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Eco-Confident

Confidence is an amazing thing.  Some believe it can make athletes more adept, students score higher on tests and people in general more attractive.  Those with confidence hold their heads high, speak with authority, are willing to take risks and are less likely to hesitate.  <!--more-->These are key ingredients in the recipe for getting things done.  And while it’s important to avoid becoming arrogant, stubborn, or unwilling to listen, a little confidence can be a sustainable designer’s best friend.

We’ve been conducting sustainable design workshops here at LUNAR recently and are finding that one of the largest obstacles between designers and sustainable design is not a lack of knowledge; it’s a perceived lack of knowledge.  Most sustainable design principles, like increasing modularity, consolidating materials, shrinking and lightening, etc., are just plain common sense and the majority of our designers already know a sizable handful of them.  They just don’t know that they know.  And as a result they feel unequipped to even take a crack at a more sustainable design.  With some simple training sessions to go over the basics, it becomes easier to convince designers that they can design in this sustainability arena with some confidence, which leads to more experimentation, creativity, and ultimately better products.

Now I understand that encouraging a designer with a basic or even flawed knowledge of sustainable design principles to confidently charge forth can be seen as irresponsible.  What if they try to make a product more useful but end up making it unnecessarily complicated?  What if they add superfluous fasteners in an attempt to make something easier to disassemble?  Well…so what if they do?  If they tout their design as an attempt at sustainability, someone will point out the flaws, they’ll learn from their mistakes and move on to their next, better attempt.  Because the real danger is not designers failing in the name of sustainable design, it’s them not having the confidence to even try in the first place.

--Travis Lee

Green Leader

Lunar’s Travis Lee was recently invited to be a part of AutoDesk’s Green Leaders series. In this video, he shares his passion for sustainable design and his vision for a more sustainable future.

Innovative AND green

I noticed these solar-powered parking meters sneak into my San Francisco neighborhood, Hayes Valley, on a busy street lined with design shops, cafes and restaurants. The Civic Center area tends to be a hotbed for green experimentation, and it was great to see innovation that adds value while being good to the environment.

This parking meter finally takes credit cards as well as coins (save those precious quarters for your laundry), and LEDs facing the street indicate whether you've overstayed your welcome. The "more" and "less" buttons apparently allow you to allocate your intended stay.

My dream feature: if lunch is going a little overtime, it simply draws more funds from your credit card, a "pay as you go" model to make city parking a little more stress-free.

-- Ron Goldin

Earth Day Special: What can we learn from sustainable building design?

Connections - April 21, 2009: The architecture and construction world is years ahead of product design in terms of creating understanding, standards, alternative design solutions and the economic arguements for the value of sustainable design.

In this Earth Day Special, Lunar's Gretchen Anderson talks with green building expert Elaine Hsieh of KEMA about how building industries have embraced sustainable practices since the first Earth Day.

Resources:

• Follow Elaine on Twitter where she shares her perspectives on sustainable building design and management.
• Learn more about KEMA.
  
• LUNAR’s internal sustainable design initiative has developed an overview of sustainable product development and the product life cycle to be used during the design process (PDF).

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"In theory..."

A friend of mine is very fond of the quote, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” Depending on whom you ask, this morsel of wisdom came from Albert Einstein, Yogi Berra, or Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut. The three of them can fight it out wherever they are, but the point is that things are rarely as clear-cut, or easy, as their defining theory suggests.

I think about this quote in the context of sustainable design from time to time. The theory of sustainable design is a vision for the way design should, and hopefully someday will, be. It’s filled with lofty and noble goals – like comprehensive life cycle analyses run on every system and designs that use only materials that can be perfectly reclaimed and reused as technical nutrients. This theory is admirable, and is nothing short of necessary for the sustainable design movement to be able to achieve its ultimate goal: design that meets today's needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. Like a lighthouse guiding a ship to harbor, this goal must be constant, unwavering, immobile.

But too often some in the sustainable design community become so entrenched in the theory of sustainable design that they lose sight of the fact that achieving it requires more than just persistence and commitment. Many, although not all, tend to have professions outside of designer or engineer. They are not tasked with creating actual products day to day. They stand in the lighthouse (again, an admirable and necessary position) and criticize the ship’s crew when they tack away from the shore to face an oncoming wave or avoid another ship. “Incrementalism is not the solution!” they yell. “Turning that direction will only get you so far!”

I want to assure those in the lighthouse that the crew knows this. We get it. Every crewmember on this ship understands that, theoretically, the quickest path between ship and harbor is a straight line. But in a storm that theory falls apart, for the crew must account for sizeable waves, wind gusts and other ships. Consumer demand, market forces, and the cutthroat world of globalization combine to make a pretty big storm. The indirect path, while slower, is necessary in practice, and if we head straight for the shore we could very likely capsize or crash.

