slow & steady: creating sustainable design
DESCRIPTION
Designers have the potential to communicate globally. This booklet looks at the issue of sustainbility, how graphic designers can communicate this to society, and how to create sustainable design.TRANSCRIPT
Creating Sustainable Design
SLOW& STEADY
Creating Sustainable Design
Slow and Steady 2
HOPE:
3Creating Sustainable Design
HOPE:(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
is a verb
Slow and Steady 4
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.
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
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.
sitting on a train, and find out the answer
to almost anything and find out the answer
to almost anything by turning to the all-
knowing Google.
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
on with our daily routine of life, there are
issues brewing that as a society we should
be more aware of.
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.'
An Overview: The Need For Sustainability
2 Eye Magazine, no. 33 vol. 9, First Things First Manifesto 2000, (London: Quantum, 1999) eyemagazine.com
5Creating Sustainable Design
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.
“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
Slow and Steady 6
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.
The Challenge
3 W. Orr, , The Designers Challenge, (California: ecoliteracy, 2007)ecoliteracy.org
7Creating Sustainable Design
“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
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.
Slow and Steady 8
“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
4 Pulp & Paper Information Centre, Paper, Naturally,
(Wiltshire: PPIC, 1993)
9Creating Sustainable Design
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.
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.
The Critical Moment
Slow and Steady 10
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.'
Design for Sustainability
FSC PaperUse 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.
ISO 14001Use 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.
RECYCLED STOCKUse 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.
DISTRIBUTIONThink about how you are distributing
your product and if you can you use more
environmentally friendly methods.
EMASCalverts is also a member of EMAS, a body
that recognises and rewards organisations that
go beyond legal compliance and continuously
improve their environmental performance.
WASTEDesign 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.
1 emigre, Interview with Rudy Vanderlans, (First Published in Page Magazine, Germany, 2010) emigre.com
11Creating Sustainable Design
Design for Sustainability
DIGITALIt is an assumption to think that using digital
communication instead of print is more
environmentally friendly. We should take into
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.
TRANSPORTATIONPaper 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.
Less is more
Printed on paper donated by Calverts Co-operative.
With special thanks to Sion at Calverts and Justin at Fenner Paper.