Speaking of Sustainability
Nathan Shedroff, author of the new book Design is the Problem, lectured on one of my classes this past week and talked about sustainable design. At the beginning of his lecture, he asked us three questions:
1. What’s a more sustainable world look like?
2. What’s a more meaningful world look like?
3. What’s a post-consumer world look like?
He never fully answered all of his own questions. Instead, he provided us young designers with strategies that would help build a more sustainable world, a world where the designers themselves are solving the problem of waste on top of consumers, where the designers are shifting from designing objects to designing services. He advised us to avoid calling it “green” because doing so ignores the other facets of sustainability like cultural, social, and financial sustainability and confines the movement to ecological sustainability.
Shedroff then laid out some concrete strategies that designers can think about while in the design process. Like dematerialization, a strategy in which the product is minimized to its most basic form by reducing the materials used to produce it and so therefore creating a less wasteful end product. Many of the strategies he presented were common sense. Like designing for use. It only makes sense for designers to make products that people will use and use for longer, delaying its wasteful destiny.
As designers start to consider the repercussions of wasteful design, our society can only move to a more sustainable future.
