TechBlick 21 - Nick [EN]

So my name is Jos and I’m working on research in circular economy and automotive sector. And I would like to know your point of view. If you accept, I’m going to record our conversation, transcribe it and put the transcription with a pseudonym, not your real name, in a repository of text documents that will be used for the research. If you do this and you change your mind and no longer want to participate, get in touch with us and we will immediately remove your interview from the repository. I’m leaving you an information sheet with contact informations after the interview, so if you agree, please tell me your name and that you agree I agree.

Nick Rawcliffe.

Thank you Nick. So the first question, can you tell me a bit about your educational and professional background and interests?

I’ve got a mechanical engineering degree, a master’s of art from the Royal College of Art in London, and I spent a year at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Working on the future of technology in our in our lives.

What is your area of expertise?

Product design processes, materials and user requirements for driving design forward.

The theme of this conference is The Future of Electronics Reshaped. What does the idea of reshaping electronics for the future mean to you?

Going away from from solid, big, chunky circuit boards and embedding electronics in basically everything that we actually already use. How to make useful data hopefully out of - out of, Uh. Well I guess closer. Closer to the body and closer to the future needs of people or things that are going to help in the future as well. Really?

What do you think is the relationship between electronics and sustainability?

Are inversely proportional. Yeah, unfortunately. But, you know, it shouldn’t be. And it can’t be moving forwards.

Can you define a circular economy in your own words?

Yeah. There’s no waste product at all. There is no waste products. It goes round and round.

Yeah. Do you participate in a circular economy yourself in any aspects of your life?

Yeah, as many as possible. How? use as less as possible in my product design. We basically try to run zero waste in the workshop. Um, yeah. I’ve done projects on circular economy and distributed manufacturing projects. Yeah. All sorts. Really? Yeah. I’m a big one for, you know, use as little as possible. Efficiency. It’s all about efficiency. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you think electronics can play a role in making the car industry more sustainable?

Yeah, but unfortunately, electronics just is mostly made vehicles more gimmicky. And unless, you know, unnecessary gimmicks, it’s like tech led innovation, which to me is the wrong way round. So if anyone’s going to get it right, they got to change that to be about usefulness. But I mean, you know, everything the automotive industry does is it to me in the past, however, you know, since its inception is going the wrong way. You know, look at the size of cars these days. You know, you want to go more towards a bicycle than anything else. But, you know, that’s that’s my thought.

What is it about circular? Can electronics make the car industry more circular?

I don’t really see in a specific direction how, apart from being making things less bad. You know, there’s a lot of things that we can do now, from printed electronics and integrating materials into the existing components of the car that aren’t about, you know, sticking in extra switches and wires and, you know, minimization of parts and, and the weight of the vehicle. Yeah. Um, but then that’s not really a massive impact from a, you know, what’s the entire carbon footprint. So.

What about promotion of circular economy in the car industry? Do they already do things like that or what do you think? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, my opinion is promoting on green aspects is the more you’ve got to spend at it, the less you’re actually doing. I mean, marketing that is, you know, the more you spend on how great you are, the less you actually are. So that’s I think that’s the that’s what I see from most vehicle companies in reality. But then, you know, that’s to sell to the many people isn’t it.