the consumerist scenario — what are elements
of the post consumerist scenario for designers and architects?

The first speaker, Ed van Hinte from NL, will talk about “Harmless Housing” — consumerism, “lightweighted” housing, and a bearable consumerist society with respect to architecture and housing. Ed hails from Lightness Stduios. The second speaker, Steve Broome, will talk about the RSA connected communities project, including the characteristics of social networks and social ties, and preliminary findings about the connection between social networks and physical places. Details for the talk are here, it’s at 6:30 at the Univ of Westminster in London — if you come along introduce yourself!

This paper about how we might define design as activism has been submitted to the Journal of Architectural Education, although I am allowed to share it here on my website with you, my colleagues. Find the paper here: Thorpe-definingdesignactivism (PDF 1.1MB)

Here’s the abstract:

In this article I argue that current conceptualizations of design as activism are often weak or narrow, and don’t stretch to the broader landscape of social movements from which most activism is born. Drawing on concepts of activism from social movement research and conventional activist practice, we can formulate a more useful, robust characterization of design as activism. Such a definition helps designers and social movement actors gain a better understanding of the spatial and material possibilities of design’s role in activism. It makes design activism more accessible within the field of design, and also to wider constituencies

I welcome comments and discussion on the paper’s arguments and examples.

I wonder if I’m the only one who read Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation (by Tim Brown) and Architecture Depends (by Jeremy Till) back to back. The effect was very interesting in that Brown seems to provide a description of design operating largely as Till suggests that it should, but doesn’t, in architecture.

Till, Dean of the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Westminster here in London, paints a devastating picture of architecture as a profession largely turned in on itself, desperate to minimize its engagement with the messy world and keep architectural knowledge centered on “the object”. Till argues for the idea of “architectural intelligence” — a position that allows architecture to shift its focus from the object to the task of making social and spatial sense real life problems. (see some of Till’s work on architectural agency over at www.spatialagency.net)

In contrast to the problems that Till identifies in architecture, Brown, head of IDEO (originally a product design firm), presents a picture of design as a process of engagement with real life problems that works not only for designers, but also for business people, governments, and social change organizations. (I profiled some of IDEO’s more activist work here) This is the idea of “design thinking” which in Brown’s estimation is too important to be left only to designers.

Although Brown writes very much in a business context and Till in a more academic one, the two messages are strikingly related…Architectural intelligence—the architect’s version of design thinking. Till explains why architects resist the notion, but Brown goes some way toward showing its contours, as I describe below.

Till skillfully argues that architecture has long thought of itself as “autonomous,” part of the modernist project to “order,” particularly through the manipulation of form. Architecture in this sense fails to engage with the “lived world.” In Till’s estimation, many architects resist engaging with the everyday, with social, political, ecological and other forces that shape and influence their work and its success. These influences are the dependency suggested in the title—a dependency that architects want to deny—which Till describes throughout the book mostly as contingency. It is only by avoiding these contingencies that architects can pretend to create order or have social relevance through the manipulation of form alone.

Brown seems to answer this with his discussion of the Shimano bike company that undertook a human-centered design exploration. Instead of focussing on Shimano’s high end market, the design team tried to learn why 90% of adults don’t ride bikes when 90% of them did as kids, and why most people have bikes in the garage that they don’t ride. Brown comments, “Shimano did not hand us a list of technical specifications and a binder full of market research and send us off to design a bunch of parts. Rather, we joined forces and set out together to explore the changing terrain of the cycling market.” In a sense, this project set out to engage with contingency.

And there’s more to the call and response in these books…

On having a “big idea”
Till notes that architects often prefer to work with one idea, “rigorously carried through from large scale to the detail” and that indeed, “mature” architecture is seen as perfecting one of these big ideas. Architecture critics define “neat packages of styles, method, techniques, and taste. If you fit into one of these categories, you are an architect. If you define one of these categories, you are a great architect. Seminal buildings are those that establish a new category, be it Le Corbusier’s early villas, Foster’s Willis Farber Dumas, Michael Graves’s Portland Public Service Building, or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim. But if you transgress these packages, these categories, you are dismissed as wayward, immature, self-indulgent, maybe even not a proper architect.”

