Corporate Social Responsibility: Mapping the Design Debates

Well its been a while since the last post due to non stop work at James Fisher, but things have still been happening.

As the zero-waste homepage reflects, I talked at the GSA this afternoon regarding Corporate Social Responsibility and mapping the design debates associated with that onto McDonough and Braungart's fractal. It basically served as a means to discuss ecodesign, co-design, OSPD and appropriate technologies in a more meaningful way. It worked pretty well a tool for exploring the issues and placing them in the 'problem space' as it were.

Its interesting to see how debates and examples and people group themselves when one does this, with co-design intiatives forming a cluster in the 'equity' corner, concpicuous for their lack of industry application, except those rare examples of OSPD. And then appropriate technologies place themselves resolutely in the centre.

The notes that I am talking about can be found here..

I met a bit of a dead end with globalisation/localisation and completely forgot to talk about Dyson which was kind of the point of tackling that. Darn. What I would have said is that if you haven;t already, you should read his Dimbleby lecture where he outlined his stance on globalisation, the outsourcing of manufacturing and the retaining of superiority through intellectual property. I wonder what he would make of open sourcing his ubiquitous inventions.

I had hoped that the talk would be more of a discussion, but didn't really facilitate it that way. I have learnt how not to do it next time. So please please do add your comments here re: today's talk. I love a good debate and would like to get this blog going more actively.