Design Impact Sustainability Guidelines 2012
Letter from the Directors: This summer Design Impact is celebrating its second year of embedded design by assigning it’s first round of full time designers, or “Fellows”, to Indian organizations–kicking off five projects that apply design to social and environmental issues. As we grow, we want to be conscious of the impact of actions, and with that in mind, we are pleased to announce the development of our first Organizational Sustainability Strategy! As you may know, one of our core values is creating environmentally and socially sustainable solutions. This value acknowledges that identifying the most appropriate solutions requires consideration of social, cultural, and environmental impacts from the project's inception. This document is the start to defining that core value and will lead to our first sustainability report in our 2012 annual report. We plan to asses our social, environmental, and economic impacts along three different tracks—in our projects, our organization, and the design profession—and we are committed to annually measuring each of these. To integrate sustainability into our projects our Fellows document where and how sustainability occurs in their design process in the Project Sustainability Framework. In integrating sustainability into our organization, we will annually conduct a carbon inventory analysis, and consequently, offset those carbon emissions. To create a more sustainably minded design profession, our fellowship program immerses design professionals in community organizations. Design Impact will collect the fellows’ reflections and their journey as advocates of sustainable design throughout the world. This report seeks to serve as a living and breathing reference of Design Impact’s sustainability initiatives and procedures for our internal and external stakeholders. We look forward to sharing our progress in the 2012 Annual Report! Warm Regards,
Kate and Ramsey
DI’s Sustainability Strategy is threefold: to integrate sustainability into our projects, organization, and the design profession. Projects that are socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. Sustainability for us is a no-brainer; in fact it is an integral part of our mission. As a socially minded organization, we care about people. But, we also realize that building strong communities is not just about people, it’s also about environment, businesses and culture. Through our long-term project partnerships with communities we create smallscale, appropriate solutions that have lasting change. Each of our projects is in-line with our core principle of creating environmentally and socially sustainable solutions and, in our 2012 annual report we will include section that details the sustainable aspects of each project. An office that covers it’s costs. Design is a face-to-face business, but meeting in-person when working across the country and around the globe is expensive and environmentally unsound. We embrace a fully virtual office, connecting staff, fellows, partners, and volunteers from around the world while minimizing the need to drive a car, take a bus, or step on a plane. However, our method of embedded design requires occasionally physically moving people around the globe to interact directly. To offset this environmental cost we complete an annual environmental audit, and donate the corresponding amount to the carbon saving sale Bharat Laxmi stoves, produced by one of our partner organizations ARTI. A better design workforce through immersion. In a world searching for better solutions to perennial problems, we believe that design can play an important role in finding solutions. This will happen only when a designer intimately understands the issues and needs of the world outside their studios. Our fellowship program, through immersion, aims to create a growing group of designers that understand the complex dynamics that make sustainable growth so hard to achieve.