A New Model for Green Design

A radical document, supported by industry organizations, major designers and leading consultancies, aims to set a new standard for sustainability in design

by Jessie Scanlon

Valerie Casey was on a cross-country flight—her third that month—when she had a crisis of conscience. The designer, who then worked at frog and is now at IDEO, had just pitched a packaging project to one of the world's largest delivery services, a company with a so-so environmental record. The film An Inconvenient Truth was still echoing through her mind, and yet she felt unsure of how to even begin a conversation about sustainability with her clients. In her frustration, she wrote what she called a "Kyoto Treaty" of design.

Just over a year later, her screed has evolved into a more formal set of principles now called the "Designers Accord," which has been signed by thousands of designers and counting. Its six-member advisory board includes Paul Hawken, best-selling author and founder of the Natural Capital Institute; IDEO CEO Tim Brown; and others. The Designers Accord has emerged at a time of increased interest in and demand for sustainable products, services, and business practices, but in an era of ongoing uncertainty about how to define or measure greenness and growing consumer impatience with corporate "greenwashing." While it is far too early to estimate its impact, the agreement has the potential to quite dramatically change both the practice of design and the business practices of the thousands of companies who work with design consultancies.

The Designers Accord is both a small nudge and a radical step. It's a nudge because many designers and studios already practice many of the principles outlined in the accord: Undertake a program to educate your teams about designing sustainably, initiate a dialogue about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with each and every client, measure the carbon/greenhouse gas footprint of your firm and pledge to significantly reduce that footprint annually, and so on. (For a complete list of the principles and more information about the Designers Accord, go to designersaccord.org.)

A Paradigm Shift for Design

"One of the firms I spoke with last week told me that they are already doing most of the things in the accord, and that signing up would simply help them commit to taking sustainable practice all the way," says Allan Chochinov, editor-in-chief of the design site Core77 and another Designers Accord board member. "If you look at most of the principles outlined in the Accord, they're not particularly onerous, and will in a very pragmatic way increase the skill sets and awareness on both the design firm and the client side. This creates a kind of partnership toward positive change."

Despite the fact that many of the principles themselves are fairly simple, the Accord marks a paradigm shift: First of all, designers across the industry—including leading studios such as IDEO, SmartDesign, Continuum, and frog—have signed up, and the two big professional associations in the U.S.—the AIGA and the Industrial Designers Society of America, which together represent more than 22,000 members—have endorsed it. While Casey counts more than 3,500 signees now, the number has been growing rapidly, with several multinationals and companies with internal design teams signing on.

For clients this is significant because it means that sustainability is going to be part of the conversation regardless of what studio they're talking to. Core77's Chochinov draws a comparison to LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design), the rating system introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2000. "Today, you can't have a conversation with an architect without the question of LEED coming up," he says. "The accord will make sustainability part of the design conversation."