I love to look through university final projects centred around design. I found this one last week, a student in the USA has developed a USB flash drive entombed in concrete and promoted it as being a green product "so when the technology becomes obsolete and it is tossed, it will not leach its heavy metals into the landfill."
He goes on to say that:
"On a metaphorical level, its weight acts as a counter-mass to the obsessive miniaturization, quick convenience, disposable mentality of our electronic products. Things should be more convenient but not at the expensive of other more important things (like making us dumb or weak for example). Being harder to bring around with you and contradicting the promise of the pocketable jump drive, Harddrive is a functional reminder about the permanence that should be a part of the design thinking of our objects."
The idea was posted on a blog where comments could be made and it amused me greatly to read through them. I have listed a few below.
They range from:
- This one is so coooooooool!!!??? If you sell them, Igonna run to a shop! How heavy it is?
To:
- Counter-culture idiotic.
- You could always build a house with the old crashed drives.
- Well you cant do that to a HardDrive it will not work if you cover the holes that the drive clearly says DO NOT COVER ANY HOLES. This product is a fail FAIL
- One of the major wastes that is weighed for LEED certification is concrete. If you could create this product from the wasted concrete in building construction, then I could understand it being "green." But it still would just be recycled.
As you can see the majority were negative but my favourite was posted by someone called Jimmy
- Finally, a product that tells me I'm a bad person for buying it.
The critical nature of design! Do you dare to be different?
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