Last Friday night, I attended the local tour stop of Design Green Now, a seminar that explored green and sustainable product design & development. This article is part of a series that highlights the panelists, their presentations, and issues discussed during the Q&A.
The moderator, Rob Curedale, is an industrial designer with 30 years experience in consumer products. He recounted to the audience his feelings on how designers’ relationships to their work have enlarged over the years from being aesthetics-oriented with a large attention for personal fame, to a holistic constraints-orientation that includes environmental and societal considerations with a greater concern for “Us”.
Heidrun Mumper-Drumm
Adjunct Associate Professor, Graphic Design
Art Center College of Design - Pasadena, CA
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Sustainability starts in the creation phase. This means not only considering materials selection, but also being efficient in the concept/prototype development phase in terms of minimizing scrap waste, packaging, procurement distance, and general energy consumption.
The challenge now is in finding an excellent process model for sustainable design, because the traditional design process doesn’t support it. We need to go from a linear model focused on constraints and objectives within our immediate realm of influence in the value chain, to a complete life cycle model. That means considering the activities and indirect needs of everyone besides the end customer - manufacturer, distributor, retailer, 2nd/3rd-hand parties, and recyclers. It means looking at the product’s environment throughout its life - packaging, shipping, application, storage, disposal - and how it interacts with that environment (beneficial, neutral, detrimental).
At Art Center, they have a Color Material Trend Lab (CMTEL) established in 2005 with funding from Nokia, where students can learn about and explore using a wide variety of materials, and staff members can request additional information and samples from suppliers.
They also have an EcoCouncil, established by Art Center students as a weekly forum to discuss sustainable design topics, in addition to proposing & organizing research and community projects. The prominent interest area involves conducting Waste Stream Analyses of scrap materials, packaging, and trash by using process maps, journals, and mathematical formulas for extrapolating collected data into a forecasted life segment/cycle assessment.
When asked during the Q&A about the ability for capitalism and profit-mindedness to coexist with sustainable design thinking, Heidrun was a bit skeptical. The future holds a lot of opportunity for both fields, but don’t expect businesses to consider environmental stewardship for its own sake. The greater motivation for businesses in adopting sustainable thinking lies in reducing materials and operational expenses, while minimizing risk and product liability.
To promote responsible action and industry change, not just by leading product companies and innovators, regulation will be needed. This may involve:
- Restricting the use of certain materials, while providing incentives for others.
- Establishing stricter guidelines for manufacturing, storage, distribution, and reverse-logistics processes.
- Taxes and rebates for recycling, landfills, and other end-of-life cycle scenarios.
While sustainable thinking can be applied to many areas within a company’s operations, Life cycle analyses incorporated within the product concept development phase represent the best way forward. Briefly, they involve building multiple cost/benefit scenarios for concepts as a part of the Scoping, Business Case, or Product Design Strategy phases of product development.
In her closing statements, Heidrun gave the following recommendations to the audience:
- Avoid Greenwashing - There are going to be a lot of manufacturers out there using subjective labels and terms describing how environmentally conscious their companies, and safe their products, are. Whatever you say, be specific and honest.
- Perform a Life Cycle Analysis
- Do not fake the eco-friendliness of your product for the benefit of the design community or other value chain members. By only using a low percentage of friendlier materials or by mixing them with others that effectively create monstrous hybrids that cannot be recycled, and whose assets cannot be reclaimed, is a major disservice to this cause.
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Design Green Now - Article Series:
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For additional information about Heidrun, please see her profile at DesignGreenNow.
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Thanks for the post - to do all that she recommends all a company has to do is to get SMaRT certified (Sustainble Material Rating Technology).
“The greater motivation for businesses in adopting sustainable thinking lies in reducing materials and operational expenses, while minimizing risk and product liability.” True. And that’s okay. Business must make its decisions based on a complex formula for success.
As part of that formula, they must consider doing good and how doing good benefits their business, their employees, their customers, their communities and the planet. If they do the numbers, they will choose to do the right and the good thing, because sustainable is also profitable.
@Mary - Thanks for stopping by! I will definitely be reading into SMaRT certification and writing much more around voluntary guidelines, certifications, materials, and regulations in the coming future.
@Lewis - Exactly, and that’s the latter half of the benefit equation but which some companies may feel fuzzy about. Naturally, sustainable thinking is a co-element of Corporate Social Responsibility. But now the benefit of being ‘greener’ also has a competitive differentiation advantage that can be built into branding and marketing communications, as a result of this global shift in cultural attitudes. To me, that’s where a great opportunity lies - yet the risk for greenwashing is high.
Responsibly disclosing, marking, and branding your product is ‘naturally’ (pun for fun) great for value chain members, but if standards or official symbols denoting 3rd party accreditation are absent, the entire process becomes muddled.