Sophie Interview 1. There’s a lot. It depends on what sector of dsesign you’re talking about, I presume you’re talking about communication design and graphics. There are some really big general ones for all designers, for me a big one is instead of taking a brief and responding by just creating a product, really think about where your materials are coming from that youll be using and how theyre gonna end up back into the system. If you don’t think about your material loop as well as your user’s, as well as all other considerations of the brief, then youll end up designing something which could potentially end up a. in the wrong place or b. being landfilled or burnt. A good example of that is designing something which is a piece of print which has then been encapsulated or laminated or has a foil block on it. So if you have a piece of paper and you encapsulate it in a piece of plastic, you are effectively making it very hard to recycle cos you cant separate so when you take it to deinking and they take it for separation with processing they cant disconnect the plastic from the paper, so you end up with it in landfill, unless of course you want people to read it in the shower in which case it’s a good thing to do. So it depends on the brief but also on your understanding of uses of inks, papers. We always stipulate having as much recycled content in our paper as a possible in order to make sure you create demand for a recycled product, which helps the whole loop of recycling anyway. I think when we started practicing there were certain things you just wouldn’t do, like using metallic inks, or fluorescent, now they’re all soya based, so from that side of things more opportunities have arisen. There are still a lot of issues, like when we did our brand identity redesign we had an issue as we wanted to put a big metallic flood across the top so we had a long conversation with Nadine kingheis in france about how that would affect it, whether they’d be able to get it off, how it would affect the batch it would go with and checking through all of that at the point before you design is really important, if youre going to have those conversations. Practically its about understanding and being able to do things like think about the brief and think if the brief is right, theres nothing worse than designing a piece of communication that doesn’t actually deliver what the client wants, a lot of the time they’ll write a brief where they don’t know what they want. If you have an ounce of intelligence you can see that for example a poster isn’t the way of catching people attention its better to do an installation. Also thinking about how you build in maintenance and longevity to something. So its not just one piece its also to do with a backup of things that go with it. So sustained communication. 2. Fundamental thing is to check mailing lists. I remember there was a website called twosides basically promoting the paper industry at a time they were getting a lot of bashing about sustainability. Twosides.info. sent out this nice piece of print that had been designed but they sent me 3, and one to two people in the office who had left. So you can do amazing promotion but if you haven’t checked your mailing lists, actually its completely pointless. Really ironic considering they promote good use of paper. We had to recycle a lot of it. I think targeted communications you have to get message right. One of reasons why campaigning and advertising around climate change
has been really unsuccessful, because its not targeted, it’s a blanket approach, as if we’re all supposed to be affected by the same emotional triggers which is not true. Some like to become very emotive, they see a polar bear crying and they wanna give loads of money to wwf, others want to march the streets and shout about it, others don’t wanna do anything. Its very difficult to work out who your audience is but you should think about that. I’ve just been reading something about how design companies have changed the way they do things. So originally we has a system where companies would design something and then they would test it (or the premise of it) through market research or user groups and pull in a collection of consumers to say “do you like this in blue or yellow” or whatever and then try and guess. Only influence consumer has then is whether they choose to buy it or not. Or engage or not. Now that is shifting where we have different systems where you can choose to invest in companies, so different ways of sourcing investment, its much more about individual creativity, and you can choose to be involved in different ways than just a consumption centred point of view. So I think models are changing due to the internet and the way we communicate and the way we pull together the mass through different network levels, rather than us and them of the big corporates. So we’ll see how it will affect things. Actually that concept has really affected the way that we print, so we don’t print newspapers anymore we have ereaders and also we collect our news from different places in a way that we have different sources and pool together information on tablets etc. 3. For starters we have very few clients who print now. So when we do get to print something