By contrast, Brown emphasizes the ultimate importance of getting off the beaten path–the importance of not having a big idea, and this often involves failure. An IDEO motto, for example, is “fail early to succeed sooner.” He argues for the central role of social and physical space where people—often from across stakeholder groups—can experiment, take risks and explore. For Brown these spaces are symbolized by the quirky work environments found at companies like Pixar or Google. He describes a process fed by his version of “design thinking” as open-ended, open-minded, and iterative, a process that will feel “chaotic” to those who’ve never experienced it.

On engaging with users
Till wants to see architects move away from merely polishing forms and techniques — the role they are largely trained for–and instead take on the role of gathering the conflicting voices in a given project to “make the best possible social and spatial sense of them.” One idea Till proposes is to widen the sense of “scale” in architecture beyond simply physical size to include social scale. 1:100, a common and preferred scale (detailed enough to seem real, not detailed enough to address the mess of actual users) becomes 1 architect to 100 citizens. The scale of a city, 1: 10,000, becomes a scale of narratives.

As if in response, Brown shows that gathering conflicting voices, which he terms “competing constraints,” is at the heart of the design thinking process. Designers need to be “out in the field” for the very purpose of gathering those voices. Although people often aren’t able to express what they want or need from a design project, designers can learn a lot from observing actual behaviors and listening to what people say (and don’t say) about what they do. “Behaviors,” he comments, “are never right or wrong, but they are always meaningful.” Brown notes that it is not observation of a statistically average user that yields the most insight, but rather observation of incongruous details and amateur practices, along with “the exaggerated concerns” of people at the margins of the intended user groups. This approach moves away from designers creating for people to a model of designers creating with people by understanding, and making sense of their stories.

On forms of knowledge
Till wants architects to see themselves as part of a network of knowledge that “weaves together human and nonhuman, specialized knowledge with everyday insights, rules with instincts, the social sciences with the social.” For many architects, he suggests, this stance would be threatening because it removes the imagined sense of detachment—the purity of architectural knowledge and its neat ordering—and replaces it with a messy, hybrid knowledge. But Till argues that “architectural knowledge, as situated knowledge, should not be applied as an abstraction from the outside, but developed from within the context of the given situation.”

Brown explains how design teams that embrace a more mature design thinking approach typically and by necessity create networks of diverse knowledge. He suggests we can think of a designer as “a master storyteller whose skill is measured by his or her ability to craft a compelling, consistent, and believable narrative. It’s no accident that writers and journalists now often work alongside mechanical engineers, and cultural anthropologists in design teams.”

On innovation
Till argues that not only have architects tended to seek the “ideal” or the “big idea,” and autonomy to pursue it against external pressures, but at the same time architects have tended to think that external forces are so overwhelming there is simply no room to maneuver. But he argues that a central benefit of architecture embracing contingency is that it offers the opportunity for architectural projects to become transformative—the contingency itself gives the maneuvering room—and for architects to shift from a focus on objects to a focus on agency. The shift in focus then brings out “architectural intelligence.”

In Brown’s terms transformation appears as “innovation”–which notably can be as much social as it is technological– and it marks the difference between mostly boring incremental changes and “game-changing” break-throughs that really deliver the “change” of his title. In Brown’s book, real innovation arises exactly from the contingency that Till so badly wants architects to embrace.

Design Thinking/Architectural Intelligence
Brown ultimately argues for “design thinking” to spread and be applied outside studios of design. He is asking for designers to design with people, possibly even facilitating a process where people design for themselves. Till is, for the moment, simply asking architects to step outside the studio, to step outside the ideal and to give up the notion that detachment is a desirable stance.

Sure architecture and ‘product’ (now often ‘service’) design are different. Products, like bicycles and kitchen tools, have to work for the consumer. By contrast an architect’s client can only rarely represent the actual users of any given building. Buildings are big, long lasting, and immobile, whereas products are small, often short-lived, and must flow into the jumble of daily life.

Although architectural projects face tremendous economic pressures, they don’t typically face the competitive “sales” pressure that consumer objects and services do. Indeed, Brown’s focus for innovation is largely for the purpose of corporate gains — to do what industrial designers have always done in terms of expanding existing markets and finding new ones. By contrast Till is more concerned with social change in civil society.

Naturally, each of these design disciplines wants to carve out a niche for itself, but if these two books are any indication, there is some convergence on where that will take design. The two disciplines are being hit by common forces such as global digital connectivity, changing expectations about what design can and should accomplish, and a more prominent social and public focus against a backdrop of global crises. In addition, the boundaries between the object and the structure, the user and the designer, and the design project and its context are all blurring.

