SLOW& STEADY
Creating Sustainable Design
HOPE: Slow and Steady
2
is a verb (with its sleeves rolled up)
“Designers are critical thinkers. Design is not just about making cool looking work for cool clients, but also offers tremendous potential: it is a tool for reinvention, for questioning, for independence, for social good, and you don't always need a client to make work that matters.� (RUDY VANDERLANS, EMIGRE) 1
Creating Sustainable Design
3
An Overview:
The Need For Sustainability
The term 'sustainability' is cropping up everywhere, but do we really know what it means? Google defines sustainable as 'conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.'
Sustainability is a complex issue that affects many fields such as agriculture, manufacturing and transport. If we take a look right back to the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, there were huge advances in technology, enabling us to do things faster and on a larger scale, making processes more efficient and more productive.
sitting on a train, and find out the answer to almost anything and find out the answer to almost anything by turning to the allknowing Google.
The growth of commercial culture has continued to rise and we now produce products for the masses which are traded and transported all over the globe. We have also seen digital technology advance at an impressingly explosive speed in the last twenty years. We are able to see and hear our family and friends from across the world in the comfort of our own home, buy our food shopping whilst
on with our daily routine of life, there are issues brewing that as a society we should be more aware of.
These novelties can entertain us, as well as help us learn and communicate. They have become part of our everyday life which is taken for granted. However, while we get
The First Things First Manifesto was first published by Ken Garland in the 1960s. It was published in the Guardian Newspaper at a time when Britain was prosperous, and designers had become submerged in a growing consumerist culture, using their skills to sell everything under the sun. Instead of being considered as artists and visual communicators, design was being perceived as meerly a vehicle for selling products and services.
Slow and Steady
2 Eye Magazine, no. 33 vol. 9, First Things First Manifesto 2000, (London: Quantum, 1999) eyemagazine.com
4
“Designers who devote their efforts primarily to advertising, marketing and brand development are supporting, and implicitly endorsing, a mental environment so saturated with commercial messages that it is changing the very way citizen-consumers speak, think, feel, respond and interact. To some extent we are all helping draft a reductive and immeasurably harmful code of public discourse.� (Eye Magazine, 1999)2
The manifesto was updated and republished with a new group of signatories in Eye Magazine and Adbusters in 1999. The manifesto urges designers to put their problem-solving skills and imagination to better use, as the growth of commercial culture and its implications becomes larger, and the message ever more urgent.
Creating Sustainable Design
5
The Challenge David W. Orr3 delivered a talk at the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania in 2007 that describes how the work of designers is entering its critical and most important phase. He outlines four facts that are fundamentally shaping the world in which we live and work. Firstly, we are spending up to 95% of our time indoors, and as a result, we are becoming disconnected to the natural world. Orr describes how this is most severe for children, who now spend up to eight hours a day infront of a screen. He suggests that this may be a cause for a spritual crisis in the future. Secondly, the population of the world has grown from one billion to seven billion in just the last two hundred years - one billion of which live in poverty, while another billion live in considerable wealth. The increase in population means that as well as a more crowded world, there is a problem with justice, with more and more people competing for less.
The third fact is that our society is built on cheap fossil fuels. We are nearing the year of peak oil extraction,where we will have consumed the larger part of the cheap, accessible oil, without having an alternative energy plan in place. Orr highlights a fourth fact; due to the levels of CO2 generated by humans, we have already warmed the planet and are continuing to do so. This is making the planet less stable and predictable for human survival.
Slow and Steady
3 W. Orr, , The Designers Challenge, (California: ecoliteracy, 2007) ecoliteracy.org
6
“As designers you hold the keys to creating a far better world than that in prospect, but only if you respond creatively, smartly, wisely, and quickly to the four facts described.” (Orr, 2007)
3
Creating Sustainable Design
Design is a large and unifying concept — in its largest sense it is about creating buildings, objects, or processes that function to solve problems or suit needs. It is about how we provision ourselves with food, energy, materials, shelter, livelihood, transport, water, and waste cycling. Graphic design, in particular, is about communicating messages visually. As a discipline it has broadened, and designers are able to work across a variety of different platforms, both traditional and online, to create communication that can inform, organise, persuade, stimulate, locate, and identify.