it’s a sort of joy and delight. Because what is interesting is how print has really disappeared, only now is it starting to come back in. We generally don’t encourage them we just do it, by default, you cant see the difference or tell there’s a quality difference. The price difference as one would think. FACTOR INTO OVERALL PACKAGE? Exactly. Most clients we work with will know that we do that and will want that. At a point when print was big and we used to talk about it a lot it was slightly more expensive but again our clients would come to us and say yes thats fine. Of course you could get around that by how you look at imposition on a plate. You can actually find that if youre more efficient with sizes or if you had a conversation with the printer and they said “by reducing that down by 10mm you can get a whole other one on there”, you save the client money, so efficiencies in one side will pay off in others thats really important, its important anyway not to waste paper because that sort of paper just gets chucked away anyway. 4. Well we do by proxy because when we start talking to them we say we could do lots more things for them in a way thats more sustainable, generally as well it goes with having conversations with them about what theyre doing, finding out how they are doing it and giving advice from a design point of view, but its always about conversations and dialogue. 5. Now it would be quite difficult to get a grip of what that ramification is because of the way the business has changed quite dramatically. So for instance we do a lot of 3d exhibition design and therefore you can have quite a big impact if you choose the wrong materials. So its about knowing,
well a lot of the time when youre starting off in design and you want to use this particular material and you go out there and find companies that can sell you that material, and if you have a paper client (parklane press or someone) come and tell you about this stuff a lot of the time if theyre just a normal company (not sustainable one) they will just spin you theyre new promotional material, and they will spin you the sustainability spec sheet of that which may or may not be very exciting, but they will spin it anyway. So i think the ramifications thing is really about eyes wide open in the sense that you have to understand and thats where our checklists came from; what questions to ask your printers and suppliers to get the right information and then make decisions about whether they’re right for you. I think its interesting with graphic designers because they generally don’t think they have an impact. My response to that is that actually they have more of an impact, due to the message theyre communicating rather than the material theyre printing it on. 6. Choosing not to work for a cigarette company if you’re against cigarettes, choosing not to work for the tory govt. if you vote labour. That kind of stuff. The age old argument weve always discussed is about the fact that many designers (and im not sure if this is so true now but many designers go to college they have ethics and things they stand for and then as soon as they leave and start working, they leave their ethics on the doorstep, but they have to, i mean were in a position where people need jobs, its a desperate time as a student and its difficult to be picky. However there is an entrepreneurial thread of graphic designers who are think “bugger that im going to set up on my own and do what i want to do” which is sort of the school that i come from. So i think you can do it and i think theres... its defined as the millennium generation so instead of having a sort of charity pot which you pay from your dividends at the end of your corporate, as well as buying a yacht in Marbella, you actually build your company around giving a sizeable chunk and not going for the profit and not paying for the dividends. You actually give back to society and i think a lot of that entrepreneurial spirit does come from the creative sector, and i see a lot of design students and new graduates who are pushing into that area and getting the clients that they want. And in that sense what you need therefore is the right people to know who to talk to, which is the work were doing with the great recovery and that particular circular network, like who do i need to talk to in these areas, i.e. is it talking to arjo wiggins about how they get their ink of the paper (like we do) and its about keeping on top of the knowledge about there thats changing continuously, cos a lot of the stuff we were seeing, is someone saying that thats a good thing to do in sustainability terms when actually it emerged it was not. Actually now technology is... the way we recover materials now is very different from how we recovered our materials 10 yrs ago. So educating yourself and keeping on top of it all in a way thats not going to drag you down is important. FOR PRACTICAL IS IT OBSOLETE TO DO PRINTED DUE TO CHANGING INFO? No its about targeted communications, if you do that you’ll find out lots of the graduates love print, so actually for them a print piece would be perfect, its got to be something you’d want to put up in a studio or keep rather than chuck away or not open. So targeted and effective.
