While some may act because they care about the environment and its future, others not motivated by the inconvenient truth alone tend to adopt environmentally-friendly options when they are easy and cost-effective. So beyond having our carbon footprint audited and virtualizing with VMWare, what are we exploring to encourage participation at PixelMEDIA?

• First we joined carbon rally where we can all take part in challenges like “Decup Your Decaf” to nix paper cups in the office, “Beverage Independence” to stop purchasing bottled drinks, and “Kick the Catalogs” to proactively remove ourselves from mailing lists. The site is easy and fun to use, providing new ideas and a running tally of our progress—over 750 lbs of CO2 reductions to date.

• Some days are so busy we’re lucky if we find time to eat, so its no wonder people sometimes chose their individual garbage can over a centrally-located recycling bin. By simply removing a few steps to the recycling bins and replacing individual waste cans with central ones, recycling became the easier option. It’s not quite asking people to live with their trash, but our cleaning crew reports a 40% reduction in waste as well as time and cost savings from not having to replace liners and empty waste baskets for 55 individuals.

• Closing the loop and purchasing recycled paper goods in the office also reduces our monthly purchasing costs. But from toilet paper and paper towels to furniture and automobiles, as individual consumers we seem to pay a higher short-term price for the greener option. Inspired by a slightly different Carrotmob concept, we’re just starting to discuss the idea of organizing employee purchases to take advantage of bulk discounts. We’re hoping a PixelMEDIA Co-op can make it more affordable to purchase sustainable products and services for use outside the office.

Where have you had success getting wider participation in your green efforts? If you have any ideas you’d like to share or know of resources that may help we’d like to hear about them. In the meantime, we’ll continue to focus on the small things we can do now while we explore the larger steps that will have the most impact.

The movement is really quite quiet, with little steps here and there – on the people side it’s items like fewer lights (bulbs in and on), mugs not paper cups, car-pooling, 2-up double sided printing (I love that), less printing, making notebooks from scrap paper (of which there is lots), shutting monitors and desk lighting off, and a company plan for dry cleaning with a “green products” company. Small steps. But steps. Nothing drastic, but sustainable. Not a diet, but a lifestyle change. Very cool.

On the IT side there are some great strides being made as well. What I like to call big impact items. For one we’re moving to laptops; whereas we’ve typically had desktops for hardcore design, development and editing. The question there is about batteries — do they offset the power savings? We’re also virtualizing with VMWare and iSCSI SAN (more on the benefits of this in a later post) – so thank you Dell for purchasing Equallogic. We’re doing this in the office and within our hosting facilities (where we manage >600 applications and web properties for our clients). We’re also building our own machines for the conference rooms (we have 11) and as-needed desktops. They’re amazing little machines too, and about the size of a external DVD drive – and it’s a quad core with 4GB of RAM.

That’s just the start for us. We will do more. And this should go beyond us at work and become more of an “everyone, everyplace, everyday” sort of thing, no?.

The larger goal, of course, is to be less of a burden on the environment and our local communities. And with energy costs on a steep curve upward, it helps to reduce costs too. Bonus. On a personal note, I have three boys, all under 5, and I can’t help but wonder what they’ll inherit.

As a design studio, however, the challenge is far greater; finding a way to help clients think differently about how design can have a positive social and environmental impact. That’s the mountain. We don’t design physical product per se, but we design things that run on those products–and shouldn’t we be concerned about the sustainability of our contributions? If you can help me figure that one out, I’m all ears.

As a company, our progress will be measured in the small steps we take every day to better ourselves. It goes beyond being ‘green,’ to just being better people, a better organization, and a better partner to our clients. And for our clients who are in the “green” space, of which there are many, how can we help them evangelize their contributions? We’re working on that too.

The odd part of this post is that I never really meant it to be one. It was just a collection of notes I had on my desk and in a notebook from a Conference I attended in SanFran this past April (MX Conference – more on that later). There was an interesting “green” session called The Designers Accord (which is also an organization) put on by an Adaptive Path staffer Brian Cronin. His story started with a question from a prospect: Are you Green? It was innocent sounding, but powerful.

Brian talked through this at length within his firm. Oddly enough, the question caught them off guard, in a good way: How do you answer that, really? Did they mean as people, as a company, or both? Are we good or good intentioned? And carbon neutrality?

The session was packed with much dialog about what this question may mean to designers like us, as designers of things. Brian showed a lot of great examples of sustainable and not so sustainable design; for instance, we all know plastic packaging sucks right? Ever buy an iPhone accessory or two and find yourself hunting for a machete. And for what? Once open, we throw it out? Sad. And that was just one example. Any idea how many iPhone accessories were bought, last month? This past weekend?

He also showed us the future of packaging: recyclable, sustainable, and easy to open. Imagine that — a great user experience, and sustainable. He continued for another 30 minutes, asking the big questions they asked themselves, openly sharing their experience with an audience of 200 executives and design leaders from around the world. What could we do? What should we be doing? Where are the bounds? What responsibilities do we have as designers and design firms to ensure that we’re employing sustainable design principles? And that is when I was introduced to the Designers Accord. And it got me thinking, and writing, and making some changes and wondering – what else?

So, if you made it this far I’ll have to assume you dig it, the topic that is. So please help us do more. Let’s work together, wherever you are, and share ideas. Suggestions welcomed.

Peace. -t