Living Principles is proud to support Compostmodern ’11 and our desire to help designers create a sustainable world. As a supporter we are offering a 10% discount to Living Principles readers wishing to attend Compostmodern ‘11.  Just use the code PRTNRCM11 when you register at www.compostmodern.org and get 10% off the professional rate (does not apply to AIGA member rate).

Compostmodern is a biennial conference that engages designers, sustainability professionals, artists and entrepreneurs to collaborate in realizing a more environmentally, culturally and economically sustainable world.

Alissa Walker, the noted design and architecture writer for Fast Company, GOOD and Dwell will moderate day one of the conference mainstage, which will feature nineteen cutting edge design thinkers including Yves Behar, designer of One Laptop per Child; Bruce Mau, author of Massive Change; Scott Thomas, Design Director at Obama for America; and Jenifer Willig, Global CMO of (RED).

The second day Unconference, will offer opportunities to chart your course for sustainable action by engaging in group discussions supported by Unconference fellows, including: John Bielenberg, Partner C2 and Founder of Project M; Phil Hamlett, Founder of Compostmodern and Director of Graduate Graphic Design, Academy of Art University; and Gaby Brink, Founder and Creative Director, Tomorrow Partners and Co-Author, The Living Principles.

Join us to see how your design choices can nourish our economy while creating a sustainable world.

Remember to use the special Living Principles code, PRTNRCM11, to get your 10% discount. See you there!

www.compostmodern.org

We have a lot of faith in the abstract. We spend hours a day dancing fingers across a bunch of keys or gliding palms across a rectangle at our desks, sending off snippets to the “cloud,” spinning notes into the electronic ether, and checking in on the numbers of our virtual wallets. We buy promises we hope we won’t have to use (insurance), comfort that’ll keep us from broke when we’re old – if we’re lucky (investments), and ideas, nicely bundled, that we trust will move us forward (education).

But when this abstractness pertains to the consequences of our collective action, we have a much harder time of it.

Recalculating the Math

How to even begin dealing with “externalities” – the value of things not translated into price?

In the Newsweek article “How Much Does a Gallon of Oil Cost?”, the recent Gulf oil spill is a reminder of how easy it is for things to go unaccounted:

“Most of us would call the BP spill a tragedy. Ask an economist what it is, however, and you’ll hear a different word: “externality.” An externality is a cost that’s not paid by the people using the good that creates the cost. The spill is going to cost fishermen, it’s going to cost the ecosystem, and it’s going to cost the area’s tourism industry. But that cost won’t be paid by the people who wanted that oil for their cars. It’ll fall on taxpayers, on Gulf Coast residents who need a new job, on the poisoned wildlife.

That means that the gasoline you’re buying at the pump is—stick with me here—too cheap. The price you pay is less than the product’s true cost. And it’s not just catastrophic spills and dramatic disruptions in the Middle East that add to the price. Gasoline has so many hidden costs that there’s a cottage industry devoted to tallying them up. At least the ones that can be tallied up.”

Turns out that the externality issue is still in need of good solutions. According to a recent Wired UK article, the new wave of “ecosystem service” groups, like Ecosystem Investment Partners, are trying to save natural resources by reframing them as investments because fundamentally that’s what matters in our free market world. This solution seems to cleverly skirt the question of consumption itself.

To their credit, companies have been talking implications for some time. But for a consumer, navigation remains difficult. (Think Walkers chips’ 2007 attempt to speak about carbon emission decreases directly to consumers through an “on-pack carbon reduction label.”) By creating relative rankings of the best and worst products around health, safety, and the environment, sites like GoodGuide are helping consumers navigate the shopping aisle. “Better than,” is the adage here, which may be fine in the short-term, but surely there are some of us that would be kick-started into more dramatic action if we could envision how much of the planet’s future we were eating up.

Designing for Change

So, is it artists, designers and storytellers who indeed are best suited to conveying true impact, navigating that delicate balance between having people turn-on rather than shut-down?

Bruce Mau, through Massive Change, was among the first in the design community to broach impact in a significant way, through a touring exhibition that, according to his website, “shattered attendance records in Vancouver, Toronto, and Chicago.” Other firms, like the NYC-based Zago have done notable, smaller-scale work, like Nine Planets Wanted. And in her last memorial, What is Missing, artist Maya Lin hopes the keening and humming of life across this planet will lodge in our to our minds and stoke us to action.

Is it just paralysis in the face of absolutely overwhelming issues that’s holding us back? Granted these are issues so complex and layered that perhaps we are allowed some time to stew. But the stewing feels no good after a while. Perhaps we take our cue from cause-related campaigns, like Project (RED) or Campaign for Obama, where action is parsed in a way that feels manageable and empowering, whether buying something or becoming a volunteer, rather than underscoring how small and impotent we may actually feel.

Staking out Ownership

Complicating the externality issue is the idea of ownership. It’s tempting to blame and surely in this case of BP and the Gulf, it’s warranted, but whether that will get us anywhere meaningful in the long-term is debatable. BP has to pay some form of penance, but relying on that may be relinquishing defeat to a system that’s keeping us from seeing the whole truth.

