TechBlick 21 - Nick [EN]

Do you currently own a car?

Yeah. It’s 17 years old. It’s a diesel. It’s got 200,000 miles on it. And I have no intention of getting a new one.

What personal or professional experience have you had with electronics in cars you have used? Maybe a rental car or something like that?

Entirely negative. The more technology there is, the more there is to go wrong. And so, you know. And I don’t see that taking that ability for, you know, right, to repair away from the owner as being in any way positive. You know, oh, it doesn’t work. I need to take it to the garage so someone can go and look at the software. He’s not the future for making good vehicles.

Do you have concerns about privacy and private data stored in electronics?

Yeah, that as well. You know, I would rather have something that didn’t need any connection to anything. I didn’t need to plug in to find out what’s up with it. But that’s me being an old man with an issue. Yeah, yeah.

Um, does recycling and reusing mean different things to you? Yeah.

The whole thing of recycling. Um. Yeah, well, cars always have been. You know, they’re the only things worth scrapping because of the amount of metal in them. Nothing’s reused. Really. It’s melted down. Most, most of the. The talk about things being reused, unless it’s in a proper closed loop system, is completely rubbish. You might as well stick it in your recycling bin at home. It’s no better than that.

One of last questions. On a scale of 1 to 5, one means not at all concerned, and five means extremely concerned. How concerned are you about issues of environmental waste and pollution? Oh.

Yeah. Extremely.

Could you explain, please?

So, um, my own practice has started off, um, with those sort of concerns. And, you know, I’ve been. Most of my designs have been driven by that for the past 20 years of being efficient and about, you know, a full life cycle, cost and minimizing that mean. To me, it’s the same concerns that the original designers from the Bauhaus in Dessau, in the 20s, were looking at. Um, but now it seems more that it’s a marketing thing of how to sell more big stuff. So I think there’s a huge disconnect, and I think we’re a long way from resolving it.

What, if any, actions do you take in your life to promote sustainability?

I don’t buy a new car and try not to buy gadgets that are going to, you know, break or things that rely on dodgy technology. Um, yeah. Old stuff. You know, reuse and reuse is more the way forward than it is.

You know? Last question how much responsibility does each individual have, in your opinion, to make lifestyle and consumer choices that help protect the environment? How much responsibility.

Every individual, well, 100%. It’s their own responsibility. But 90% of people aren’t educated enough to understand what that means. That’s where the missing. And the missing funding is, I think, is educating people properly rather than letting the companies educate them in the way they see fit. So yeah.

Okay. Thank you very much.

coded.