6 minute read
Beautility
GREEN IS THE NEW BLACK
Remember 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 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
artificial meat (all you have to do is cook it). Soon we could order sofa seeds from Amazon and then grow a new IKEA couch! Stop making products—just let them grow!
Decycling redefines recycling with a preventative step before customers buy anything—avoiding the problem before it happens. We don’t have to remove unhealthy products and molecules from the economy if we don’t release them in the first place. Selling carbon credits is preventive medicine. Going to the gym is actually buying what you don’t want: to get sick. We are facing the most critical challenge: survival. The biosphere is back at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Technological progress is making the need for design and its impact more important. Universal design and inclusive design showed us how easy it is to incorporate solutions at the beginning so we don’t have to undo problems later. The coronavirus is showing us that the world must tackle global problems. Decycling and regen design give us plenty of new work. Even if we weren’t in an emergency, regen design would be good business too: new jobs, new infrastructure and building an ecosystem that supports us.
Our climate emergency calls for four kinds of design: (1) remedial design, fixing things we have and making them work better, (2) proactive carbon-negative design that extends beyond products with a zero-carbon footprint, (3) preparation and maintenance design to deal with the current rising temperatures and reduced water, and (4) emergency design, which immediately responds to disasters after it’s too late, like finding food and shelter.
This crisis is insistent and may take precedence over traditional design criteria like innovation, uniqueness, market differentiation and attractiveness. In the past, environmental impact meant to make less of an environmental impact. This emergency calls for increasing the impact with bigger environmental results, like bigger negative carbon footprints, higher dikes, etc. Now we need massive environmental initiatives to restabilize the climate using mass production methods to amplified impact. Swarms of little good things add up to big solutions—bottom up, grassroots, quid pro quo! Cutting a pound of carbon burned reduces 3.3 pounds of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. Fixing the polluters is good for reduction, but burning less fuel doesn’t remove the carbon already out there! We need to clean up our 200-year-old mess by decycling the carbon—put it back. Reverse coal mining will become one of the fastest growing jobs! Forget about oil extraction—we need oil re-traction. Today “Less is more” has new meaning.
Rolling back all carbon emissions now means tapping into all the forces available: creative, scientific, industrial, political and even military. Design is like judo: turn the energy of an attack into its own defeat. We can get radical results from painless design thinking when we get our products to do the work. Get an eco-black belt by specifying materials that contain extra carbon, like carbon fiber, or adding more carbon filler to plastic for a really matte black! How about turning atmospheric carbon into diamonds? (They are forever!)
Isn’t it ironic that a little potato peeler’s win for humanity might show us how we can integrate climate solutions at the beginning of our design process too? Just like universally designed products are better for everyone, regenerative products are better for the whole world! Neutral is not good enough. Green is the new black, with beautility!
More than eight years ago, Mark Dziersk, FIDSA, invited me to contribute this column to INNOVATION. He was the first champion of beautility. He turned out to be a real provocateur and supporter of good ideas! We’ll miss his regenerative good nature and endless energy.
—Tucker Viemeister, FIDSA www.tuckerviemeister.com
