Living in Peace and Wisdom on our Planet

By Jonathan Bardelline, GreenerDesign

"The planet is your client."

That was one of the messages repeated frequently throughout the day at Compostmodern 09, a phrase summing up need for designers to rethink who they are designing for, and to remember to keep the planet, which includes the environment and well as all of the people on it, in mind when designing.

"We're in the middle of a revolution most of us can't see," emcee and Greener World Media executive editor Joel Makower said at the beginning of the San Francisco event on Saturday, referring to the wide variety of ways that businesses and organizations are rethinking products and services. The presenters throughout the day helped make that revolution visible, with messages challenging the roles of designers and plenty of real and proven examples that show sustainability can be integrated in all realms of design.

Eames Demetrios, director of the Eames Office, kicked off the day with "Powers of 10," a short film by Charles and Ray Eames that starts with a view of a picnic and zooms away, then zooms back in, by powers of 10, expanding out to the edge of the universe and then tunneling inside of a picnicker's body, looking at the smallest bits of matter. The purpose of showing the film was to impress the importance of understanding scale.

"We're in a world where there is too much," he said. Thinking in terms of scale can help prevent poor design, and looking into things as closely as possible can help designers understand things better.

One of the main themes of the day was what design can do to help the world, but Demetrios also mentioned how environmental crises can save design. "Design works best when it's confined by constraints," he said, and designing for sustainability is a big constraint.

On the subject of closely examining things to find solutions, inventor Saul Griffith described how during 2007 he measured the energy use for every product he used and everything he did.

"Energy use is completely invisible to us," he said, putting the onus on designers to make energy more visible to consumers, or to do something about the energy use inherent in products.

Showing a slide of every product that accounts for energy he used throughout 2007, Griffith said designers must start picking items and reduce their energy, mostly by making them lighter and making them last longer. "We need to redesign everything," he said. "You have to design things and experiences that last a long time and are very thoughtfully designed and beautiful."

Moving on from the subject of how design can better the environment, John Bielenberg, Pam Dorr and Emily Pilloton gave examples of designs to better societies.

Dorr's Hale Empowerment & Revitalization Organization (HERO) provides sustainable housing for low-income people in Hale County, Ala., and one of the projects developed by Bielenberg's Project M was "Buy A Mater," a way to help people in Hale County purchase water meters and get connected to municipal water systems.

Better designs were needed for both projects, but in different ways. For housing, they needed home designs that could be built cheaply, yet built to last. And for getting water meters to homes, they needed to design a message and a way to spur donations. One solution that worked was to sell T-shirts that said "425" for $425, the cost of a water meter.

Pilloton's Project H, which she founded after last year's Compostmodern event, has taken on redesigning services. One of her first projects was to do fundraising for the Hippo Water Roller, a plastic tub that helps people who live in countries where they need to regularly gather water on their own.

She quickly moved from bringing funding to the Hippo Water Roller to working on redesigning it to make it easier to ship them to countries, thus bringing down the cost of each roller. Instead of having the rollers shipped whole, the product was redesigned so one end could come off like a cap and nest inside the rest. Now 75 rollers can be placed in a space that used to fit fewer than 40 rollers.

For the Hippo Water Roller, the social impact is of more importance than the material impact, she said. Although the rollers are made of plastic, they provide a way for people to easily gather water, and they are the only materials that stand up to conditions in some countries. Also, each roller lasts about seven years.

Nathan Shedroff, Design MBA Chair at the California College of the Arts, wrapped up the event with a compendium of information on what to do in order to take the messages from the day and put them into practice.

Ranging from giving advice on what language to use with clients, and touching on processes like dematerialization, material substitution, design for durability, intended and unintended design for reuse, rethinking systems and, ultimately, restoration, he showed the many ways to further the sustainable design revolution, and make is visible to more people.

Videos of presentations from the event will be available on compostmodern.org.