstrated at every stage in the design process.

The Eco-Housing assessment criteria and rating system, developed after studying other national and international green rating systems, is applicable only to residential projects. The voluntary rating system incorporates global best practices to help developers and architects design and evaluate the green quotient of new residential projects.

On the other side, to determine the environmental performance of a building, the Eco-Housing assessment criteria are divided into the following eight broad categories, with each category describes a set of measures that need to be fulfilled. The eight broad categories are site planning, environment architecture, energy-efficient lighting, solar water heaters, efficient building materials, water conservation, segregation of waste, and other innovative technologies. In the same field, every measure has been assigned points depending on its impact on environment, and its relevance to local conditionsv.

The Eco-Housing assessment criteria developed comprise both voluntary and obligatory measures. Each measure has been assigned points depending on the environmental impact. The Eco-Housing assessment criteria have a totality of 88 measures spread over the 8 focus areas. In the same field, only 27 of the 88 measures are obligatory. The maximum reachable points are 1000 and the project has to get a minimum of 500 points to qualify for Eco-Housing rating.

Thus, each measure has a submittal necessity and the essential documentation should be together with the Eco-Housing proposal to show compliance with the measures being attempted. In addition to that, the Eco-Housing rating system is based on the number of points earned. The rating accomplished relies on the number of voluntary measures incorporated in addition to the obligatory ones.

On the other hand, many companies in Europe have formulated their environmental policies, and try to integrate this issue into the daily work of the product developers. In order to find out how the environmental policy of a company essentially affects the designers, a series of interviews with product developers has been made. On the other side, the environmental aspects have now been in general incorporated in the product development process. Nevertheless, designers frequently have to give priority to some essential aspects such as economy, function and quality, limiting severely the possibility to integrate the environmental aspects.

The design promotes changes in social thinking and understanding of natural resources. Ethical consumption and protection of land resources are some of the most important environmental issues today. Where design diverges, however, from those areas of cultural activity which are related directly to self-expression and life improvement is the moment at which it enters the realms of mass production and mass consumption. From that point onwards it becomes harder for self-expression, whether that of the designer or the consumer, to assert itself within the economic determination of the framework which defines their actions.

Mass cultural values, reflected in mass taste and symbolized by mass-produced artifacts, are perpetrated by the mass manufacturer and absorbed wholesale by the mass consumer. Only within subcultures, or other ‘alternative’ cultural groups, are other values asserted and, once again, it is through artifacts, whether clothes or lifestyle accompaniments either made especially or appropriated, that these values are communicated.

Design is, therefore, an important medium of communication that expresses the values of the system within which it functions. Environmentally friendly design sets out to describe the twentieth-century design in as broad a cultural context as possible, indicating many of the different forces that have determined its evolution and describing a number of the more significant developments that have taken place.

Many smaller, more self-contained histories could run parallel with this general work, serving to pull together many of the threads. The biography of any number of industrial designers, or the full story of any mass-produced object, such as the telephone or the chair, would, for example, touch and illuminate many of the themes. Environmentally friendly design serves to contextualize design not for academic purposes alone but also to allow designers themselves to see their task in perspective and to question some of the narrow assumptions they have inherited about their cultural role in this century.

While still fulfilling manufacturing industries’ needs for ever-increasing production and consumption, the designer is still in a unique position of being able to improve the quality of life in a number of ways, whether in terms of influencing the ergonomic and aesthetic quality of products, or of social and psychological fulfillment and cultural richness.

The new environmentally friendly design concerns the symbolic relationship of man to his material environment, namely, that a commitment to new materials implies a commitment to the present and to the future and the discovery of new materials throughout this century has generally been accompanied by a mood of optimism and excitement. Latterly with the demise of this commitment to ‘the shock of the new’ and the reassertion in many quarters of an interest in nostalgia, revivalism, traditional skills and vernacular styles, the value of new materials has also been thrown into question.

In this century the age of new materials belongs, therefore, to the period between the two world wars when, in spite of sustained economic pessimism, the optimism engendered by a belief in the future was fuelled by the new materials, and the modem aesthetic that designers created for them. Although developments in metals and plastics have dominated the advances in materials technology for manufacturing industry in this century there have been a few other innovations which have also had far-reaching effects. Among those which came into their own in the interwar period were rayon and new forms of glass. The aesthetic limitations imposed by the production methods are particular to this particular process.

An emphasis on curves, the compositional role of the ‘parting line’, colour and size are crucial visual components of plastics design, the technical limitations of which the designer has to discuss carefully with the engineer before design can begin. Perhaps more than any other single material it is plastics which have encouraged designers and manufacturers to move towards aesthetic simplicity in the mass-produced artefact.

In sum, the period of 1990- 2000 was marked by the specification of environmental problems, so the related question as to how problems will be investigated, and more significantly, which personnel will be chosen to carry out the research, grows in importance. The main trends in ethical consumption are innovative technologies and production facilities which help farmers to reduce land use and produce more annually.

There is no doubting that there could well be some revolutionary changes about to occur in the way in which the agro-food system functions. There is the belief that technology is shaped by social structures and that it often performs a specific social function which reflects the interests of particular sectors of society. This critique explicitly takes into account the unequal distribution of political resources in society and the implications that this has for the development of agricultural technologies Technical change is not only an instrument in the generation of an economic surplus but also an object and an instrument of social conflicts.

Technical change conditions the social control of the means of production, the organization of the labor process, the social division of labor, and the social appropriation of the surplus. Social conflicts affect the rate and direction of technical change at several different levels.

Each step towards a tighter specification of the aims of the organization constitutes a de-selection of other approaches to research. If the appropriable nature of these innovations supposedly corrects for market in terms of R&D resource allocation, it is reasonable to ask whether appropriateness effectively distorts decisions made concerning what gets researched, especially if private sector involvement in research effectively pushes the public sector into a more subservient position.

References

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Bansal, P. Building Competitive Advantage and Managing Risks through Sustainable Development. IVET Business Journal. 2001, pp. 48-52.

Brands, Innovation and Growth. PIMS 2004, pp. 1-49.

Corbey, S. “The BedZED lessons“. University of East London, 2005.

Holm, I. Ideas and Beliefs in Architecture and Industrial design: How attitudes, orientations and underlying assumptions shape the built environment. Oslo School of Architecture and Design, 2006.

Lazarus, N. “Beddington Zero (Fossil) Energy Development: Toolkit for Carbon Neutral Developments – Part II“. BioRegional, 2003.

Reilly, Trish.. Green by Design. The Environmental Magazine, 13, (2002) pp. 20-22.

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