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Sustainability update/Hong Kong views

admin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:40:37 +0000

A Value Creation Icon-o-Cast

LUNAR’s Travis Lee and John Edson talk through recent developments in sustainable design and materials, and chat about Travis’ experiences during his assignment in Hong Kong.

Recycle your old consumer electronics and help build the market for sustainable materials:

Best Buy will recycle your old electronics gear
ReCellular is a great place to recycle on old mobile phone.

Learn about LUNAR’s free Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability here.

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LUNAR presents at World Usability Day

admin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:56:17 +0000

World Usability Day 2009 will bring together 40,000 people in 180 cities in more than 43 countries to discuss this year’s theme of “Sustainability.” The event was founded in 2005 “to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use” (from their website) and on November 12th over 200 events around the world will be held in concert to raise awareness of good usability and design practice.

This year, LUNAR will be presenting in two cities on opposite sides of the world. LUNAR California Interaction Designer, Ron Goldin, will be discussing how designers can utilize emotional design for positive change in Redmond, WA at Mircrosoft. LUNAR Europe co-founder, Roman Gebhard, will be speaking at the Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum, Theresienhoehe in Munich. He will be introducing the Designers Field Guide to Sustainabilty along with real world examples to show people in the product development community how they can apply this thinking to their work.

We will be posting their talks after the event, so check back soon!

Patagonia – A Good Model for a Post Consumer Era Manufacturing Company

admin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:24:35 +0000

Manufacturing companies interested in transitioning to sustainable business models would benefit from considering what Patagonia has done. Through a combination of their values, mission, life cycle assessments, and actions, they have become pioneers on the path towards sustainability.

Patagonia’s roots were in climbing hardware (Chouinard Equipment Company in the early days.) Founded by Yvon Chouinard, a renowned climber, the company’s first move towards sustainability came in the early 1970s when it became a leader in a movement called “clean climbing.” Pitons being hammered into and removed from rock were scarring pristine faces. Although pitons made up 70% of the company’s sales, Chouinard discontinued producing them and initiated a revolution in climbing. He launched a line of aluminum hexentrics and stoppers that could be wedged into cracks in the rock and removed without damaging it. Although he took a risk by dropping pitons, Chouinard was able to change the way climbing was done without impacting his business’s revenues.

After leaving climbing hardware for outdoor clothing, Patagonia’s mission became to give “maximum attention to product quality” while “striving to do no harm” to the environment. Although Patagonia’s actions are among the most environmentally conscious of any company’s, they chose to qualify their “do harm” statement with the “striving” qualifier. This is a more realistic approach as mankind’s existence will impact the environment. The key is to ultimately minimize it to the point where it is sustainable.

Patagonia makes all their decisions within the context of the environmental crisis. Without a value like this, it’s easy for a company to forget about environmental consequences of business decisions. Although they seek immediate and dramatic changes whenever possible, they realize they must sometimes pursue an approach of incrementalism.

In 1991, Patagonia conducted a life cycle analysis of the key fabrics used in their industry. Although one would presume polyester and nylon would be the worst environmentally due to being petroleum based, cotton and wool didn’t fare much better and in some cases were worse.

They found that although cotton fields comprise only 3% of the world’s farmlands, they use 10% of the world’s insecticides production. As a result of this finding, Patagonia decided to switch to organic cotton. To expedite the change, they decided to sell “clothing made with organically grown cotton” rather than “organic clothing” as they had not yet found organic dies that met their quality standards. By compromising, Patagonia was able to immediately influence the rest of their industry to use organic cotton and help get the organic cotton farming industry on its feet.

At the time of the lifecycle analysis, Patagonia’s fleece jackets were made from virgin polyester. They switched to polyester made from recycled PET soda bottles. Between 1993 and 2003, they diverted 86 million soda bottles from landfill.

By instituting company values and missions that address environmental issues, performing life cycle assessments and designing and producing in alignment with the results, any company can join Patagonia as a sustainability pioneer.

What other companies have initiated compelling sustainable business models?

Glass or Ceramic?

