Driving Sustainable Design

With Dott 07, John Thackara looks at daily life as a design opportunity and tackles social issues in small doses

by Helen Walters

• View Slide Show

Despite all the talk of the "power of design" to drive sales, C-suite executives and industrial designers often butt heads when working together. Business leaders complain that designers don't have any idea what it takes to run a successful company; designers promptly counter that those same leaders don't have a clue how to commission or champion the design process. Then there are the environmentalists, getting more air time of late, who fear that neither group is concerning itself with asking the correct questions (is a product really necessary?) or trying to solve the right problems (is a product sustainable?).

Luckily for all three groups, there's John Thackara. Working at the intersection of business, technology, sustainability, and design, the former journalist, educator, and director of the Netherlands Design Institute is in the business of meshing innovations that drive social change with design.

As the director of design futures network Doors of Perception, and program director of Dott 07, an ambitious, year-long initiative to establish a sustainable region in cities throughout the northeast of England, Thackara is at the forefront of the flourishing sustainable design movement. And as far as he's concerned, the right question to be asking is, "What might a sustainable world look like?" with a prompt follow-up, "What sort of design actions can we take to get there?"

Life as Design

Resolutely pragmatic, Thackara champions a down-to-earth approach that requires action and doesn't shy away from either trial or error. This is a man who's interested in talking, for sure—he's lectured in more than 40 countries around the world—but he's also concerned that projects should be rooted in reality, and have a purpose other than high-falutin' idealism.

That's why Dott 07 is so interesting. Organized in collaboration with Britain's Design Council and the regional development agency One NorthEast, it's looking at "daily life as a design opportunity," says Thackara. The program of events tackles issues from health to food, energy to tourism to travel, examining how design principles can be applied to help achieve the goal of sustainable living, or a lifestyle that preserves and protects natural resources.

A number of things are pretty remarkable about Dott 07. For one thing, Thackara centered activities in the struggling, post-industrial northeast of England. It's an area that has been in slow decline for the past 20 or 30 years, since the area's chemical industry slid painfully but inexorably into oblivion. Such willful parochialism is almost unheard of in Britain, where the focus is almost always trained on glamorous London (in the south), or trendy cities such as Liverpool or Manchester, which have embarked on determined, relatively successful rebranding exercises in recent years.

Collaborative Approach

But that's Thackara through and through. He's not interested in what's fashionable, he's interested in making a difference. Nor, rather more surprisingly, is he interested in hyping a designer's role in the process of creating socially responsible, profitable businesses.