What do sustainable designers need?
What do designers need to design sustainable products?
There are many analytic tools out there. SDTC's STAR process and Okala are just two. It's been made evident to me that engineers take to these tools easily enough. I would wager that generic designers could do the same - assuming they can use excel and look numbers up in a table.
The problem with analytic tools is that they're after the (design) fact - you use them to figure out what you did wrong. Our goal ought to be to figure out how to do it right the first time. In a perfect world, Okala wouldn't be needed cuz you'd know it was as good as it was going to get.
While I think Okala is especially interesting and worth 'pushing' in some way, the main question is: how does one define 'design activities' such that there's some guarantee of sustainability from the outset.
I also think that it's not that big a problem methodologically, but it is a big problem politically & psychologically. Designing is a kind of problem solving where you balance a bunch of different factors that conflict (e.g. cost v quality). None of the design methods that I'm aware of make specific commitments to a defined set of factors. This means that all we have to do is add 'sustainability' as a factor. In the case of some methods, it's literally that simple.
Assume we could do that, and have a design process that embeds sustainability. The real problem is convincing people that its a good/valid process. Using it would be a 'risk.' To knock that down, we actually have to apply the process to the design of things and then analyzing the designs (with Okala or other things) to demonstrate it.
If we can demonstrate that the process works, then people will be more likely to accept it.
So I see the following research program:
- Establish a design process with sustainability built in.
- Publish it broadly.
- Find industries willing to let a 'third party' (e.g. a school like Ryerson, or a consortium of schools) help them design things using the process as pilot projects. Also run workshops and courses where the process is applied to real problems.
There is one problem in developing the process: decision making on matters of sustainability is context-dependent, and the context-sensitive information needed for such decisions isn't quite there yet. For instance, decisions about how to treat rainwater will depend whether you're in Arizona or Athabasca...or anywhere else for that matter.
Ideally what we'd want in this case is a method that evaluates a design with respect to a certain context. From a computer-y or mathematical point of view, the method would be like a procedure that takes the design as an argument, along with other key parameters that describe the context, and produce an evaluative result - like an impact factor. You could use the same method to then describe the same design used in different settings.
If this is a worthwhile goal, the question is: How do we understand what goes into that procedure? I think the answer will come little by little, and by doing examples: perform manually an analysis of the same design in two different settings/contexts. Look for similarities and differences. Come up with a heuristic that applies. Now do it again, for another product or design. Look for more heuristics. As you collect more heuristics, you can start to study the heuristics themselves, and find (hopefully) universal principles. This will allow the overall algorithm to start to get integrated.
...just some late night thoughts.
Comments
I also like the emphasis on practice, not just more creativity. We need practical ideas that improve design solutions in all aspects of the Triple Bottom Line (society, environment, economics). We need information, methods and tools that help designers reduce risk and navigate what to some will be unfamiliar territory.
To test out different processes, could we run a bunch of tournaments? We could randomly assign participants to red and blue teams. One team is provided information about the new process. Both teams are given design challenges to solve over a short period of time. Students observe the process. At the completion, a jury evaluates the designs on innovation, practicality, and impact on the Triple Bottom Line.
I am not sure I understand the 2nd last paragraph. Are you evaluating different ways of doing (or adapting) a design to different contexts, or are you specifically looking at how we should evaluate a design within its context?
In the last paragraph, are you proposing that we study how a design is sensitive to context, so as to provide guidelines to designers?
A pre-requisite to all of this work is determining what design process different designers are using today (both what they say and what they actually do). Where do their ideas come from? What parts of the existing process are likely to be amenable to change? I think one of the challenges to introducing 'context' is that it means a lot more work, compared to taking the last design and tweaking it for a new client.
"sustainability as a source of ideas" == biomimetics & natural design. No? And the methodological basis of this is analogical reasoning.
I'm not sure we need to reduce risk. There will always be "early adopters." If we get something into their hands, and they succeed, then the risk will be perceived to be lessened by others. My concern is that resources invested in "reducing risk" might be better invested in making sure the early adopters are happy.
The tournament idea is okay, but I like the notion of a "design observatory." There's a colleague, Ben Hicks at UBath, who's got this idea to create a multinational facility that will hire designers to actually design real solutions to real problems from industry. They will be meticulously observed and everything they do will be recorded. Their design solution will be "sold" to the client for, like, a dollar. The anonymized data of what happened will be collated and made available freely to design researchers all over the world.
Now take the same idea, but have 2 teams working on the same problem: one using a "standard" process, and the other using something that's been tweaked in some way. In this way, the data derived for the "experiments" is much more robust.
Re: 2nd last paragraph. Consider paper v. plastic bags. It depends on the context which is better. If you have a paper recycling facility up the street, you'd get one assessment. If you have a plastic recycler up the street, things could be different. The process of doing the assessment is the same, but you get different answers. Another example: treating stormwater in Arizona is one thing; treating it in Toronto is another, even if the same method is used to decide. We can't adapt a design to a context without knowing how to adapt it, which means we have to assess it in the "new" context.
In the last paragraph, it's not the design I'm interested in, but the assessment method. Say we use the Method X, which attributes 100 impact points to the use of Material M, regardless of "context" (includes geographic location, available technology, economic situation, etc). In point of fact, in one context, a more accurate value might be 90 points while in another context, 110 points might be better. If all the factors changed this way - and I don't doubt that they do - then the assessments we can do today really aren't that accurate.
What I'm worried about is that if impact factors as they currently exist are used extensively, and if the factors turn out to be wrong (in specific settings) and lead to bad decisions, then the general cause of LCA and related methods will be seriously harmed.
A single impact factor as we know them today is in fact a variable defined by a function of the context. What I'm suggesting is that we need to start figuring out what those functions are.
Understanding the design process is at once really easy, and really hard. The really easy version is this: (1) understand the problem, (2) conceptualize alternatives, (3) choose one concept, (4) flesh out the concept until it can be implemented/manufactured/manifested/whatever. The really hard version is: every designer does it differently, so we can never really know, to significant detail.
What designers still aren't ready to accept is that they're all doing the same thing. But it is all the same thing.
Sustainability fits into all 4 stages I noted above, but in different ways. I'm convinced that the trick is to show people that design processes are fine as they are. It's the designers that have to change.
Hence the title of the post.