Compostmodern. Sustainable Design Conference Recap.
A couple weekends ago I had the pleasure of popping down to sunny warm San Francisco with a couple other AIGA Portland sustainability committee members to attend Compostmodern. This bi-annual conference is about improving products, industries, and lives through sustainable design. And by sustainable, they don’t mean just eco-tactics, but rather the full impact — on the culture, the environment, the people, and the economy.
At the conference, 19 forward-thinking design professionals shared their stories, projects and challenges.
Bruce Mau, Chief Creative Officer of Bruce Mau Design
Lisa Gansky, Author of the Mesh
Yves Behar, Founder of Fuseproject
Janine James, President, Chief Creative Officer, The Moderns
I’m still trying to absorb it all, but here are a few nuggets of wisdom that stuck out:
We create better together, and should be encouraging diversity and participation.
Enter into partnerships to move past the “seasonal” effect of a collaboration and adopt a long-term outlook.
Design is less about the individual ego, but the collective impact.
Inclusive instead of exclusive
Design with people, not for people.
When facing a design challenge, if you start with the wrong question, you’ll get the wrong answer.
Use the triple bottom line to evaluate success
Design the system not the object
Live your dream and wear your passion
Christopher Simmons of Mine commented that while designers now have a seat at the business table, our ability to speak in the same language is a necessary part of the equation if partnerships and collaborations are to reach their full potential.
Julie Cordua of (Red) discussed the power of corporate partnerships to advance worthy causes.
Bruce Mau said “I don’t want consumers to be the definition of a person, I want them to be citizens.”
Yves Béhar, founder of Fuse Project, created “See Better to Learn Better” to help combat the 11% of children in Mexico whose eyesight was too poor to learn at school. To get around the cultural stigma of wearing glasses, Yves used uniqueness and participation, where each kid designs their own set a glasses, and for only $5.
Another project presented was SOUP, created by Kate Daughdrill, an MFA student. Once a month, people gather for a $5 dinner to fund micro-grants for creative projects in Detroit. During the dinner, people pitch ideas for projects, and everyone in attendance votes on their favorite. The winner receives the proceeds from the dinner. Kate says, “We realized that we were the ones that had to invest in our neighborhoods.”
I enjoyed reading the Compostmodern recap on DWELL’s site. Their end paragraph about moving forward states:
The breadth of topics covered at this year’s conference was impressive. Every speaker shared anecdotes about how they approached sustainability and carved their own niche. Whether that niche involved assuming decisive roles, crafting better products, communicating ideas unconventionally, creating corporate partnerships, or rallying a community, there is no shortage of possibilities for design professionals to find their own way to contribute to the global sustainability movement. There is no “one” thing that everyone has to do, but there is a place for everyone. That’s a very powerful idea, in my opinion.
To learn more about these ideas, people and projects, visit Compostmodern.