BE A U T I L I T Y
GREEN IS THE NEW BLACK
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emember when matte black was king? Back in 1980 when Davin Stowell, Tom Dair, IDSA, and I started working together, we were sharing space with Patricia Moore, FIDSA, who had recently received her master’s degree in gerontology. She took the opportunity to sensitize us to older people’s physical abilities, which led me to ask, Why not design beautiful things for old people that work better for everyone? So 10 years later when Smart Design started designing a new potato peeler, we knew what to do. Today, thinking ahead and anticipating changing user abilities is normal. It is basic human factors. Now a basic factor is the climate emergency. It’s inclusive too—we all have to turn green in 10 years. Before OXO Good Grips, there was no such thing as universal design. But that didn’t stop people from enduring arthritis or trying to get their wheelchair into the bathroom. In 1990, Sam Farber’s wife was beginning to suffer from arthritis, so they asked Smart Design to address Betsy Farber’s need to peel vegetables. We solved the biomechanical problem with a cool black handle design. But manufacturing a peeler with a big rubber handle was obviously going to cost more than making a cheap metal part. OXO was a startup. We needed a profitable formula to go with the good design or no one was going to benefit! Davin Stowell and Sam Farber figured they could piggyback our tooling costs on the yuppie gourmet consumers who were buying expensive kitchen products. We did not tell consumers that OXO products were made for old people. But people with different abilities are always on the lookout for good solutions to their needs (it turns out kids can handle the big rubber handles better too), and Good Grips are easy to spot. Everyone loved those fun fins when they hit the market: Customers loved the way they feel, and retailers loved the bump in their margins. Humans have always had issues with garbage—we
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just throw it out (that’s why we call it garbage!). Then mass production made garbage really pile up. When polluted water and air get bad enough, we can take steps to clean up the sewage and manage the landfill better. We design recyclable green products for the crunchy granola set that help return nature to equilibrium. We can create sustainable development with a circular economy aimed at stabilizing resource depletion and the degraded environment. But as humans continue to reproduce and spaceship Earth sails off to toward warmer climates, it’s apparent that we need more renewable resources. Industrial designers are complicit—but creative! Could we use universal design tactics on the climate crisis? Embed concerns at the beginning of our design process that lead to products and services that solve more problems more easily? Push beyond the normal brief with pro-climate criteria that reach beyond reducing wall thicknesses, using green materials, or recycling or reusing bottles? The word “regenerative” was first used to describe the benefits of organic farming. John Tillman Lyle, a professor of landscape architecture, applied regenerative ideas to economics and industry in his 1994 book Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development. Like compost, regen products are fertilizer for their network; they literally feed power or other benefits back into their system. Opportunities for new technology, microsensing and micro energy can make a big impact. Small, efficient and distributed networks can make precise surgical moves. More than IoT of toasters and smartphones, linking microsensors invite their hosts into an interactive community ecosystem. Self-powered markers linked together form primitive artificial intelligence—a biosystem operating on its own power. What could be more green than the ultimate regen products that actually grow themselves? That cut out whole production steps. Using mycelia and fungus you can grow shoes, buildings and
