Hasta La Ideas

Energy Strategy for the EcoFridge collaboration between UC Berkeley Engineering and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Design students

“I don’t know about this whole sustainability thing, anymore,” a student said to me recently. “No offense. It seemed cool for a while. But a lot of the stuff I see is weak.”

These days I spend a lot of time with students and brand-new grads. They’re fired up to make an impact, and are impatient with solutions that don’t directly take on big issues like e-waste and energy scarcity. Many of them know what greenwashing is, even if they don’t know what it’s called. Young designers have been vaguely led to believe that designers hold the power. But when they set out to create green product solutions, they often fail—it’s just not work that can be done alone.

Waste is money. Wasted materials, water or energy indicates a design failure on some level. Better solutions are both technical and creative: they’re high-performance and beautiful, while guiding people to conserve. So even if your school never taught sustainable design, nothing’s stopping you from taking this on yourself.

Make friends with engineers

Performance is an engineer’s main priority, and is the key to their creativity. Meet your engineering partners halfway. Familiarize yourself with their language. Learn how to analyze product impacts. Get savvy about understanding energy and greener materials. More importantly, though, find a way to collaborate that inspires engineering to push the boundaries of performance.

Many of the best sustainable design student projects I see come from interdisciplinary teams. A colleague and I recently coached a team of students who were designing a new refrigerator. Half of the team was made up of UC Berkeley engineers, the other half product designers from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The engineers investigated technologies like thermal battery innovations, essential for creating a high-efficiency appliance. But they were developing a mass-market product, not simply a new technology. The designers focused on user behavior, cultural context, aesthetics and ease of use. To succeed in the Mexican market, any environmentally friendly technologies had to be affordable for everyone. The biggest waste in fridges, though, isn’t necessarily solved by new technologies: it’s in addressing the huge amount of cold air that pours out when the door is held open. The team’s final design incorporated an insulated window and quick access tray that allows users to ponder, and then to pull out the food they use most, without opening the full door. All of this keeps the fridge closed longer, which saves energy by preventing the cold air from escaping.

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