Future. Considerations of a designer 50n years from now.

Out of all of the issues a designer has to consider, I think the biggest issue for a designer in the future will be where they resource their materials and how the product can be recycled. My reason for this is that so much energy is used in the transportation of goods and materials across the globe and that a lot of the refuse that is supposedly recycled isn’t.

The first issue of sourcing materials is a big one. Some materials can never be sourced locally or nationally. That is reason for the amount of transportation and jobs created from transporting the materials from nation to nation. In the future I predict that a material that was used before will have to be exchanged for a closer alternative. An example of this was in the war when in cities railings and other metal forms were removed and taken to melt down to be used for making parts of planes and gun shells. Materials that can be sourced locally will have to be utilised in order to reduce transportation of raw materials. The jobs destroyed from the removal of shipping etc will be great however the amount of energy and fossil fuels saved will be far greater.

I believe the second issue I mentioned, the circuit of recycling, in the future will become a lot more crucial. Although we are currently recycling more than ever, some countries more than others, some of the resources we use are slowly dwindling. Do we actually have a resource which we only have to extract once and then use forever again and again and again?