Back in early May, I wrote about a group of about 20 or so designers and educators who attended a Designers Accord town hall meeting in San Francisco to explore the subject of sustainable design and exchange ideas. This post is part of a short series in which I continue the conversation with some of the other presenters there about designing messaging that drives measurable, ground-level change.Previous posts:
Series Introduction
Lynda Grose and the Sustainable Cotton Project
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts, really one of the only programs of its kind in the U.S. He's a prolific author whose most recent book,
Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable, outlines a stunningly accessible vision of the future of design. At the town hall in May, Nathan discussed the interdependence of design, business, and sustainability—as he pointed out, "you can't have one without the other."
More recently, I asked Nathan a few questions via email about how individuals and organizations can translate sustainable design thinking into practice. His responses—along with the whole of
Design Is the Problem—reveal a pragmatism infused with optimism that is often lacking among sustainability proponents, and that is utterly necessary if real change is going to take place in both the private and public sectors.
Jess: What has teaching this stuff taught you about how people best respond to sustainable design issues? How did that influence the writing of Design Is the Problem?
Nathan: I've been teaching sustainability and product development for at least three years—and some of experiences definitely influenced the book. One of the things that sometimes happens is that people assume sustainability is only about the environment. Another is that a lot of business students, though not engineers and designers as much, aren't terribly interested in sustainability at first. I should note that these aren't my students, luckily.
Next, many students go through a profound kind of depression at first. In the first 6-8 weeks of our Sustainability Studio in the program, our students were noticeably discouraged. It's not that they didn't realize that the impact we've had on the planet and other people was bad, but the extent in both breadth and depth is pretty staggering. It's not until about weeks 8-10 that they really pull themselves out of it, and that's mostly because we not only talk about the tools available and the strategies to create more sustainable solutions, but they actually use these. We don't teach about sustainability [as an exclusive concept], but in the context of making solutions. I think this context is critical because it simultaneously informs
and enables, and that sense of enablement is important for sustainability, and is at the core of design.
A lot of this rethinking of the design process seems to require three things: the commitment, the know-how, and the resources to implement. That seems like a tall order for the average American business, which is statistically likely to be small (under 100-500 employees, depending on the industry); how does a single person operating within an organization begin to pull those three things together?
The first thing organizations can do is familiarize everyone in the company with the basic principles and frameworks of sustainability. Everyone should know what sustainability is and shouldn't be afraid to talk to others about it. Walmart has done this very effectively through their engagement with Act Now Productions, now known as Saatchi & Saatchi S.
I was at a sustainability conference recently and there were too many people who got up on stage and essentially said "I'm not sure why I'm here because I don't really know anything about sustainability." I challenged the entire audience not only to be more informed next year but to set a goal that everyone in their organization, by the end of the year, should know enough to be comfortable getting onto any stage and speaking about sustainability. It sounds like a tall order but I don't actually think it's that difficult. It's actually
much easier for smaller companies than for larger ones.
Sustainability is just one important business trend but it represents a major failing of most organizations. They don't know how to both engage their own employees
and inform them about their own business. Everyone in an organization should know and be able to respond to the organization's strategy, business goals, industry drivers, and customer profiles. It's crazy that most employees can't articulate this and it's the fault of leadership, not the employees. Sustainability is just a new business driver to add to this overall need.
The book spends a lot of time discussing the need for a "systems perspective" and what that means. But it seems to me that American culture and institutions are designed to celebrate the individual—individual experience, individual expression, individual success. First, can you talk a little about the value of a systems perspective and second, how can a society like ours reconcile its individualistic nature with the need for a broader view?
Perhaps we've emphasized the individual over the system too much, in the same way we emphasize competition over cooperation. Neither is better than the other, and neither can exist without the other—not if things are to progress. Evolution wraps these same two dichotomies together as proof that they're both natural and necessary.
Individuals can't function nor be individualistic without a supporting society (which is a set of systems). There's nothing incompatible with supporting
both systems
and individuals, cooperation
and competition, and standards
and innovation. Maybe, we simple need to tell the rest of the story. In the U.S. media, we tend to present everything as an either/or choice across one, narrow spectrum. You're either a Liberal or a Conservative, a business person or an environmentalist, etc.
The truth, of course is that life is more rich and complex than these false choices. It used to be common that people identified as "fiscally conservative but socially liberal" but even this has disappeared from the national dialog. We're asked to choose between being prudent or being sympathetic, as if the two were mutually exclusive. Business is seen as being all about money and profit despite that
not being the initial history of business in the U.S., nor reflecting why so many people start their own companies.
We have to cast off these false choices and old stories. Even if they were true in the past (and I don't think many of them ever were), they're not relevant now.
Where is this reconciliation happening right now? Where is it most lacking?
It's more lacking in large organizations of all types: businesses, governments, and even nonprofits. The culture of doing business or running an organization must be completely reconsidered, starting with hierarchy, strategy, and instituting a service-oriented culture.
We are grossly inefficient but in ways most pundits don't consider. For example, most every critic of government points to businesses as an example for being
more efficient and effective. I'm not sure how many companies they've ever worked in but most businesses aren't a terribly good example of efficiency nor effectiveness. There are exceptions, for sure, but really, our government would have failed long ago if it had suffered some of the disasters business has been responsible for. Local governments have, undoubtedly, moved faster in many cases and are more effective than state and national governments but, again, there are exceptions.
We also need to rethink our economic models. The ones we've been using for the past 5-10 decades were flawed from the start. We've been patching them for years but the patches aren't good enough. You get what you measure and we've been only measuring money—not any other element of a successful society or lifestyle. It's no wonder that's the world we've gotten, and we find it increasingly difficult to value anything else.
You also co-wrote the book Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences, in which you discuss the many ways businesses can connect to customers to develop deeper, longer-lasting relationships. In a recent interview, you discuss how important it is to use meaning as a way of connecting with people on the issue of sustainability. But is there more to it than that? Is there something inherently parallel about meaning and a sustainable system? Is a sustainable system itself inherently meaningful?
The jury is still out on that. I believe that the more meaning we have in our lives, whether that's from buying and having more meaningful things, experiences or relationships, the less stuff we ultimately need. I don't, however, have research on this and I'm not aware of it. All of my experience is anecdotal but I do see evidence of it all around me.
The people I see with the most meaningful lives have stuff, for sure, but less of it than most others, and they tend to consider their purchases more carefully and in a wider context. They tend to be more engaged with sustainability—and [engaged] more deeply. They're not the people rushing out to "acquire" bamboo floors and green this-and-that for the sake of it. That's largely a fad at the moment. If they were remodeling, they would certainly make these choices but not for the sake of having these things.
I find that the people who live their values more tend to be happier or, at least, more at ease. I attribute this to being more engaged at the level of meaning. So, in a very real way, I believe that helping people live more sustainably will, necessary, need to engage them at the level of meanings and values—at least for any long-term effect. Thankfully, we have models for doing this, now. We just need to use them.
You can read about these models in Nathan's book,
Design Is the Problem. I highly recommend it, whether you're a designer or communicator, business owner, or simply interested in new ways of thinking about old systems. You can also
visit Nathan at his personal website, and learn more about CCA's
MBA in Design Strategy.
Labels: business, creativity, design, green_design, politics, pop, san-francisco, sustainability
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