Nike, Steelcase, Clorox and Herman Miller Leading Charge on Sustainable Design

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- Nike, Clorox, Steelcase and Herman Miller have infused sustainability into their design processes in ways that have led to innovative products that offer value to consumers.

Business for Social Responsibility used the companies as case studies in a new report aimed at educating businesses about processes that can be used to drive sustainable design.

"Aligned for Sustainable Design: An A-B-C-D Approach to Making Better Products," produced jointly with IDEO, claims that companies are abandoning the former design "pipeline" model of product development in favor of an approach that draws from various departments within an organization.

"Companies succeed in sustainable product design by developing a more integrated design process," Emma Stewart, director of BSR's environmental R&D team, said in a statement. "Rather than just focusing on new strategies and skill sets, they create new, cross-functional connections in their organizations that enable them to design and commercialize breakthrough products."

The report breaks down the sustainable design process into a framework with four basic components: Assess, Bridge, Create and Diffuse. Companies must be able to assess the material impacts of projects and design capacity, such as Nike did when a lifecycle assessment of its products and activities led it to develop an index for measuring progress on designing sustainable products.

Another facet of sustainable design involves the ability to bridge functions and people to design and redesign products. For instance, when designing its GreenWorks cleaning product line, Clorox put together a team that drew on its supply base and trade associations for knowledge on natural materials.

Design teams can create generative internal and external learning projects, such as Herman Miller, which launched a series of pilot projects in the mid-1990s that focused on product durability and reduced impacts. The pilot projects helped the company develop its cradle-to-cradle design protocol to screen all products for sustainability.

Unlike the formal cross-functional approach of Herman Miller, Steelcase takes a behind-the-scenes path toward sustainable design that illustrates an informal, bottom-up process, the report said.

A final component of the A-B-C-D approach is the capability of diffusing lessons and accountability mechanisms that affect better decision making throughout the company. For example, Nike's Considered Design Team works across product lines and functions to build literacy, goals and metrics for sustainable design, the report said.

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