Despite skepticism in the design world about design thinking, and the clear resistance that Till describes to the idea of architectural intelligence, I think these two designers are on the right track. In fact, I would have them go further in terms of reframing the design professions — but we’ll save that for later.

Did you read either of these two books? Thoughts?

More results

One of my fellow design activism bloggers (at Social Design Notes) asked if I would share more details of the survey results. Good Idea. I’ve created a list of the sources that people suggested for learning more about design activism. The responses are anonymized in this downloadable file (PDF) which serves as a holiday gift from all of us, to all of us. Enjoy and please comment below if you’d like to suggest additional sources. (A few of the responses in this file mention Worldchanging, but sadly I have to report that Worldchanging is now closing its doors, with hopes of finding a place to archive their past years’ articles.)

Winner

Congratulations to Amanda Bill, winner of the gift certificate drawing for the design activism survey. She teaches fashion and textile design studies at the Institute of Design for Industry and Environment in the College of Creative Arts at Massey University in New Zealand. Amanda says, “what a terrific surprise … I hardly ever win anything!”

When asked to say a few more words, she added, “I love getting students to think about designing for social and economic change especially since fashion is one of the biggest industries in the world, with huge inequities in the value chain, massively complex sustainability issues, not to mention the gendered power relations involved. I’m really pleased that these topics are finally becoming legitimate in designers’ education.” Nice to meet you, Amanda.

See you in 2011. Interesting news is brewing…

MARC itself is interesting because it combines social sciences with architecture and design to “reveal the connections between built environments and societies.” The group has a number of impressive and ambitious research projects going, for example on climate science and urban design, eco-cities, multifaith spaces, radicalisation in the urban environment, and mapping architectural controversies.

In the case of radicalization (or radicalisation, if you’re in the UK), Ralf Brand’s “The Urban Environment: Mirror or Mediator of Radicalisation” (www.urbanpolarisation.org) took the case study cities of Belfast, Beirut, Berlin, and Amsterdam. The project looked at how the urban environment reflects and influences polarisation processes in cities. The project resulted in a very interesting “Charter for Spaces of Positive Encounters” available for perusal on the website. Elsewhere in the Architecture department at Manchester, the projects group aims to engage student work with life outside the university and an example of their work is “Sharing the City” (www.sharingthecity.org.uk).

Another interesting group that presented at the workshop came from the University of Sheffield. The School of Architecture there has an “Agency Research Centre” that focuses on “transformative research into architectural practice and education.” The group also publishes a journal called “field:” (www.field-journal.org) and volume 3, for example, covered agency and the praxis of activism.

One of the ongoing research projects is called “Spatial Agency” which looks beyond “the building” to consider wider practices of spatial production and how architects are both agents but also able to facilitate the involvement of others. The website contains a database of projects and people through which to explore the negotiation, deliberation, and contention that arises in this field of spatial agency, with examples ranging from community builders to known architect’s studios and from famed neighbourhoods to historical experiments. These examples map out the how-where-why of spatial agency. Although the website navigation is somewhat abstract at this stage, the project and its contents are worth a good look.

Meanwhile over at Loughborough University, the research project “Adaptable Futures” is exploring a different aspect of change in the built environment. The research aims to incorporate the dynamic of time into building design so that buildings can better adapt to change. Although this is in many ways a construction engineering project (it’s based in the Innovative Manufacturing & Construction Research Centre), anyone familiar with Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn will find it provocative. This project, more than those mentioned above, is tied into the commercial realm with a focus on non-domestic buildings and partnerships with a number of large companies. This is perhaps why speakers from this project talked more about the politics of public agency negotiation. But it strikes me that the implications of the Adaptable Futures work could be far-reaching in activist terms.

example of Adaptable Futures building components

I stress that this is not a comprehensive summary of work going on in the United Kingdom, rather, it reflects some of the interesting work I encountered at this one workshop–particularly in areas north of London. As always, readers are welcome to add to this review through comments or contacting me directly.

rating sustainable communities
First was the STAR Community Index program, an effort to “transform the way local governments set priorities and implement policies and practices to improve their sustainability performance. It will become the definitive means by which local governments measure and ‘certify’ their achievements.” Taking many of its cues from the US Green Building Council’s LEED rating system, the STAR rating system aims for transformation by means of a national, consensus based system.

a partnership between ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability USA, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the Center for American Progress (CAP)

In order to work out a national level system, the STAR group has already produced an interesting report  “A Comparative Analysis of Sustainable Community Frameworks” (download here) which looks at the diversity of sustainability rating systems from across the US. The report is useful in that it profiles a wide range of ratings approaches, from individual products to buildings to whole cities. It also discusses frameworks such as ecological footprint or genuine progress indicator.

