This summer I attended an annual gathering called Overlap where 50 participants came together to explore methodologies and best practices for sustainability in design. Representing the full gamut of disciplines including industrial, graphic, interactive, information, service and experiential design, these professionals shared their insights on challenges and opportunities for sustainability in their work.

Our shared dialog helped me realize that the absence of an industry-wide sustainability mandate in the design sector has left designers with an overwhelming sense of personal responsibility for the products and services they develop. While they're expected to innovate and redesign existing processes for sustainability, the business frameworks in which they work do not empower them to go beyond skin-deep fixes in their designs.

In this discussion, the first of two interviews with designers from the event, I speak with Nathan Shedroff, a pioneer of the concept of "experience design" and an author, teacher and consultant on design and sustainability.

Chhaya Bhanti: What is the role of design in sustainability?

Nathan Shedroff: In a lot of design, appearance is the most important, often to the detriment of sustainability goals, and that's the kind of design that really needs to change. Design can promote the idea that the stuff we make is temporary and ethereal and often meaningless, and designers have to rethink that. Design can be and should be held responsible for the un-sustainability of products and services.

One of the most important things for designers to realize is that this isn't just about environment. There's financial and social impacts of sustainability as well. All three of those categories need to be taken into account and that's one of the things that most designers aren't aware of yet.

CB: How can designers directly influence sustainable decision making at their companies?

NS: Designers are actually very good at taking a step back and thinking about higher issues. Certainly the best designers are used to interpreting a creative brief in wider terms and with wider boundaries than probably even the clients and managers that generate that brief intend. So that's a very natural thing for designers to do.

The problem is that to really redesign systems and to think of effective design as opposed to efficiency or eco effectiveness versus eco efficiency, requires a systems level perspective and a re-description of what the challenge is. That's often not possible by the time the design brief is written. This is the reason why designers need to start interacting with organizations, their clients and their own companies about what they know about the customers, the design process and what they know about the materials, sustainability and technology.

There is an opportunity for designers to bring that strategy to the table, either officially or unofficially. Even if they are not telling their client, they're just doing it as a part of their design process. Who doesn't want a better product or more efficient use of energy and material, right?

CB: Can you cite an example of sustainable design?

NS: There are probably a lot of examples of sustainable designs that weren't exactly the product of sustainable design principles but were more intuitive than deliberate -- servicization for instance. If you look at iTunes moving music to a digital realm and getting rid of packaging, etc., it's a good sustainable solution as well but that wasn't probably intended. Just rethinking the entire service interface and the value that is delivered is really important. The more it is delivered as a service, the less emphasis on the product -- the possibility that the product can have less impact.

I think the most sustainable company right now is Apple because their materials now are a product of dematerialization. Their products are probably the most dematerialized of any other competitors. They have moved almost entirely to aluminum because of easy recycling as opposed to plastic, which is less recyclable.

CB: Is there an existing framework that you think designers should follow as a guideline for sustainability? Is there an industry-wide standard in place and do we need one?

NS: There's something called the Designers Accord, which is more about the social principles in design. Part of the reason why there aren't any design standards with respect to sustainability is that there isn't really any design standardization in the design industry on anything, and designers like it that way because that gives them the freedom to innovate.

In fact, the companies that innovate using the Six Sigma standard do a terrible job of innovating because Six Sigma doesn't enable innovation, and it may be that standardization doesn't enable innovation very well. So the last things designers want is for someone to say, "Oh, here's the standardization on how to design sustainably," because whether it's true or not, they'll see it as limiting their ability to be creative and innovative.

That doesn't mean that there aren't ways of regularizing some of the understandings about what sustainability is and how you go about it but I don't think you can standardize the process or the outcome.