The Compostmodern 2009 Conference

[Justin Boland]

Source:
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009456.html

This is a real goldmine, dig it and dig it deep. Some highlights according to my frontal lobes:

Saul Griffith juiced things up with a bit of attitude ("Design will not save the world--go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious fuck"), and was brilliant as usual, giving a variation on his Game Plan presentation, but with less math because the audience members were all designers. However, he used two real equations in his talk, to prove a central point that's often overlooked in green design circles: "Designers, you'd better start getting comfortable with numbers and analysis. Or get comfortable working with engineers." You can say I'm biased because I'm a scientist-turned-designer, but it's my objective opinion that green design requires some degree of quantitative analytical understanding of environmental impacts. You don't need to be Leonardo DaVinci, but you need to have some concept whether or not 1800 watts is a ridiculous amount of power to use for drying your hair. You don't need to be able to do the calculations yourself (though it helps), but you need to be able to talk to an engineer and know bad numbers from good numbers. Designers can't be content styling boxes which have been thrown over the wall by the engineers -- you can't get revolutionary design that way, you can't lead industries that way. Designers need to know what to ask for, what numbers aren't good enough, and know where engineers are just being stubborn vs. what would break the laws of physics. Good engineers are also designers, understanding that the performance specs are not just strength-to-weight ratios and material costs, but having a clue of the larger context, the user and society and the environment are also part of the performance spec. As Griffith said, "the planet is the client." Or at least one of the clients.

Emily Pilloton of Project H was great to see, simply because of the sheer momentum with which she's rocketed into the sustainable development world. In one year, she's gone from $400 and living in her parents' house to having over 100 designers around the world working on projects. Her main points were that it's okay to not know what you're doing, just start doing something. The more you do, and the more people you get involved, the more impact you'll make, and it can take off like a rocket.

Dawn Danby emphasized opening up the green design community -- as she said, "don't be an egotist, be a synthesist." We need to get rid of our specialness and open dialogue up, both because it gets more people involved and because it gives us more leverage with clients and industry. Getting down off our high horses is what lets us get more influence with clients to get them interested in green design. You may call it dilution, but look at Wal-Mart: it has caused more industry change than a score of nonprofits, because of its sheer size.[b] Another great point Danby had was that [b]we shouldn't worry so much about designing things from scratch -- we must retrofit and hack the world into sustainability. Consider that the IPCC has recommended we reduce CO2 emissions by 80 percent in the next 40 years -- that means remaking almost all material culture. All products, all buildings, all power plants, 80 percent of the world we've built. We can't just throw away what we've got now. Most of it will have to be redone, retrofitted, remodeled -- hacked.

[Justin Boland]

By the way, here's the site for Project H: http://www.projecthdesign.com/

"product design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health and Happiness"

Fast Company Coverage:

If you missed the Compostmodern sustainable design conference in San Francisco last week, you can get an excellent taste here of one of the top presentations. Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the Design Strategy MBA program at California College of the Arts. His full presentation, with the tongue-in-cheek title "Becoming a Sustainable Designer in 47 Easy Steps", can be downloaded at his website. http://nathan.com/thoughts/compostmodern.pdf



The presentation clearly visualizes and relates a spectrum of conceptual frameworks for talking about sustainable design -- what we at Fast Company call "ethonomics" and what Shedroff says should be called "blue" not "green." Whether "life cycle analysis", "natural capitalism," "biomimicry" or "social return on investment," these frameworks all take place within the three spheres: Human capital, natural resources and financial capital; Society, the Environment, and the Market; or People, Money, and the Planet. Through the applications of concepts like "dematerialization" (putting less stuff in your stuff, like an ultralightweight keyboard) or product-as-service (Zipcar, a shared car rental service that eliminates the need for car ownership), human ingenuity can replace natural resources, close waste loops and make the world a better place for the future.

[Justin Boland]

More Compostmodern Coverage from GreenBiz:

Source:
http://greenbiz.com/news/2009/02/23/compostmodern-09

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. -- “The planet is your client.”

That was one of the messages repeated frequently throughout the day at Compostmodern 09, a phrase summing up need for designers to rethink who they are designing for, and to remember to keep the planet, which includes the environment and well as all of the people on it, in mind when designing.

“We’re in the middle of a revolution most of us can’t see,” emcee and Greener World Media executive editor Joel Makower said at the beginning of the San Francisco event on Saturday, referring to the wide variety of ways that businesses and organizations are rethinking products and services. The presenters throughout the day helped make that revolution visible, with messages challenging the roles of designers and plenty of real and proven examples that show sustainability can be integrated in all realms of design.

Eames Demetrios, director of the Eames Office, kicked off the day with “Powers of 10,” a short film by Charles and Ray Eames that starts with a view of a picnic and zooms away, then zooms back in, by powers of 10, expanding out to the edge of the universe and then tunneling inside of a picnicker’s body, looking at the smallest bits of matter. The purpose of showing the film was to impress the importance of understanding scale.

“We’re in a world where there is too much,” he said. Thinking in terms of scale can help prevent poor design, and looking into things as closely as possible can help designers understand things better.

One of the main themes of the day was what design can do to help the world, but Demetrios also mentioned how environmental crises can save design. “Design works best when it’s confined by constraints,” he said, and designing for sustainability is a big constraint.

On the subject of closely examining things to find solutions, inventor Saul Griffith described how during 2007 he measured the energy use for every product he used and everything he did.

“Energy use is completely invisible to us,” he said, putting the onus on designers to make energy more visible to consumers, or to do something about the energy use inherent in products.

Showing a slide of every product that accounts for energy he used throughout 2007, Griffith said designers must start picking items and reduce their energy, mostly by making them lighter and making them last longer. “We need to redesign everything,” he said. “You have to design things and experiences that last a long time and are very thoughtfully designed and beautiful.”

Moving on from the subject of how design can better the environment, John Bielenberg, Pam Dorr and Emily Pilloton gave examples of designs to better societies.

Dorr’s Hale Empowerment & Revitalization Organization (HERO) provides sustainable housing for low-income people in Hale County, Ala., and one of the projects developed by Bielenberg’s Project M was “Buy A Mater,” a way to help people in Hale County purchase water meters and get connected to municipal water systems.

Better designs were needed for both projects, but in different ways. For housing, they needed home designs that could be built cheaply, yet built to last. And for getting water meters to homes, they needed to design a message and a way to spur donations. One solution that worked was to sell T-shirts that said “425” for $425, the cost of a water meter.

Pilloton’s Project H, which she founded after last year’s Compostmodern event, has taken on redesigning services. One of her first projects was to do fundraising for the Hippo Water Roller, a plastic tub that helps people who live in countries where they need to regularly gather water on their own.

She quickly moved from bringing funding to the Hippo Water Roller to working on redesigning it to make it easier to ship them to countries, thus bringing down the cost of each roller. Instead of having the rollers shipped whole, the product was redesigned so one end could come off like a cap and nest inside the rest. Now 75 rollers can be placed in a space that used to fit fewer than 40 rollers.

For the Hippo Water Roller, the social impact is of more importance than the material impact, she said. Although the rollers are made of plastic, they provide a way for people to easily gather water, and they are the only materials that stand up to conditions in some countries. Also, each roller lasts about seven years.

Nathan Shedroff, Design MBA Chair at the California College of the Arts, wrapped up the event with a compendium of information on what to do in order to take the messages from the day and put them into practice.

Ranging from giving advice on what language to use with clients, and touching on processes like dematerialization, material substitution, design for durability, intended and unintended design for reuse, rethinking systems and, ultimately, restoration, he showed the many ways to further the sustainable design revolution, and make is visible to more people.