Since ‘rating system’ is a common activist tactic among designers, this report makes for an interesting and thought-provoking read.

design activism from academia
The University of Washington (based in Seattle) may have been one of the first universities in the US to offer a course on design activism, thanks to associate professor Jeff Hou. Hou is currently the chair of the Landscape Architecture department, which maintains a webpage on the subject of design activism that profiles a range of the department’s urban ecological design projects that could be characterized as activist, such as humanitarian aid and urban revitalization.

More recently Hou has edited a book, Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (published by Routledge, 2010) which explicitly highlights activist notions of the making of public spaces.

sustainable design in schools
Finally I met up with Gilda Wheeler, the program manager for sustainability and science in public education for Washington state. Wheeler’s group is pioneering education for sustainability in Kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) and they’ve developed some great material. The highlight is their recent “Integrated Environment and Sustainability Learning Standards” (downloadable) which describe what students must know in the area of environment and sustainability. But rather than add a new layer of curriculum or coursework, the standards describe how the learning can be woven into existing curriculum activities. For example, the document describes how knowledge of “interdependency” can be drawn out in the existing science and social studies curriculum — on a grade by grade level (e.g. 2nd-3rd grade or 9th-12th grade).

This standard is particularly good to see, since in my experience one problem we encounter in teaching sustainable design at college level is that students are still entering college with little coherent knowledge of what sustainability means. It seems that Washington may be the only state with this type of learning standard, so let me know if there are others, or encourage their adoption if there aren’t.

Wheeler’s group has also developed a “sustainable design project” that any teacher can use and adapt to their own K-12 needs. There is a teacher manual available and the goal of the project is to “bring industry, business, and higher education partners together with K-12 classrooms to design sustainable solutions to real world challenges.” The website has a video from one of the sustainable design projects that has already been done, as well as the teacher manual and the conceptual plan for the project.

Head made a distinction between what was needed in “high income” countries versus what is needed in “low income” countries. Low income countries need to use sustainable urban design in new development to achieve better living standards. In high income countries he noted that renovating and retrofitting existing urban areas and built stock is the largest task on hand in “high income” countries, and that this work is far more important than optimizing and testing new technologies in new development. He acknowledged that retrofitting existing areas is arguably harder than making new, sustainable developments.

Some other highlights included the pictures he painted for how we will retrofit existing urban areas. There will be few, if any cars in cities, which will densify and incorporate hydroponic greenhouses for food growth. Head speculates that we will use soil-based agriculture less frequently in the future. In Head’s report, he addresses three policy areas, one of which is “justice.” He notes, “as sustainability is the criterion for scale, justice is the criterion for distribution to ensure that there is fairness across society and globally.”

What also interested me was that he noted that “the market will not do it” and this is one of the reasons that Arup, along with some other corporate, government and nonprofit sponsors are “taking action” and have created the Thames Gateway Institute for Sustainability (see who’s involved here). Head emphasized that the aim of the institute was to get built examples on the ground rapidly as a means of developing and supporting best practice while steering regeneration in the direction of long term sustainability. The institute says, “Our initial focus within Thames Gateway, Europe’s largest regeneration area, not only provides us with a huge test-bed for research activity, but also a ready market for the solutions we are helping to develop.” The implication for the institute, and perhaps Arup as well, seems to be that rapid demonstration will lead to policies that reshape the market.

For example, one of the projects concerns eco-retrofits for both social and private housing, that will lead to a “total community retrofit” that addresses social as well as economic and technical performance. A related project concerns green roofs and includes plans to install green roofs on 4000 homes in the gateway area.

In an earlier post I talked about how different sectors of the economy — public, private and nonprofit — all have a role in activism. Arup and its partners’ activism in the Institute for Sustainability is an interesting development. Some of the Institute’s efforts are going to directly engage designers, and this is perhaps one of the avenues along which design work can travel to reach more activist opportunities.