A June article in Harvard Business Review tracks the game of culpability pass-along:

“Initially BP accepted responsibility for the incident. But as the scale of the disaster grew, company leadership switched gears. By the time executives were dragged in front of Congress on May 11, a full three weeks after the blowout occurred, they shifted into externalization overdrive. BP blamed Transocean for ignoring “anomalous” pressures in the well pipe. Transocean executives, in turn, blamed faulty decision-making by BP and sloppy well cementing by Halliburton. Halliburton leadership used the Nuremburg defense and claimed they were only following BP’s orders. Witness the first law of externalization: when everyone is at fault, no one is at fault.” 

We all intuitively know that last bit to well – that it’s much easier to get someone else take care of it, than each look the problem straight in the eye ourselves. But in fact there are visionaries doing just that. 

John Francis, profiled on Majora Carter’s “Promised Land,” talks about the Bay Area oil spill forty years ago that became the catalyst for a life change:

“In 1971, in January, I saw an oil spill in San Francisco Bay. Two tankers collided near the bridge. Seems like no matter how far you drove, that the smell stuck with you. I decided a little while after that experience to give up riding in motorized vehicles. So I stopped riding in motorized vehicles and started walking…I thought that I could give my community a gift on my birthday…and that gift would be of my silence.”

Francis didn’t ride in vehicles for 22 years, and spent 17 of those years in silence. During that time, he crisscrossed the States on foot to earn the nickname “planetwalker” while earning a Ph.D. in land management. He took on an externality and essentially internalized it, redirecting it into a force for good, reinterpreting it into something profound. With wit, perseverance, and wisdom. 

Maybe there’s a lesson in that for the rest of us.

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The upcoming AIGA Compostmodern conference will be held January 22-23, 2011, in San Francisco and will feature notable speakers, including Dara O’Rourke, co-founder of GoodGuides, Bruce Mau, Chief Creative Officer of Bruce Mau Design, Jenifer Willig, Global Chief Marketing Director at (RED), and Scott Thomas, Design Director at Obama for America. Early-bird pricing has been extended until December 25. For more information, please visit http://compostmodern.org.

The second half of this decade has ushered in valiant experiments in consumption. There’s living off six pieces of clothing for a month. Swearing to buy nothing for a year. A year-long diet of locally-grown food.

All well-warranted insinuations that buying stuff is something to avoid, at almost all cost.

Even if we remind ourselves that we’re increasingly defining ourselves more through experiences than the things we own, it’s hard to ignore the fact that as a nation, we’re hardcore shoppers. According to the sobering online film The Story of Stuff, we spend 3-4 times as many hours shopping than our European counterparts, with only about 1% of what is bought staying on our hands for more than six months.

Reconsidering “More is More”

After WWII, product designers were directed to create things that would stop working in the name of economic expansion. This sort of “planned obsolescence” had consumers going back to buy the same, or similar, products over and over. Even now, things like print cartridges, fast fashion, and MP3 players, are designed to have relatively short functional lives.

Bruce Sterling, “visionary in residence” at Art Center College of Design and founder of the Viridian Design Movement (precursor to the weblog Worldchanging) suggests in his Last Viridian Design Lecture that our obsession with stuff has deep socioeconomic roots, but that we may have turned the corner to a new age:

“In earlier, less technically advanced eras…material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship…They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors…So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It’s not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.”

Designing for Deeper Meaning

The resurgence of craft and artisanship is surely one expression of this new era. There seems to be considerable thirst for more meaningful or satisfying relationships with objects generally. The meteoric success of most anything Apple seems to be just one proof point.

In his TED talk “Designing Objects that Tell Stories,” Yves Behar, award-winning product designer and founder of fuseproject, speaks about this new “humanism.” From Puma packaging that brilliantly strips out excess material to leave the buyer with the gift of a bag, to the “XO” laptop for One Laptop per Child, to a energy efficient Leaf Lamp that redefines lighting, design becomes a way to articulate new values like sustainability, empowerment, beauty and functionality. He says:

“As designers we need to really think about how we can create a different relationship with our work and the world…I think it’s the values that we put into these projects that ultimately create the greater value.”

This is not agnostic talk. The hope is that design can continue to help reorienting us away from a strict focus on production systems we’ve spent the last hundred years investing in, and potentially back to the true meaning of things – to what we actually need and want.

Tapping Community

Combined with a healthy questioning and reexamination of objects themselves, is deciding when and how we are willing to interact. Buying sometimes can lead to a sort of indentured servitude to the inanimate. As Bruce Sterling puts it:

“The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.”

Micki Krimmel, founder of NeighborhoodGoods, has created a community lending site that allows people to lend and borrow things from friends and friends-to-be. This borrowing movement, profiled in a fairly recent NYT article, has been dubbed by author Rachel Botsman as “collaborative consumption,” or by co-founder of firm, SnapGoods, an “access economy” where “access trumps ownership.”