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:51:17 +0000

One of our designers was recently working on a project that required a material with a cold, smooth, high quality feel, and she asked me which was a more sustainable material, ceramic or glass. As always, it depends. But this is what I told her:

Glass: There are many different types of glass, but I’ll just focus on soda-lime glass, which is the type most commonly used in containers, windows, etc. Glass is heavy and often gets a bad rap for that, but if recycled properly it is one of the few infinitely recyclable materials in common use today. It is also one of the few materials with a well developed recycling infrastructure in almost every developed country. It can be fragile, but can also be made to be durable with various geometries and wall thicknesses (think about how long old Coke bottles stay in circulation). Glass can be considered, for all intents and purposes, to be non-reactive, so it won’t off-gas or leach like plastics. There are some pretty destructive practices involved in mining basic ingredients for the mass production of glass, but if the product is made from recycled glass, that is not a concern. There is also an issue with the extreme longevity of glass. You’ll see quoted here and there that it takes a million years for glass to completely biodegrade, but the actual time is much longer than that. The bottom line is that once we take minerals from the earth’s crust and transform them into glass, they’re basically glass forever. This is another reason that using recycled glass is very important. The glass we have already created is not going anywhere, so we should make something out of it in order to reclaim this “technical nutrient”. So the bottom line is that recycled glass is a good choice for a product that won’t be transported much, is not subjected to high impact, and is sold in a region that has recycling facilities.

Ceramics: Again, many different types of ceramics, but for this we’ll talk about clay based ceramics commonly used for flatware, mugs, vases, etc. Ceramics have most of the downfalls of glass, but lack one of the most important upsides: ceramics cannot be recycled. They can be down-cycled, which involves grinding them up and dispersing the power into a slurry used to create other ceramics, but the resultant is usually weaker than the original. Glazed ceramics have the same chemical stability of glass (glaze is essentially, although not exactly, a thin glass coating over the ceramic). It also has the same extreme longevity issue, which is why we keep digging up ceramic garbage that people tossed out four or five thousand years ago. Ceramic is lighter than glass, but usually because it is porous. This means that to make products equally durable, you have to make them thicker so they usually weigh about the same (like a drinking glass and a coffee mug). One of the big benefits of ceramic over class is that ceramic is a good insulator due to its porosity. It’s also very good with extreme changes in temperature (glass will break if the temperature on one of its surfaces changes much faster than the other). So, ceramics are a good choice for an application that requires extreme longevity, good insulation, or excellent resistance to changes in temperature, but if you’re going for a cold, smooth, hard, high quality feel, I’d stick with glass.

Green Water

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:55:22 +0000

A Solutions Icon-o-Cast

In this special edition of Icon-o-Cast, LUNAR’s John Edson shares a presentation he gave at the 2009 Sustainable Brands conference in which he discussed applying sustainable design principles through a framework developed by LUNAR to the problem of distributing water.

This edition is available in both video and audio formats.

Resources:

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Download Quicktime video

Eco-Confident

admin — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 13:46:02 +0000

Confidence is an amazing thing. Some believe it can make athletes more adept, students score higher on tests and people in general more attractive. Those with confidence hold their heads high, speak with authority, are willing to take risks and are less likely to hesitate. These are key ingredients in the recipe for getting things done. And while it’s important to avoid becoming arrogant, stubborn, or unwilling to listen, a little confidence can be a sustainable designer’s best friend.

We’ve been conducting sustainable design workshops here at LUNAR recently and are finding that one of the largest obstacles between designers and sustainable design is not a lack of knowledge; it’s a perceived lack of knowledge. Most sustainable design principles, like increasing modularity, consolidating materials, shrinking and lightening, etc., are just plain common sense and the majority of our designers already know a sizable handful of them. They just don’t know that they know. And as a result they feel unequipped to even take a crack at a more sustainable design. With some simple training sessions to go over the basics, it becomes easier to convince designers that they can design in this sustainability arena with some confidence, which leads to more experimentation, creativity, and ultimately better products.