Design Activism’s main strength is its wide-ranging nature, and this is frequently a benefit of Fuad-Luke’s work, for example, with his Thames and Hudson publications, The Eco-Design Handbook (2009) and The Eco-travel Handbook (2009). In the first section of Design Activism, Fuad-Luke covers the activist territory very broadly, offering not only a chapter on the historical origins of design activism, but also providing a variety of frameworks for thinking about design activism followed by a broad range of contemporary examples. The final chapters of the book hone in on a particular process for participatory design known as “co-design.”

Fuad-Luke’s review of the history of design activism stretches back to 1750, taking in arts and crafts, modernism and other design movements. Most activism in these movements, he concludes, primarily targeted designers and in his view had little effect outside the boundaries of design culture. In some senses he sees the history of design activism as one of designers talking to themselves. Fuad-Luke doesn’t explicitly investigate the tension between the potentially conflicting roles of designers as “citizen activists” on the one hand and “professional experts” on the other. I suspect that designers’ roles as professional experts partly explain why they “talk to themselves” in an effort to change design culture toward more socially beneficial ends.

Diagramming the terrain
In the sense of diagramming design activist terrain, Fuad Luke has produced a very good initial reference from which to explore many dimensions of design activism. The book offers many frameworks for thinking about activism. For example Fuad-Luke presents the “five capitals” model of sustainability as a way to identify the range of causes, or issue areas, that activists might address, and he includes six separate diagrams (the five capitals plus other capitals) to show the dimensions that lie within each form of capital. He also diagrams various forms of eco-design and, more broadly, lists design approaches (some issue-led such as “gender” and some not, such as “design research”) and maps them on to contemporary activist causes (such as “participation and democracy” or “environment”). He offers a checklist for characterizing design activism, but also suggests a triangulation of design work among practice, exploration, and studies. And these are just a few of the many frameworks that appear on the pages of the book to explain not only the design and the design activist situation, but also to explain some of the causes (or issues) themselves, such as climate stability, ecological capacity, and over-consumption versus under-consumption.

Design Activism also looks at examples of practice, and these are broadly organized into activism that addresses over-consumption and activism that addresses under-consumption. In the over-consumption section Fuad-Luke addresses awareness-raising/behavior change, alternative methods of production, eco-efficiency, “contesting the meaning of consumption,” and social cohesion/community. For activism targeting under-consumption he covers shelter/water/food, education, and health. Here again we find a useful range of categories with which to consider design activism.

But as the previous paragraph probably begins to suggest, Design Activism struggles a bit under the weight of so many frameworks. At times the reader wonders how to make sense of them, or which of them might fit together into a coherent, bigger picture. For example, having presented a number of frameworks early on in the book (five capitals model, design approaches, issue areas) for understanding design activism, Fuad-Luke doesn’t use any of those frameworks to organize his contemporary cases. I’d be the first to agree that there are no “right” answers when it comes to trying to categorize activism and the issues that activists address, and it is important to understand that there are a number of ways to look at this emerging field of work and study. However I do look forward to the next step of streamlining the large number of lists and diagrams down into a few more central frameworks for describing the range of activism and how it works .

Co-Design
The last section of the book deals with co-design, a form of participatory design. This section details the history of the co-design approach with respect to open source models and other related models (for example meta design, slow design, social and inclusive design) and offers a good process model for co-design. There is a chapter devoted to co-design tools such as social software for distributed collaboration and co-design events. Fuad-Luke links co-design explicitly to activism by proposing that, “participation emancipates people by making them active contributors rather than passive recipients. It is therefore a form of design humanism aimed at reducing domination.” Yet there is a slightly jarring contrast between the book’s first section of wide-ranging exploration and this sudden focus on one design process.

In many ways, it feels to me as though this second section deserved to be longer, or to be its own book. In such a short overview, Fuad-luke has little space to offer a critical examination of the strengths and weaknesses of participatory processes, nor can he fully explore the spectrum of uses for participatory and collaborative design, from commercial, non-activist projects to what I would characterize as activist. For me this section of the book leaves us with a provocative question about whether and how it may be appropriate to view activism, such as co-design processes, as a tool of design rather than positioning design as a tool of activism.

The participatory discussions also emphasize, more than other elements, the strangely apolitical nature of the book. Although it’s true that in broader civil society activism is arguably becoming more cultural (for example dealing with issues of identity, rather than issues of civil rights), activism’s core is still highly political. I sense that Fuad-Luke, like others in design culture, is more comfortable within the confines of design’s traditional organizing principles such as client service, usability, the design “project,” human needs, or “doing good by design.” These concepts contrast fairly sharply with more conventional activists’ language that deals in rights, struggles, grievances and claims. This gap suggests to me we still have a way to go until we really understand design as activism.

