Environmental, Social And Economic Challenge

In the 1970s a shortage made a certain material expensive overnight, and manufacturers who had never thought about the weight of a drinks can suddenly had a reason to. The can that used to weigh over 80 grams now weighs about a third of that, and every gram came off because somebody was forced to look. Nobody set out to reduce material use for its own sake. A constraint arrived, and it turned into forty years of design improvement.

This lesson is about that mechanism. The specification asks how three named challenges, deforestation, resource depletion such as water and minerals, and a possible increase in carbon dioxide levels leading to potential global warming, might present opportunities and constraints that influence the processes of designing and making. Both words matter. A challenge closes some options and opens others, and a designer who can only see the closing half is answering half the question. This is designing and making principles content, examined in Section C of Paper 1, which carries half the marks on the paper.