Annie Leonard: The Story of Stuff

The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard is a simple yet very illustrative and informative video about the people’s production and consumption patterns. In this video, the portrayal of production and consumption in our world is rather cruel and greedy. The Government and corporation seems cooperating with each other fairly well considering that both parties knew the harm that the present production and consumption process will contribute in the society.

Gathering of resources continues to consume our environment. Cutting trees sounds normal and acceptable for production of certain human resources for living if it’s in controlled manner. However, cutting trees perpetually without any concern in the outcome is definitely unacceptable. Consuming not only the country’s resources but also the third world country’s resources is crossing the boundary. Doing this does not prove anything about someone’s hierarchy in the world but prove how arrogant and insensitive they are.

The use of toxics in production of things is unstoppable and it does not show awareness or concern towards the environment and people. Industrial production system mainly produces toxic products.  As a result, it consumes the environment badly and buying those products also consumes us and our home. For example the Brominated Fire Retardants is mixed during the creation of appliances, computers, mattresses, etc. Meaning staying close to these products is harmful for our health that it causes neural cancer at the worst.

For us industrial designers, awareness is crucial in designing and/or producing things. For the reason being that showing concern can make major impact towards our environment and towards consumers. There are many ways to avoid consuming the world grotesquely like recycling materials and choosing the right or less harmless materials in production of products. For example Fisher price toys are made of industrially harmless materials so the young ones can play with it. Sony Ericsson Co also produced a line of phone consists of recycled plastics which shows sustainability and awareness.      

Story of Stuff is a video that industrial designers, like us, needs to see. It is simple that wakes the senses up to actually see what is happening in production and consumption pattern in the world. Watching this short video warned me and made me raised my awareness about material choices and production practices that I might do in the future. I guess this video implies that there is nothing wrong to consume our environment to produce things as long as we use it while nurturing it at the same time. So we are doing the environment a very good favour in return to what they have given to us.