Strangeness in the title
The reader must continue to the end to find out about the book’s unusual subtitle. Fuad-Luke comments that conventional notions of beauty are those that align with financial profitability, a profitability that is ultimately destructive in social and environmental terms. He argues that instead, “we need new visions of beauty—we could call this beauty, ‘beautiful strangeness’, a beauty that is not quite familiar, tinged with newness, ambiguity and intrigue, which appeals to our innate sense of curiosity,” a beauty that, rather than stemming from profits, stems from resilience. Positioning of the goal of activism—its destination—in aesthetic terms is important for a design audience, but selection of the word “strangeness” strikes me as unfortunate given the weight of negative connotations that terms such as “activism” and “sustainability” already confront. We are in need of more resonant rallying cries, and the book does offer these within its pages.

I recommend Design Activism as a useful overview of activism within design culture. The book covers a valuable range of conceptual and case material and represents an important step on the way to rethinking design practice.

working with a purpose

Obviously there are no easy answers to these questions, but I have written a few relatively “timeless” posts on these challenges. In the past I’ve outlined two main strategies that involve, broadly, converting a conventional design job into a sustainable design job, (I covered this in two posts here and here) or converting a conventional sustainable development job into a sustainable design job (I covered that here).

I think these two broad strategies apply to the question of finding a role as a design activist as well. In other words, you can try to take a conventional design job and make room for more activist work, or you can go for a more traditional activist job (such as community organizer or environmental advocate) and work your design skills in to it.

In terms of how you might bend an existing, conventional design job into one that allows more time for activist work, perhaps in a pro bono context, I’ve profiled a few organizations that attempt to match design service providers (pro bono or reduced rate) with clients in need, so this might be a starting point for convincing an employer that there are worthy local projects. One of these organizations, The 1% also offers guidance and rules of thumb for pro bono work from an architecture perspective.

Given the recent economic climate, another consideration besides simply “providing services” might be “providing skills” through the design process, something I wrote about in my post “unemployment.”

I wish I could say that finding this kind of job isn’t that hard to do, but it is. It requires persistence, patience and a whole lot of strategy. Estimates are that it can take 9 months to a year to find the right job, and finding the right job can be like a full time job in itself. You also have to pay attention to all conventional job search requirements, so I recommend using a job hunting guidebook or advice service as well, so that you can adapt those job finding strategies to your particular search. I wish all sustainable design and design activist job seekers the best of luck. If you have any good stories about finding or creating these kinds of jobs, please do share them.

Chemicals have a been a theme for me over the past few weeks. First I had a reader inquiry challenging the idea that there could be any health risks from plastics in food and drink packaging. Then, I had a run-in with my son’s school over a new, portable classroom that wasn’t properly aired before his class started using it, making the indoor air of very questionable quality.

Plastics–are they OK?

A reader of my Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability wrote to challenge the idea that plasticizers and other chemical additives in plastic could cause a health hazard. She argued that with today’s strict regulations there is no risk of harm from plastic food packaging.

In the book I talk about about a range of issues concerning plastics and more generally, chemicals. For example, I discuss downcycling and suggest that plastic drink bottles remade into textiles contain chemicals that aren’t intended for contact with skin. I also note that there are nearly 100,000 chemicals in use, few of which have been tested, and given the way our eco-sphere works, these all end up back in the environment in one place (such as our bodies) or another.

In responding to this query I noted that recent research (reported in the Guardian Newspaper) adds to the evidence that substances contained in many common plastics, including rubber used to make clogs, are absorbed through skin contact. (The Guardian Newspaper also produced a special report called “Chemical World” a few years back that is still relevant).

However, the main problem with the chemicals is that not enough of them have been properly tested for health effects, and the result is that we only regulate chemicals that we know about. A classic example is BPA, a chemical additive found in bottled water containers, baby bottles and the like. Last year mounting evidence about adverse health effects from BPA caused it to be withdrawn from the market.

The long term solution to this problem is hatching in the Green Chemistry movement, which is aiming to put the burden of proof of safe chemicals on the manufacturers. Currently a chemical is innocent until proven guilty, however, there are simply too many chemicals and, based on the evidence we do have, no reason to assume their innocence. Proposed green chemistry policies also recognize that health problems might arise for interactive, multiple exposures.