Now I understand that encouraging a designer with a basic or even flawed knowledge of sustainable design principles to confidently charge forth can be seen as irresponsible. What if they try to make a product more useful but end up making it unnecessarily complicated? What if they add superfluous fasteners in an attempt to make something easier to disassemble? Well…so what if they do? If they tout their design as an attempt at sustainability, someone will point out the flaws, they’ll learn from their mistakes and move on to their next, better attempt. Because the real danger is not designers failing in the name of sustainable design, it’s them not having the confidence to even try in the first place.

Green Leader

admin — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:32:17 +0000

Lunar’s Travis Lee was recently invited to be a part of AutoDesk’s Green Leaders series. In this video, he shares his passion for sustainable design and his vision for a more sustainable future.

Innovative AND green

kevin oconnor — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:00:00 +0000

I noticed these solar-powered parking meters sneak into my San Francisco neighborhood, Hayes Valley, on a busy street lined with design shops, cafes and restaurants. The Civic Center area tends to be a hotbed for green experimentation, and it was great to see innovation that adds value while being good to the environment.

This parking meter finally takes credit cards as well as coins (save those precious quarters for your laundry), and LEDs facing the street indicate whether you've overstayed your welcome. The "more" and "less" buttons apparently allow you to allocate your intended stay.

My dream feature: if lunch is going a little overtime, it simply draws more funds from your credit card, a "pay as you go" model to make city parking a little more stress-free.

– Ron Goldin

Earth Day Special: What can we learn from sustainable building design?

kevin oconnor — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:30:38 +0000

Connections – April 21, 2009: The architecture and construction world is years ahead of product design in terms of creating understanding, standards, alternative design solutions and the economic arguements for the value of sustainable design.

In this Earth Day Special, Lunar’s Gretchen Anderson talks with green building expert Elaine Hsieh of KEMA about how building industries have embraced sustainable practices since the first Earth Day.

Resources:

Follow Elaine on Twitter where she shares her perspectives on sustainable building design and management.
Learn more about KEMA.
LUNAR’s internal sustainable design initiative has developed an overview of sustainable product development and the product life cycle to be used during the design process (PDF).

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“In theory…”

kevin oconnor — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:46:35 +0000

A friend of mine is very fond of the quote, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” Depending on whom you ask, this morsel of wisdom came from Albert Einstein, Yogi Berra, or Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut. The three of them can fight it out wherever they are, but the point is that things are rarely as clear-cut, or easy, as their defining theory suggests.

I think about this quote in the context of sustainable design from time to time. The theory of sustainable design is a vision for the way design should, and hopefully someday will, be. It’s filled with lofty and noble goals – like comprehensive life cycle analyses run on every system and designs that use only materials that can be perfectly reclaimed and reused as technical nutrients. This theory is admirable, and is nothing short of necessary for the sustainable design movement to be able to achieve its ultimate goal: design that meets today's needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. Like a lighthouse guiding a ship to harbor, this goal must be constant, unwavering, immobile.

But too often some in the sustainable design community become so entrenched in the theory of sustainable design that they lose sight of the fact that achieving it requires more than just persistence and commitment. Many, although not all, tend to have professions outside of designer or engineer. They are not tasked with creating actual products day to day. They stand in the lighthouse (again, an admirable and necessary position) and criticize the ship’s crew when they tack away from the shore to face an oncoming wave or avoid another ship. “Incrementalism is not the solution!” they yell. “Turning that direction will only get you so far!”

I want to assure those in the lighthouse that the crew knows this. We get it. Every crewmember on this ship understands that, theoretically, the quickest path between ship and harbor is a straight line. But in a storm that theory falls apart, for the crew must account for sizeable waves, wind gusts and other ships. Consumer demand, market forces, and the cutthroat world of globalization combine to make a pretty big storm. The indirect path, while slower, is necessary in practice, and if we head straight for the shore we could very likely capsize or crash.

The unfortunate reality is that, unlike the theory, the practice of sustainable design is full of contradictions, unknowns, bargaining and compromise. So, please keep the lamp burning. Please continue to discuss what sustainable design should be. Your guidance is looked for and appreciated – but understand that getting there takes some strategic steering from time to time.

– Travis Lee