7. I don’t think they can on their own, the way to do it is to get involved with groups that are doing it, reading up on it, being vocal about it, writing articles about how rubbish/good certain issues are within it. Thats the sort of thing that we end up doing here. 8. I think the shift, the death of the print company brought on by digital platforms was a shock to the print industry, they were not prepared for it, talking to the guys weve worked with for years it seems really difficult. Although saying that, i think there is a resurgence in print at the moment, i think its not to do with whether its a hindrance or an aid, i think its just the disruptive nature of how things change and its about adaptation. Actually the thing that it had the most impact on was things like sustainable, recycled papers, as a lot of the mills that were producing them closed down due to lack of demand. Mills producing sustainably sourced and recycled paper. Like 9 lives and things which is still going. There was some 100% PC paper which was really nice and they just disappeared which was a real shame cos it meant that the range we had to work with at that point suddenly shrunk. SO HINDRANCE IN THAT SENSE? It was a death more than a hindrance, but saying that because we have other things kicking in like increased landfill tax and EU regulations about recovery and recycling and the fact we have targets from local authorities to collect paper and also their public procurement of things like that, thats probably what held it together, the fact that they use recycled paper. A lot of print companies then ended up setting up design studios within the print companies to do websites as well, so i think its about adaptation rather than... 9. The problem with it [cradle to cradle] is that you have to have a complete system to go round it, we don’t have that, we have an infrastructure of paper recycling and deinking therefore you make it so that the ink come of better. You make it to fit the current systems and you build in innovation at a point where in the long term you move towards something, you cant just shift to it and expect it to be picked up. You should be mindful of the fact that a lot of print production and paper recovery is highly efficient, in the paper production process the mill waste is going straight back into the system and actually what your doing RECYCLED OR VIRGIN? Both, doesn’t matter, pulp goes through, whatever doesn’t gets put back through. Paper can only be put through 6 times. HOW YOU ADDRESS LOSS OF FIBRE QUALITY? Its very very rare to find paper that is 100 PC they always put virgin in it to give it strength, cos otherwise fibres aren’t strong enough. Saying that the quality is incredible now, you think about the qualities we used to print on it used to be like printing on toilet paper and they used to give u spec sheets that u used to have to give to the printers and say “you have to put 2 and a half times the amount of ink on it”. So despite it being recycled lots of ink getting used. One of most important things you can do is like when were doing that 3 trees don’t make a forest thing; if youre designing a beautiful piece of print and you wanna put a metallic on and its highlighting bits, if its a specific pantone colour or a specific blue, green whatever, the printer has to buy a kg of that ink to do your print. If youre running 100,000 copies of that then thats fine but if youre doing a small run; if youve got tiny bits of it a lot of the time theyre only using a teaspoon of that ink. So they buy a whole kg of ink for you to use a tiny bit, then it sits
on the shelves waiting for someone to spec that exact pantone again on a job thats going to be running again in the next 2 years before the ink runs out. So there are ways of being more efficient, so 4 colour printing, using normal CMYK. Or going to the printers and saying “what pantones have you already got on your shelves that i can use”. Things like that, there are so many efficiencies that you can do in the process. The environmental benefits, there is definitely a reason to use post-consumer fibre, and that is that it increases demand for post-consumer waste and recycling. GROWTH OF THAT SECTOR? Exactly, its about making sure that we build in recovery of materials properly so that we’re not just saying... The mantra of a product is actually a transitory point on a material path. So you have to be able to think about what it ends up being; how can we split it? Cradle to cradle is about splitting the biological and the technical, its when you put them together that you end slipping down. Thats what happens when you encapsulate paper. You’re putting the biological with the technical, they are very difficult to split at that point which means you’re putting it into energy and burning it. It takes a lot of energy to recover materials but part of that is because we make it very difficult. If you use the minimum amount of ink so you’re not doing full bleed metallic or whatever, or even just layering on hundreds of layer of spec colours. Although its beautiful and very interesting to print, thats when it becomes tricky. 10. Cost but also myth of cost. A lot of people think things are a lot more expensive when they;re not really. It goes back to how efficient you are with the design anyway. A myth of appearance, people still think its gonna be a bit hairy jumper and flecky; not good quality. I mean i believe in doing it by stealth anyway, so not many people know if it is or not. I think i don’t really print that much anymore, which is the main one. Not to say we don’t have impact still, theres the whole issue about digital, carbon footprints. CARBON FOOTPRINT DIGITAL MEDIA? Yes, servers and electricity use. Theres a certain tactility that we forget about, goes back to your question about targeted communication. 