Have you heard? Green is the new black, according to everyone from Vanity Fair to Forbes. This makes some of us shudder, as eco-everything becomes yet another trend to keep up on. We’ve all seen the pharmaceutical ads encouraging patients to self-diagnose, and we can sometimes feel like those doctors who are inevitably forced to prescribe drugs they know little about. Sure, we can spec recycled paper. We’ll just add a little soy ink. And that’s often as far as we go, having done our part. It’s safe enough, we reason, and the patient is happy again. Next, please.

But let’s be honest with ourselves, if not our clients: we don’t really know what we’re doing and some of us aren’t even sure why we’re doing it. All we know is that this trend keeps growing, sinking its roots into the public conscience like new media and that whole Internet thing. It’s a new reality growing up around us and we aren’t quite sure how to respond.

The beauty of this reality, however, is that we don’t need to know all the answers. We’re designers: every project we start requires a problem that needs solving. That problem is a seed, and our job is to grow it into an effective solution. Well, we’ve just been tossed another seed-the challenge of sustainability. As pundits argue with each other and throw statistics back and forth, the seed has already taken root. Our job as designers is to start asking the questions needed to keep it growing. How often do we water it? How much sunlight does it need? What is its nature?

Some of us don’t want to ask these questions. We’re not doctors or politicians, or any of the people who are supposed to step up and save us all. We’re just designers, trying to pay our rent on time. The problem with this approach is that we are also polluters and buyers of polluting products. The paper industry alone is the third largest industrial polluter in the U.S. We give them our money, but we don’t ask enough in return. We encourage consumption among our audience-we earn our very living from it, in fact-and we leave it at that.

But we simply can’t have it both ways. We can’t grace the covers of Fast Company as “Masters of Design” and the shelves of Target offering “Design For All,” and still claim that we are powerless to address this issue of sustainability. If we are the influencers that we claim we are, if we the solvers of problems and communicators of valuable information, then we must be held accountable for the part we play.

We know instinctively that there aren’t any easy answers to our questions. But as composer John Cage tells us via designer Bruce Mao’s Incomplete Manifesto, the only way to avoid paralysis is to begin anywhere. One such place might be Design Can Change. A digestible, fact-based resource, Design Can Change offers an overview of the issue, poses some new questions, and points us in new directions. Most importantly, it recognizes our power as designers to effectively move toward a sustainable future.

The very nature of design equips us well for this challenge: we understand collaboration, we understand how to approach problems from new angles, we get our rocks off by being on the cutting edge and yet know how to dutifully slog through the most difficult projects. And we know that it all begins with asking the right questions. In future posts, I’ll raise some of these questions and discuss additional entry points. My goal-and I hope, eventually, yours-will be to create various ways into the discussion about sustainability and to build a framework within which we can each play a part.

Stay tuned for next month’s Sustainable Studio,
Jess

Jess Sand | Principal | Roughstock Studios
Author, Small Failures: Sustainability for the Rest of Us | BoDo Author | The Sustainable Studio

Please give a warm welcome to Jess Sand, BoDo’s author of sustainability

At The Sustainable Studio, Jess will be share insights and resources on designing sustainability. She’ll talk not only about designers and their work, but the clients and communities they depend on.

Well versed on the issue of sustainable living, writer and designer Jess Sand blogs at Small Failures: Sustainability for the Rest of Us . With a diverse background (office overlord, prep cook, poet, number cruncher, honky tonk DJ, bartender, teacher, marketing manager) she also blogs at Bar Stories.

An enviable lass, Jess’s marketing, writing and design skills are based in cultural San Francisco at Roughstock Studios.

This is all good timing actually. When Eric Karjaluoto and Peter Pimentel of smashLAB contacted us about their new project Design Can Change, Jessica was well into formatting her series on the same subject, sustainable design. Like minds, yes?

You can read more about Jess on BoDo’s visiting authors page.

The BoDo Team
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