How can we start thinking about sustainability as intrinsic part of good design, instead of an addendum?
How can we embrace the potential impact of our craft to design new services, shape organizational behavior, and enable policy change, not just churn out artifacts?
How can we assume accountability for what our designs influence, and not just the design itself?
These are the questions many of us have been asking constantly—and answering with only with limited success—for years. I am reminded of the confusion designers have around this topic each time I publicly speak about sustainability—the first comment from the audience during Q+A is always the same: "Tell us what to do!" We are a profession who spends our entire lives generating new ideas, challenging the status quo, and building glorious concepts from nothing, yet remarkably we are paralyzed when confronted with the issue of how to meaningfully engage in the most important issue of our time.
This is the challenge the Designers Accord sought to address when it started 3 years ago. The concept was simple: if designers, educators, and business leaders could openly share knowledge and experience about sustainability, we would collectively (and more quickly) build our intelligence around these issues, and then generate more innovative and world-changing ideas.
(more...)