11. I don’t know i think as consumers we are very astute, we actually can, we are cleverer than we think we are. I think theres a very interesting concept around ethical choice, and the fact that now we have digital tools around us that can help us decide on things or make decisions where we can access information very quickly so if something does feel slightly wrong in terms of greenwash, you can very easily tell. Theres also social policing of that, and if someone does do that then its a risk to the brand which is very key. A lot of these big brands wont go down that route FEAR OF GETTING CAUGHT? Yes. Sustainability is becoming much more normal and from what i hear its a bit conflicted, some surveys say that its expected now among consumers, they expect things to have green credentials. They expect businesses to ensure that things come from an ethical source. Thats one side i hear, the other side is things like the Bangladeshi fashion debacle when thousands of people have suffered and died from being squashed in a terrible situation making clothes for nothing. And we still don’t stop our purchasing power, and don’t put pressure on companies. IF NOT CONSUMER DEMAND? Pressure from many different points you need government and European legislation on one side, and consumer pressure on another, you need brand risk and the
need to... also board of trustees and shareholders theres a kind of responsibility coming out now where companies will have environmental audits done and environmental annual reviews and CSOs, very new to have sustainability officer at CEO levels. Trouble is a lot of this stuff (in terms of secularity as well) should sit in R&D and should not sit in a sustainability area because they are not given any kind of power or money or budget BOXED OFF. I think pressure from all places, but consumer pressure is very important and you cant really dismiss it. 12. I suppose PMCs... Bit like Sainsbury’s and tescos shop wars, if you give power to somebody, who has the power of negotiation, they will get the lowest price. Ive never used a print management company. SUSTAINABLE ONES? Im sure they all say they do. I think no, were quite a small team and generally we have our favourites, if you work with a print buyer, and you are worling with your rep from the printer and they don’t really know what theyre talking about, so if you say “can you do this/that, what paper etc.” And they go “ye ye ye”. And then by the time you get to the technical guys who say “we cant do that on that paper” you end up getting a bit stuck. So its good to have relationships with your technicians or account managemers. SO PMC RENDERED OBSOLETE FOR THAT REASON? Yes, we don’t go for cheap we go for quality and sustainability. I guess the answer to your question is no. Interesting being asked specific questions about print because unfortunately we don’t really do it anymore. When a print job comes in we all get really excited about it. Such a beautiful media. THATS WHY I FIND IT INTERESTING. That in itself is interesting because you see a lot of designers coming out now that have this need to do something tactile, you must be the same, you love letterpress you love old ways of doing things, the smell of ink etc. 13. Yes it already is, problem is its not balanced, i don’t think its to do with the fact that sustainable printing is expensive its to do with the fact that cheap printing is not true costed. CHEAP PRINT SUPER SHORT TERM. IF THEY DIDN’T EXIST LESS DIFFERENCE IN PRICE? Its like any kind of recycled material is gonna be more expensive cos you have to factor in the energy to recover it. But problem is in first place, like if you take something like aluminium, aluminium is so energy intensive to begin with, but none of that is factored in, or the fact you have to take it out of the ground, so its always really underpriced, very hard to get a proper understanding of what things cost. Actually saying “well this is more expensive because we are having to add on the cost of recovering it/reprocessing it”, when what youre actually doing is offsetting some of the energy embedded cost in the first place cos your not getting out of the ground again. SO DEDUCTING AGAINST? Exactly, so argument is about value extraction tax, which is very interesting. What about if trees were taxed instead of labour, you would get a very different price for paper. Good website about value extraction tax, google it. Interesting article about genetically modified trees – problem with trees is that when you cut them down and process to paper you get a lot of things that come out of the tree that are quite hazardous because very concentrated, so thats one of the things about paper mills you need to worry about, what happens to the effluents – this article shows how they devised a
tree that when you processed the paper the effluent was not as bad as it would be normally, which is interesting. 14. Waste of time. AGREED, PARKLANE PRESS DO IT, CHARITABLE ONES OK? Its not about where the money goes, its about why companies do it. Its a way of getting over a problem without actually dealing with the problem, its a guilt lever. And actually if its about planting more tree, it should be more about the fact that you should be planting more trees anyway, and the right kind of trees. Putting aside the Indonesian issue about rainforest trees for packaging, the most paper pulp probably comes from eucalyptus, because its a very fast growing tree, it is effectively a crop, so it should be treated the same way, so you would manage the crop as you use it. So you don’t cut down hundred year old trees, you actually just use the tree that is good at what it does and you don’t use it for toilet paper. Virgin toilet paper is an absolute crime. EXISTS?? Yes most toilet paper is virgin paper. WHY? No idea, yes... Or its called sustainable because it comes from a renewable resource, a tree. Technically its right in terms of how its virgin pulp but it comes from a renewable source because you can grow another one but it depends how long it takes. 