Hasta La Ideas

Boy, inventor and wind power advocate Saul Griffith sure knows how to win over his audience. Going against the advice of his graphic designer, he opens by showing this now-famous t-shirt graphic with the motto: “Design Won’t Save the World. Go Volunteer at a Soup Kitchen You Pretentious Fuck.”

But we soon forgive him because it’s all a way to get our attention, as Griffith rocks back and forth on stage, flapping his arms, pointing at facts and figures with a laser pointer. He’s going to school us, literally. And he’s going to start with some basic education that we might have missed while we were so busy learning about design. This is a man who has invented several products, started several companies, plus he’s a certified (MacArthur Foundation) genius, and has multiple degrees in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering including a Ph.D from MIT in Programmable Assembly and Self Replicating Machines (what does that even mean?). Luckily, he’s funny.

Designers need to learn some math. According to his calculations in how energy is measured, you can equate your entire lifestyle into the measurement of burning a lightbulb. A 12,000 watt lifestyle means you can think of yourself as walking around with that many lightbulbs continuously burning behind you, like a human Vegas. Even though Griffith is a fairly sustainable chap, his 2007 life was 18,000 watts.

He shows his life as a pie chart of wattage consumption. The pink part is everything that he uses that’s designed. (Your fault, he says.) The hard truth about this chart: “I am a planet fucker. If you are in this room, you’re a planet fucker, too.” We average about a 11,400-watt lifestyle here in North America. If you actually loaded up a backpack in the morning with all the energy you needed throughout a day, it would be over 100 pounds of multiple fuels.

The problem lies in the fact that building all this infrastructure, just to get to the green revolution will actually still be adding impact to the planet. Renewistan, the country he’s invented just to contain all these new green energy industries, will need to be the seventh largest country in the world in order to have enough space to produce 10-20 terra-watts of clean power.

However, it turns out we already have an energy consumption regulation program: It’s called a recession. Historically, when the economy goes down, so does our energy use. That’s the best worst news I’ve heard all day.

Designers in the future will choose their clients based on the different problems associated with each degree of rising temperature: species lost, people faces water shortages, border disputes, entire cities and populations lost to rising sea levels. Kids, these are your new clients. But before it gets that bad, your role is to simply to design solutions to make people want to use less energy and make it easier for them to do so. Just take one slice of and figure out how to make it more enjoyable and functional at a fraction of the impact, make it lighter, make it more efficient or make it last longer.

In other words, you better start getting comfortable with numbers and analysis.

We need a sustainable Bob Dylan, and we need a new sustainable soundtrack, and we need a new sustainable font, he says, and a new aesthetic that’s not “nasty bright green plastic.” And we need to start thinking about “heirloom design,” one great object that lasts you a lifetime. Like if you were born and your dad said, okay, here’s your pen, it’s the only pen you’ll ever get. And it would be a really durable well-designed pen. And hopefully have a laser pointer built into it, too.

During the Q&A with Gelobter and Griffith, they offer some great optimism after calling out the audience for being fellow planet fuckers. “Planet lovers,” Gelobter corrects with a laugh. Griffith says there are enough consumers, bloggers and keen eyeballs out there to call out the all the greenwashing right away. But then someone asks a question about the changing client-designer relationship in light of the fact that you might tell them not to make something. “Your client is not the client anymore,” Griffith scolds. “The planet is the client.” Which means you might have to change the expectations about your career: You’re not going to do 64 blockbuster products. Maybe you just make one?

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In case you can’t see in that slide up there, Allan Chochinov is going to talk about Denting an Impossible Design Problem in 10 Sustainable Steps, something he did with a group of graduate students at the SVA MFA Designer as Author program (coincidentally, our dear Allan was recently interviewed by the chair of that program, the great Steven Heller, over at AIGA: “To Design or Not to Design“).

