Day 6 of the NPD course was delivered by Michael Gutierrez PERA/Supply London. He was focusing on the legislation and liability that comes with being a manufacturer/designer/distributor. I am beginning to realise from this and the previous intellectual property modules, that design is as much about having a good lawyer as it is about innovation. Saying that, the key to getting the best bang-for-your-buck from your legal assets seems to be using them early in your development process. If you can afford legal cover/advice at the front-end it can save you a lot of money if things turn to custard. This is what lawyers like to call “risk-management”, because legalities are going to get your money at some point. It is best to give the beast a sacrifice rather than taking a chance with it eating you alive.

Read more »

Here’s a link to Home-air-purifier-expert.com, a site which goes some way towards explaining the reason why Pli adds no formaldehyde to any of our products, in glues, binders, fillers, coatings or paints… (via Treehugger). Exposure times to industrial emissions of formaldehyde are limited by law. Prolonged exposure even to small quantities of formaldehyde is thought to cause health problems.

Read more »

Anyone who has worked with MDF as a building material knows it probably isn’t that good for you. Memories of coughing up a wood-paste after doing all night workshop sessions at design school are all too vivid for me. Then it was off to a furniture factory where my old friend MDF literally made my skin crawl. It is a very functional material, you can make almost anything from it, but at what cost? It isn’t just the poor people who have to build your cabinets and shelves from MDF on a day to day basis. Once those products become part of your home the chemicals slowly leach out into your atmosphere and find their way into your lungs.

In 1987, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classified formaldehyde as a probable human carcinogen under conditions of unusually high or prolonged exposure (1). Since that time, some studies of industrial workers have suggested that formaldehyde exposure is associated with nasal cancer and nasopharyngeal cancer, and possibly with leukemia. In 1995, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) concluded that formaldehyde is a probable human carcinogen. However, in a reevaluation of existing data in June 2004, the IARC reclassified formaldehyde as a known human carcinogen (2).

Read more »