Before environmental issues became part of the mainstream, the role of a designer was already starting to get much more interesting. Product innovation used to be the exclusive purview of R&D, where scientists and engineers tinkered away on technology-centered, proprietary advancements. Designers were left to style products for consumption and marketers worked further downstream to stimulate demand.

The emergence of more user-centered-thinking has given designers an influence well beyond the old drafting table. Upstream in the product development process, designers can now leverage tools like ethnography and sophisticated needs analysis. When given the opportunity, these methods drive the whole development process towards more meaningful and commercially viable innovation. These user-centered methods are the precursor for solving the green problem.

On the other end of the chain, the consumer has not yet been fully blended into the process, so the benefits and value of these new design approaches are less understood, and even prompt some level of suspicion. The way we go about asking these questions, and translating consumer needs back into business and design requirements, creates a wariness that has been uttered by some of the most optimistic proponents of green business. Do consumers mean what they say? Do they really want a greener future if it means dramatically changing their way of life?

Consumers Won't Compromise
For several years, I have had the luxury of pursing this question, tracking environmental attitudes over time to uncover innovation opportunities across several industries. This work has been both encouraging and terribly frustrating. On the bright side, awareness of eco issues and interest in environmental lifestyles has risen dramatically, particularly so after Hurricane Katrina, An Inconvenient Truth, and most recently higher gas prices. But there is still an alarming gap between those who say they want green options and those that actually buy into or try to live a greener lifestyle.

Recently, I was invited to participate as a speaker at the Greener by Design conference in Alexandria, Va., with innovation culture and systems guru Robert Shelton. Our talk focused on the encouraging shift towards more open models of innovation, where knowledge is shared both inside and outside a company's walls to solve for the complex and daunting challenges that we face. This praise for the widening of knowledge networks emerged as a theme in many different conversations throughout the rest of the conference. More and more companies have begun to shift sustainability from public relations statements and corporate social responsibility promises to actual product development and marketing activity--a way to create real value. Facing up to climate change will require a major redesign in the way we bring things to market.

The caveat? Over 50 percent of consumers want greener, more natural housing cleaners, but only 5 percent actually purchase this category of product: consumers do not want tradeoffs. Clorox's Green Works is one company that embraced this gap. How did the Green Works team aim to get past the 5 percent? When choosing household cleaners, green-leaning consumers are looking for proven efficacy, broad availability, comparable price, and a brand they know and trust. They're not willing to settle for a product that performs less than a more eco-unfriendly alternative. Clorox Green Works accepted these constraints and delivered a natural product that passed blind performance tests--in partnership with the Sierra Club. Despite initial external skepticism that a brand like Clorox could succeed with a natural product offering, the good word got out and sales results have "far exceeded expectations," according to Kohler.

The "no tradeoffs, no compromise" approach has served as a mantra in many companies and across industries when challenged with comprehensive green innovation. But there's something missing in this stark consumer win-it-all equation: Consumers are not part of the conversation and they know it.

I have spent a good deal of time sitting down with these emerging green consumers and many themes come into to focus. When asked to take the time to give their real opinion about their lifestyle, they reveal an untapped desire to participate in the process to be more than just a stat about consumption and purchase behavior. When you move the conversation beyond price and performance benefits to engage people in the challenge of designing a green future, they want to do so much more than just vote with their wallet.

Unleashing the Innovator in Everyone
In fact, I found that once on the topic I could not get these consumers to stop thinking about innovation and the role they should play in the design process. One-on-one interviews, blog studies, and focus groups all inevitably turn into green therapy sessions. People wanted to dissect how they chose to eat their food, build their home, rely on transportation, raise their children, and create meaning in their lives. When the conversation shifted to how we could live more sustainably, the real ideas would begin to flow.