 In my last videos, I've told you design is all about projecting into the future. And teaching is the best way to do so. This video is about my students. Hi, my name is Consola Reinelli, I'm a designer and PhD candidate. This channel is all about design, sustainability and other treats. During the last semester at the university where I teach UNIRSIAT FINIS TERRAE, forced by the COVID-19 lockdown, we had to move into an online system. None of us were prepared, probably you wouldn't as well. Besides directing final projects, I also teach this semester Research 3, which is a course whose objective is to bring out a personal opinion from our students. In this sense, I ask them a question. Why design is more important than ever in history before? The seven next videos are a selection of what they turn in as a project. Please enjoy. Design is the ability to look, analyze and investigate, to be creative people. This comes from the hands of a permanent study and research of different external disciplines and the challenge of integrating them into each of our projects. Design, products and consumption generated in the last decades is the big problem that affects reality in the last few years. So, why is design important today? The consciousness that exists today, in the future, is the one that didn't exist many years before and is the one that created the great scarcity of natural resources that we live today, in addition to the excessive levels of waste that we create daily. Responsibility is individual, group and world, to investigate how to reverse these problems and consciously design, taking advantage of the maximum of the materials. This will make us position sustainability on the absorbency of the products and this is the task that we must do today. If the consciousness is not generated today, we will continue in the circle of consumption and programmed absorbency in which we have been for decades and which encourages us to have the environmental and social problems that exist today. In a landscape where the man's neck is made to notice and the culture of the waste is the conception that we have, it is necessary to reflect on the practices that the industrialization leaves, which generate contamination, defects, an unconsciousness of what happens with what it occupies. Time passes and all the material is deteriorated, but part of the design is understood that this waste is intentional, for market reasons. Today the design is important because it is necessary to develop new forms of construction, new forms of packaging, new forms of seeing the damage that humans generate. The depletion of the builders, where sheets of paper and plastics that are going to swim to oceans, potteries and among the same houses, generates serious problems. Perhaps it will not reverse as much in us, but if in the future generations. This is why today we will find projects such as the 2025 of the Corfo, which seeks to finance sustainable projects. As a change of conception, I was born and the new generation shows more awareness about this delicate topic. The design must show the path to how to be in charge of raw materials and generate new alternatives to use. Today's design can only do aesthetically beautiful things, definitions of design, it is a concept that needs humanity over time. For a designer, it is essential to understand the characteristics of society and the features that define their culture. According to Erley and Zala, they mention that design consists of identifying the opportunity and creating for each project the idea that will lead others to believe that even the improbable is possible. In effect, design consists of asking questions and finding new opportunities. We find ourselves in a period of cultural change that requires a new way of thinking. As the rhythm and lifestyle change, people will think and communicate in different ways. We are in a context in which society faces economic, social and environmental challenges, increasingly complex. We are surrounded by so many things today, technology, information, globalization, and that while we have more things, more needs will be presented and more designs will be required. Design is a tool that allows for an evolution and improvement. Why design is today more important than ever before in history? To answer this question, first we must define what design is. According to Charles Inns, design is a plan that has elements of the best possible way to reach a specific goal. I consider that this definition is adequate, since we can interpret it as a discipline that understands the essence of the needs and problems of the users to then solve them in the best possible way, combining certain elements appropriately and taking into account that the details make the difference in a great design. Understanding this, we can take a look at the current context and ask ourselves, what is happening today? According to the ecological organization The Ocean Cleanup, currently there are more than 5 billion pieces of plastic that cover the ocean and the rivers are the main source of pollution, since they are the arteries that transport waste from the earth to the ocean. Likewise, it was found that only 1,000 rivers are responsible for approximately 80% of the pollution. And according to the BBC News, at a global level, more than 2,100 million tons of waste is produced every year and only 16% of that garbage is recycled. Therefore, based on these studies, we can deduce that pollution increases to giant steps and that the industry is the main factor of this ecological disaster. However, the human being as an individual is not able to question this action to achieve a substantial change. We live in a consumer society where we are so accustomed to the disposable that it is difficult for us to think in a lifestyle with a responsible