The beauty of these ventures lies in the fact that they all start with very pragmatic motivations, like “I need a blender for that BBQ on Saturday, but I don’t want to go out and buy one,” or “Maybe I could make a little extra cash lending out my forklift,” but then spin out to loftier benefits, like a strengthened communities and resource conservation.

This idea that stuff is an impediment to a more happy and fulfilling life is something we’ve been wrestling with, on and off, for a while. After all, Thoreau’s two-year experiment in self-sufficiency and a simple life in Walden was quite a while back, in 1845. Though the world is no longer big enough for all of us to have our own pond, what we’ve been seeing recently have been some increasingly elegant alternatives.

Not a bad way to go if we’re earnest about moving towards redemption on this planet.

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The upcoming AIGA Compostmodern conference will be held January 22-23, 2011, in San Francisco and will feature notable speakers, including Yves Behar, award-winning industrial designer and founder of fuseproject, Miki Krimmel, founder of NeighborGoods.net and co-author of “Worldchanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century,” and Jonah Sacks, founder of Free Range Studios and one of the lead writers of the “The Story of Stuff.” Early bird tickets on sale until November 30^th.  For more information, please visit http://compostmodern.org.

At the next Compostmodern, we’ll continue the conversation: What are the most innovative solutions on the path to sustainability? What are new tools designers can use? Where should designers focus their attention to have the greatest impact? We’ll be joined by an amazing group of speakers, talking about everything from storytelling to democratizing design to collaborating for sustainability. At the unconference on day two, you’ll be leading the conversation. We want the event to not only inspire, but be a catalyst to true action. For all of the talk about sustainability in popular culture today, we know that we haven’t come close to solving the major challenges we face yet, from future water shortages to climate change. Designers are critical in helping the world find the solutions we need. 

Have you attended Compostmodern before? If this is your first year, what do you hope to learn and share? Please add your comments below. And join us in January. Early-bird tickets are available through November 30.

Though conceptually beautiful, for most consumers and businesses it still remains somewhat of an enigma – an abstract, multi-faceted puzzle of a term that still seems to miss a truly compelling unifying explanation, a holistic flavor, or a tidy diagram that comes with a suite of checkboxes and a balance sheet.

The inclusiveness of the sustainability umbrella is also a curse.

Most people agree that there are at least three dimensions to the word – environmental, economic, and social. This Venn triad lends itself to appropriate complexity, but also invites healthy amounts of skepticism and wrangling.

A double-check on Wikipedia, reports:

“Sustainability is perceived, at one extreme, as nothing more than a feel-good buzzword with little meaning or substance but, at the other, as an important but unfocused concept like “liberty” or “justice”. It has also been described as a “dialogue of values that defies consensual definition.”

Compounding the issue, businesses and consumers may be looking at sustainability quite differently. For many businesses, sustainability discussions often seem focused – perhaps most appropriately on greening supply chains, optimizing product life cycles, and thinking about carbon offsets, but if you talk with Kierstin De West, founder of a sustainability brand and research consultancy Ci, that’s not how consumers think about things:

“Sustainability…has on many levels, been hijacked by green marketing and “buy green”, it’s important to note that for consumers, sustainability is defined by a series of issues that go beyond green and fall into consumers’ Four Pillars of Sustainability™: Social, Environmental, Social and Spiritual Sustainability.”

The spiritual pillar is intriguing because it begs the need for a deeper meaning, a more resonant answer, or at least a story or myth, which still seems, in many ways, to evade us.

What are the collection of stories we need to give a sense of the full picture?

At the 2010 Sustainable Brands Conference, Marc Mathieu, founder of BeDo, Eric Park, Creative Director at Ziba Design, and John Creson, Executive Creative Director of Addis Creson, proposed the idea that sustainability could be spun around the tenents of the American Dream. Actually, that “sustainability can be rightfully married with the ideals of opportunity and freedom.”

A very simple solution, but one that seems quite elegant.

As part of their project, people were asked what they thought of when they heard the words American Dream, the interviews were captured on video. Gennay Banks, an 11th grade U.S. History teacher summed up the perspective of her students, neatly pairing the term, not with personal opportunity and getting ahead, but with, surprisingly enough, activism:

“In America, we can right the wrongs…The American Dream is being able to critique and come up with solutions…If you’re in America you should be able to recognize the problems, and the dream is that we can change those problems and we can become activists and do something about it.”

So can sustainability be repacked and framed as an extension of the American Dream? A Dream that’s been retro-fitted for the times – more about the self-sufficiency and independence that comes with personal responsibility? A sort of Opportunity and Freedom for the community-minded?

As Americans we don’t take so easily to denial, deprivation or compromise. In some ways it’s this – a sort of resilient optimism – that is our biggest strength. Gennay and her students put well, it is perhaps our “willingness to do something” that may be our saving grace.

***

The upcoming AIGA Compostmodern conference will be held January 22-23, 2011, in San Francisco and will feature notable speakers, including Marc Mathieu, former head of Global Brand Marketing at Coca-Cola and Founder of BeDo and Kierstin De West, Principle at Ci. Early bird tickets on sale until November 30th. For more information, please visit http://compostmodern.org.