The Futures Archive S1E3: The Bottle

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And to our education partner, Adobe.

Transcript

Lee Moreau
Welcome to the Futures Archive, a show about human centered design, where this season, we’ll take an object, look for the human at the center and keep asking questions. I’m Lee Moreau…

Jamer Hunt
…and I’m Jamer Hunt.

Lee Moreau
On each episode, we’re going to start with an object. Today, that’s the plastic bottle. We’ll look at the history of that object from our perspective as designers who’ve done work in human centered design and not just how it looks and feels, but also the relationship between that object and the people it was designed for.

Jamer Hunt
And with other humans too.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is brought to you by the design team at Automattic. Later on, we’ll hear from one of their product designers Srujana Akkiraju. The Futures Archive’s education partner, this season, is Adobe.

Lee Moreau
Jamer, thanks so much for being with us.

Jamer Hunt
Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m excited for this conversation.

Lee Moreau
So Jamer, we’re going to talk about the bottle today, the plastic bottle to be specific. But before we get into all that, I think we should get a little bit more information about you and what you do. I know you as the professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons, at the New School in New York City, and I also know you as the author of Not to Scale, a book with a very long subtitle which came out just before the pandemic.

Jamer Hunt
So the subtitle of Not to Scale, is: how the small becomes large, the large becomes unthinkable, and the unthinkable becomes possible. And it’s a book that tries to help us understand the world that we’ve created in the world that we need to live in. And so it jumps off, I think, from the notion that the internet has really changed our experience of scale and things that used to be physical are no longer. And in a sense, the kind of mechanics of it, like the physics of our world has changed as we’re now living in this kind of digital, hyper networked world, and it’s created new kinds of phenomenon and new kinds of problems for us. And so the book at one level is an attempt to kind of wrangle with the present by looking at the way in which something like scale, which we tend to take very much for granted, actually might be a really productive way to kind of think through what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and how we might work our way through it.

Lee Moreau
The relationship between insights about people and the systems that define us, that’s really central to this conversation about the bottle. Now most people think of the bottle as an object you hold in your hand, you maybe drink something out of it. Do you remember a world before this—we’ll call it pre plastic bottle ubiquity—where there are plastic bottles just everywhere? Was was that part of your childhood, your youth growing up?

Jamer Hunt
No. The short answer would be no. I think in the sense that we were not soda drinkers, but I think even at the time soda came in glass bottles. And so it really was a decade or two later that the plastic bottles began to replace glass.

Lee Moreau
So you saw this shift, you saw this transition take place.

Jamer Hunt
Let’s say I lived through it. I’m not sure that I saw it. I don’t think I really understood it. You know, other than the obvious that, oh, the bottle is now plastic, it’s no longer glass, but I don’t think I understood the scale of it. For me, I think it was that slow transition. But as someone who never really drank soda, I was never buying plastic bottles very much. Probably what I was much more familiar with was the, you know, plastic milk jug, the one gallon milk jug. That was probably the greater introduction for me. I have a vague, vague recollection when I was very young of- of glass bottles being delivered to our home. And then the next thing in my memory, because I was one of five children, was a sort of two and a half gallon kind of like half a cow that lived in our refrigerator. You know, that’s sort of probably my earliest memory of a plastic dispenser being a regular part of my life.

Lee Moreau
OK, well, this is like confessions of a of a milk drinker or something like that.

Jamer Hunt
Right.

Lee Moreau
So we’re going to be talking about the plastic bottle here specifically because it’s different from other bottle types and materials that we could be talking about. So we’re talking about the kind of ubiquitous plastic bottle and all its various forms, which would include your childhood milk jug, the two and half gallon milk jug, but also those Dasani and Poland Spring and all these other bottles that you can see around us all the time. So to set this up, Jamer, we’re going to hear from a few different historians and designers who are going to talk about the plastic bottle in more depth. And before we get into that, I think it’s important to understand that the history of the modern day plastic bottle is very similar to some of the other items and artifacts and objects that we’ve already been talking about. They basically came to prominence during World War Two, when the mass production of plastic was geared up for the war effort and left a huge production capacity in our country and around the world that needed to be satisfied later on.

