I am at a stage when I really have too much stuff. My house is full of furniture from Philippe Starck’s Costes chairs to Le Corbusier lounge chairs to Barcelona day bed and Eileen Grey stuff…. and then there are a collection of French country and New England styles Ralph Lauren furniture in the basement. These are stuff I accumulated from my days in LA, HK, Boston, London and Milan. Now I don’t know what to do with them. My basement is filled with things from art pieces to cameras; high tech gadgets to old French magazines date back to 1980s. I seriously think I need less, but I am getting more everyday. I carry an iTouch, iPad and iMac to work, plus my Leica, solar charger, Blackberries and portable GPS and all chargers and cables. My life is dependent on all those things.
When Graham Hill (founder of Treehugger) tells everyone that less is more, he has a good reason. He is now inviting people to submit design ideas to Life Edited, a design competition for a 420 square feet apartment that embodies this philosophy and demonstrates how we can "radically reduce our urban footprint, while living better and saving money." I am sure people who live in Tokyo have plenty of proven ideas for this. You don’t need to have a competition, just fly to Tokyo and check out those tiny apartments. I am heading to Tokyo in two weeks.
Life Editor’s idea is to get people to think about transformable space furnished only with the essentials and digitized media. The idea is to own less. Now we have plenty to learn from Buddhism philosophy. The Heart Sutra espouses the doctrine of “emptiness.” One of its famous lines teaches “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Design schools should design a new elective called 'Buddhism and Design.' I like that idea. I will teach that.
Don’t misunderstand that emptiness here in a nihilistic, nothing-exists sense. Rather, it means that nothing is absolute—everything is relative and impermanent, and everythng in a constant state of change. Therefore, there is no point in becoming irrationally attached to things. Don’t get upset if you can’t get your hands on the latest Louis Vuitton limited edition bag. I feel that embracing “emptiness,” rather than clinging to the material aspects of existence, opens us to a more direct, genuine, and fulfilling experience of life.
Graham is using his own 420 sf apartment as a reference for what the space ought to include living space, a home office, a work area with a rolling tool chest, and a retractable kitchen.
Is it less? In a paper recently published in the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives, Paul Ehrlich joined a group of nearly a dozen of the world’s most ambitious ecologists and economists to try to put some hard numbers behind sustainability. They boldly entitled the paper “Are We Consuming Too Much?” I suggest you get a copy of that.
The authors suggested the problem is not consuming too much. It’s that they’re consuming far too little. Think Africa. Consumption is obviously inadequate when people are dying of malnutrition. But insufficient investment also means that the next generation of Africans will have less than this generation, and the generation after that still less. This is a death spiral of declining consumption and investment, two keys to well being and sustainability.
But what about us? The answer Ehrlich and his colleagues came up is a surprise to many. It turns out that even we with our Priuses and SUVs and venti lattés might not be consuming too much, as long as we are investing enough in the future to ensure that generations to come enjoy standards of living at least as high as ours. And that suggests that we might be worrying way too much about how much we consume and far too little about how to invest in the poorest regions of the world, many of which are home to some of the earth’s greatest biodiversity as well as its most desperate people. I definitely buy the idea, investing in biodiversity is the most important step to secure our future.
