For Industrial Designer Philippe Guichard sustainability started before his career began in the unlikely place of a comic book. Since then, it is been a normal part of his design process and how he sees the world.
In this excerpt from On Experience, Philippe tells the simple story of how a man and his son in the desert cleaning a glass to drink from framed up the importance of the environment in his work.
“For me, sustainability was always at the, the heart of what I’ve been doing.
When I was studying engineering too, I really thought about that. Like, I thought that the systems that we were building were not necessarily, uh, environmentally sustainable, so I was already thinking of that.
The sustainability angle started when I was a kid, actually. There’s one story, if I may
share. I think I’m about eight or maybe nine, but like, you know, not 15. And I’m reading a, a comic book, and there’s just one page.
A father and his son in a desert with the dunes of sand and everything. And the father start to clean the glasses to make tea, and he take a tiny bit of water and just clean the first one, use the water from the first one to clean the second one and everything, and throw a tiny bit away.
And the kid asks, “Oh, wow, you know, do you really have to do that?”
The dad says, “Well, water is very, very precious. So yeah, we are in a desert. We need to take care of this.”
And the son says, “Oh, yeah, okay, I understand. Uh, but is that the same for everyone in this world?”
And the dad replies, “Oh, there are places where they have so much water that they shit in it.”
And, and it may seem very brutal or something, but I’m not saying that in a way to swear and everything. I’m just saying that to convey the shock. So what you think is your world and seems normal to you is an extreme for someone else.
And, that was one of the triggers of environmental sustainability is like, okay, water is precious. Not because I have that in my toilet bowl that I should waste it, and it’s not because it’s available that I shouldn’t care about it.
So that’s been framing a lot of what I’ve been doing and thinking for the last thirty-plus years.”
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