Portfolio Center recently played host to the Atlanta chapter of the AIGA’s second Green Salon of 2008. Brian Dougherty of Celery Design Collaborative presented as the speaker.
“The new frontier in green design is moving money from the waste column into the design column,� says Brian. He started Celery ten years ago in Berkeley California because he couldn’t find a studio doing the kind of work he wanted to do. Although sustainable design, which Brian calls green design, initially only accounted for 20% of his studio’s projects, that share is now 100%.
Green design seems to have designers of all ages and experience a bit puzzled. When we asked design students about their conception of sustainable design, the “what is it� question was not as widespread as, “how do we do it?� The answer is, there is no pat answer.
“Design,� Brian offers, “is about creating solutions within limitations. Green design is a big set of new things to think about.� Probably not the Cliff’s notes students were looking for. “Currently, there is no defined set of principles,� Brian adds, “So the process is a lot more collaborative.� In a sense, we all stand at the forefront of sustainable design planting seeds of change.
That “set of new things� runs the course of current sustainability concerns, like re-usability, carbon footprint, printing optimization, warehousing, transportation, paper choices, and ultimately, the design artifact’s destiny. Brian’s approach, which he calls designing backwards, considers all these factors in each project Celery touches.
All this sounds like a lot of work, so hopefully a byproduct of the effort will be moving some money into the design column like Brian says. But green design doesn’t take a lot more effort, just a little more imagination. “Sustainability is spurring us [designers] to be more creative, not more limited,� says Brian.
Brian reviewed some work his studio has done for clients such as Lemnis, Sun Microsystems, AutoDesk, Ebay, Elephant Pharmacy, and Hewlett-Packard.
Celery’s work with Sun Microsystems yielded a valuable tool both for individuals and companies. The product is called OpenEco, and is a web-based application available free on the internet at www.openeco.org. In about an hour you can input your utility bills and get a graphic representation of your energy consumption. Brian sees this project as one that has the ability to affect change on a small scale many times over. OpenEco, Brian says, can help people “use the information which was not gathered before to make decisions that drive action.�
Celery’s direct mail strategy for Elephant Pharmacy’s launch in Berkeley gives insight into using a different mentality when approaching a project. By viewing the distributed materials as “gift mail� instead “junk mail,� they assumed a different character than the ubiquitous flat mailings. Direct mail has a notoriously low success rate and generates a huge amount of waste. By approaching this mailing as a gift rather than junk – including sample soaps and a fresh flower – Celery’s design work connected with the recipient in an unexpected way. The gift box conveyed a different message and differentiated Elephant Pharmacy in the process. Celery is able to accomplish the same thing with green design. A fresh approach yields a different outcome.
HP, with its estimated 170,000 global employees, represents the behemoth corporation – the aircraft carrier that takes 3 days to come to a stop. “Bucky Fuller says,� Brian reminds us, “that even a ship the size of a tanker has a tiny tab that gets tripped in order to begin its massive rudder to move.� Green design may well be that tab. Over the course of a seven year relationship with HP, Celery has moved beyond the baby steps of printing annual reports on recycled paper to including CD-ROM’s in the materials, and recently, making entire sections available online as print-on-demand. These are the types of incremental changes on a large scale that will have substantial impact on companies’ resource use. And, as a designer, if you can save your client a huge sum of money, reduce waste in a project, and maybe even get an award for the effort, the seeds of green design look to be taking root.
Portfolio Center students share a strong desire to communicate ideas, the willingness to let go of preconceived notions, and the compulsion to learn new ways of thinking. These qualities are fostered by the school’s constant stream of industry bigwigs, who bring their varied and colorful perspectives from all over the country. These creatives, who are always generous with their time and energy, tend to hang out with students, conducting informal workshops and continuing the day’s discussions over dinner. Often, what results are provocative interviews—written, shot, and designed by PC students.
