Designed for life

Eye-catching or subtle, sharp or deep, good design hits home when it hooks into your values. Martin Wright and Roger East find a wide range of smart designers whose work commands attention - and respect.

Imagine a car with fumes so clean they could be pumped directly into the interior. Not a great leap of faith, considering that fuel cell vehicles, whose only exhaust emission is water, are already poised to purr off the drawing board and into the showrooms. But imagine actually doing it - to make a point.

That’s the thinking behind a new concept car, in which the water is channelled through the interior of the vehicle, flowing in sealed translucent pipes around the cabin. At least, it could be…. In practice, the closest we’ve come to it is Honda’s Kiwami, whose dreamy strips of blue liquid crystal look so aqueous that even some of the company’s own sales force initially mistook them for water. That really would have been a case of making apparent the ‘hidden beauty’ of zero-emissions - and so bringing sustainable design to the surface.

As design consultant Edwin Datschefski says: “Innovation often doesn’t come through visually - a piece of fabric made with organic cotton and natural dyes just looks like a piece of fabric, and there’s no way of telling recycled plastic from the virgin variety.” So designers such as Traid and Beyond Retro are making new clothes from old in a way which celebrates their origins - a jeans back pocket nestles cheekily across a breast; used leather belts are woven together into a hip ‘saddleback’ handbag.

Clever design can shed a fresh light on some of the more mundane aspects of sustainability, too. Take home electricity consumption. A meter which measures power use sounds deadly dull.

But mould it in the shape of a mysterious little chameleon creature (dubbed a ‘Wattbug’), which glows green when power use is optimum, but scowls and turns an angry red when you’re overdoing it - and you’ve swung the pendulum from worthy to fun. It can even be connected to the internet, allowing a virtual community of Wattbuggers to be able to exchange energy advice and so curb consumption.

And if it all sounds a little too Californian for its own good, you can take comfort from the fact that its designer, Inci Mutlu, is a 30-something woman from Turkey (www.incimutlu.com). It’s not in production yet, but it should be. But back to the Kiwami: Honda may be dipping its toe in the waters, as it were, but most new green cars are disappointingly bland.

Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing, railed against Toyota’s lack of imagination when it brought out its groundbreaking Prius hybrid: “Unlike the Beetle or Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, the Prius is not a driving billboard for itself. You could have 1,000 of these cars drive by and you'd never, ever notice it. You wouldn't notice the styling, you wouldn't notice the gas mileage or the lack of emissions - and you certainly wouldn't aspire to own one just by looking at it. I’d redesign the thing to be stunning.

Maybe a permanent bumper sticker announcing my current gas mileage on an LCD readout. The first 5,000 people who buy this car will be doing it to make a statement. And every person who does so will be making that statement to the 10,000 people who see them driving it. A virus waiting to happen.” Then there was the name itself:

“How can you tell someone about a car you're excited about if you don't even know how to pronounce it?” Ouch. To its credit, Toyota has carried out a modest redesign of the Prius, and even produced one with a blaze of leafy greenery streaking across the bodywork - a neat take on the ‘go faster flames’ of sad boy racers.

Sustainability doesn’t have to mean dull, in other words. And just as well: the days are long gone when phalanxes of green consumers would seize on anything which looked vaguely recycled. But for many designers, the whole idea of ‘designing for sustainability’ can be a turn-off: it invokes doom-laden ‘mustn’t use’ strictures and disaster limitation defensiveness - what design consultant Beatrice Otto calls “the cod liver oil perception of sustainability”.

“A lot of designers see the very idea of ‘sustainability’ as a restriction,” adds Datschefski; “they think, ‘oh god, it’s all got to be recycled stuff, I can’t use shiny, exciting new materials’.” It’s not helped by the dominant approach to sustainability among business managers.

“Life cycle analysis and similar tools aren’t designed the way designers think and work,” says Otto. “They’re more quantitative, it’s a different mindset.” All that careful assessing and quantifying, all that ISO14001-ing - it’s pretty unsexy stuff. Datschefski agrees. “It’s more about measuring progress than stimulating innovation…

Fifteen years after people really started getting excited about sustainability, so much of what goes on is just so boring.” Environmentalists, he says, are in danger of coming over as social workers, forever warning you off, telling you what not to do. It doesn’t have to be like this, of course. Far from sustainability being a brake on innovation, insists Otto, “if you shift your mindset, it can be a challenge instead”.