consumption. It is because of this that the industry must start to worry about its production methods to thus transmit this habit to people. Back to the initial question, why today is design more important than ever before in history? Because today design is a discipline that has been developed in various professional areas and is able to incite in numerous contexts of life, both on a human level and on a social level. Since then, the role of the designer is to solve the needs of the users, but today more than ever a great problem must be solved, such as global warming and the great amount of waste we produce. For this reason, sustainable design is a key piece to solve the problems of today and contribute to tomorrow. Being this, who takes into account the environmental aspects in all production levels? In the same way, the goal is to make products that provide the least impact possible in the ecosystem throughout the life cycle. Why is today's design more important than ever before in history? To answer this question, I start from evaluating the design, from a historical point of view, a necessity and a solution like the answer at each time. This question cannot be evaluated as a statement in our creative evolution. The existing has established points for us to continue to advance, because each design at each time has been of importance. If we talk about design, we can say that it is evolution, development or transformation because our environment is dynamic. Design is an activity that focuses on the person and their environment. It allows us to give problematic solutions to which we face daily. It is an interdisciplinary process, since it is located next to us. Design is to analyze, observe, investigate, link. These are ways of understanding and processing information with which we are in contact daily, potentially and virtually. This information gives us the opportunity to develop a better future and be aware that our creations have a repercussion and that we must take care of them. The technological advance, such as software, hardware, robotics, machinery, etc. are interrelated and serve as a basis for knowledge and development. Technology is a tool with which we are in contact daily, which has allowed us to systematize processes. It also allows us to quickly obtain information, possibly giving us a connection as a world society. This allows us and makes it easy to develop solutions in the educational, social, political, environmental, economic, and many others. At the same time, it has transformed us as a society, to be immediate people, where the easier the processes are, the better our quality of life. On the other hand, we have taken this to consumption and production, generating millions of deceptions at the level of industry, being unconscious in our way of consuming. So this problem is for all of us and we are going to make a change of habit. This always sounds like a cliché phrase, but it is a joint responsibility, so the design has had to be redone towards sustainability. Due to this health crisis, we have valued being a collaborative unit as a society and as multidisciplinary teams, which will help us to have a future as individual and as a social. Today, when we face the constant thought of our future and its fragility due to this pandemic, we have to be aware of which products and services are essential for our life. So the design has had to adapt to this new model of consumption, where the essential things are the ones that we are prioritizing. The consumption of certain objects and services has been postponed and perhaps obsolete. And others have increased, for example, masks, where the design professionally has had to develop different solutions of specific products and there have also been creative designs for the same necessity, but not all of them being an efficient proposal to the real necessity. This new reality has shown us that we can live with less, so our priorities are so constant and that's why the design is important at every moment, so the design is today more important than ever because it is our current reality. As designers, we are constantly adapting and today we have a global problem, which we must fight individually and collaboratively. To contextualize, we must know that we are living a moment of global transformation that has led us to question the structures of power that support social justice, current and the destruction of the environment. So, in a context of changes and redefinitions at a planetary level, we have a great opportunity to imagine and think in a more collaborative future, understanding that human beings are part of nature and that we depend on each other. Having said this, it is that it is a new way of relating between species and the world. This is why, in the global context in which we find ourselves, there is a space to perceive design from the basis of which it is a discipline in constant change and evolution, of permanent questions regarding the ways in which we communicate and what tools we use for that purpose. We must understand the designer as a known researcher and a relative of the image and the word to sit down the bases of what we today will know as the future of design. It is the moment to be more creative than ever and to travel aside is not individuality, thinking about design as an object that responds to opportunities and needs in reality in conjunction with the adaptation of social and environmental needs. Adopting the concept of design from an integral vision, in which we take care of the opportunities in order to benefit society and understand the design process from nature, learning from its models and systems. If this video gets monetized, we are going to donate all the money to Greenpeace Chile. Please don't forget to subscribe and like and don't miss my next videos. Ciao!