LOOKING at THINGS

Book Proposal

SAMPLE SPREADS

The wooden clothes peg is a triumph of design. The two timber parts are identical and the wire spring allows them to open and close with elegant simplicity T

This model was created by David M. Smith of Springfield USA in 1853. It is one of 146 different peg patents filed in the US between 1852 and 1887. The design was improved by Solon E. Moore who, in 1887, added a coiled spring made from a single piece of wire to keep the peg closed.

Planks of beech are seasoned in the open air for 7 months, then dried in a kiln for 3 or 4 weeks to stabilise the timber. These are reduced to strips 9mm thick and machined on both sides to form continuous lengths of peg shapes before being cut into individual pieces. These are cleaned up and waxed before the spring fitted between the two sections.

The one piece, hygienic, self cleaning, virtually smell free toilet is so widely used today that we have forgotten the Georgian ‘Privies’. These were often hidden in the cellar or in a hut, discharging into the street. This smelly, disease ridden toilet had to be emptied by hand, so was often left for long periods.

Even though the middle classes and ‘well to do’ Victorians had flushing toilets they often emptied into unsafe drains. The Prince of Wales’ long illness in 1871 was attributed to faulty drainage at Sandringham. At the other end of the social spectrum Hector Gavin’s report on public toilets in 1840 recounted that ‘one woman had fallen through a rotten privy floor and drowned in the filth underneath’. Just imagine her last breadth next time you use your clean, warm and private loo.

Researchers at the University of Padua have found that the popularity of Prosecco is resulting in increased planting of vines in the Veneto region of Italy. This is causing soil loss from the hillsides further up the mountains due to erosion from heavy rain.

The researchers estimate that some 400,000 tonnes of soil are lost each year. This represents some 4.4Kg for each bottle of wine.

Is Prosecco green  ?

According to a recent BBC Radio 4 Food Programme chocolate production is threatened by global warming. Cocoa trees only grow in particular areas and as our climate changes these zones are moving.

A representative of the chocolate industry played down the seriousness of this situation stating that it was simply a matter of growing trees in the new zones. However, a majority of the growers, mostly in west Africa, are subsistence farmers paid very little for their crop and so will find it difficult to develop new sites.

Are we running out

of chocolate  ?

The MacArthur Foundation report on Fashion tells us that ‘clothing sales have doubled in the last 15 years and will treble again in the next 30’. This is particularly worrying when we discover that fashion is one of the most environmentally damaging industries. It uses vast quantities of water, causes deforestation and pollution and relies upon ‘a carbon fuelled supply chain which creates 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions each year’. That is more than international air flights and shipping combined.

The fashion designer Stella McCartney, whose 2016 dress this is, acknowledges that to turn around the $2.4 trillion industry is going to be difficult. “But”, she says, ‘we need a new textile economy in which clothes are designed differently, worn longer and recycled and reused much more often’.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation tells us that some $460 million worth of clothing is thrown away each year. We purchase over 80 billion items of new clothing but are wearing these less often before disposing of them. This is so much so that 6 out of 10 fast fashion garments end up in landfill or incineration within one year and less than 1% are re-cycled into new clothing. This means that £82m worth of UK clothing is thrown away each year and a lot will sit in landfill for many years giving off methane gas and leaching toxic chemicals and dyes int the soil and groundwater.

Too many clothes   ?

Do we need to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle ?

A web video posted by Chukwuemeka Afigbo who works for Facebook shows this soap dispenser delivering soap to white hands but it doesn’t recognise his black skin. It appears that the higher the score on the Fitzpatrick scale (a measure of skin tone), the more difficult it is for light to bounce back. However, the real issue is that the design team did not pick this up and rework the sensors to allow for a variety of skin colours.

This failure has also been found in fitness monitors, digital watches, laptop computers and more recently in Oximeters which measure blood oxygen levels. I and failed to give correct results for non white skin. These faults could indicate a wide spread ‘unconscious bias’ in the new product community, especially when we discover that a majority of the world’s population are not white.

Lucy Winkett on BBC Radio 4’s  ‘Thought for the Day’ recently reported that ‘1.3 million bikes were sold in the four months after the Covid Lockdown started in March 2020’. However, she also recounts that ‘only 10% of the less well off cycle and 75% never do so’. This is interesting, as a century ago cycling was a popular working class activity with workers escaping from the industrial towns on their bikes.

Who rides a

bike today  ?

Do black hands

matter   ?

Are there just too many of us ?

Why did only 26%

vote Tory ?

Humans have survived and multiplied so much so that the world population reached one billion in the 1830’s. In less than 200 years this figure has grown to 7.5 billion. This means that for every one person alive in 1960 there were 2.5 sixty years later. The UN Population Division estimates that we will reach a peak of 11 billion in 2100.

In a recent Radio Four documentary Adrian Chiles discovered that some 18 million adults did not vote in the UK 2017 election. If we explore the figures for 2019 we discover this figure grew to 21.6 million or 40.4% of the 18 to 85+ population. These statistics also indicate that there were 7.6 million more non voters than conservative supporters. The percentage poll figures, quoted to justify the government’s mandate, are calculated from the number of people who have voted. If we consider the non-voters we find that rather than the 43.6% of the vote, the Tories had support from just 26% of UK adults. Ben Page, CEO of the Ipsos Mori poling company, adds that ‘because these people don’t vote they don’t matter’. Politicians have little interest in them because they have no effect on their political lives’.