Susan Freinkel
So when the end of the war came, and there was no longer a need for 200,000 plastic bugles for the army, that toymaker could go back to making plastic stuff. And they didn’t want to make just a few plastic toys, they wanted to make a bunch of plastic toys. And that’s when you really started to get kind of the incursion of plastics into daily life.

Lee Moreau
Susan Freinkel is a science writer, and she’s also the author of a book called “Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.” And what she’s really setting up here is not only could we produce and sell a lot of plastic products, plastics just lasted too long.

Susan Freinkel
By the time plastic bottles came along, we were pretty well into sort of the next gen. A ration of plastic consumption. In the immediate postwar years, most plastics went into durable goods. At a certain point, though in the fifties, it becomes clear to the industry that you’re not going to keep growing and expanding on durable goods. You need to find new markets, and one obvious new market was disposability.

Lee Moreau
And so, Jamer, this is a an issue of scale, right? When we’re shifting from durable goods into disposable goods— what does that unleash?

Jamer Hunt
Well, certainly for modern consumption, for the American way of life, the idea of planned obsolescence was critically important that you had to be constantly creating new markets and new demands for the things that you produced. Otherwise, if you produced something that lasted for 100 years, you wouldn’t be selling a lot of them because people would hold on to them. And so plastic becomes kind of one of the vectors towards a notion that nothing needs to last very long. And that’s very much part of the American kind of mythos as well. The idea that, you know, we are constantly at the cutting edge of civilization and of progress. And so plastic was really not just an important material for manufacturing, it became kind of a symbol of American ingenuity, of the future, of a kind of lifestyle, of perpetual newness and excitement where all of our needs would be met because we could produce these things at enormous scale and for very cheap, because plastic was also becoming extraordinarily cheap. And so the sense of abundance for all really fit with that sort of American dream and the American kind of economic model that came to predominate across the globe in the 20th century, which was the idea of mass production married to mass consumption as a way to build towards not only economic growth and prosperity, but sort of nationwide happiness.

Lee Moreau
There’s a paradox, obviously, in that the stuff that you’re making can last forever. And yet we need to still find a way to sell more stuff. And I think as consumers, we struggle and have struggled for some time to get our head around that. So maybe the way to to get around that problem is just to tell a different story. And I think this brings up the idea that the history of plastics and their growth is also the history of marketing. This is Susan Freinkel again:

Susan Freinkel
People had been introduced to the possibilities of plastics and had sort of been told that these materials would make it possible for you to have an abundant lifestyle for not a lot of money.

Lee Moreau
There is abundance again, and if plastics have helped to sort of usher in this new lifestyle of abundance, it sets off a whole series of other changes in terms of what we buy, how we buy it and how our desire is shaped by the stories that we hear. Joseph Malherek is a historian of consumer culture, and he tells us about what happens when we have new packaging systems and this lifestyle of abundance.

Joseph Malherek
When you can manufacture things at a more mass scale, you could also box them up and sort them so that they could be available to consumers on that individual level and so that they could go into a store and identify the packaging.

Lee Moreau
So really, what he’s talking about here is the shopping that we understand today, right? You take something off the shelf. It’s how we buy groceries. It’s our experience at Wal-Mart every day, all over the world. This wasn’t how it happened before. It’s important to kind of remember that this self-service retail model didn’t actually exist, that it rose to prominence around the same time as the technology of plastics and packaging and all of these new materials. Let’s let Joseph Malherek take us a little bit into that story with some more depth.

Joseph Malherek
Basically, the whole idea is, you know, as opposed to going into a shop and telling a shopkeeper that you want such and such quantity of oats. And the shopkeeper brings them to you from the shelf, instead— you, you get them from the shelf yourself. And if the consumer or the customer themself has to get the product, they have to have some sort of understanding of what it is, some sort of relationship to it. And so with the rise of packaging techniques that sort of permitted this— boxing techniques, printing techniques, canning techniques, bottling techniques that allowed this sort of mass manufacture of goods and self-service retail, manufacturers knew that they had to establish a more direct relationship with consumers.

Lee Moreau
You need to be able to call something by name— your your milk is Borden, your detergent is Tide, your soft drinks are Coca-Cola. This is the world that we know. This feels a lot more familiar, right?