Allan starts the talk the way he always starts his talks: With a nice overview of CRAP. All that awesomely-horrible crap that designers are making like a “banana slicer,” and a paper towel holder where the packaging exceeds the volume of the actual product, and Zebo, where you’re defined by answering the question “what do you own?” Designers exercise the right to just create whatever CRAP they want because people will ultimately buy it. Designers think they’re in the artifact business, says Allan, but they’re not, they’re in the consequence business. And he came up with a checklist that every designer should consider. And here’s the list:

1. Acknowledge privilege: Being a designer does not give you the right to be a CRAP maker
2. Use the word “consequence”: Talk about the implications of your actions
3. Question authority: Don’t wait for permission
4. Surround yourself with the awesomest people you can: Go to parties, drink wine, make friends
5. Don’t play fair: If making something gorgeous will get your clients on board, do it
6. Be intentionally dumb: Start with the most obvious and ridiculous solutions
7. Redistribute (then reduce reuse and recycle): Find materials that are already out there first
8. Broaden your market: Think beyond your audience
9. indulge discursive design: Do something that’s wildly inappropriate
10 Talk to anyone who will listen: Get the word out

Using those steps, Allan decided his students would take on a very heady design problem—designing a new prosthetic arm—and surrounded himself with some very awesome people: Frank Wilson, author of The Hand, Elliot Washer, founder of Big Picture Learning, amputee-model-superstar Aimee Mullins and Open Prosthetics, an open source prosthetics community.

Maybe we can convince Allan to post some of the student solutions because my words won’t do them justice. They were incredibly thoughtful and visually impressive. Some students made jewelry or fashion pieces that helped make the transition from stump to prosthesis. Another designed campaigns to allocate money from the sales of gloves towards prosthetic advocacy. One used the kids’ toy Toobers and Zots to make a new arm more like a cool toy. A student solved the problem of putting on button-down shirts with elastic-stitched buttons. There were arms with perches for birds built into them and the above example of turning the arms into cargo sleeves for storage. Jackets that told the story about how people lost their limbs in graphics on the sleeves. One student even made hands from clay into a meditation kit so amputees can play with hands.

During the Q&A, Eames and Allan (doesn’t that sound like some kind of sustainable furniture manufacturing company?) both agreed on one very important rule #11: Clients don’t really know what they need so you gotta be pushy! “Every company needs a skunkworks,” says Demetrios, which leads me to sheepishly head over to Google because I have to admit I don’t know what it is. And what a great word it is! “A group of people who, in order to achieve unusual results, work on a project in a way that is outside the usual rules.”

And speaking of skunkworks, will you check out Twitter tag #cm09? Lots of great little tidbits over there I might not have typed because I was busy typing something else. Like this.

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So what, you may be wondering, is this Compostmodern really about? Well for one, it’s not just your typical green conference…or your typical design conference, say co-founders Gaby Brink and Phil Hamlett. Compostmodern was created “to inspire designers to think about sustainability beyond just process and materials,” says Brink. “That we can bring about change wherever we are, in our own ways.”

And here’s the fantastic Joel Makower, whose turn as moderator at Compostmodern last year was so influential, he’s planning his own green design conference, Greener By Design. Since we saw him last he’s also published a book: The Green Economy.

Makower reminds us of one thing that’s probably crossed everyone’s minds at least once today: This is a very interesting time for this conference to be happening (um, understatement!). It’s rather Dickinsonian, says Makower, totally a “best of times and worst of times” scenario.

The best of times: Technology has spurred the convergence of three rather important parts of our lives: energy, information, manufacturing. And this guarantees that we’ll be able to use what we learned from the information revolution (how computers became smarter over time and learned to talk to each other) and apply it to our ancient energy grid (someday the exchange of energy will be intelligent and communicate wirelessly).

The worst of times: Makower wants us to think about a number: 5000. 5000 days is about how much time we have to figure all this out. It’s about 13 years. In that time we can’t just “be more sustainable,” have to completely transform the way we think.

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Here’s a gallery featuring shots from Toy Fair, spanning two floors of the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York.

>> view gallery

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Design Miami will expand its presence in Basel, Switerland come June, when it debuts in a larger venue closer to the hub of Art Basel, which last year drew an estimated 60,000 visitors. For its fourth go-round in Basel, Design Miami will move from the the Markthalle to Hall 5 of the Basel exhibition complex (pictured), which is adjacent to the Art Basel venues: Theo Hotz-designed Hall 1 and Hall 2, the 1950s landmark building designed by Hans Hoffmann. The new location boasts 60-foot-high ceilings, a mezzanine gallery, and 15% more floor space for the design fair. “I am absolutely delighted about this new location and the potential it offers,” said Design Miami director Ambra Medda in a statement issued yesterday. “It takes the fair to the next level and opens up endless possibilities for Design Miami Basel and the world of design.” And hey, more space for exotic plant-studded side exhibitions! Design Miami Basel runs from June 9-13.

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