Hasta La Ideas

As my new eco-crush Nathan Shedroff ended Compostmodern on a serious but pragmatic note Saturday night (have you done your homework?), I had a dizzying moment of clarity—and not just because I’d been chained to my keyboard since 8am. For the first time, maybe ever, I realized that true sustainability really is three-fold. Not just environmental, but social, and also, that horrible word that is no longer our friend: financial. Financial! After last year’s Compostmodern all we had on our plates were the world’s environmental and social problems. Now, designers are responsible for solving the world’s economic woes, too? As I walked out of the building I already knew the answer: Yes.

Later, when it seemed like all 100,000 designers who have ratified the Designers Accord stuffed into the sweaty Sugar Lounge for post-conference libations, the conversations buzzed with a kind of heightened awareness I did not see at last year’s conference. All I could think about was a term we heard a lot from a certain someone during 2008: “the fierce urgency of now.” At this conference, we not only got the design world’s version of fierce urgency, we got a deadline: Moderator Joel Makower opened the conference by saying, by his calculations, we only have about 5000 days left to figure this out.

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