Jamer Hunt
It does. And the thing that struck me in all of this was trying to understand whether those manufacturers at the time understood the potential problem of this, and I relate it in some way to the size of the United States. If we lived on a small island, I’m not sure that we would have produced things at such scale because we, you know, people who live on small islands tend to know that they’ve got to kind of put their waste somewhere. They’re not going to be able to just kind of dump it and run. And so, you know, I can’t imagine that that manufacturers, you know, back in the 50s 60s were all that worried about the waste because, one: they probably weren’t thinking in terms of the multiplying effects of not only this happening in New York, but also in Los Angeles and also in Taipei and also in Nairobi, so on one hand, you know, I think the globalization of this mass production was not on people’s mind. But also, I think there was just a sense that it would go somewhere.

Lee Moreau
So now we’ve brought design and marketing into the manufacturing and distribution process. You put all this branding and marketing and pretty colors on stuff, and you actually see it in a different way. It makes me think of the way that we think about water itself as something that we put into plastic bottles, right. There was there was just water before, but now we have like kind of regular water— I’m from Maine originally, so like for me, regular water is Poland Spring water that you see in the green bottle. Like, that’s that’s my version of the colloquial like water now. But then there’s fancy water, right when I see somebody with a bottle or something like that, you know, in a different plastic bottle, I’m like, Oh, that means something. I mean, this this is kind of absurd, right?

Jamer Hunt
Yeah, it’s really remarkable. I remember I was traveling in Rome a couple, probably a decade ago and was struck because there are public water fountains all over the city and you just sort of lean your head in and drink some clean and tasty water on a hot day. It was such a remarkable amenity. And meanwhile, what we were seeing in our public schools, for instance, was they were closing down the water fountains and selling bottled water for, you know, a dollar to the students. It’s an extraordinary, almost magical accomplishment to have sold us water at this scale and at this price when we have it freely available clean and healthy everywhere. You know, there can be no greater story in American advertising than than the promotion of the water bottle.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is brought to you by the design team at Automattic, which is building a new web, and a new workplace all around the world.

Srujana Akkiraju
I’m Srujana Akkiraju, I am a product designer at Automattic.

Lee Moreau
Srujana joined Automattic to get closer to the people she was designing for.

Srujana Akkiraju
I work on a product called Sensei. It’s basically a plugin that allows anyone to just quickly create a course and set it up online. So what I really enjoy about this is it’s just like the the impact and like the scale of this problem, right? Like democratizing education and e-learning is huge and the impact that it can have on, you know, educators across the world and also learners, they’re able to reach a lot more students this way. You know, I spend a lot more time and invest a lot more time working on something and actually can see the value and the impact that my design decisions have created for the end users.

Lee Moreau
For Srujana, joining Automattic meant designing with a new kind of flexibility.

Srujana Akkiraju
There’s no set way of working. It’s all dependent on your team and what works best for your team and the product that we’re working on.

Lee Moreau
Designing a better web. Join us at Automattic dot com slash design. That’s auto-m-a-double t-i-c dot com slash design.

Lee Moreau
You know, the water bottle was inconceivable just a few decades ago. But we get to the point now where we’re like, OK, well, we’ve done it, we’ve got the material, we’ve got the design, we have a desirability, we may or may not have a need, as you were suggesting, but we certainly have people who want something. We have mass scale and it’s all there and we’ve done it. Congratulations us. Hurray. You know, plastic water bottles are everywhere. They’re ubiquitous. Now what?

Jamer Hunt
Yeah. Now, now we’re facing the consequences. There about, from one article I read and Reuters— are about a million plastic bottles produced every minute. That’s about a half a trillion per year.

Lee Moreau
Wow.

Jamer Hunt
So it is at a volume that is absolutely unimaginable. If I remember the numbers correctly, if you count to a billion by, you know, ones each per second, you get to about 73 three years, I believe. You know, that’s a lifetime. You can sort of relate to that if you count to a trillion by ones, it’s something in the order of 73,000 years, which is, you know, longer than modern civilization has been around. And so our numbers like a half a trillion, which we’re now kind of throwing around. I would argue that at the time the bottle was invented, very few people were even saying the word that it was just not part of our vocabulary to think in those numbers. You know, the impact of this is well beyond what any of us could have imagined. And now we have to figure out what to do about it.

