What does a sustainable photography studio look like, and how do you create one? Jason Lindsey worked hard for several years now to make our studio sustainable. In the process, we've encountered some unexpected challenges and reaped some surprising rewards. We began when we relocated our studio to a 2200-square-foot brick building that was constructed between 1890 and 1900. We knew we had our work cut out for us. The building was drafty. It had an earthen crawl space, no insulation, including in the attic, and a few loosely fit, single-pane win… Read More>
A few weeks ago in San Francisco, CA hundreds of professionals, mostly from the creative industry, attended AIGA's GAIN Conference for Social Change. I was one of these creatives. Besides exploring this fantastic city, I had the pleasure of attending this two-day event where business and social visionaries shared their approaches and solutions to creating societal value. As an Art Director that has spent most of her career at advertising agencies, I've often questioned the type of client work being done and why. Over the years the most successful and fu… Read More>
Teaching sustainability to a new group of students always brings to attention issues with my teaching style, pace of content delivery, and strength of the project parameters. In other words, every time I teach this topic, it's a learning experience. Typically I've assigned projects that last around 4-5 weeks where the first two class periods are heavily focused on reading, research, and ample discussion. This method has worked "all right" in the past, however, in many cases the design results were more hit-or-miss than other assignments that didn't include a sustainability discussion. I'm always searching for new ways to fix this. This past April, an opportunity presented itself in the form o… Read More>
In Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland talks about takeaways; moments which define “what it’s like to be alive on this planet.” (Coupland, 1991) As they are described, takeaways are not things that you can purchase or plan, rather, they are those moments that seem to happen serendipitously or naturally, and they stay with you, and define you, and prove that you’re alive. While Coupland never envisioned takeaways as something to be constructed or planned out, his recognition of such moments is profound. Generation X was written at a time when we as a culture were just beginning to understand the implications of our digital and te… Read More>
Which is greener, a printed or digital piece? Naturally it depends on who is being asked. Talk to a paper manufacturer and he will certainly support printed communications as much more sustainable. Ask the CEO of a web hosting company and she will make the case for digital work. In a recent article on WhatTheyThink Blogs: Going Green Richard Romano discusses a study recently conducted in Finland which concludes that a printed newspaper is more sustainable than an online version (Romano). Similarly Don Carli from the Institute for Sustainable Communication rightly points out that “Computers, eReaders, and cell phones don’t grow on trees and their spiraling requirement for energy is unsustainable” (… Read More>
From individually wrapped prunes to over-packaged USB drives, excess packaging has become a momentous problem. Required for safety, preservation, and marketing, packaging can be valuable, however excess packaging waste is a growing environmental and societal concern. Pulitzer price winning author Russell Baker once wrote, "The American dream is to turn goods into trash as fast as possible." This could not be truer than in the case of packaging. Emphasis on selling more and cheaper goods has been the ultimate goal of… Read More>
Sustainability is the wicked problem of design in the 21st century. From now on, all problem solving, decision and policy-making, and all aspects of design have to consider their impact on the health of individuals, communities, societies, ecosystems and the planetary life-support system in order to be sustainable. Sustainable solutions require transdisciplinary integration of multiple knowledge bases. Design can play the role of integrator and facilitator in this process. The complexity of the interrelated social, economic, cultural and ecological problems that are facing humanity not only call for collaboration between diverse disciplines but also for political an… Read More>
“Clever work wins awards; smart work wins clients.” – Eric Karjuouto, founder, SmashLab I recently had the distinct pleasure to judge two competitions that focused on printed and digital design that was moving towards sustainability and social responsibility. As the entries were stirring, I was, at times, a bit unsure about how to specifically judge the environmental and social sustainability of a given piece. To be as consistent as humanly possible, I relied heavily on the Re-nourish greener print and digital standards. These allowed me to use a baseline to compare and contrast entries. However, despite the use of the standards, I wondered if there was simply a bet… Read More>
Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. —The Brundtland Report, 1987 This is the most widely accepted definition of sustainability. It is attributed to Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and Chairperson of the World Commission on Environment and Development. The Commission was established in 1983 by the Secretary General of … Read More>
I have developed a list of twenty one key factors for analyzing green claims, for use by my graphic design students at New Mexico State University. The list’s purpose is to help them develop sensitivity to the subject in order to produce more critical work. The impetus for creating it stems from events in 2007 when the Advertising Federation, an industry group in the U.S. fell short of actually recommending that the Federal Trade Commission institute new guidelines limiting green claims in advertising, branding and packaging. Despite the voluntary nature of the proposed guidelines large advertising firms resisted the possibility of their environmental claims being even tacitly examined by the Federal government. The FTC did even… Read More>
This is the third in three installments of an in-depth look at the future of design education... the designer as social entrepreneur. The idea of being an entrepreneur for many causes anxiety when faced with the realities of affording health insurance, generating enough income, and saving for retirement. Others see it as a means to achieve personal and professional dreams without having to answer to anyone in management. Add the adjective “social” in front of entrepreneur and the fuzziness of success increases. A social entrepreneur focuses on promoting social good through entrepreneurial activities, however the idea of profit isn’t necessarily economic,… Read More>
