In activity three we were asked to look into our problem that we chose for the investigative report. I learned gobs of information when I did this because I knew nothing about it beforehand. I learned that if we keep tearing down our buildings without a care where the materials go, they will take over the landfills and we will be struggling to find space on earth for all this “trash” of ours. It will take over our communities and make our lives miserable. We cannot continue to go through our lives not being mindful of the things we do everyday, especially as designers. The poverty reading was sad to think about even though I know it is a reality in our world. There are people in the world dong hard labor for maybe two dollars a day. That is sad and terrible, so how do we help? The thing that stuck out the most to me was that we always try to help by giving food or money, but we don’t tell them how they can make their own food and obtain their own money. If we did this then there would be half the amount of people stuck in poverty. In Leyla’s ted talk, she talked about life cycle thinking, biodegradability, fridges, recycling of phones, and environmental folklore and the importance of these things. Life cycle thinking is all about knowing how the product affects the environment. For example, how it is packaged, transportation, and it’s end of life. She talked about how biodegradable things are actually bad for the environment if they are placed into a landfill because they produce methane instead of carbon dioxide. If they are composted they will produce the carbon dioxide and break down as they were meant to do. The fried, she said is the enemy because is causes us to waste much more food than we would originally. Companies make the fridges bigger and bigger each year and the crispy drawers do not keep lettuce or other veggies crispy and we will end up throwing them away. She said that when we are done with our phones, we need to take them back to the place we got them to be recycled as much as they can be because we throw out so many phones. Biophilia is the affinity for life and nature. We can contribute to this by building nature into our designs. For example, we can put water in our buildings and it has a calming effect. We can also make building with big long glass windows that let the nature in, and things like that. Biophilia designs are beautiful and I want to strive to design things like that in my career.