Saturday

Think Big...But Take Small Steps, Too



Another takeaway from last month's Digging Deeper event put on by IDSA-SF: Travis Lee of LUNAR Design shared LUNAR's new Designer's Fieldbook to Sustainability [download it here (PDF)], offering pragmatic suggestions for incorporatin sustainable thinking in to every day design. His message to participants? Big ideas can change the world - but they can also be paralyzing. So while we're thinking up the Next Great Paradigm Shift, we must also take action now to create a culture where sustainability simply becomes part of the everyday equation. In doing so, we may wake up one day and find ourselves much further down the path than we knew we'd come.

Some of the fieldbook's simple but powerful ideas:
  • Make it less complex.
  • Reduce material variety, and make sure there's a market for the materials you choose.
  • Design packaging in parallel with product.
  • Design for "life after death."
  • Don't use paint - it makes plastics much harder to recycle.
Another bonus? LUNAR's Fieldbook includes a nifty wall poster to help you keep these and other sustainable design rules in front of you at all times.

~KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz, SLM Founder and President
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cradle-to-cradle ::.

CRADLE-TO-CRADLE
A phrase invented by Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s and popularized by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book of the same name. This framework seeks to create production techniques that are not just efficient but are essentially waste free. In cradle-to-cradle production all material inputs and outputs are seen either as technical or biological nutrients. Technical nutrients can be recycled or reused with no loss of quality and biological nutrients composted or consumed. By contrast cradle to grave refers to a company taking responsibility for the disposal of goods it has produced, but not necessarily putting products’ constituent components back into service.


.:: ideas ::. connect@3pointzero.org