This is the second in three installments of an in-depth look at the future of design education... the designer as social entrepreneur. Communication Design students graduate from universities across North America annually most of the time well suited to enter into the workforce and compete in the nuanced world of clients and cubicles. (At least, this is how I feel I prepare my students.) However, as we've seen quite dramatically over the past three years that when the economy comes crashing down, so does the hopes of many young designers of finding full time studio employment. School prepares fledgling designers to create solid portfolios, articulate their process, and apply for jobs, … Read More>
This is the first in three installments of an in-depth look at the future of design education... the designer as social entrepreneur. J. Gregory Dees (Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship) wrote in his introduction to his 1998 landmark article The Meaning of Entrepreneurship (PDF): “The time is certainly ripe for entrepreneurial approaches to social problems. Many governmental and philanthropic efforts have fallen far short of our expectations. Major social sector institutions are often viewed as inefficient, ineffective, and unre… Read More>
This past spring, I taught a junior-level graphic design methodology studio course in which I was excited to focus the bulk of the term on educating the students about sustainable design processes and theories. Back in January of 2010, when I was planning the class, I struggled mightily to balance the amount of readings, films, research and discussion with actual making. Lessons learned from past classes taught me that reading books and articles on the topic helped form a better foundation to understand the topic, but the more the students read, the more confused they became and the more time was taken away from the studio component of the course. The texts are imperative, however what specifically is being digested and discussed in c… Read More>
As a university design student “making” was my raison d’etre. It was a ritual to trek up to my studio (in any form of weather) to meet a quota of the somewhat unrealistic number of explorations I aimed to meet daily early on in my career. I felt spiritually satisfied if I met my creative demands, and bitterly frustrated when I missed the mark. This regimented process was influenced by professors who demanded precision and perfection on every project. I found their expectations impossible to meet, but reveled in the chance of getting “close”. Reams of paper, alcohol-based markers, and charcoal pencils were my initial tools for making that changed over time to become layout software and dozens of laser print… Read More>
Graphic design education is missing a critical component. Students receive intensive training in many areas, such as foundation, design history, typography, and composition. But where does environmental sustainability fit on this list? At what point on our path as designers do we learn how to be better stewards of our environment? The topic of sustainability in traditional design education is consistently an afterthought, if thought about at all. When sustainability is thought of, it usually takes the form of a single project set apart from real world expectations and limitations. These projects seem to be designed in a bubble as if students may only take environmental sustainability into consideration wh… Read More>
Yvette Perullo, for her MA at the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University, collected direct mail for four months with her family to produce a 6'2", 106-pound installation for her graduate thesis exhibition. This was done to help the everyday citizen visualize how much direct mail the average American household receives in one year. She further printed the gory statistics of waste and deforestation on stacks of direct mail next to the sculpture to help inform designers visiting the exhibit on the issue and also how to help. Direct mail is a perfect example of why graphic design, … Read More>
Four years ago I noticed a number of beautiful direct mail pieces that I spent countless hours designing in a trash bin near a bank of apartment mailboxes. It dawned on me that warm summer evening that everything I had previously created and in the future will design would end up in the landfill or be incinerated into our atmosphere. During the seemingly innocuous process of choosing a nice weight/color of paper and burning a CD of files for the printer, I was helping to destroy the forests where I loved to wander, breathing in their wisdom. This awakening led me to question whether there was a mo… Read More>
"The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem." - Jared Diamond, Professor of Geography at UCLA. (From the book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Penguin Books. 2005.)It is fairly simple to call a few printers in your local area and find one that gives you the best price on paper and printing that meets your busy schedule. It's a job well done as soon as you drop off your CD packed full of files at your chosen printer and take a breather before starting your next big design job. But what if price a… Read More>
"Sustainable design gives an authentic value to the consumer." - Katarina Graffman (Ethnographer)In the second portion of this continuing essay, I turn my focus to another integral component to the graphic designer's daily language: ink. Ink was developed, for commercial purposes, by the Chinese thousands of years ago and was constructed of various mixtures of pine soot, lamp oil and animal gelatin. Color was added through combining berries, minerals and a variety of plants/roots. As commercial printing (as we now know it) grew in demand from economic expansion fueled by th… Read More>
"There is no business to be done on a dead planet." - David Brower (Sierra Club Foundation Founder)We've heard a lot lately about global warming and its connected dangers posed to our civilization and current way of life. But what does this mean for the graphic designer besides possibly investing in a stylish new bike or replacing a few incandescent light bulbs with some compact fluorescents (CFLs)? In this first installment of a multi-part essay, I'll focus on why sustainability is important for the future and current success of our craft by looking at the material that th… Read More>
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