Matter/Anti-Matter

I was part of a panel discussion at Western Washington University yesterday for Design Green Now, a series of talks about sustainable design taking place on the West Coast. Together with my fellow panelists Sophia Wang Traweek, Marc Stoiber and Arunas Oslapas I think we covered a pretty good range of topics with our short presentations, but the real heart of it was Q&A with the 70 or so students attending and some questions submitted via a website. It was also good to see a presentation about the various sustainability efforts going on at the WWU campus.

As often seems to happen in these discussions the daunting complexity of the challenge became an over-arching theme. The moderator, Sean Schmidt (who did a great job) asked a question submitted on the website about what should a company's priorities be -- recycling, looking at materials usage, energy reduction, take-back schemes, etc. The answer? "All of the above" and "It depends." These are not the neat and tidy answers one would like to move things forward quickly, but unfortunately that's the way things are right now. As I seemed to keep saying at the talk, "it's complicated."

It was an enjoyable evening that brought out a lot of good discussion, many thanks to the crew at Ecoystems for inviting me and putting it on.

If you are in San Francisco, Portland or San Diego, check out the upcoming ones.

Another write up at Searching for Green

(Credit: New York Times)

Having just returned from New York City, I wonder whether I find it so intense because that's just how it is or because I tend to overbook my schedule, trying to squeeze in an ambitious number of meetings, rushing back and forth between midtown and downtown. In almost every cab ride I took on this trip, I noticed that many cabs now have a touch screen infotainment system that lets you pay with a credit card, watch TV, or access local city info (including a GPS tracker). I like the credit card option and the GPS but had mixed emotions about the rest. A colleague of mine sniffed: "This is sad. Of every place on earth NYC has the most eye candy anywhere. There's so much going on around you that the window is the best entertainment ever. Has our entire society caught the ADD virus? I think there should be an info card showing passengers how to play 'slug bug' or 'I spy.'" To be fair, every television has a clearly marked mute button, which "could become one of the most visited spots in the city," as the New York Times commented, assuming that cab TV may not be captivating for everyone.

(Credit: Inhabitat)

On Wednesday my employer, frog design, hosted a little bar night for friends and media, and it was great to catch up with everyone. Among our guests was Emily Pilloton, the hyper-energetic incarnation of the "slash" entrepreneur. Emily is the managing editor of Inhabitat / a contributor to Good Magazine / and runs Project H, a nonprofit that facilitates social projects between corporations, design firms, and charities. And if all that was not enough, she helped organize the Greener Gadgets conference that took place at the McGraw Hill headquarters in midtown on Friday. What sounds like an oxymoron at first (the greenest gadget is the non-gadget, no? The comparative -- "greener" instead of "green" -- is thus carefully chosen...), was in fact a clever design competition to promote green innovations. The competition engaged established design firms, emerging designers, and design students to come up with new solutions to address the issues of energy, carbon footprint, health and toxicity, new materials, product life cycle, and social development. The top entries were judged by a panel and the audience, and awards were given out at the end of the night. Here's more about the winners.

While the green design movement, recently propelled by the Designers Accord, an industry-wide coalition of design and innovation firms to promote sustainability, is on a roll, the financial industry is deeply worried about the sustainability of economic wealth. "It's going to be very nasty," as a friend of mine who works at Morgan Stanley said about the looming economic downturn. However, the investors and entrepreneurs who convened on the 36th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel during the OnMedia conference seemed more or less untouched by such woes. Content is king (again), and I met quite a few folks whose ostentatious confidence was reminiscent of 1999. The attitude was not the only deja vu -- the program also appeared to cling to the same old themes ("it's a distribution game now," "the perfect storm of amateur content," etc.) that the industry has been pondering for years now. Most panel sessions consequently occurred in half-filled rooms, as many attendees opted to gather at the buffet to network instead. Many of the start-ups presented in the CEO showcases mirrored the traits of the first dot-com bubble: optimism in abundance, a strong belief in the self-regulatory power of the Internet, and monetization models that are not fully vetted. In some conversations I had, VCs conceded that a consolidation of the "new media typhoon" was inevitable. I, for my part, heard the lines "money follows eyeballs" and "we will initially focus on building a community" far too often. The whole event was also a bubble of its own kind. When I asked someone why he had spent the money to attend, he replied: "to see friends."

(Credit: Flickr)

En route to JFK on my last day, I met with a correspondent of the German daily FAZ at Le Pain Quotidien, the neatly designed bakery/cafe chain. We talked about the demise of the American empire (the typical topic when European expats meet in the US) and discussed the recent re-design of FAZ (see this story in Monocle) over thick-crusted European bread. There's nothing better than a quality experience.

Oh, and I had one last designer moment on the way home: I flew Virgin America, and after a week of moving and shaking it was appropriate that it felt like a ride on a disco ball.

(Credit: SF Gate)

The topic of sustainable or green design is of increasing urgency to companies involved in product development. Last year, it reached a tipping point in public interest and concern over global climate change, fueled by massive media interest.

