Maeda's SIMPLICITY

Push-to-Waste

I visited DaimlerChrysler last week in Detroit, Michigan. In terms of relative size in that locale, GM is the largest, followed by Ford, then DaimlerChrysler. As you may have read in the news, GM is suffering greatly from financial woes due to its massive scale and related inefficiencies. In contrast, due to its smaller scale and certain strategic decisions made a few years ago, DaimlerChrysler is something of an Apple Computer for being the smaller, but more innovative, player in the car industry.

Cost management expert Casey Mehta deftly led me through the complexities of developing ways to reduce waste in the process of car manufacturing as a means to reduce cost. The one thing I learned, among other things that I cannot divulge, is that it is simpler to generate more waste than it is to create less.

Computer technology has helped us generate waste at a pace that we really could not imagine before. Today we casually print out a 30-page document in two minutes that we will never read. Heck, we might even print an extra copy or two by accidentally submitting the print job multiple times. I cringe during every year when the thesis season begins, and students print out massive amounts of pages as a kind of "insurance."

We are now told that the future will no longer be laserprinters, but lasercutters. These magical machines cut cardboard and plastic with unparalleled precision and speed. One day in the near future, you will reach for the "File" menu and select "Fabricate ..." and within minutes you will have a scooter lazed into being. Off you go!

But I can't help but wonder how much waste will occur in this inevitable transition to personal fabrication at a massive scale. I see the lasercutter at the Media Lab and at MIT's Department of Architecture (and for that matter at every school with one of these toxic-fuming devices) with piles of acrylic scraps that are poorly utilized. Imagine a big thick piece of acrylic where a medium-sized circle has been cut from the center where the surrounding form has been tossed into the trash can. If laserprinters generate a ton of garbage as thin sheets of paper, I cannot imagine how much garbage lasercutters will generate in the future.

The power of efficient manufacturing at the scale of a corporation is the ability to continually reduce waste at a significant scale. Are companies good for the environment? Rarely. But perhaps they can at least do better than millions of people with their own personal home-factories. I hope that companies recognize the ecological implications of their cost-saving exercises, even if those savings are not passed on to the consumer. I am happy to pay for a cleaner earth.