Should a newspaper’s graphic designer worry about whether it’s printed on recycled paper or not?
Should an interior designer working on a new restaurant care about the fuel efficiency of the furnace heating the place?
Should an industrial designer of laptop computers be concerned about what happens to these products when they’re discarded by their users?
A few decades ago, the answer to these questions would probably be no. Graphic designers of the day would have been happy to see newsprint get whiter and less ink absorbent, even if that would have required more chemical processing. As for interior designers’ attitudes about heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems, what they wanted was the specified ambience throughout; how this was achieved was someone else’s problem. And the environmental destiny of computers, cellphones and innumerable other electronic gadgets was the last thing on the minds of their designers. They were too busy struggling to keep up with exploding technology that was—and still is—making these products obsolete within ever-shorter lifetimes.
But today, the answer to these questions is probably yes. If you’re a graphic designer working at a publication that doesn’t use recycled paper today, your employer is in even more trouble than most of its competitors. If you’re an interior designer and your unconventional plan will require supplementary heating and cooling units to make it workable, you will probably end up with an unhappy client. And if your industrial designs for electronic devices take no account of their ultimate destiny as toxic junk, your company is being recklessly irresponsible.
With rare exceptions, designers are used to working within constraints that both focus and limit what they do. Usually, this means entering an ongoing process at a certain stage, and advancing it along to another stage. Graphic designers don’t fell trees, grind pulp or make paper. Nor do they formulate inks or run printing presses. Their work fits in between these “before and after” operations. In a similar way, interior designers don’t usually make the carpeting, light fixtures, wall coverings and furnishings that go into their designs, let alone the components of the HVAC and plumbing systems. And laptop designers don’t fabricate microchips, mother-boards, hard drives or flat screens. Designers of all kinds are accustomed to taking all these “before and after” aspects of their jobs for granted. That is now changing.
The limits around what designers need to know to do their jobs properly have broadened, because the purview of design itself has broadened. The design of a newspaper, for example, is not simply a matter of its content and how it looks to its readers. The entire enterprise is also now viewed as a design, one that involves a complex mix of industrial processes like making papers and inks, blended with social processes like promoting community causes and doing investigative reports. To participate in any step in this process is to be part of the whole enterprise, which has a characteristic “footprint” economically, socially and environmentally. In many types of enterprises, to participate as a designer is to assume a larger responsibility than most.
One of the most important functions of a designer is the power to specify. Designers in all fields have always specified how things look, but only a minority also routinely specify how things are to be made. Even fewer have ever paid much attention to how things are unmade when their useful life is over. Now these issues have become important parts of many designer’s jobs.
Package design provides a simple example of how things have changed. Traditional specifications for retail packages were confined to creating visual “shelf presence” and a strong projection of brand identity, often in a tamper-proof, impact-resistant enclosure. Many packages meeting these requirements have short useful lives as they move briskly through the retailing pipeline, followed by stubbornly long lives as waste in landfills and dumps. Today’s designers need to view packages not only as attractions on the retail shelf, but also as instant waste once the sale is made. In selecting materials, they need to consider both the environmental cost of making them in the first place and their environmental destiny when they are discarded.
Many design processes have now expanded to include social and environmental considerations that played no role when design objectives were more narrowly defined. This has shifted preferences and priorities, for example, towards materials made from renewable resources, especially ones that can also be recycled. In most cases, adaptations can be made to achieve these new objectives without compromising the final products.
Of course, many industrial designers have always been involved in the process of actually making the things they design. How something is made can often be crucial to how well it works, or what it costs, or how long it will last. But even designers who have long been involved in the up-front “before” issues of manufacturing the things they design need to broaden their view to include equally important “after” issues of dismantling and recycling at the end of the product’s life. This is especially true today of electronic devices of all kinds, which are particularly difficult to deal with as waste. Replacing ubiquitous plastics with recyclable materials such as aluminum and glass is one important step in the desired direction.
In dozens of different industries, finding more efficient, more sustainable and less environmentally harmful ways to do things has become a top priority. Designers of all kinds have a huge role to play in the search for innovative ways to meet these “before and after” challenges.
