We’ve got a post-script from last week’s Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting at BOLTgroup in Charlotte, North Carolina. Thanks to Karen Smith for her reflections and photographs.
How do you entice a crowd of designers to attend yet another meeting straight after work?
Offer rich content on sustainable design…and free wine.
BOLTgroup hosted the Designer’s Accord Town Hall in Charlotte, NC, the first such event in the Southeast. The Town Hall created a forum for sharing sustainable design practices and was attended by over fifty designers. The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, and corporate leaders, working together to create positive environmental and social impact.
Designers from the Charlotte area sipped on beverages in corn-based plastic cups, and ate off plates made from plant-based renewable materials. Industrial designers, graphics designers, architects and interior designers made connections with like-minded colleges committed to sustainability in their practices. Everyone was enjoying the initial “meet and greet” so much it was hard to start the presentations. An emergency run to the store for more wine reminded us how designers love their libation! After an extra 20 minutes of consumption and a tapping of the microphone from our MC, Monty Montague, the crowd settled in.
While brief technical difficulties got the presentations off to a rocky start (momentary microphone reverberations sounded oddly like a crackling radio station) the first presentation finally succeeded by way of a web link with Valerie Casey from San Francisco. Valerie, founder of The Designers Accord, gave us a history of how the Designers Accord came to be and reviewed some of the guidelines: 1. declare participation, 2. educate teams, 3. measure your footprint (be conscious of resources), 4. dialogue – talk to each client, 5. engage/experiment/collaborate – all design starts to tackle issues.
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Packaging design is like nuclear power or a pet chimpanzee: easy to take for granted until it goes terribly, terribly wrong. Striving to minimize both its environmental footprint and customer complaints, Amazon.com created “The Gallery of Wrap Rage,” a collection of customer photos and videos of frustrating packaging in action. Scroll through to see a baby in tears after a first run-in with twist ties, a couple of Spanish-speaking gentlemen struggling with cheese marked abre facil (easy open), and the meta-frustrating The Amazing OpenX (pictured at left), a device designed to cut through plastic clamshell packaging that comes wrapped inside one.
