11. UNPACKING HORIZONTAL’S FOUR DESIGN STANDARDS

Why Now?  11 of 13 Short Stories.  4 minute read.

Design Standard “One” requires us to provide outstanding “comfort” to our clients. Horizontal’s comfort and support is an experience. What ever your sleeping position, your shape, size, or weight, our suspension system adapts to the orthopedic needs of your spine, aligning it, and relieving pressure points. Cushioning and suspension simultaneously relinquish room to your body where it’s needed and apply pressure where it’s needed. Body and bed work in unison to optimize sleeping posture. The one third of your life you are destined to spend horizontal should provide comfortable rest that sets the stage for satisfaction and happiness all the days of your life.

Design Standard “Two” requires us to “borrow” and “return” Nature’s materials; what William McDonough and Michael Braungart called “Cradle to Cradle”. There is no waste, no product graveyard, no ‘landfill’ fairy tale, no fictional salvation through recycling. Horizontal borrows materials that belong to the natural world. As custodians, we don’t add anything to these materials that prevents them from returning to where they came from. After a long useful product life, these materials return to earth, safely biodegrading back into valuable nutrient materials that help sustain Nature’s cyclical design.

“Remaking the way we make things”. Cradle to Cradle, published in 2002.

Our products also “inspire”. Perhaps discovering what we do and why we do it will introduce new themes into your life. Perhaps after experiencing truly restful sleep in the Horizontal Environment, with your body refreshed and your mind clearer, you will gain greater awareness of your own possibilities. Great sleep does that.

Design Standard “Three” requires that materials used to make Horizontal do “not harm human beings” now, or in the future. As parents, we understand it is fundamentally wrong to steal the future from the young and the yet to be born. Leaders of oil companies, most major corporations, large financial institutions and governments lack adequate compassion to comprehend this. Their minds are focussed primarily on short term, outsized personal gain and that of their cohorts. Observing their actions rather than their words, we see everything else they engage in is a lower order of priority. Their primary actions support the policies and products that harm prospects for human beings. Many actively craft justifications to perpetuate these harms far into the future. Truly, our ‘emperors’ have no clothes.

Leaders are too self-interested, too compromised, or too fearful to confront Climate Breakdown.

When taking action, Horizontal considers the 7th Generation Principle. How will our actions today affect our descendants seven generations into the future? Imagine all our institutions and companies behaving this way. It is possible, and necessary, if humanity is to be spared the worst consequences of Climate Breakdown. Dramatic reduction of harm to life by commercial activities is a solvable problem. Recalling Margaret Mead, “We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.”. Within the sleep industry, Horizontal demonstrates this truth.

Design Standard “Four” requires “long-lasting quality”. Making products from non-toxic, renewable materials that last, is conservation in action. In Horizontal’s case, when a part reaches the end of its useful life, it can be replaced without discarding the entire product. A life long relationship with a Horizontal product is far more satisfying and less expensive than a conventional bed/mattress purchase. The Horizontal bed/mattress can be the first, and last bed you ever own.

Planned obsolescence increases sales and profits by humping and dumping the customer, over and over again.

Design Standard “Four” affirms our rejection of planned obsolescence; a deliberate business strategy in which the obsolescence of a product is purposely built in from conception. This is done to compel people to discard products and to force the purchase of new products. This strategy succeeds only by placing the burden of its true cost onto people everywhere; in the form of incomprehensible volumes of waste, major health, social, and environmental costs, higher taxes, expansion of public and private debt. The negative consequences are many, and the enormous costs are unaccounted for on the balance sheets of the perpetrators.

Planned obsolescence increases sales and profits by humping and dumping the customer, over and over again. Rather than serving people, it uses people. Products that last a long time and deliver reliable, valuable service don’t have these hidden, harmful impacts.

Design Standard “Four” also calls for “beauty”. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson has the last word, “…beauty is its own excuse for being”.

– Len Laycock

Author’s Note: All facts and information referenced in the Why Now? series, including facts and information about chemicals and their impacts on human health and environment, have been drawn from previously published sources in the European Union, United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and India. Sources include national and state government documents, government funded agencies, national and international corporations, peer reviewed research from universities, the industrial safety industry, material data safety sheets, worker’s compensation board records, articles published in major newspapers, articles published by national and international news reporting services, published authors respected in their fields, and reports and studies published by reputable nonprofits and environmental organizations.