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.