Lee Moreau
So you’ve taken us to the sort of precipice now, Jamer, and we’re just going to jump off and go down into the dark side.

Pierre Paslier
The problem with plastic is definitely built into the supply chain that we’ve built around it for the past 50 years.

Lee Moreau
So that was Pierre Paisler, a the co-founder of Notpla, a packaging company that’s famous for a product that it developed called Ooho, which is an edible packaging made of seaweed.

Pierre Paslier
So we’ve kind of built everything around plastic, which means that other solutions that might have a role to play, it’s very hard to enter the supply chain that has been built for plastic.

Lee Moreau
And I think in this particular case, it’s the scale— the system is not just about the manufacturing, but he’s also talking about the legislation and the regulation and the fact that this stuff lasts in the environment for centuries, and that’s what he’s trying to confront with his products.

Pierre Paslier
I think human centered design has been a very interesting approach to create more kind of like experiential and delightful products and experiences for people. But it’s also when you leave it kind of like unleashed, it runs into the direction of making everything optimized just for the enjoyment of the user at the expense of the environment, of our resources. And I think that unfortunately, because it goes hand in hand with capitalism, it can be a little bit of like a blind spot to to focus too much on user centered design. And forget that actually, we have to make things work for the long run, not just for the the one moment that the user is going to benefit the most from.

Lee Moreau
Pierre is really highlighting one of the central critiques of human centered design that in its insistence and focus on satisfying human needs and desires that we miss certain very important aspects of material, culture, society and the world around us.

Pierre Paslier
But also the problem with plastic is that it doesn’t take into its costs the implication of end of life. So it’s kind of like a shadow cost of plastic that no one is really kind of like seeing upfront, but that we are all paying as a society with the health implications, loss of habitat, pollution.

Lee Moreau
And as consumers, whether we like it or not, we’re comfortable with plastic, even if we don’t want to admit it. We’ve gone down this path. And this is what we’ve been sort of telling ourselves over the last several decades. Even if we don’t understand the scale or the scope of plastics impact in our lives, this is- this is something that we have— we’ve we’ve made so much a part of our lives and so much a part of our environment and our planet that it’s really part of our context now and we have to confront it.

Susan Freinkel
I think plastic is a proxy for capitalism.

Lee Moreau
Susan Freinkel again.

Susan Freinkel
We start with the stuff that we pull out of the ground and it goes through different production things and it ends up at the dump. It’s a linear, wasteful economy, and it’s an economy that is continually encouraging and enticing us to buy, buy, buy, buy more. So plastic brought into being all sorts of things that didn’t exist before, that we have gotten very used to buying.

Jamer Hunt
My immediate reaction is that we need to start to think about something that goes beyond human centered design that is planet centered design, or squirrel centered design, or seabird centered design. In other words, the- the conceit of the human at the center of all of this has been sort of part of the problem along the way. I don’t want to be too critical of human centered design if that’s the kind of direction the show is going in. But you can understand why we don’t think about these externalities, these other impacts is because in part, we put the human at the center. This has been a long story of, you know, going back hundreds of years in the western world of us thinking about the human as the beginning, middle and end of the story and lots of other cultures. And, you know, lots of other people think in other ways about that.

Lee Moreau
So Jamer, we’re kind of getting to the end of this story. And what I am curious about is in your book, you talk about the importance of comprehension of scale, the tools that we use, the kind of technical means that we’ve employed to kind of understand what scale actually is. How do we frame a way of seeing this world that we’ve created? It seems like a big culture shift that would be required there.

Jamer Hunt
It really is, and I think that it requires, in a sense, kind of looking at these processes almost from the other end of the telescope. Starting to understand not just what the production of new things creates in terms of opportunity, but also in terms of the legacy that goes along with it. You know, it systems thinking, it’s ecosystems thinking, you know, I think we tend to sometimes think of systems as human artifacts, but it’s really ecosystem systemic thinking to understand that we have a role to play within a large ecosystem and that that role means we have to take seriously everything we contribute to it and everything we make and produce. And if we don’t take that seriously, if you can’t think in those terms, then we’re just going to continue to perpetuate these problems. It’s a paradigm shift. You know, it really is almost at the level of, you know, recognizing that the Earth rotates around the sun and not vice versa.