Schools and chemicals

In confronting the school I also had some evidence to hand. Children are more susceptible to environmental contaminants because they breath more, relatively, than adults and they behave in ways that put them in closer contact with their surroundings (crawling on the floor, putting fingers in mouths etc.). Poor indoor air quality can result from a combination of factors, such as poor ventilation, chemical emissions from new construction and finishing materials, mold (particularly in carpets) and so forth.

Increasingly research is showing a positive link between good indoor air quality and better student health, behavior, attendance, and academic performance. More broadly, sustainable design in schools is showing similar benefits (particularly air quality in association with daylighting). For example, recently completed, sustainably designed high schools in Oregon (by Boora Architects) are showing these benefits.

In addition, there are several organizations concerned with school design, and not only indoor air quality. The Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) has a good report on indoor air quality on its website, along with other resources. Together with the state of California, CHPS tested a number of materials for off-gassing of chemicals, and the findings are also available on the CHPS website in the Low Emitting Materials Table. In the UK there is a similar oganization, the CIBSE schools design group.

Another group concerned about schools, environmental contaminants, and health is the Children’s Environmental Health Network. Their report “ABCs of Healthy Schools” details many areas of concern for new school building as well as finding and eliminating problems in existing settings. The American Architectural Foundation also hosts the “Great Schools by Design” program that publishes a number of reports on their findings.

An Activist Challenge

With chemicals the main challenge is what we don’t know. There are some things we do know, such as some of the air quality or platicizer issues mentioned above, and where possible we can aim to make those problems and solutions more widely visible, and to disrupt routine practices that make use of bad chemicals. The struggle in this regard is that many of these bad chemicals are still legal, and many of the practices, such as putting children in an improperly ventilated new classroom, is also within regulations. My son’s school is “looking into” the issue, but it comes back to the point that as long as it meets regulation, there is little justification for remediation.

Here it makes sense to join up with groups, such as those mentioned above, that are already working on these issues. I’m reminded of a quotation from architect Teddy Cruz who, working on an affordable housing project with a nonprofit housing group, noted that part of the design process was explicitly political–to find a way to change regulation, “the project became a political instrument to change code” and the construction became a political framework.* But this kind of work is not contained within a single project. Cruz comments that although he has built a number of buildings, it takes time to build a political position.

For the many problems we don’t know about, we may need to consider more old fashioned collective action. For example, if you are a member of a professional design association (even if you’re not), urge your association to support green chemistry legislation so that individual consumers and designers are not stuck trying to find research to determine the safety of any given chemical.

* (see Journal of Architectural Education 2007, 60(4), “Introduction” and page 8 )

Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable by Nathan Shedroff (Rosenfeld Media 2009)

There is much to like in Nathan Shedroff’s new book, Design is the Problem, which is a survey of sustainable design approaches that can be applied across the lifecycle of products. Shedroff also provides contextual and background information about sustainable design in a business context. The book succeeds at covering a wide range of concepts relevant to a designer or business person who wants to learn about sustainable design. In reviewing the book I noticed three main things about it:

– It’s a really useful survey of methods and approaches.
– The style of the book may affect how you can use it.
– Regarding activism, there’s an interesting tension running under the surface.

In this review I look at these three aspects more closely.

Good Survey

In looking at both approaches to sustainability generally (for example, what it is, how it’s measured) and at methods (such as design for efficiency, buying local, or design for disassembly) Shedroff usefully goes further than the norm. For example, he goes beyond environmental concerns to look at social and economic indicators for sustainability. From an activist standpoint, Shedroff includes a remarkably interesting list of criteria used in social investment screening, noting that all of the issues “become the focus of protest at some point.” Here is yet another angle on the value of activism to design!

Shedroff also goes beyond the “three Rs” (reduce, reuse and recycle) to consider “Restore” in which he discusses systems. He closes with a section on “Process” which also starts to weave together and support some of the previous, more check-listy sections, by looking at innovation, development, and corporate reporting of results. Another good aspect of the book is Shedroff’s frank, conversational tone, reminding readers that there are no easy answers to difficult challenges. His range of examples also covers many different kinds of products, such as tools, garments, electronics, vehicles, food, luggage and so forth.