15. ISO 14001, we were very close to it, we were actually 14001 compliant before we moved here, but we never did it because its such a lot of paperwork and you actually have to hire someone to do it. Saying that, there used to be greenmark, which was a very small mark which is good for SMEs, but they kind of died. In terms of material usage they [general marks] are useful, for example fsc has been a very key driver in sustainability of wood and therefore paper pulp, and although people use it as an alternative to recycled pulp, theyll say its an fsc stock, at least you know its not coming from the Indonesian rainforest, so those kind of things are quite important to have. ISO 14001 from a printer is an interesting one and if you want to learn more about that you should talk to Sean at Calverts, because they didn’t have it for ages and they were not able to bid for work because they didn’t have it and now actually they are in their third year. OTHER MEANS? GOVT. COULD PAY FOR AUDIT? They used to have free auditing but it was too expensive. It was all European funded and then the funding ran out and the current government is not very green. Actually before the current govt. Came up and we had ken as mayor, we were part of the greenmark 500 which was effectively a group of businesses who could supply green services to businesses in London. But because borris came in it all got wiped. The problem is we have very short term government structures, which makes all of this quite difficult to continue. GOES BACK TO POINT ABOUT LEGISLATION. Thats why most environmental legislation that actually makes a difference comes from European Union, its more long term, they see merit in environmental issues, more centralized. 16. Yes and no, im presuming that question means we stand there and say “the world is shit and climate change is upon us but don’t worry well come up with a technical solution”. Which in a way is the premise of cradle to cradle because they say we will design things in a way in which you wont have to worry about throwing them away, because actually they will replenish and become part of a cycle. Problem at the moment is that we don’t have that at all, I think the uk at the moment is only 19% circular, it makes you think
about all that waste stream thats going out, so yes and no. Whats interesting is the creativity side of how as individuals and citizens we can effect change of individual (not just what one would describe as individual change i.e. turning off lightbulbs but more about the way you practice good design), and that goes back to being part of a bigger sphere of influence. Basically if you have you in the middle, and you have all your clients and people you talk to around you, and people around them etc. Basically your sphere of influence is much bigger than one believes it is. So therefore i think its about individual development and understanding of your role as being a citizen of the world and not relying on technology but being actually one of those who push innovation and technology yourself. Be an agent of change. 17. No i think the biggest elephant in the room is that we have to stop consuming so much, fundamentally. the question is then when we do consume how do we get back the materials that we need to make the next materials. We’re very clever things people, we are very good at using elements to create messages that go up into space, come back down, and talk on the other side of the world, making things turn into other things using materials to bond together to make mile high buildings. We’re very clever and intelligent therefore it can be done therefore it can be undone and redone. We are not there yet, we cannot talk about cradle to cradle because we do not teach design in that way, we do not think about our stuff in that way, people cant even put things in the right bin, for gods sake. 18. They probably do by default, so actually if you don’t have anything you ifnd it and act resourcefully. I think thats key. In fact we should be learning from their resourcefulness in order to do things better, again it goes back to dialogue and conversation and learning for each other, particularly about things like material efficiency also. 19. Well it was a long time ago, when i started my design career in 1993. Sustainability really started for me properly when i went to the royal college, and i was really shocked by the fact that a lot of the politics i had grown up with (i come from quite a political family), weren’t part of the day to day discussions or dialogues of students, or not necessarily of students but werent part of the work ethic. So i kind of pulled together my background and the business partner that i set up Thomas Matthews with came from seattle, and she was really shocked that we didn’t recover our materials the way they do in seatlle, so actually our first projects were about collecting waste from the canteen and hanging it from a gallery and saying this is your waste for a week. 20. Yes follow the ten points. We did those in 2005 and theyre still relevant. First thing is redesign the brief. Really understand who your users are, really understand who the influencers are, really understand who has the knowledge that you need, understand that your product is part of an endless life of a molecule, its not the be all and end all, get over yourself that sort of thing. Its about working well with others, collaborate, listen, keep on top of everything. Understand that if you tell somebody to do something on a piece of print, they might possibly do it. So if youre telling them to buy the newest piece of footwear or television, they may well go and do it, and therefore that has ramifications. So consider the implications of what youre doing and be responsible about it. Remember youre not just a servant to this you
actually have a sphere of influence around you of things that you do [affect others]. And therefore practice it if you believe in it and practice it all the way through your work ethics as well as the way that you live, you know if your vegetarian apply those ethics to practice. 21. – 22. Green Graphic Design, may find more in America, ico grada may have stuff on this, international graphic design association. Another book called do good design by david bernham, he heads up the sustainability side of ico grada.