Hasta La Ideas

Had the Industrial Revolution never happened, there’d still be doctors, lawyers, farmers and merchants—but there darn sure wouldn’t be any industrial designers. It’s a bit of a shame that the event that enabled our very profession caused such widespread pollution, but we didn’t understand the environmental effects back then, and even if we did it wouldn’t have stopped men like Carnegie and Loewy.

Now that we are grasping the environmental effects of pollution, what we’re learning is staggering. A new study published this week posits that pollution from Asia’s industrial boom is affecting the weather in North America. The study, performed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and reported by Live Science, finds that “Pollution from China’s coal-burning power plants is pumping up winter storms over the northwest Pacific Ocean and changing North America’s weather.”

“The increasing pollution in Asian countries is not just a local problem, it can affect other parts of the world,” [lead study author and atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Yuan] Wang told Live Science. …Wang and his co-authors examined how the tiny pollution particles in Asia play a role in cloud formation and the storms that spin up each winter east of Japan, in a cyclone breeding ground north of 30 degrees latitude. Monsoon winds carry aerosols from Asia to this storm nursery in the winter.

…The new study finds that sulfate aerosols are among the most important drivers of Pacific storms, by encouraging more moisture to condense in clouds, Wang said.

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In this three-part mini-series, Stefanie Koehler shares her experiences in bringing a sustainability focus into her work.

Part 1: A New Way of Thinking
· Part 2: Putting Theory into Practice · Part 3: Learning from Nature

Practicing sustainability-focused design, like any art form, is a skill that requires craft and sensitivity. As designers, we are tasked to skillfully create consumable goods, services and systems that inevitably make an impact on many levels, many of which are not well understood or even measurable. By learning and then practicing various approaches, I have begun to understand design from a whole-systems perspective, considering both the micro and macro scale. This way of thinking has led me to consider the trade-offs—from materials to process to business strategy—that I make with every design decision.

Doing is Believing

Many people think that sustainability-focused design is a burden—futile, depressing and difficult. Some don’t even believe it is possible. Designing with sustainable outcomes in mind may have these pitfalls but I have been able to debunk these negative opinions by studying sustainability theory and putting it into practice.

To become efficient and ultimately more effective at anything, one needs to practice—a lot—and sustainability-focused design is no exception. By applying comprehensive sustainability approaches to different design challenges, I have not only learned that sustainable outcomes are achievable but also that it is rewarding, both personally and professionally.

In Jeremy Faludi’s Collaborative Product Design course, offered by the fully online Sustainable Design graduate program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), I was able to practice sustainability-focused approaches such as energy effectiveness, design for appropriate lifetime, biomimicry and responsible materials, to name a few. We directly applied these solutions to new solutions for existing products with real companies; I had the pleasure of practicing a collaborative redesign for Steelcase’s Circa Chair.

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General Motors has quietly been making strides in greening their operations. What’s most encouraging is that GM isn’t doing it for the publicity; they’re doing it simply because technological advances in sustainability are increasingly making good business sense.

In 1999, GM began experimenting with turning landfill gas—those otherwise worthless fumes that do nothing but stink and fill the atmosphere—into energy. By using landfill gas to heat a portion of their paint shop in Orion, Michigan, they discovered they had reduced their energy costs by half per vehicle. In 2002, GM then started using this LFGTE (LandFill Gas to Energy) technology to power parts of their Fort Wayne, Indiana, assembly facility.

Presumably having worked out the kinks, now they’re taking bigger steps. This month GM invested $24 million in LFGTE machinery. The Fort Wayne facility’s LFGTE percentage will quadruple from 10% to 40%, and the Orion plant will draw a whopping 54% of its juice from the stuff. This will cut 89,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, about the equivalent of what 18,500 cars put out. The total LFGTE yield between the two plants will be 14 megawatts; if they repeat this nine times with other facilities by 2020, they will hit their self-imposed goal of using 125 renewable-energy megawatts.

Here’s a local news affiliate’s overview of the project:

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Half of the fun of the holidays is ripping into presents from family and friends or watching someone else do it. We might feel just a twinge or two of guilt as we crumple shreds of once-pristine paper waste into a trash bag and toss it to the curb for garbage collection, but what the hell, you’re on much-needed vacation and you left all of your cares at the office.

Wrong.

The facts: In 2011, Great Britain alone racked up 227,000 miles of wasted paper after the holiday season. (That’s enough paper to wrap the world nine times over around the equator.) And according to a study done by Stanford, if every American wrapped three presents in reused materials, the saved paper would cover 45,000 football fields.

The upshot of the guilt trip is that it leads to solutions like wrapping your gifts in the comics section and recycle it when the present party is done, or, say, reusable packaging. UK-based agency BEAF does the DIYers one better with Eden Paper, wrapping paper for the rest of us that you can plant once you’re finished tearing into those gifts.

It’s simple: By planting the used paper in some soil and watering it like a regular potted plant, you’ll see sprouts in no time. As with Democratech’s sprouting pencil and plantable OAT Shoes, the gift wrap is produced with the seeds embedded right into the paper. The brand is currently offering the paper in five flavors—chili peppers, onions, carrots, tomatoes and broccoli—but looks to include various flowers and herbs in the future. The gift wrap looks good, too—as good as it tastes, I’m sure. Design-wise, it’s a much-needed upgrade from a lot of the holiday wrap you see around the time of year. There’s only so much you can take when it comes to iridescent snowflakes and glittery ornaments.

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Trash is a big problem for the environment. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. is the worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) in the world for producing garbage, throwing away two billion tons annually. And while recycled materials have come a long way in helping us to reduce our garbage, there is something else that can be done and this includes an interesting insight into product design.

Turns out that how consumers decide if something is trash or recyclable isn’t based on whether the product is, in fact, recyclable. It has more to do with the appearance and size of the product. If it looks like trash, then it will be less likely to be recycled.

Products change during their use. Paper is torn, cans are crumpled. And how form or size changes impacts the likelihood of a product being recycled or just tossed in the garbage. This is the finding from a recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research [PDF].

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