Designers hold themselves to eco standard
SAN FRANCISCO–Ten years ago, a designer of a top-selling toothbrush might beam with pride over his or her creation. But seeing that indestructible saber of plastic washed up on a beach shore–battered but relatively unchanged–might cause the same designer some pause in today’s eco-conscious climate.
Valerie Casey would know. As head of global practice for design firm IDEO, whose clients include Johnson & Johnson and Sprint, Casey said at a recent design conference that she had a crisis of conscience about a year ago when she realized she wasn’t talking to her clients about sustainable design, for fear that they wouldn’t be amenable to ideas about eco alternatives.
So in the last year, she’s organized the Designer’s Accord, a nonprofit coalition of designers who pledge to share ideas and information about sustainable design practices with clients. The project launched in recent weeks.
“The Designer’s Accord is a call to arms to designers to have a positive social and environmental impact in their work,” said Casey, while speaking to a crowd of designers here Saturday at the sustainable design conference, CompostModern 2008.
Trade group the American Institute of Graphic Arts officially endorsed the accord at the conference, joining about 3,500 designers from around the world.
Casey said that because there’s so much misinformation floating around about what’s green or sustainable design that she aims to build an open database for designers, writers and architects to share knowledge about what they’ve learned in the field. (The open platform will be available this summer at Designdirectory.com, she said.) As inspiration, Casey pointed to projects like an air-conditioner-free building in Zimbabwe that uses a ventilation system modeled after that of a termite mound.
“We don’t have to start from scratch,” she said. “Unless we can aggregate this knowledge, we’ll never push this forward.”
Paul Hawken, a longtime sustainable design advocate and founder of earth-friendly retailer Smith & Hawken, responded positively to Casey’s project, but hinted at the overwhelming feeling that comes with watching trends of global warming–a feeling Casey called “eco-fatigue.” Hawken wrote to her: “A lot of people, even me sometimes, wish the problem would go away. But once you see it, it is impossible to unsee.”
What does that mean for consumers? It means holding creators of toothbrushes and other goods to a higher standard by choosing eco-friendly alternatives.