Earlier this month, a dinky animated film about an obsolete mobile phone facing an existential crisis beat big-budget corporate advertisements to win a coveted Melbourne Design Award for best animation. But the film — titled Life Pscycle-ology and produced by small-scale eco-design and consultancy company Eco Innovators — was more than a mobile telephony soap opera.
As its chief protagonist, Eric Sun, reeled amid the confusion and rejection of being abandoned for a glossy, feature-packed new model, the film didn’t only garner belly laughs, but also provided veiled insights into issues surrounding eco-design and the ever-shortening lifecycle of consumer goods.
Originally developed as a fun resource for design students, Life Pscycle-ology also educates the design community on its responsibility to create more sustainable products, sans guilt, according to the film’s writer and director, Eco Innovators founder Leyla Acaroglu.
“The idea was to hide sustainability strategy … and all this knowledge in humour,” says 28-year-old Acaroglu, who created the film with the help of animator Nicholas Kallincos.
“The humour is the catalyst for … all these people who wouldn’t otherwise be interested in sustainability to engage with it.”
The film follows the decidedly cute Eric Sun through lip-quivering past life regression therapy with his psychologist, Dr A. Fraud, where he learns of his various extractions. He recalls his former lives as Australian nickel, South African gold, Brazilian palladium, Russian platinum and a sombrero-wearing piece of Mexican silver. He reminisces about the delight of regular use as a new mobile phone and the heartbreak of decreased battery life and enforced obsolescence.
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel for little Eric Sun. In his final session with Fraud, he learns not only about his potential for disassembly and resource recovery, but the possibility of reuse in other electronic products such as USB flash drives, digital cameras and snazzy new mobile phones.
It’s a genuinely feel-good tale and the sort of device that characterises many of Acaroglu and Eco Innovators’ endeavours. “The concept of sustainability is still seen as a bit of a hippie thing,” she says. “The design community is increasingly interested in sustainability, but it doesn’t really know how to deal with it yet … We’re trying to give them some insights without scaring them off.”
Indeed, Acaroglu’s suite of new creative projects not only hopes to redress what she calls the field’s “PR problem”, but engage and inspire.
The upcoming Eco Innovators iPhone app will take the form of a “mythbusting quiz” that tests users’ knowledge about the environmental impacts of design, production and consumption, while the Repair Workshops project — running as part of the State of Design festival in July — pairs creatives with engineers and scientists in “a left brain, right brain love-in” to “repair and reimagine” the broken household consumer goods donated by the audience.
“We’ve all had that same experience when we might drop our digital camera, the screen breaks and then we try and get it repaired only for it to be cheaper to buy a new one,” says Acaroglu, who will appear as a judge on ABC TV’s New Inventors in April.
“People have the perception that sustainability is about going back to the dark ages,” she says. “It’s actually about valuing the things we did right and the things that we need to hold onto, like the ability to repair and the creation of products that are designed to be repaired.”