7
“All life and all communication involves flows of energy, matter nd information, but it is the capacity to communicate through the use of print and digital media that defines the human species. The extent to which we communicate, learn, collaborate and coordinate our actions in a sustainable manner will determine the fate of humanity and the quality of life enjoyed by current and future generations.� (Design Can Change, 2012)4
Slow and Steady
4 Pulp
& Paper Information Centre, Paper, Naturally, (Wiltshire: PPIC, 1993)
8
The Critical Moment Graphic designers are at a point in time when they can communicate globally, and have a huge opportunity to use their creativity, problem-solving skills and imagination for social good, to raise awareness of social and environmental issues. They can inform people and help them make better buying and lifestyle choices. When taking on projects, designers are considering their own ethics and values, and are making better, more sustainable design choices based on their knowledge of the current environmental and social issues. As a designer is the middleman between the client, supplier and the intended audience, they are responsible for sourcing materials and delivering a product or service to the end user. Sustainability should therefore be considered at the beginning of a project and not in retrospect. The product should be considered at each stage, from where it began to where it will end up. We are currently devouring our natural resources at an astonishing rate, as well overproducing goods and creating an alarming amount of pollution and unnecessary waste.
Creating Sustainable Design
There are many different causes of greenhouse gases, the top three being power stations, industrial processes and transportation fuels. While print design is an effective and versatile means of communication, the pulp and paper industry is one of the industrial processes that contribute to the environmental damage. The manufacture of pulp and paper is the third largest user of fossil fuels worldwide, the third largest industrial polluter to land, air and sea and the largest user of water per pound. We create an enormous amount of paper waste, much of which can be recycled, although most of this ends up in landfills. The problem with waste is that waste that is burnt, as well as waste that is rotting (especially food waste) also produces greenhouse gases. Designers must face the challenge of current social and environmental issues in order to create design that creates solutions and is sustainable. To design for sustainability, we must look at the each stage of the print process, from forestry |to pulp, pulp to paper, to printers, then to the end user where it will eventually be disposed of or recycled.
9
Design for Sustainability The term 'sustainability is cropping up everywhere, but do we really know what it means? Google defines sustainable as 'conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.'
FSC Paper
DISTRIBUTION
Use a printer that uses the FSC mark. The Forest Stewardship Council ensures that the paper used comes from traced sources and therefore is involved with illegal or badly managed forestry, where trees are not planted to replace the ones cut down.
Think about how you are distributing your product and if you can you use more environmentally friendly methods.
EMAS Calverts is also a member of EMAS, a body that recognises and rewards organisations that go beyond legal compliance and continuously improve their environmental performance.
ISO 14001
RECYCLED STOCK
Use a printer that is ISO 14001 registered. This standard is set by the International Organisation of Standardisation, and requires organisations to identify and control their environmental impact, improve their performance regularly and set environmental objectives and targets.
Use recycled stock where possible. Paper can be recycled up to 9 times and takes less energy than creating virgin paper. The Government used to insist that all documents were to be printed on recycled paper - however they dropped this to save costs and said that FSC was good enough. Unfortunately, it is uneconomical to recycle paper in the UK, and it is shipped to China. These would usually be empty ships after delivering products. Aylesford Newsprint Mill recycle newsprint and meet 20% of their energy needs by burning waste sludges.
WASTE Design around the printers page and use this to determine your design. Printers usually print up to A1 or B1 size. Using the page space will create less waste.You should also think about what you want the user to do with your product. Too much packaging can also contribute to higher costs as well as waste, so keep this in mind when designing.
Slow and Steady
1 emigre, Interview with Rudy Vanderlans, (First Published in Page Magazine, Germany, 2010) emigre.com
10
Less is more DIGITAL
TRANSPORTATION
It is an assumption to think that using digital communication instead of print is more environmentally friendly. We should take into
Paper is a heavy product and it takes a lot of fuel to transport it. This is sometimes overlooked, however there is transportation in all stages of the process, from transporting to the paper mills, to printers, and back to be recycled.
consideration the amount of energy it takes to read and communicate online. If you are designing for web, make sure you consider how it will print out, and make full use of the page space.
Printed on paper donated by Calverts Co-operative. With special thanks to Sion at Calverts and Justin at Fenner Paper. Creating Sustainable Design
11