Where he succeeds best is in encouraging readers to step back and see systems, bigger questions and contexts, while tying these ideas to relevant user/customer experiences.

screen captures from the PDF version of the book, Design is the Problem

The Style of the book

The book’s tone and content clearly make it the writing equivalent to “business casual” attire. Perhaps the author and publisher thought this stance would be compromised by detailed notes and references, but for whatever reason, sources for many of the book’s assertions are weak and potentially compromise the book’s usefulness. As an author myself I know how difficult it is to balance “notation” with the flow of reading, to decide which assertions require notation, and to manage and accurately credit sources. In the end it is always difficult to get the balance right and ultimately it depends on the readers.

A few examples illustrate this issue. Consider the section on usability, where the author presents a diagram on the levels of meaning and follows it with a list of the 15 core meaning attributes. No source for these is given. In discussing product take-back programs, Shedroff asserts, “the packaging redesign (and material savings) that was necessary under these conditions [in Germany] was duplicated in places even without the same taxes and laws.” But there is no source to indicate what “places” these might be. In the disassembly section there is a list of techniques but no sources for any of them or for the general topic of disassembly. A list of general resources at the end of the book, though useful, doesn’t correspond to chapters (such as “disassembly”) in a way that would help the reader further explore the topic.

For readers seeking general inspiration, the lack of notes and sources is not an issue. But the problem is that the book will serve most readers as a “reference.” If I’m a practicing designer and I want to investigate the packaging or disassembly further, I have to start from scratch. Yet surely Shedroff had sources that he used to develop these sections of the book. Why not share them? If there aren’t many sources (which I suspect is sometimes the case) then it’s also helpful for the reader to know. Similarly if I’m teaching or if I’m a student, I’d like to have more evidence with which to follow up the various claims and methods described in the book. As Shedroff himself acknowledges, there is still lot of debate around sustainability and that makes evidence more important.

The index is also weak for a book that is meant to serve as a reference. For example, although watches are mentioned, “watch” is not in the index. Similarly snap-fit and snap-on issues are mentioned, but “snap” is not in the index. The searchable, PDF version of the book solves the problem and is included with the purchase of the paperback…but you have to be at your computer to use it.

On the good side the book has short “chapters” presented in a clear, well-organized table of contents that make the methods and approaches themselves easy to find.

screen captures from the PDF version of the book, Design is the Problem

Interesting tension

From an activist perspective, Shedroff’s book is perhaps most interesting for how it tries to navigate the tension between what businesses can do and what actually needs to be done. Businesses can be activists in the way they use design. But there is a gap where the capacity (and willingness?) of businesses to advocate or act on sustainability ends and the interests and mechanisms (democracy, social movements, etc.) of wider society are necessary.

This tension manifests itself in the book, particularly in the contrast between the beginning and ending, which are by turns alarmist and revolutionary, and the central core of the book. At the beginning we find community resiliency compared with terrorism and rhetorical questions about reducing the world’s population in any socially acceptable way. Yet the core of the book carries the message: “we must change—but not too much.” Shedroff comments that, “getting too far [ahead] of your customers or the market can be more disastrous than being too far behind.”

Case studies such as Cliff Bar and Apple Computer highlight how the companies undertake sustainability work, but covertly, to avoid “castigation from environmental groups.” In a BP case study Shedroff presents the lesson as “be ready to offer more information,” a recommendation quite far from the transparency that most public agencies and activists would prefer (consider the green chemistry movement).

The book also resists investigating lifestyle changes even when they are quite obvious—do without a certain material, don’t eat a certain food. In these cases Shedroff tries to stick with the science of the comparison rather than stepping back to the societal level. For example in a discussion of buying locally, he presents the case of lamb and the counterintuitive result that “lamb grown in New Zealand and shipped to England had a lower environmental footprint than lamb raised in England.” What about not eating lamb?

In laying out the scope of problems and the systems view, Shedroff seems to argue for transformation. He wants to see business, and designers within business, as central change agents, but the “stop short” nature of the book, which counsels reform, shows how limited businesses ultimately are. Emerging “social” elements (such as lifestyle changes, social enterprise, social innovation, and social movements) will probably ultimately drive transformation and outpace what business alone can do.

Positive Recommendation

I like Shedroff’s book as a very useful collection of information in one place. I wish he had been bolder with respect to the business context and more thorough in his notation. But perhaps we can see the book as trying to meet people where they are and take them forward. That’s a good step.