water supplies
Air pollution
Toxic pollutions (including carcinogens, acid rain, and the by-products of industrial and agricultural chemicals)
Over-concentration of substances (too much of even good materials, in too high a concentration, or in the wrong places, are just as toxic as harmful materials)
Resource depletion (such as oil or water)
Destruction of eco-services (such as the environment’s ability to clean air and water, and shade us from harmful ultraviolet rays)
For all of these issues that affect the environment, they all directly affect human health as much as they affect the health of plant, animal, and other life in nature.
The stress our activities have placed on the environment by our population has endangered not only specific species, but whole systems. Food, water, and energy are intimately interconnected, although our policies treat them as separate and unrelated. If you’re interested in the more details on this topic, a great place to start is the U.N. Millennium Assessment at www.millenniumassessment.org.
Social Vitality
To be considered sustainable and just, many designers require products to have a positive impact on the society they are serving (as well as those who helped create them). Product planning must embrace the concept of stakeholder involvement and incorporate social responsibility. Most people in the West are appalled and embarrassed when they find that products they’ve purchased were made with child or slave labor. Certainly, these aren’t values they promote in their own communities. However, most never bother to inquire whether these conditions exist for the goods they buy and merely wait for the media to inform them of what does or doesn’t reflect their social values. Consumers often rely on assumptions that companies they trust—especially, large, known companies—wouldn’t sell such goods, but this assumption is often a mistake.
For example, it’s not acceptable to most people for a disposable diaper to be considered sustainable if it’s dangerous or detrimental to the environment. However, it’s also not acceptable, for many, if that product is dangerous to the people who use it. To still more, it can’t be sustainable if those making it are at risk. Still others question whether the product itself truly fulfills a sustainable role in society.
… all communities and individuals have different social values.
To complicate this further, all communities and individuals have different social values. It’s impossible for a company to offer solutions that satisfy everyone. So they often don’t bother satisfying anything but the law. Smaller companies will sometimes specialize in offerings for customers with specific social values (such as religious restrictions), and our governments (at all levels) will often legislate certain standards that a majority can agree upon, but this is often not enough. We’ll see in the next chapter the myriad social issues in this space, and you’ll understand the difficulty organizations have trying to satisfy customers’ social concerns.
Social concerns are issues for sustainable designers—and there are a lot of them. Some affect corporate policy—either for our own firms or our clients. Others operate at the product, service, or event level and govern the design of such solutions. All require careful cooperation with a variety of experts in other roles, including executives, engineers, marketers, and managers of all types (hiring, operations, finance, sales, etc.).
These are also issues of vision and mission for a company—whether a design firm, a client, or the design department within a larger corporation. This is where designers must learn to be strategic and communicate to business leaders in business language. Designers are often disempowered—frequently by their own doing. When designers fail to understand the issues, vocabulary, and concerns of business leaders, they’re not equipped to participate in strategic discussions that decide the organization’s mission, vision, goals, or offerings. They must be content dealing with the results of these decisions at the implementation (or tactical) level and design the best solution they can that fits the already-specified parameters. Instead, designers should seek to involve themselves in the strategic discussions that determine not only what the offerings’ parameters are but what to offer the market in the first place. This is where designers can have the most impact. (More discussion of this is in Chapter 16, “Innovating Solutions.”)
Financial Vitality
For sure, innovative solutions, no matter how sustainable, can’t be effective if they aren’t financially viable. While designers, traditionally, eschew these considerations or assume others are “on top of them,” this further disempowers their work. Currently, the economy is stacked against sustainable solutions because it doesn’t recognize or value the true cost (that which totals social and environmental costs in addition to financial costs) of the products and services that are created, deployed, and disposed of. This makes it even more difficult to design in a sustainable fashion. However, those designers who understand the mechanisms that support or challenge the products and services they develop, will find more opportunities to have innovative ways of solving challenges at all levels of sustainability (environmental and social as well).
Currently, the economy is stacked against sustainable solutions because it doesn’t recognize or value the true cost (that which totals social and environmental costs in addition to financial costs) of the products and services that are created, deployed, and disposed of.
As I said earlier in this chapter, at the heart of sustainability is efficiency, and this always makes economic sense. Designers who reduce the amount of energy or materials in their solutions are inherently making more sustainably—financially—viable results. In this way, we can often take on more challenges across the array of sustainable issues and still deliver financially attractive answers.
But financial viability means more than just a better bottom line. As we’ve seen recently in the global financial markets of fall 2008, lack of transparency and accountability can create whole financial systems that aren’t real, sustainable, or viable. The basics of supply and demand, credits and debits, loans and savings weren’t at issue here (although even these have their problems). Instead, a shadow world of unaccountable value was created and then allowed to grow unsustainably until the entire house of cards came crashing down. In the wake, the good investments and value suffers along with the bad. This, too, is a lack of sustainable design. Those who developed these mechanisms didn’t have a systems perspective, lacked ethics and accountability, and developed a system that wasn’t healthy for any system, let alone the financial system itself. This is what can happen when sustainability isn’t part of the criteria in a design and development process.
… financial viability means more than just a better bottom line. As we’ve seen recently in the global financial markets, lack of transparency and accountability can create whole financial systems that aren’t real, sustainable, or viable.
An Ecosystem of Stakeholders
While we’ve traditionally considered the important players in the development process to be the client (or company) and the customer, these are not the only two actors to consider. The design industry has recently started to recognize the importance of deep customer understanding (often called design or user research) in the development of successful solutions. However, from a systems perspective, there are other stakeholders to be aware of as well.
Traditional approaches to business define shareholders as the only population to consider when making business decisions. More enlightened approaches to business include other groups, such as employees and customers. The most effective organizations, however, have learned to consider input, needs, and cooperation with suppliers, distributors, retailers, and other business partners throughout the supply chain. You can see where this is going. The more systems-oriented you are and the more you consider the full spectrum of sustainable issues (managing and using human,