RE:START

June 11, 2011 Clark Kellogg No comments

RE:START is the new Spark blog dedicated to survival on, and of this planet. All things considered, with an emphasis on design. Please send us your news and views to restart @ sparkawards. com.

THE “S” WORD

(Revised) June 11, 2011 by Clark Kellogg

It’s hard to find a person who is against sustainability. I can think of only two people I know. Sustainability is in the same league as Motherhood and Apple Pie. But in most conversations, sustainability’s approval rating nosedives somewhere between 14 and 31 seconds later. That’s usually the time when the gauzy notion of sustainability inevitably gives way to defining what it is (30 point drop in approval rating) or doing something about it (free fall).

What’s going on here? For one, humans are good at using our big brains to know a lot. But it doesn’t always translate into doing a lot. Second, we are on sustainability overwhelm. Staying current is like drinking from a fire hose – everyday. And that’s hard to swallow. Third, amid this explosive growth in knowledge and information the very meaning of sustainability has been diluted to the point of meaning just about anything, and thus meaning nothing.

We all support motherhood, apple pie and sustainability. We know what the first two mean and we know how to create them. Not so for sustainability. Even the Brundtland Commission’s definition – development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs – is difficult to apply to the here-and-now of one’s own life. Paper or plastic?

Without an explicit shared agreement about the meaning of sustainability even the well-informed and well meaning among us cannot make much progress. Indeed, this lack of clarity enables avoiding the most neglected problem in sustainable design today: time. There are many projections about when catastrophic environmental events will take place (GHG, ice shelf melting, sea-level rise, water wars). It’s hard to know how accurate they are and it doesn’t matter. The plain fact is that we don’t have time to wait and find out if the projections are correct. What matters is taking smart bold steps now because here’s what we do know: the longer it takes to start meaningful healing of the earth, the less likely we are to have a viable future. In short, we don’t have time to waste.

Is there any hope? Yes, and its not false hope. Design – and design thinking – as a set of solution-seeking tools is spreading to every corner of the world. Indeed, we are all designers now and optimism is an onboard skill of designers (sustainable or otherwise). More importantly, healing the earth is igniting the largest movement of human energy in the history of the planet. It is a movement without precedent; amorphous, unorganized, instinctive, and blessedly uncontrollable. Literally billions of people are on the job. It is already the single largest public works project ever.

If we can get as good at making sustainability as we are at making motherhood and making apple pie we just could be very happy, be well-fed and live long, balanced lives. Cloth or disposable?

THINK LIKE A DESIGNER

June 13, 2009 by Clark Kellogg

“Everywhere you look today, Design has taken on new meaning. Design isn’t just about decoration; it’s a critical component of how we communicate, collaborate and compete. But behind the “look and feel” of any good design are a host of carefully conceived principles; fundamental propositions that define the essence of the design. The trick is to learn those underlying rules–to think like designers.”

- “Design Rules,” Fast Co. Mag, October, 1999

Two things about this quote stand out. First, it recognizes design as a

useful process beyond object-making. And, it was published ten years ago. It was also ten years ago that I started teaching a course at UC Berkeley’s architecture school called, “Beyond Buildings; New Sites for Designers.” The purpose was to help students understand what habits of mind they come to know (often tacitly) through the design studio sequence of classes. Then, we looked at how those skills can be used to make things other than buildings. Over time, that work has boiled down to a list of qualities – or habits of mind – that one could arguably title “How to Think Like a Designer.”

It would be foolhardy to claim this list is absolute or even complete. It has started many conversations and some debates. We are reproducing it here in that spirit. For now, here is the whole list. Your comments and insights are welcome.

Design Thinking: Clark Kellogg’s Ten Habits of Mind:

1. Focused Creativity

2. Generous Collaboration

3. Drawing and Thinking in Pictures

4. Comfort with Ambiguity

5. Non-linear Information Processing

6. Multiple Solutions

7. Learning by Doing

8. Communicate for Understanding

9. Charrette Culture: Shaped by constraints and bounded by time

10. Curiosity is better than Judgment

Clark Kellogg, Partner, Collective Invention

From his perspective as a consultant, architect and graphic designer, Clark holds forth on Design At Large in the D/Views Blog. Clark Kellogg is a designer and partner at Collective Invention, found HERE

D-DAY FOR DESIGN

June 6, 2009 by Nathan Shedroff

(Here, in honor of the 65th anniversary of D-Day and the invasion of Europe in World War II—- a new call for courage. Ed.)