Lee Moreau
In this conversation about the bottle, we start to shift from the thing itself right into this much broader landscape. And I’m— first off, I’m curious if you see that, you know, not just in the bottle, but into other items as well. So you know what are the other things in our world that we can kind of look at that are both a quotidian object that we have in front of ourselves that plug into the broader systems? Can you just kind of give us a range of things that we might be thinking about as we as we sort of make this mental leap from the one to the many?

Jamer Hunt
The wonderful thing about that question is that I can’t think of anything that doesn’t fit that description. I really have a hard time thinking of anything that one could design, anything that we’ve produced that isn’t somehow caught up in both very local kinds of systemic complications, let’s call them or relationships, but also at the kind of regional scales, of the federal scales, the global scale. And that brings with it, I think, great insight in terms of understanding our impact on the world. But then it also presents, I think, a problem for us. It becomes hard to kind of think anything beyond a system. Everything seems to be connected to everything else, and it can become paralyzing if you’re not careful. So I think one of the signature shifts over my time in design, which is roughly 20 years, has been this shift from a focus on the artifact as the kind of way to understand design and the outcome of design, and the production of design, to now understanding that this is a process that is embedded within a larger system and that if we’re really going to understand that system, we’ve got to start thinking and looking at all kinds of different scales.

Lee Moreau
Tell us a little bit about this notion of wicked problems and this connection between the comprehension of the scale and then getting into how do we even confront some of these incredible challenges.

Jamer Hunt
Yeah, it’s it’s funny that article where the term wicked problems comes from is from I believe 1971 written by Horst Riddle and Melvin Weber. Clearly, during that massive upheavals that are going on socially and politically. And if you read the article, they basically say we as planners and you know, they’re coming from a sort of city planning tradition had been really successful for quite a long time. You know, we made our streets cleaner. We made our cities healthier. We pretty much got most people housing if they needed it. And we had this remarkable kind of run of success up until the 60s. And then suddenly something changed. And what changed was other voices coming in people who were not, for the most part, white men of privilege and power, but were instead people left out with these changes. And so the Wicked Problems essay is really so fascinating because they’re throwing up their hands and saying when you shift from a question of efficiency to a question of equity, we no longer have the answers. It’s too complicated. There are too many different voices and there’s no way to make the right decision anymore. And it’s rare that you see an academic article that basically just is people throwing up their hands and saying, this is too hard.

Lee Moreau
But we see this all around us, right? That shift from efficiency to equity and an appreciation for and really an understanding for what have we done, and where do we go from here— this is impacting us on so many levels all the time.

Jamer Hunt
Yeah. And I think for me, I think the great eye-opening was, you know, at various moments the environmental movement that helped us to understand as designers that what used to be a process of looking from the cradle to the grave as many people have described it, the material arrives. You shape it. It goes to the consumer. End of story could no longer be that that story is a lovely one to tell yourself, but it means not accounting for the waste that you’ve produced, and not to mention the environmental devastation of the extraction. And I think once you see that you begin to realize that you have to think in systems because that’s the only way we’re going to sort of see and act our way out of this situation, if we can and if it’s not too late.

Lee Moreau
And we are designers and we’re thinking about the future and we’re thinking about systems. So projecting forward, how might we fix this simple problem of the plastic water bottle moving forward? What are some other things we could do?

Jamer Hunt
Yeah, thanks for calling it a simple problem.

Lee Moreau
You’re welcome.

