In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

DESIGN SOCIETY PROMOTES ECOPROJECTS

In Business, November-December, 2005, Vol. 27, No. 6, p. 28

Professional organization becomes catalyst for creating products that are resource-efficient, less toxic and full of “life sustaining energy.”

Amy Farrar

ECOLOGICAL DESIGN hasn't exactly had a long history in the design community, which has traditionally been known for putting clients' interests first. But that is changing, and ecological design is one of the newest buzzwords in the field. “We have some really exciting things going on in environmentally responsible design,” says Gigi Thompson, director of Marketing and Communications for the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA). What Thompson is referring to is the IDSA's Ecodesign Section, a professional interest group within IDSA that supports design that minimizes damage or restores the health of the natural environment.
Chief among the group's activities is the creation and promotion of “ecodesign” education for students, which the group has arranged through a partnership with the EPA. Ecodesign Section Chair Philip White, who is an assistant professor of Industrial Design at Arizona State University, helped develop the Okala curriculum on ecological design for product design students. Okala (oqala) means “life sustaining energy” in the indigenous Hopi language. “Okala envisions a future where humans recognize the value of global ecology and we work to ensure its protection,” says the group's web site. More than 40 design schools in North America requested Okala materials (courses presented through them are integrated into existing classes). Eastman Chemical, Whirlpool, and the IDSA/EPA Partnership supported its development. White, who has been an IDSA member on and off for more than 10 years, contacted the EPA.
IDSA currently has thousands of members from all over the U.S. and six other countries. When asked what designers can do to help the environment, White says, “They can inform themselves, they can try to deliver the most ecologically friendly designs possible given the constraints of their clients and projects, they can support nongovernmental organizations and education of the public and designers, they can support changes in legal frameworks, trade agreements, and subsidies to support more sustainable patterns of production and consumption. Many of these things the public can do as well.”
Today, there is more open discussion among designers as far as environmentally friendly design goes, “where in the past it was almost taboo to bring up topics that might scare off a client. We have a very long way to go, however, before we are at a state where we can say we are designing environmentally sustainable products and systems.”
There are things designers can do to create products that are more ecofriendly, however. One example was laptop computers designed with energy saving sleep modes. Another is communicating energy efficient features on packaging, and encouraging work teams to qualify for the U.S. Energy Star ecolabel, a voluntary government program developed in 1992 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to encourage energy efficiency in office equipment.

ENCOURAGING ALTERNATIVES
Designers can advocate using alternatives to common toxic materials, for instance, tin solder instead of lead solder, metallic powder coating or metallic hot stamping instead of chrome plating, and nonbrominated flame-retardants in place of brominated flame retardants.
Designers can also advocate that products be designed to be readily disassembled (by hand or machine) and its constituent parts recycled, White says. “'Design for Disassembly' requires that all toxic or recycling unfriendly components be easily removed and the large mono-material components be uncontaminated by toxic chemicals,” he says. “The Europeans and Japanese are far ahead of U.S. manufacturers in design for disassembly and recycling.”
A more ambitious goal would be to propose that all materials in the product comply with the new European REACH (Registration, Evaluation, and Authorization of Chemicals) regulations - which are far more stringent than U.S. standards. The European Commission adopted REACH in 2003. It requires companies that manufacture or import more than one ton of a chemical substance per year be required to register it in a central database. The goal of the new regulation is to improve protection of human health and the environment while maintaining the competitiveness and enhancing the innovative capability of the EU chemicals industry.

CHALLENGE OF OUR GENERATION
IDSA's Ecodesign Section web site says that ecologically conscious design “…is the design challenge of our generation.” Ecological design is considered by judges of the Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), copresented by IDSA and BusinessWeek magazine. Criteria for the awards specify the
ecologically responsible use of materi-als and processes throughout product life cycle, including resource and waste reduction, energy efficiency and repair/ reuse/ recyclability.
As far as the public goes, White believes that a significant segment of the U.S. population wants to do the right thing environmentally, as long as it's not exorbitantly expensive. “That is roughly 20 to 25 percent of the people,” adds White. “Another 40 percent or so will take it into consideration, as long as the price is more or less equal. These are significant segments of the market! These people are often confused, however, about the complexity that the many environmental aspects of products pose.” White thinks a mandatory ecolabeling system monitored by a neutral third party would greatly assuage people's anxieties about the truthfulness of claims. “This would create a revolution in the marketplace and truly give companies incentive to move forward with more responsible product design.”

MARKETING ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTS
AN IDSA member who founded her own business in 1989, Jacquelyn Ottman of New York City supplies companies with ways to develop and market environmentally sustainable products. Some of her clients include Nike, IBM, the Hardwood Manufacturers of America, and Energy Star Label.
Ottman's company worked with the EPA and IDSA and sponsors Philips and the Hardwood Manufacturers of America to create Design:Green, an initiative designed to jumpstart ecodesign education of American designers. Design:Green offers an introductory full day workshop and networking opportunity to students and practitioners who want to know more about how to integrate green into their designs. Workshops consisted of a lecture and interactive case exercises run by Aveda, Philips, Herman Miller, and other corporate leaders in ecodesign.
“I am aware that 75 percent of the impacts that a product throws off during its lifetime is determined at the design stage,” says Ottman of what motivated her to spearhead the Design:Green initiative. “The solutions are possible-we just need to be creative.”
Although the official grant period has ended for the project, Ottman is continuing it as a project of her firm due to the positive feedback she received from workshops conducted in New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis. More information about Design:Green can be found at www.designgreen.org.