Chris Sherwin, ecodesign and sustainability consultant at Philips Environmental Services, agrees that it can be “a new innovation lever”, and that “looking at a product through green glasses you come across things you might not have spotted before”. The company’s drive to cut energy consumption in consumer electronics, for instance, found its most radical expression in its ‘human-powered’ wind-up portable radio. For Datschefski, “sustainability can be all about finding exciting, shiny, lighter materials”, some of which, inevitably, will be recycled. Hence Kingston University’s Recycling by Design initiative (www.recyclingbydesign.org.uk), which aims to get to the root of this perceived reluctance on the part of designers to deal in second-hand stuff.

Hence also their Rematerialise Project (www.rematerialise.org) an ambitious web-based effort to address the fact that precious few designers walk in to ask for ‘a roll of recycled propylene, please’. So instead it allows them to search for ‘plastic’ or even ‘bendy’ materials, along with a range of properties and applications. Not everyone wants to wrestle with conspicuous novelty, though.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to think too hard about it,” says Datschefski. “The product won’t sell if it’s too complicated.” Some of the most striking applications of sustainability are the simplest. Herman Miller's Aeron chair is “an icon”, says Otto, that sells on the basis of “sheer good design”.

It's well known, but “many people don't know it's sustainable as well”, thanks to its adoption of the ‘cradle-to-cradle’ approach, pioneered by US architect Bill McDonough, founder of the Institute for Sustainable Design. The materials it’s made of (most of them recycled), and the way it’s put together, mean it can be easily repaired or disassembled to make new products. One of the simplest of all design tricks can be summed up in that familiar mantra: Less is more.’

Ever since Amory Lovins’s Factor Four catalogued the massive wins, in terms of money as well as resources, waiting to be plucked by doing more with less, dematerialisation has been the holy grail. It pops up in unlikely places: American Airlines’ gleaming sheen is achieved by simply doing without paint: the polished metal design not only stands out from the crowd on the tarmac; it also cuts down on fuel (paint is surprisingly heavy), and emissions. Lateral thinking is almost a prerequisite here.

So the Soundbug transforms any surface into a speaker; Air Packaging Technologies’ ‘bag within a bag’ cleverly substitutes a cushion of air for layers of costly protective packaging; a web-savvy generation downloads its music digitally to by-pass the need for a physical purchase [see ‘On the rebound’]; and armchair designers design armchairs without glue. Dematerialisation really comes into its own in the developing world. A ‘solar cooker’, which uses the sun’s heat rather than firewood, saves poor people money, stops them getting ill from breathing in the fumes of smoky stoves (which kill over five million children every year) and leaves trees standing (where they can carry on their vital design functions of protecting water resources and preventing soil erosion - see Small is Powerful, GF37).

It might not be a consumer icon, but if you’re struggling to survive on a dusty African hillside, it’s pretty damn cool. As is the Ariel Magicare ‘one dollar washing machine’: a gloriously simple solution to the brutal grind of handwashing clothes on rocks or washboards, which can leave women’s hands bruised and blistered by detergent, and means the toughest cotton shirts end up in shreds long before their time. Developed by the Intermediate Technology Development Group and Ariel, it has sold over nine million units from Morocco to the Philippines.

Designed for resurrection
Cool design may make sustainability fashionable - but fashion is by nature ephemeral. So where does this leave the principle of designing for durability? “It is time for a new generation of products that can age slowly and in a dignified way, that can become our partners in life and support our memories,” declares design guru Ezio Manzini, lyrically, if optimistically.

He’d approve of Stokke’s Tripp Trapp chair, which ‘evolves’ from a child seat suitable for babies, to something substantial enough for a teenager to lounge in. Or, at the simplest level, the bags featured on the Rethink Rubbish website (www.rethinkrubbish.com), eye-catchingly fashionable when new (though fashioned from the old and discarded), yet capable of becoming the close companion of a thousand outings.

But if the product itself can’t last, or its owner doesn’t want it to, there’s always ‘design for disassembly’ - a growing trend, spurred by EU directives compelling car and electronics manufacturers to take back their products at the end of their useful life. Kodak’s ‘disposable’ cameras may sound like the ultimate in throwaway culture, but in practice all but a tenth of their components are reassembled into new ones.

