Thanks, Mom!

My mother is a blogger. This is still hard for me to imagine, and is not--I swear--why I started a blog of my own. But it is why I am writing this post. She recently posted on Amy Ephron’s "One for the Table" blog (also published in the HuffPo, yay Mom!) about her own mother’s chicken-fried steak recipe in honor of Mother’s Day. I figured it was only fair to ‘pay it forward’ and attempt my own Mother’s Day post in honor of my mom.

I tried to make a connection between my mom and industrial design and sustainability, the tent poles of my blog. But aside from my decade-long attempt to get her to stop buying bottled water imported from Fiji, I came up short. I can, however, write about why I started this blog, and that's because I'm a mother. My first blog, "Safe For Humans," is about toxins in consumer products. As an industrial designer visiting the factories that made my products, I was always aware of the noxious materials in use. When I became a mother I realized that as a community of consumers, we need to know more about the products we (and our kids) are using. The inaugural post in SFH, about a child dying of lead poisoning after accidentally swallowing a cheap piece of jewelry, struck me both as a mother and as an industrial designer. How could a manufactured kid's product contain enough lead to kill?  What went wrong? From BPA leaching into baby bottles to toxic flame retardants in our children's pajamas, the message is clear: No one is looking out for us.

Consumers need information, without hyperbole or hysteria. "Safe For Humans" attempts to make the topic of toxins a more detached and serious conversation grounded in the kind of academic sustainability that I studied at Columbia University, while at the same time considering the complications that go into mass-producing a product. That endeavor led me back to my roots, as a designer, in order to seek out the space between design and sustainability at this blog, called "Safe to Make." As designers, we need this information, too. We are the specifiers, and it is no longer acceptable to be unaware of (or complacent about) the impact that our products have. What is lacking is a more reliable bridge between the worlds of sustainability and design. There is a fantastic amount of information and research being done- green chemistry, life cycle analysis, etc-  it just doesn't always make its way to the troops on the ground. I hope that, along with your help and feedback, "Safe To Make" becomes that bridge. And so, here, in a roundabout way, is my Mother's Day post. Happy Mother’s Day!