Hasta La Ideas

If you’re an extreme sledding fan, you will love this competition:

Radius Product development is putting together a (first annual) Green Sled Competition where designers, design offices and teams around Boston will make sleds out of recycled/found materials. On March 7th we will meet at Tenney Mountain (NH) to test out the designs and compete on numerous levels.

Rules and guidelines:
The sled must be made of at least 90% recycled, reclaimed, or 2nd-hand objects and materials. The other 10% is open to allow for hardware (nuts, bolts, paint, etc). The sled should be made of at least two different materials. The sled must carry two people down the hill. There is no limit to the number of members on a team. A team can be made up of members from more than one firm or company. Gravity-powered solutions only…

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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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If you’ll recall, we were on hand for the recent School of Visual Arts‘ dot dot dot lecture that featured Gary Hustwit and we had a blast. So we’ve already marked out calendars for their next one, “The Curators,” with a Sharpie, highlighted it twelve times using five different markers, and circled it a half-dozen times with blood red ink. Unfortunately, this resulted in our calendar becoming completely illegible, so we’re using this post to remind ourselves, as well as to encourage you, to get to the White Rabbit on March 11th to see Nicholas Felton, Rebekah Hodgson, Jason Kottke, and Ms. UnBeige 1.0, the charming Jen Bekman. Here’s the description:

Curatorial strategies are spilling out of galleries and museums and into our everyday design practices. As emphasis shifts from designer to consumer, the vital role of designer is often that of mediator, shaping ideas and content created by others into another user experience. How have these new pivots changed the role of designer from one of artisan to one of curator? Four lecturers speak to curation as a way of design life, and how their audiences learn from, are inspired by, and gain insights from it.

Note: their site says the event is already “sold out” but we just received notice from them about the event again, so it’s probably worth your while to find if there’s space available. Worst case, we’ve also been given a peek at the next dot dot dot lecture, which will be held on April 15th, entitled “The Influencers,” and will feature Hillman Curtis, Steven Heller, and Jason Santa Maria. So if you can’t make it in March, make sure to keep an eye out on their events page so you can nab a spot in April.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media

What’s up with the literary overachievers in this afternoon session? Nathan Shedroff has written four, yes, four books just in the last year, and all of which came out last week. Let’s name them, shall we? Experience Design 1.1, Design Is the Problem, Experience Design 1 Cards, and the Dictionary of Sustainable Management.

Shedroff is the Design MBA chair at CCA and also, many years ago, invented the term “experience design” which is obvious when you look at the domain name he secured probably sometime in the 80s (nathan.com). He has a vast list of resources that he will have ready for us to absorb so we can jump in feet first Monday morning. And thank goodness; he said we don’t have to take notes because he’s going to post everything for us online. Okay, okay, I’ll still take notes.

Can we even be sustainable? And what does sustainability really mean? In 1987 it meant: “Use and development that meets today’s needs without preventing those needs from being met by future generations.” But today, Shedroff thinks it means “Don’t do things today that make tomorrow worse.” And if you have more stubborn people you have to convince, add “…for your kids.”

We’ve also lost control of the work conservative, he says, which is so close to the world conservationist that it should mean the same thing…so people who actually care about conservation should take the word conservative and make the conservatives find another word. Wild applause for this.

Also? Sustainability it’s not just “for the planet,” it’s a three-fold way of thinking: social, environmental, financial. So no more Green. “Have a funeral, bury it.” It signals that you care more about plants and animals than people. You can call it Blue if you must. It’s something pioneered by Adam Werbach and his work with Wal-Mart (last year’s Compostmodern closing speaker). and when you’re talking to business people, use the word “capital” appended to the end of each three areas. Actually, try Human Capital, Natural Capital and Financial Capital. “It sounds stupid,” he says, “but a lot of business is really stupid.”

He then runs through a bunch of the metrics we use to define sustainable design. Life Cycle Analysis, Cradle to Cradle, Natural Step, Biomimicry, Edwin Datschefski’s definition of Total Beauty, Social Return on Investment, Sustainability Helix…most of these are great for addressing one issue but overall they’re not complete and don’t equally tap the three-fold of social, environmental, financial. Nothing alone is good enough, but if you research what parts work for you. (Remember, Shedroff is posting all of this online for us. He has done all the hard work for us, now all we have to do is, um…do it.)

Now. What can you actually do?

Design for Use: Usability, accessibility, clarity and meaning. You can tell your clients if they don’t make more meaningful, useful stuff, someone else will.

Dematerialization: Materials, energy and transportation. Push the suppliers and manufacturers to think about these things.

Substitution: Materials, energy and transportation. We need to know more about the materials we recommend. And maybe get rid of printed matter altogether.

Localization: Reduce transportation. We expend a lot to move things around.

Transmaterialization: Sharing things. They last longer and use less resources.

Informationalization: Don’t send the dish, send the recipe. Open source and network sharing.

Design for Durability: Heritage design. He uses Dyson as the example. Making something last longer, be more meaningful and also more repairable.

Design for Reuse: Maille condiment jars have been shipped in beautiful jars that can be reused as drinking glasses.

Design for Disassembly: Rickshaw bags are made entirely out of nylon, and the entire thing can be dropped into a recycling bin.

Close the Loop: Finding civic partners who can use your waste or supply your materials.

Redesigning the System: Look at a place like Curitiba, Brazil, where an architect became the mayor and transformed both transportation and the slums using design.

Redesign the System: The GDP has gone up, but the GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) has done down. We should be using this system instead to define success. This is another design problem. Our economic models suck (“And if you get an economist drunk they’ll admit that,” he says).

And after that, read six books—told you there would be homework—which Shedroff will post on his site tomorrow. And yes, I do believe there will be a test.

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Last year, at the wise old age of 26, Emily Pilloton founded Project H just before the last Compostmodern. With a $400 loan from her parents and a network of people she knew from being an editor at Inhabitat, she had no idea what she was doing except for one thing she was sure of more than anything: After being trained as an architect and working as an industrial designer, she got fed up with design in the traditional sense and vowed to focus on design that improved Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness.

Her first task was that she wanted to fund and deilver 75 Hippo Rollers (hence the ‘H’), a water transporting device, to a South African community. But at $90 per unit, she realized it was inefficient to ship and quite expensive. So with a newly-formed San Francisco chapter of Project H, she partnered with Engineers Without Borders to help design and build a better Hippo Roller. They came up with a design that could be stacked together, but it wasn’t necessarily more sustainable. Sometimes what you’re designing is more important than how you’re designing it, she says, so the social impact way out weighed the need for, say, using completely recycled materials. Project H in the meantime has seen a chapter in Austin working with a foster care program, and an LA chapter working with a homeless shelter to put women to work making textile-based products.

But wait, there’s more! (Starting to think she didn’t sleep last year.) Pilloton then turned her attention to an AIDS orphan school in Uganda, a place where some students are “double orphans,” meaning both of their parents died from AIDS. A new building for the school was being constructed by Architecture for Humanity, but Pilloton wanted to figure out how better industrial design could serve the school as well. They came up with a grid of half-buried tires that could support a dozen active games they invented into a “learning landscape.” And then they went there and built it for $1000. And of course the kids loved it. Three more are being built in the Dominican Republic, North Carolina and the Bay Area.

Perhaps the most interesting part about her experience is that most of it came from her Compostmodern connections. In the last year she also wrote a book, Design Revolution: 100 Products and Solutions that Empower People, which will be out in September: Allan Chochinov wrote the forward, and Scott Stowell, a speaker last year, designed it. And, Pilloton has just been named as the managing director of the Designers Accord, a movement that was launched last year here at Compostmodern.

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