Jamer Hunt
You know, simple, I guess, in the sense that a water bottle is relatively simple but complex in so many other ways. I am more and more I’m wondering about what it means for design to be always focused on the future and what is the impact of that kind of thinking. And I’ve always thought of design as something that produces a practice that produces kind of possible futures or alternative futures or new possibilities. And that’s been part of what makes it kind of fun and glorious and dazzling and exciting and all the things that drew so many of us to the field. But I wonder more and more whether that impulse is part of the problem, not part of the solution and whether we need to focus our gaze somewhere else. And for me, lately, it’s…I’ve been thinking about the present as the space of undoing and unraveling as a way to think about how we manage these problems, not to project forward, but to think about how we undo what the present is. An example I sometimes give is reparations. Reparations is a way of dealing with the past in the present. It produces future results, for sure. So it’s not as if there aren’t future results to that, but the act of reparations is one of accounting for our 400 years of slavery. By looking at that history, understanding that history and in a sense, trying to undesign the racism that has become systemic. And I wonder whether systems in their very nature in their very system-ness produce kind of inequality and hierarchy and differentials of power, and that perhaps the only way to address that is to unmake those systems rather than to sort of fix those systems. And so it’s still an idea I’m just toying around with, but I think it’s for me just one way to kind of think through how we’re going to deal with these problems that seem absolutely impossible to undo. When you talk about undoing however many billion plastic bottles we produce in a day, it’s hard to really imagine that I or you or we together or 10 of us or 100 of us will be able to solve that. I don’t know how you do that. If the idea is to continue to sort of move with the same thinking that we used before, we have to approach this from a radically different way of framing the problem.

Lee Moreau
And so it strikes me that part of our hypothesis there, if I can call it that is that because design is so future forward, almost aggressively moving toward growth, I mean, we are design is in many respects tied to market economy, tied to the growth of this capitalist marketplace that we live in. But if we could kind of be a little bit more historical in the way that we think about design, which I think, you know, to be honest, I don’t— I do think we struggle with our history in terms of design. We might be able to create some new avenues. Is that- is that kind of where that takes us?

Jamer Hunt
And understand what got us to the present. I keep being worried that our idea of solving for the future is to just design even harder to sort of, you know, ratchet up the design intensity and somehow if we just 10 percent more ingenuity, cleverness and perspiration, we’re going to finally crack through the this boundary and create sort of a more sustainable future. And I just am, I’m yet to be convinced by that.

Lee Moreau
Well, I’m glad that we’re a couple of humans who have started to have this conversation. I think, along with a lot of listeners who are also actually engaging in this conversation as well.

Lee Moreau
All right now, we’re going to change gears a little bit. As you know, after every episode of The Futures Archive, we’re going to end with a prompt. A sort of design exercise for you, the listener, to keep working on the object and the ideas that we’ve talked about on this week’s show. You’ll be able to share your ideas and see what other listeners are thinking about as well. I’ll explain where in just a bit. This week, I’d like you to pick a day any day of the week and document every single beverage container that you use on that day, every one— it doesn’t matter if it’s a ceramic coffee cup, if it’s reusable, if it’s made of paper or plastic, or if it’s simply your cupped hand. We want to see all of them. Please post your photos on Instagram and use the hashtag The Futures Archive, that’s all one word. We’ll share some of our favorite responses in our Instagram Story at Design Observer. You can read the full prompt on our Instagram. And check out some of our favorite responses from last week.

Lee Moreau
The Futures Archive is a podcast from Design Observer to keep up with the show. Go to TFA dot Design Observer dot com or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you like what you heard today, make sure to rate and review us and share this with your friends. So Jamer, amazing conversation. I’ve got a lot to think about and probably a little bit to lose sleep over, but if anybody wants to learn more about you and your work, where could they find out some more information?

Jamer Hunt
Sure. Thank you again for this. This has been amazing. Usually at Jamer Hunt, whether on Twitter or Instagram, and you know my books available. So take a look at it and I would love to get some feedback.

Lee Moreau
Please post your answers for this week’s assignment on Instagram using #TheFuturesArchive, that’s one word. We’re really excited to see what you come up with and what you’ve drank from this week and make sure you’re following us also at Design Observer on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. The Futures Archives education partner is Adobe. For each episode, you can find supporting materials, including further reading, lesson plans and all kinds of activities suitable for college level learners. For more about Adobe’s educational initiatives, follow them at EDEX dot adobe dot com. And The Futures Archive is brought to you by Automattic. Thanks again to Susan Freinkel, Joseph Malherek, and Pierre Paslier for talking to The Futures Archive. You can find more about them and my co-host, Jamer Hunt, in our show notes, as well as links to archival audio and other interesting stuff. Our associate producer is Adina Karp. Owen Agnew edits the show. Blake Eskin of Noun and Verb Rodeo helped to develop the show. Thanks, as always to Design Observer founder Jessica Helfand and to Design Observer executive producer Betsy Vardell.