This past week, I spoke on a panel at the Sustainable Brands conference about the potential end of conspicuous consumption. Koann Vikoren Skrzyniarz, the founder of the conference, asked three of us to talk for 15 minutes about whether we had, indeed, entered a post-consumer world (as many writers posit these days) and, if so, what that means. For myself, I’m not sure we’re quite there, though I hope we are. The biggest issue is that we don’t yet know what it looks like, and our visions of what a more meaningful, sustainable, and post-consumer world might be are either too much in the past–like our entire history up until the 50s, or the future–imagine the latest vision of Star Trek.

One of my co-panelists, Teaque Lenahan, from gravitytank, a Chicago consultancy, showed a video his firm created. What it made clear was that our grandparents experienced not only a more sustainable world but one where reuse and recycling was standard operating procedure. In fact, during World War II, this was equated with patriotism.

People planted Victory Gardens, saved and recycled materials and didn’t use other materials unless absolutely necessary. People gladly sacrificed for the good of the nation.

Now, compare that to today. Perhaps, the most extreme reversal came in the moment after 9/11 when our president asked us all to go shopping in response. It may have even been a good idea but the lingering cultural reverberation is that patriotism = consumerism and that’s ever more scary. I’ve made my own case against the concept of “retail therapy” in my latest book, Design is the Problem. In addition, just about every study looking at the intersection of happiness and consumption shows that the two seem to be opposed (the more we consume, the less happy we are). Now, students and scholars are actually building-out the notion of Gross National Happiness, a term coined by the Sultan of Brunei, into a real economic indicator: http://grossnationalhappiness.com

One of the problems we face is that we don’t actually know what this new, better world looks or feels like. We can look to our past or find clues in the present from places like Cuba (the most sustainable country on the planet at the moment), India (the country with the least consumerist people), Curitiba, Brazil (a city that has transformed itself socially, economically, and environmentally–all on a budget), or Sao Paolo (a city that banned outdoor advertising in 2007). I was reminded at the conference that Vermont banned outdoor ads in the 70s. Though these places probably don’t resemble what the USA or other countries need to grow into, they all offer glimpses into a more sustainable, meaningful, and less consumerist culture. So, they’re a start. But they’re not the vision we need.

The reason why visions are so important is that most people need one in order to step off in a new direction. This is what leaders do so well. The more visual, aural, and verbal the vision, the more people it communicates to and the more vividly it communicates.

Gil Friend, who runs the company Natural Logic and whose new book, The Truth About Green Business just launched, took us to task after our panel for not approaching the most important question of this brave, new world: what are the new economics? For example, if everything lasts twice as long–or more–then which is more sustainable? And if people consume less (possibly because they don’t feel a whole lot of meaning in their lives), then most companies are selling half to a quarter to less of the goods and services they do today. What do their business models look like? How do they survive? And why is it in their interest to change?

I don’t yet have the answer to the fundamental change part of this question–the one that is really about the macroeconomy. However, I do have an answer to the questions posed by companies about why they should care about sustainability, transform their offerings into services where possible, and get ready to make less stuff overall. The answer is simply: if they don’t, they’ll be beaten to market by those that do. Learning these lessons early and devising the solutions to these challenges will put forward-looking companies in a stronger position, with a brand promise that resonates with customers more deeply. Try being late to this party– when a handful of companies have already reached radical resource efficiency, innovated their products and services, and aligned themselves with the customer trends that connect at the level of meaning–the deepest and most powerful point of connection possible.

These won’t be connections that can be broken by features, performance, or price. Apple’s already made that clear to anyone paying attention. We’re reaching an inflection point that combines Darwinian evolution’s first premise with the most hardcore market capitalism: this is going to be a test of Survival of the Fittest like we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. General Motors has already shown that playing the frog in the slowly warming water will no longer cut it in the marketplace. It’s astonishing that it took 35 years for the water to boil, but companies can’t count on that slow of a reaction in the hyper-global world today. Quite simply, those companies that don’t make rapid, significant strides in sustainability and meaning won’t be around in ten years. Period. And, we’ll all be the better off for it.

Nathan Shedroff, Chair, Design Strategy MBA, California College of Arts