Sustainable |day is a living process for discovering and sharing the design of our future…

Of course we all have a part in this process and for the first time in history we will need some global collaboration for deploying both the full might of our collective human spirit and our limitless technological prowess. We are on a tight schedule and as dramatic as it may sound, it’s our only chance to bring balance back to our human relationship with the earth, it’s natural resources and every other species in our tiny planet.

We have inherited a badly designed industrial system that has evolved into a severely ineffective and completely unsustainable reality for us all. Our current systems completely depend on a continuous and ever increasing assault of our environment and the total abuse of our natural resources. This stems from the fact that they were never truly designed, they were never taken through an appropriate process in order to establish basic requirements and creatively balance smart and responsible solutions for those requirements. Instead, our current systems are measured only on economical viability and therefore most industries have evolved into streamlined and highly efficient capital accumulating sub-systems. Our diverse cultures and our irreplaceable natural resources are our most unique and precious assets and yet our systems in general do not factor them into their developmental equation.

If any of us were given the opportunity to write a brief for the development of our global industries, most of us would include some basic requirements such as; clean air and water, natural foods and healthy products, diversity of species and cultures, fair and beneficial trade for all. Today, those things have become increasingly rare for the vast majority of people on earth. Statistics and experts in broadly different fields of expertise are aligned on one converging point, for humanity to succeed beyond our current unsustainable state, we must wake up re-think and completely redesign most of our systems meaning our things, our environment and by extension, our lives.

This is a good thing for most people especially designers like me but also for engineers, visionary executives, smart investors and innovative companies because the path to a sustainable future does not require a retreat back into the past and away from development or even a slowing down of our frenetic pace, on the contrary, it will demand ever more sophisticated technologies implemented in new and more innovative solutions in the forms of services products and new business models.

No one can pretend to have all the right answers or know exactly what is the most appropriate solution as a whole but if we could summarize the most basic requirements into one word, one word that should be embedded in every design brief, business document, contract or mission statement from here on out it should be a word that by definition, it enables the existence of a future, sustainability. Sustainability is not a specification or certification that we can all of a sudden start to comply with, it is an evolving process and just like our little weblog project here it requires dedication in order to enable discovery and proactiveness in order to take the time to share our experiences and learning’s in real time.

We would like to invite you on a journey to navigate through a sea of green and often greenwashed information out there in search of real sustainable design innovations. Design that embraces the environment and our cultural diversity as a synergetic approach to development. Our goal is to design, identify, adopt, mash-up and filter out the best examples and implementations and share them with as many people as possible in order to accelerate our collective learning. Join us and participate, learn, teach, ask questions, pronounce your intentions, react to and build on others ideas. Let’s take the first step together and feel the pulse of change, let’s bring meaning and purpose to our ecological footprints.
Let’s imagine a sustainable day.