IDEA awards | enter eco-design

A few weeks ago, the highest honors in the design industry were unveiled, the 2007 IDEA awards. Sponsored by BusinessWeek and the Industrial Designers Society of America (now international) the IDEA’s have become probably the most prestigious and thought after awards, especially in the industrial design field.

It’s no secret that with the recent rise of “green design”, environmental impact has become more relevant in the design industry, but it wasn’t until 2006, just last year that the society finally decided to include an eco-design category in their annual conference and award event. This might have been influenced by the strong wake up call from the keynote speaker at the 2005 IDSA conference, William McDonough.

Bill was clear and poignant when he brought his 11-year-old son up on stage and pointed out that most of the beautiful “award winning” products sitting on the gallery floor in the next room were actually poisonous to children the users and incompatible with our natural environment. He demanded that we designers must think of not only the present but also the future and that good design must be responsible. He showed clear examples of how we can embrace sustainable design as the future of our industry. He received a standing ovation from the crowd, composed of the cream of the crop of the corporate design world.

The IDSA has come full circle to openly embracing sustainable design since once supposedly banning environmental design legend Victor Papanek from the society for speaking up against the damage that the industrial design profession has done…

”There are few professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few… by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed… In this age of mass production when everything must be planned and designed, design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself). This demands high social and moral responsibility from the designer.”

This year, there was a stronger showing in the eco-design category although personally I feel that we as  professionals are still just starting to understand our influence and responsibility in the pursuit of a sustainable future. We have the right tools and skills to easily incorporate these values into our design process, but it’s really about the definition of good design.

These type of design awards are great because they bring awareness and communicate these great examples but hopefully in the future we wont need an eco-category in the industries most important design awards because any design good enough to be recognized with an award, must be good not only for the bottom line but also beneficial to society and our environment. Here are the standouts from this year…

GreenAir is a low-cost, space-efficient air purification system that uses plants to reduce toxins in the air.

The Steward Waterless Urinal offers many benefits over standard fixtures incorporating water-saving features without sacrificing performance.

The Enermax Package offers an environmentally friendly solution to battery packaging using 100 percent craftboard in a simple, straightforward tubular design.

Roll n Roll are portable, personal chopsticks that give people an environmentally responsible, sanitary tableware alternative when in public. They are made of a thin metal slice that can be rolled vertically to form a straw or chopstick, or a wrist like a bracelet.

The Mountain Sneaker is a part of the Greenscapes Collection, a line of casual footwear and apparel that uses earth-conscious materials and construction methods without sacrificing style and function.

The Epic Spray System is a more ecologically sensitive spray-paint system that uses disposable plastic paint bags and carbon dioxide as a propellant.

Do the easy things | reduce your office waste

Most of the products and services available and in use today are somewhat inefficiently designed because a life cycle analysis is not part of their traditional development process. The amount of waste material associated with most products and services unfortunately is not usually considered a responsibility of the manufacturer or service provider.

Consumers who are sensitive to the environmental impact that their lifestyles have on our planet are starting to change some of their tendencies but these changes usually start in their private life with things that they have full control over, and thus most of the positive changes are happening at home. Only recently and mostly due to consumer pressure some corporations are starting to consider the environmental impact associated with their products or services.

Reducing waste is probably the most important and easiest thing we can do as individuals in order to do our part and contribute to the changes required in order to correct our collective unbalanced relationship with our environment.

With this in mind, Bootstrapper has published, “working green, 50 tips to reduce your office waste” where we can all pull some very practical and very simple things we can do in our workplace or home office to reduce waste and do our part to reduce the heavy burden our workplace has on the environment…some of my favorites are:

-use both side of papers

-reduce your margins on paper

-support alternative schedules

-unplug equipment when not in use

-buy sugar and cream dispensers

3 wheeling | Innovation from the trenches

We know that sustainable design is an evolving process to learn from and refine and redesign in a constant pursuit of better solutions. It really is not much different than other traditional design and development processes employed in many industries today. In order to successfully deliver more sustainable designs, a development team must be empowered to execute good design, and usually this comes down to the execution of the process and the allowance or opportunity space for innovation.

Innovation is very tricky because it is influenced by many factors. These factors being dynamic, change according to manufacturing technologies, industry tendencies, corporate agenda, and can even be influenced by a strong social movement as is the case with the green design revolution just under way. This is when the opportunity opens for up for all things out of the norm, innovations like the more efficient 3 wheeled cars…

the soon to be released Clever: a supper efficient and super affordable natural gas engined three wheeled vehicle for the urban masses (via clubofpioneers…)

In order to innovate from a sustainable design perspective, one must place the problem to solve and not the existing industry at the center of the design process. According to Okala, the ecodesign strategy wheel correlates perfectly to the traditional product life cycle phases, with two key requirements incorporated, design innovation and differentiation. Yes, as crazy easy as that may sound, it’s all about having the vision and guts to deviate from the norm and perform innovations. The incorporation of new challenges like social responsibility and environmental stewardship should not be viewed as another intricacy or hurdle in the process, on the contrary, they open a new frontier for design, the most important one historically, and it will provide new fertile ground for sustainable design to take center stage. Sustainable alternatives will often look very different because of the clean break from industry standards that usually takes place. Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion Car was just that, representing a completely different way of thinking manifesting shocking differentiation.

