There’s been a lot of chatter around the office, mostly email and hallway talk, about what this really means. I love that we’re talking about it. But what does it all mean? To go green, or be green? To us?
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
Tags: designers accord, eco-friendly, green, PixelMEDIA
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Our perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 15th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Most of content we touch may already live on a website, but sometimes print leave-behinds are a necessity. When we design print collateral for our clients, layout is often driven by content. Perhaps it should also take into account the amount of space and pages the content requires; 1000 double-sided datasheets are less expensive and more environmentally responsible than a equivalent six-page whitepaper.
When we gather requirements for print design projects, they typically focus on color, layout, and means of updating–all good points. As PixelMEDIA embraces green efforts and we try to drive our clients in that direction, let’s put a new requirement on the table: green your print campaign. Recycled stock has come a long way–why not make it the rule, not the rare exception? And glossy might look great, but there’s typically no room for shininess in the recycling bin.
All good campaigns, folders, and datasheets must come to an end; let’s be involved not just at the start, but also in making that a greener, happier end.
July 15th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Great post and great topic.
We at Adaptive Path also working hard to make “green” a part of client conversations. We recently conducted our first internal design session on ways to drive a current consulting project towards more sustainable outcomes. It’s a bit messy and requires new muscles, but you’ve got to walk (or stumble) before you run.
Some of what I learned from this first session:
A great deal of what has the highest impact is out of reach of the normal interaction-design project (e.g., packaging, end-of-life, customer support), but might be a part of a service design project.
Ideas for improved sustainability need to be presented to the client based on their other benefits (e.g., efficiency, lower costs, better experience, etc.).
And it’s harder to interject green notions halfway through a project. You gotta go green through-and-through.
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Great post.
Having only 3 years out of school and in the workplace under my belt I am still learning the meaning of business as usual. The advantage to this is that I, and others like myself, see the business landscape with more “what if we could do this?” and less “that won’t work because…” The disadvantage, of course, is not having the experience to understand the long term effects of change. For companies to effectively go green I believe two things need to happen:
1. The newbies and the veterans need to work together to design solutions custom to their businesses. New ideas met with time tested wisdom is a terrific formula for positive and profitable change.
2. Going green needs to be cheaper or at least more cost effective. Over the last year of selling promotional marketing products to a wide range of industry I have discovered that the desire to “go green” far outweighs the need or commitment to do so. With regard to premiums and giveaways, most marketing professionals jump at a new eco-friendly item only to sit down when the price tag comes out. On the other side of the coin, the companies making these products are only doing so for the eco selling point. This means that the percent of the product that is “green” is only what the law says it needs to be…usually just 51% of the material. The question then remains: Are these really eco products and do they even offer any benefit besides the “green” branding they come with? Does the PR and goodwill of using eco promotional products outweigh the price tag?
Applying this example to other types of eco initiatives, it seems to me that the focus should not be on appearing to be eco to others, but being green because of the internal benefits. Fuel efficient buildings, decreased dependence on paper communication and time efficient work strategies should be at the foundation of the change. The rest is just icing on the cake.
December 4th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
The world needs to find a solution for clean energy and stop using the pulluting fossil fuels before it’s to late there may be many ideas but there will be a hard time trying to decide on what would be best for the ecosystems and enviroments well thats my side of the story.