Clean Design Protocol from the Bottom Up
I’ll just give you a bit of my background to give you a sense of how I got involved in all this. I was asked in 1984 to design the national headquarters for the Environmental Defense Fund. The head of Environmental Defense is a lawyer, and he said, "We want to make sure all of our people in the office are safe for indoor air quality and things like that." We took this very seriously and started looking around for consultants who could help us and talk to our lawyers about what it meant to design in a world where we're full of lack of information. I guess two things happened. One is we went looking for information and we couldn't find any. The state of the art indoor air quality in 1984, just for your information, was a consulting company that was primarily funded by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and was apparently doing research to show why there was no danger from second-hand smoke in the workplace. That was the state-of-the-art at the time. So we went back to EDF and said, let's get on with this project because there's no information out there and we started calling manufacturers and saying, "What's in your products? What is the off-gas and things like that?" And the typical answer we got was it's proprietary, it's legal, please go away. And we've been at this now for 20-someodd years and we're still asking the same questions and we still get sometimes the same answer. When we looked at these issues, they become more and more central to the public experience. So here in 2000, on the cover of Business Week, but look at the language that's being used here. "Is your office killing you?" "The danger", "sick", and things like that. We're trying not to cause a shrill response. We're trying to look at this very gimlet-eyed and focus on the redesign of things to be safe and healthy. That's the purpose of all of this. Because what we found is that most people don't know what they're making. Some of them will send you letters like this one we got where it...
Please note that Find Internet TV does not host any videos or allow users to upload videos. The video is provided and hosted from a third party server. The source is noted to the right of the video and depending on the source, the author and copyright may be listed as well. The information provided here is aggregated from the source and provided by video search engines. Find Internet TV does not host and is not responsible for the content.