Companies that fail to address it risk legislative punishment, as well as negative brand and sales consequences. But green also provides a huge market opportunity: recent surveys have indicated that key customer segments are willing to pay more for greener products.

Lots of companies at this year's Consumer Electronics Show were touting green design and environmental thinking, though as my colleague Adam Richardson observed, "in some cases, it seemed more sloganeering than anything very deep."

Not surprisingly, the backlash is rampant. Because green has become a forceful business imperative, it is getting harder these days to tell green design from "greenwashing" and to tell those who jump on the bandwagon from the ones driving it.

Consumers are harder to please too: increased demand for green products and services is contrasted by growing skepticism about moral free riders who take advantage of the public's goodwill for all things green.

Designers, and in particular industrial designers, who are uniquely positioned at the intersection of business, technology, and culture, may bring some clarity into the many shades of green. Since their work covers both the beginning and the end of the product development chain, they not only obtain privileged insights into user behavior, materials, and manufacturing, but they also possess a unique environmental responsibility, as well as the conceptual and practical power to actually make a difference.

As such interdisciplinary, enlightened vanguards of the new green conscience, they can drive an industrywide conversation and establish universal standards: "Sustainability promises to be one of the defining issues of our time, one with profound effects on our personal and professional lives," states the Web site of the Compostmodern conference on sustainable design. "For designers, it represents unique challenges as well as tremendous potential--nothing less than an opportunity to redesign how the world works."

Designers are hearing this call and beginning to institutionalize and externalize the knowledge that had previously been tacit and dispersed. Several leading design consultancies, including Design Continuum, Frog Design (full disclosure: my employer), Ideo, and Smart Design, have entered "The Designers Accord," an industrywide coalition to promote positive environmental and social impact.

The call to arms, which was first introduced in Frog's Design Mind magazine last summer, has since been endorsed by the influential design blog Core77, and it is growing as more firms pledge their involvement. In the coming months, the initiative will expand to include an open-source Web site in which member firms may share resources and ideas.

Cynics may say signing the agreement requires not much more than lip service, as most adopters will already practice many of the not-so-demanding principles outlined: "Undertake a program to educate your teams about designing sustainably; initiate a dialogue about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with each and every client; measure the carbon, or greenhouse gas, footprint of your firm, and pledge to significantly reduce that footprint annually," and so on.

Fair enough, but that's not the point. What is more remarkable about the agreement is its open, "coopetitive" nature: for the first time, and disregarding their traditional competition, design firms (and also the two leading professional organizations, Industrial Designers Society of America and AIGA) commit to sharing their experience and pooling their resources for a greater cause.

That's a real paradigm shift, and it may indeed provide the lever that the Accord adopters are hoping for: "Our rationale is that, by collectively committing to having this conversation, our client base--the world's manufacturers, distributors, and services providers--will be compelled to evaluate sustainability as a key vector in decision making around the products and services they create for their base, the global consuming audience."

LAS VEGAS--Lots of companies here are touting green design and environmental thinking, though in some cases it seemed more sloganeering than anything very deep. Here are just a few samples from the floor at the Consumer Electronics Show:

Among other things, Nokia was showing off their reduced packaging (50 percent smaller; most of their phones now shipping in it; have saved them $150 million to boot)

HP had a large area of their booth dedicated to their environmental efforts, and like Nokia had several people on hand who could talk knowledgeably about it.

There's still a long way to go on this issue, though, as can plainly be seen by looking at the sheer quantity of stuff at the show. And those massive plasma TVs look fantastic, but they sure gobble energy like there's no tomorrow. Not to mention the fact that most of what's being shown here will be obsolete (and non-upgradable) this time next year, if not sooner.

Here are just a fraction of the shipping crates stacked outside one of the convention halls that were used to bring everything to the middle of the desert. Remember that closing scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark? It's like that.

(Credit: SuperGreen Boards)

My colleague Hunter Smith of frog design has used his entrepreneurial spirit to launch a budding start-up based on his two greatest passions: eco-design and skateboarding. Hunter's company, aptly named SuperGreen Boards, employs some of the most advanced eco-friendly technologies for producing custom longboards, slalom, and speedboards.

SuperGreen Boards uses bamboo, which is not only beautiful, strong, and flexible but is also sustainably harvested. Maple wood, known as the gold standard for skateboards because of its strength under the pressure of the rider, takes a minimum of 100 years to mature before it can be used. Bamboo, in comparison, takes only five years for a stalk to mature, converts eight times more CO2, and is 17% harder than maple. Adding even more strength to the board, Hunter uses a fiberglass alternative made entirely of finely woven strands of bamboo fiber, and bonds it to the board using very low VOC (Volatile Organic Compound) epoxy. In the next few months, Hunter is hoping to convert from low VOC to a soy-based epoxy as the technologies become available.

Hunter says: "I'm delighted to see skaters adopt a green mentality and a desire to preserve the Earth for future generations. I am proud to provide boards for down-to-earth, eco-conscious riders with an eye for style."