Health impacts

The products we design affect not only the environment as I am stating in many of my posts, but also affect the health of the users around it. When refering to users I am talking about all the people that are in contact with the product. From the farmers of the raw material to the ones that burn it when we send it to the landfills.

In our disposable cup studies, we study the different components that affect us and the way they do it but we focus on the effects that the ones drinking suffer. The chemicals we focus on where melamine in the paper cup and styrene in the polystyrene cup.

After researching the dangerous effects they have in our bodies, we realised that the amount of chemical is few so that even if the danger is high with this substances the real danger one is not.

For our presentation we decided to do the theater acting as we were in a press conference about the last news about the high effects of these chemicals. What we were trying to say with this act is that sometimes is more important the way you communicate the risk than the real one. This has to do with the media, and the way in which we trust all we listen or read from it.

However, news and media are not the only things that affects us when dealing with this issues, history do it as well. In the melamine for example, the scandal of melamine in chinese milk is something we cannot change but still is something that affect us when communication that paper cups contain melamine.

To end with I would say that this issues are really sensitive and we really have to take care on what we say and who are we going to say it.