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.
There's nothing formal or standard out there. A lot of people are working separately on different frameworks and solutions but, for designers, we still have to patch together answers from a lot of different sources. Lunar just came out with their Designer's Field Guide to Sustainability. There are also a lot of LCA (life cycle assessment) tools out there but I don't think anyone's working on anything that could be taken as a framework for a standard.
CB: Could you tell me a bit about life cycle assessment in design? It seems quite complex. Is this a simple process for designers to follow?
NS: Life cycle assessment is very difficult. If you do a dust-to-dust study of a complex product, the boundaries are really far out there and they're much further than you assume in the beginning, so it's a lot of work and a lot of money. But it's the only way to get an accurate view of at least the environmental impact portion of a problem of a product or a service. It's the best tool there is but it's very time consuming, it's very expensive.
There are a couple of ways of shortcutting the process by doing lower resolution assumptions about materials, which can make it a little faster and less expensive. The problem is that you can only do this when you have known quantities. So, further down the design process when I am prototyping and afterwards, I can start estimating the LCA impacts. But when I am in my conceptual phases, especially all the way out in brainstorming but even a lot of the conceptual development, I am not at a point where I can start specing material and I can estimate how many ounces or grams of this material versus that material. We're not at those issues yet.
So in the entire conceptual development part of the design process LCA doesn't really help me. The only thing that I can really go on as a designer is my understanding about sustainability and sustainable design principles, whatever experience I have generated, whatever examples that relate to the thing that I am designing. And hopefully I can make better assumptions by the time I get to prototypes and concept descriptions that start to become detailed enough that LCA can become a useful tool in the process.
CB: You have designed a new program at CCA (California College of the Arts), an MBA in Design Strategy. What are the objectives of this program? Part of what you're training designers to do is to come on board with business strategy and planning as well?
NS: I got my MBA at Presidio, so I come from that experience. Our program focuses on innovation and design-led innovation in particular, and sustainability is a part of every course just like it should be around the world for anyone that was rethinking any curriculum. In the description of my program and how we are approaching is to try to create the most up-to-date MBA in innovation. For the designers that come into the program it's about letting them understand their business peers and issues so they can be effective leaders not just designers and for the non-design people that come to the program they are also learning to be more effective innovators and they're learning about sustainability.
Designers have a very us-versus-them culture and that's how they sustain themselves as a profession, by separating themselves from what is often a chaotic and mis-categorized form of management of a design process. The things that work in management or the rest of the company doesn't usually work well for the design division. So we can't have the influence that we could if we can't have the participation and we don't understand the language, the issues or we don't have the experience dealing with them. So that's a big part of the program.
CB: Can you speak about the challenges that a designer faces in trying to implement sustainability in their workplace?
NS: The biggest challenge is just understanding their business peers and other stakeholders and making their clients understand that it isn't just a fad, that it isn't just about a green environmental thing that's about valuing trees and plants over people but that it's a core business strategy that benefits all business. It's as much about efficiency and health and risk mitigation as it's about a beautiful planet and that's okay and helping them approach it from a strategic level.
CB: You have a lot of experience with almost all aspects of design. What role do you think packaging and information design play in creating sustainable design solutions? Do you think labeling plays an important role?
NS: Most consumers would choose a better product across all three aspects of sustainability, if they could accurately trust the data at the point of decision. In fact most consumers will even pay more. The biggest problem is that consumers have no reliable way to make that decision so they don't make it, they can't trust what advertisers say and even experts can't agree on what are the best solutions.
There's no reason why manufactures and service providers shouldn't be making sustainability part of their agenda. And at the same time it's shown that it will positively impact their bottom-line. There are a lot of people working on sustainable labeling but we are probably five to 10 years away from that because we don't have enough content to put in there. Patagonia- and Timberland-type companies are doing some of this, but until you can compare them to other brands, you can't really trust the data.
Nathan Shedroff, who has previously contributed to GreenBiz.com®, explores how designers and developers can create more sustainable solutions in his latest book, Design is the Problem.
Chhaya Bhanti is a brand strategy and sustainability consultant based in New York City. She has worked in fine art, film, experiential design, 3D visualization, brand strategy and advertising for over 10 years and is most interested in design and media based solutions for sustainability. Chhaya is deeply committed to socio-environmental issues in India and is building a media literacy platform for Sanjhi, her NGO in Rajasthan. She earned an M.A. in Communications and is now pursuing an MBA in Sustainable Management.