The ultimate goal is products which disassemble themselves on demand into handily reusable components. Brunel University’s Active Disassembly project is working on the development of ‘smart materials’ which will reassume their original shape when heated to a certain temperature. It sounds far-fetched, but researchers believe it could be a practical - and highly cost-effective - means of avoiding the vast wastage involved in consumer electronics products, to name but one area of application.

You can even imagine a future in which an ‘end of life’ plant sits in an industrial estate on the edge of town, with lots of nanobots busily disassembling a load of discarded kit at one end, and spitting out separate chunks of raw materials ready to be remade into new products at the other. Less hi-tech, but no less imaginative, is Julienne Dolphin-Wilding’s kit furniture, made of offcuts from yew and other salvaged wood, formed into blocks which craftily interlock to produce a chair, or stool, or table….

When you’ve outgrown one, you can ‘unpack’ it and make another. Then there’s Tom Dixon’s Eco Tableware: (www.tomdixon.net) plates, bowls and beakers made of a robust plastic whose earthy origins - organic waste from coconut, rice or bamboo processing - means they can simply be composted back into the soil when the owner tires of them. Recycled, as it were, with maximum prejudice - which needn’t be the fate of all home comforts.

Inventive designers like Herman Miller and the Wilkhahn company offer periodic refurbishments including an ‘aesthetic makeover’ for the furniture they sell. Result? They retain the loyalty of their customers, who in turn get what to all intents and purposes is a fresh set of sofas every few years, and kiss goodbye to that familiar ‘Jesus! Where are we going to dump this ugly hulk of a stained old armchair?’ angst….

Despite scepticism among some that designers could embrace sustainability without sacrificing style, there’s no shortage of shining examples in action. The question is, how to take it further? It’s partly down to the way we train designers.

Sustainability, says Otto, could sit very well within a course structure like the innovation module on an MBA - and it should be integrated into mainstream design education too, not confined to niche courses. So how do you excite students? ‘Design for sustainability’ might be stimulating for some - but a clanking constraint for others.

The Royal College of Art does it in an Innovation Unit. At Goldsmith’s, John Wood runs an MA in Design Futures - its very title designed to appeal to those who’d be turned off by overt greenery. But the underlying agenda, Wood insists, is very much based on fundamental ecological precepts. Interestingly, he emphasises the entrepreneurial side of design - getting the students to present their work in terms of a pitch to a potential client.

Do it for the money
There are a growing number of specialist courses out there, including an MSc at Cranfield and a BA in sustainable product design at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, while a final year sustainable design project at Bournemouth has drawn “amazing interest” from students - perhaps not unrelated to its £350 cash prize. It’s even creeping into engineering courses, with a new module on ‘engineering design for sustainable development’ on offer at Sheffield.

For schools, the picture is not so promising. Sustainability at least gets a mention in the design and technology curriculum, but, says Datschefski, there’s precious little support for the 10,000 teachers involved. Martin Charter, of the Centre for Sustainable Design, is in no doubt of the demand. “The next generation needs to have this thinking in their head already.

Expertise should be coming into companies with the graduates; they shouldn't have to be looking elsewhere for it.” The Centre has developed a ‘Smart ecoDesign’ training programme, specifically targeted at the electronics sector and its suppliers. But, cautions Chris Sherwin, keen as he may be to redesign the world, designers really aren’t in the driving seat.

“Decisions happen way before they even get to the designers,” at the level where companies determine their strategies, and - most fundamentally - where consumer demand leads the marketplace. Which responds more to economic factors - like the opportunity to save money through energy efficiency - than to environmental commitment. Business drivers, in other words, will be all important - which gives weight to a recent study by the Design Council, which found that UK manufacturers were lagging behind competitors in Sweden, Holland and Germany when it came to embracing ‘eco-conscious’ design.

As a result, they were losing out on potential markets, both now, and in a future where sustainability requirements may very well be more rigorous. According to the Council’s business director, Harry Rich, the government could do more to encourage the realisation that “designing products and services with the environment in mind does not have to be a business straightjacket”. But “staying one step ahead of legislation, instead of waiting for it to bite, could give businesses a strategy that sparks innovation, giving them the edge over the competition”.

Research by Hannah Bullock and Kath Stathers.

Beatrice Otto’s report, Searching for Solutions: An Overview of Sustainable Design, was commissioned by the Design Council

Royal College of Art, 020 7590 4345