The unfortunate reality is that, unlike the theory, the practice of sustainable design is full of contradictions, unknowns, bargaining and compromise. So, please keep the lamp burning. Please continue to discuss what sustainable design should be. Your guidance is looked for and appreciated – but understand that getting there takes some strategic steering from time to time.

-- Travis Lee

“Conservation is not done with the pen…it’s done with an axe.”

Think about that for a second.

It was written in 1949 by the seminal figure in ecological conservation, Aldo Leopold. It’s quite a powerful phrase, the simple articulation that man must consume and build. There is no greater asset than our ability to create. It comes at a great cost, but without question, we’re all beginning to better define the ‘right’ manner for this process of creation.

At the heart of the issue lies one fundamental truth: less is more. Less material. Less packaging. Less harmful content. Less shipping footprint. Less impact. Less, less, less… How paradoxical is it, then, that the U.S. Census officially predicts nine billion people will inhabit the planet by 2050 – one third more than currently exist. By definition, that’s a lot more stuff. More products. More packaging. More shipping. More consumption, on the grandest of scales.

At every point, the symbiotic act of creating all of this content will require the skilled designer and engineer: those members of the creation chain endowed with the knowledge and privilege to conceive of, form and specify the manner in which all of this stuff is brought to life. The great ‘axe holders’ of the future.

A few months ago I was having lunch with perhaps the most powerful of the axe holders, Warren Haug, former Vice President of Research and Development, Proctor & Gamble. I asked the pressing question, ”How does P&G deal with the subject of sustainability?” His answer was brilliant in its simplicity: “The public is on board with green as long as two things happen: one, it doesn’t degrade the product and two, it doesn’t affect the price.”

That’s it. That’s the world that P&G and most retail and consumer products live in.

The designers and engineers are then given the mind-bending task of making more attractive goods and making them more cheaply – all while wielding the axe of responsible creation. Sounds daunting, but it’s being done.

Last year HP asked Lunar to breathe new life into the home computer. “Make it more compelling. Give us something iconic…and help us cut costs!” We did all of this, and built sustainability into the equation by consolidating components and simplifying the product architecture.

Last fall HP started delivering the Touchsmart PC,  a gorgeous piece that exudes ‘less’ while offering the consumer ‘more.’ We shed the oversized metal box and integrated the CPU and display into a single compact gesture that reduces part-count and shrinks the shipping footprint considerably.

Most notably, the product reduces material usage by 50% (primarily plastic and steel). It has also successfully helped catalyze a paradigm shift in consumer perception of size and desirability. HP is now defining this emerging category as the Single Volume Product (SVP). SVP is a more dynamic solution to the part and feature consolidation that was originally introduced in the All-In-One computer (i.e., Apple IMac).

We’re proud of the work we’re doing, and though it’s never easy, responsible creation can happen when sustainable thinking meets creativity that makes a difference.

-- Scot Herbst

Lunar's Journey Towards Green

Travis Lee, Lunar's sustainable engineering lead, and Alberto Villarreal, the company's senior lead designer, spoke with GreenBiz Radio last month about clients asking for greener designs, the challenges of lowering product impacts, and how Lunar helped HP reduce materials and save money.  Our Elements initiative guides both the greening of its internal operations and the products it makes.

Listen to or read the GreenBiz Radio interview here.

Learn more about Elements here.

Ted Howes on Sustainable Design

Solutions - Nov. 26, 2008: IDEO's Ted Howes presents at the Digging Deeper sustainable design conference held in late July in San Francisco.

The evening panel discussion dug deep into the eco-issues designers face everyday to reveal building blocks for sustainable design.

Audio version:

Download MP3 audio file here

Nathan Shedroff on Sustainable Design

Solutions - Nov. 13, 2008: Nathan Shedroff, author, academic and entrepreneur, presents at the Digging Deeper sustainable design conference held in late July in San Francisco. (Prefaced with a short interview by Lunar's John Edson.)

The evening panel discussion dug deep into the eco-issues designers face everyday to reveal building blocks for sustainable design.

Audio version:

Download MP3 audio file here

Joep Meijer of theRightenvironment presenting at "Digging Deeper"

Solutions - Oct. 1, 2008: Joep Meijer, founder and president of theRightenvironment, talks about models for sustainable design at the  Industrial Design Society of America's Digging Deeper event in San Francisco July 22, 2008. (Prefaced with a short interview by Lunar's John Edson.)

The evening panel discussion dug deep into the eco-issues designers face everyday to reveal building blocks for sustainable design.
            

Audio version:

Download MP3 audio file here