The unforgettable Dymaxion Car with it’s spinning rudder back wheel was innovative in every way and therefore completely different from it’s contemporaries

Because sustainable design innovation is so closely entwined with a products life cycle, in a world of commodity parts and giant OEM’s, it is often extremely difficult for these giants to deviate from established and predictable systems without enduring strong competitive hick ups. That is why many old school corps have so much trouble transitioning out of obsolete (but still profitable) models and managing the innovation that can reposition them for the future in their respective industries. It should not be surprising to see the best innovations especially in sustainable design come from smaller to mid size outfits. No, they don’t usually have the same market impact or consumer recognition as offerings from the major players mainly because of the lack of exposure but have no doubt, the most innovative, most differentiating, therefore more sustainable design today is coming from the design trenches, and not the ivory towers just like the three wheeled cars.

Rebar features double tiny electric high torqued engines inside the front wheels and an ultra efficient third engine on the single back wheel for high speeds…

stiven

Bamboo | the miracle grass…

Because of its recognized “sustainable” characteristics, bamboo has become very popular in recent years as the material of choice for the eco-product and high end furniture and flooring industries. The fact is that in the west, we are just beginning to uncover the world of possibilities that this almost miraculous plant has to offer. Bamboo is a highly renewable resource and when combined with innovative technologies and processes, it’s one of the most useful, versatile and probably the most sustainable building material available today. To top it all out, it’s beautifully!

In certain applications, bamboo provides structural characteristics that outperform even the most technologically advanced industrial building materials, it has greater compressive strength than concrete and about the same strength-to-weight ratio of steel in tension.

It takes an acre of trees to build the average American home but because of its dense and rapid growth, only the square footage of that same house to build it out of bamboo. It can be harvested every year after only 5-7 years of growth compared to 20-50 years for other woods. Bamboo’s rapid regeneration allows it to be cut without killing the plant.

It is extremely resilient and more impervious to termite attacks than other woods. Bamboo survived the Hiroshima atomic blast closer to ground zero than any other living thing and provided the first re-greening in Hiroshima after the blast in 1945. Again in Limon, Costa Rica, only bamboo houses from the National Bamboo Project stood after a violent earthquake destroyed all other constructions in 1992.

It is the fastest growing plant on earth growing up to three feet per day and produces 30% more oxygen than other hardwood forests sequestering up to 12 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare. Bamboo is also very beneficial to the soil in which it grows by keeping a larger amount of water in the watershed and its high nitrogen consumption can also help purify the toxic runoff from other industries.

There are more than1500 species and over 5000 documented uses for Bamboo ranging from housing and clothing to food and medicine and it can be highly accessible because it can grow even in nutrient depleted soil and is native to every continent except Europe and the Arctic regions.

Bamboo is considered a mystical plant throughout Asia, a symbol of strength, flexibility, tenacity, and endurance. This greatly misunderstood and underutilized plant has a very promising future as a sustainable alternative in several industries and it probably wont be too long before we see the widespread use of Bamboo in west.

stiven

the Green PC | a transition towards sustainability…

With the mainstreaming of everything green lately, we have heard a lot of noise from PC makers as they unveil their latest environmental campaigns. Although Apple and Dell have gotten more exposure, HP and the other major players are also taking action. As we read through the fine print, we realize that these initiatives mainly consist of highly essential but somewhat boring stuff: (apple) finally phasing out the most toxic chemicals such as Brominated Fire Retardants and PVC, (Dell) finally launches a comprehensive recycling service, (HP) delivers their first gold rated EPEAT product (not very innovative as far as design). My point is that there isn’t really much to get excited about, most of these steps taken are expected and pretty basic, non of them really step out of the green box and delve into sustainability.

Recycling services and responsible materials should quickly become industry requirements, but who will be the first to actually gamble on a change of paradigm, who will take the first major plunge into redefining what a PC could be. Where can we look for a broader spectrum of creativity within the “transition towards sustainability” that the computer industry must undertake?

Enter the annual Microsoft/IDSA Next-Gen PC design Competition. I dug around the entries to filter out some more inspirational examples of what a sustainable personal computer alternative could be like in the near future.

The BulbPC sports a very interesting form factor and is designed to be a sustainable computing solution by encouraging enterprise on a local community and village scale. All the components can be made from readily-available materials like up-cycled aluminum. The minimalistic design makes it highly versatile and can be easily built or disassembled by hand and a standard soldering iron.

Felt like home takes a completely different approach to materials suggesting the use of biodegradable organic wool for the casing. This product does feel more like home with a much more approachable and cozy look and feel.

The hu-bi concept consists of re-using discarded PC components that may be obsolete in developed countries and reassembling them into modular PC’s for poorer developing countries. Even the casing can be made from recycled older PC’s. This concept would force a lot of e-waste back into an industrial cycle giving new life to otherwise discarded parts.

The Disposable Computer is a modular system using a recycled paper or pulp material (see also solemates) for its external casing instead of metals or plastics. This makes for a very flexible “service model” approach to our computing needs. The internal parts could be re-used a la “disposable single use cameras”.

There are many more interesting concepts on the Microsoft sponsored gallery site. One of the competitions requirements was for the concepts to include some type of environmental responsibility component but most of them focus on new types of human-PC interactions with wacky form factors and lifestyle centric designs. Although most examples of environmentally friendly products available today are not usually beautifully designed, there is no reason why this should be the case. As the major players get into the ring and start pouring real funding into this space, we will surely start to see leading edge design and sustainability working in synergy in consumer electronic products.

stiven