We recently launched the “Sustainability at Home” series, a forum for discussing how each of us is tapping into natural resources or finding alternative ways of living in a more sustainable way. Here is one of the stories that our colleague, Mark Hanks shared with us.

For Mark , who owns a home in a remote part of the Cape Cod bay, practicing the 3 R’s–reduce, re-use, recycle–is not just a matter of choice, it is a matter of necessity. His small peninsula shared with 40 seasonal residents has no access to running water or electricity and as such, it exemplifies off-grid living. And as Mark and his family have found, diversifying energy sources makes for a more efficient and comfortable living.

For years, Mark’s family depended on a 10 kWh Diesel generator for their energy. They relied on the generator primarily to power a 240v well pump, several power tools, a bank of batteries and for lighting. However, using this generator was not ideal–the noise level, fuel consumer and waste of power were less than desirable.

So, last winter Mark decided to replace the generator with solar panels (Evergreen tm, Photovoltaic solar cells). By quietly converting the suns energy into usable power and storing that power in a bank of batteries, Mark is able to generate up to 2.5 kwh (kilowatt hours) of electricity per day. On average he only uses half that, as conservation is the key to efficiency when producing your own power.

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Is there too much convenience in our world today? To find new ways to make money, companies naturally try to make it easier to buy and use their products and services – and they put a lot of energy into this. But as they make things easier for consumers, are they making consumers lives more difficult? We may be approaching the edge of having too much convenience.

As we travel and interview people, some of the stories that we hear shed light on this. People tell us about the things they’re doing to make it harder – not easier – for them to do things like spending money or eating food. Can you imagine someone putting a credit card in water and freezing it to help them stop and think before they spend? It’s happening. But on the other side, the New York Times reported that at least one 401k provider is issuing debit cards to allow consumers to effortlessly borrow from their retirement savings.

There’s been a lot of innovation energy (and marketing energy) put around bringing consumers’ impulses and decisions closer together. As we approach the possibility of too much convenience, a new growth opportunity lies in helping people push them apart instead.

We approach every project as an opportunity to improve people’s lives in tangible and significant ways. It was no different when our Milan team set out to design the new “Acuity” chair for Allsteel, three years ago.

This was the first time that Continuum was involved in designing an office seating project, so we came to it with a fresh perspective. A few months into the project, we identified some significant opportunities to improve the user experience—in general we found that most Task Chairs were complicated and did not provide the user a seemless experience on various levels. Users had a number of concerns: they often found the chair initially uncomfortable to sit on and the seating controls (under the seat) difficult to locate and operate. As our research revealed, the chair felt uncomfortable initially, because it didn’t automatically adapt to each user’s personal body mass, build and intended work activity.

So, the big idea was to create a new chair that embodied EASE of ACCESS and COMFORT… with the help of intuitive adaptive ergonomics. Foremost, we focused on designing a chair that automatically adjusts to each individual body type (taking advantage of the user’s body mass as the key component in the kinetic system) to facilitate the chairs ability to immediately fit and function correctly for the widest variety of physical builds and work activities. Likewise, we chose to limit the number of controls and designed them to be completely accessible and to operate intuitively, so as to allow the user to easily fine-tune the chair to support the specific task at hand.

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A recent Financial Times article, entitled “Plastic: The Elephant In the Room” by Sam Knight, was particularly meaningful to me. It illustrated an important point. Too often, ecological issues are presented in simplistic, black and white terms–plastic is bad, glass is good; things that decompose are good, things that don’t are bad. However, the reality is that sustainable solutions need to address complex issues involving many gray areas and dichotomies.

Case in point: during a recent visit at a recycling facility, I discovered that polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, typically used in milk packaging, have a very high commercial value, because they are recyclable. Meanwhile, colored glass bottles have a very low commercial value, because the brown glass that results from their recycling is considered undesirable. So, the PET bottles are carefully rescued from the trash, while the rest of the glass piles up in great big mounds around the facility.
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The other week I saw a great exhibit on Cuban art and found myself lingering in the room full of protest posters from the late 60s/early 70s. That room of revolution and the images from Seoul’s recent massive protests have me thinking about the need to redesign activism in America.

The 90s didn’t give my generation very much to get upset about, but I spent my younger years feeling the absence of a particular collaborative participation. I imagined the past, where a collective voice could mean anything from sitting around the turntable listening to Bob Dylan albums to gathering around the State House to make opinions heard. Though these images have an idealized air, I do continue to believe that the outlets that served my parents – and our country – in the last century are no longer effective.

And yet, the venues that seem to have replaced them in communal dialogue lack a certain visibility – or group effervescence. That picture of Seoul is powerful, seeing tens of thousands of people physically joined in protest. The blogosphere doesn’t so much impress that upon me; perhaps it’s too nuanced for such mass participation and in some ways, I can see how the dialogue has evolved beyond this. But aren’t there times when a common voice would be valued? Aren’t there times when you wish there were a way to have one? I won’t politicize the idea: I am sure you can come up with your own example.

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What happens when you put twenty-five Boston designers in a room with Massachusetts state officials to talk about the design industry? Throw in a few state representatives and the former deputy mayor of London and you’ve got a pretty lively discussion going. Neither side knew what to expect, when congregating at Continuum on June 10 for a design industry roundtable with the Undersecretary of the Mass Dept of Business Development and the state’s newly appointed Creative Economy Director. The government people wanted to hear from designers about what the state could do to help them grow their businesses.

So, what do design firms want? More than anything, they want an upgrading of Boston’s image as a center for good design. The coolness factor came up again and again (“Boston is politically liberal but architecturally conservative.”). They want a re-branding of Boston as a hip design place, so that design talent will move to Boston–and stay. They want a design community (witness Pink Comma gallery) and more access at a younger age to local commissions (a la European young firm design competitions.) They want greater visibility for their work (maybe a Design Expo?) to open up local markets and to create demand for Boston design.

The view from London is that Boston has unrivalled education, technology and design talent. The state and the designers just need to connect the dots and get everyone working together. Large and small companies want to expose young people to design careers (note AIGA’s Youth Design Boston) and better synch up design education with industry needs (design and business. . . or engineering or social sciences.) Design incubators, bank financing, small business development support and manufacturing capability also came up.

So, what can the state do? Maybe start by walking the talk. Redesign the state’s letterhead and business cards; hire good designers to fix the lousy signage. How about acting like the huge client that it is and open up public design bids to young architects?

Use the designers, promote them, connect them–and in the end, remember that design isn’t just an industry–it’s a way of thinking.

Beate Becker
Director
Designing an Industry/Designing the Future
(781) 789-8919
beatebecker@comcast.net

The meeting was put together by MassArt’s Designing an Industry/Designing the Future, a project that brings together designers to think and act collectively as an economic sector with voice, visibility and economic value.

The Boston Globe recently ran a story about how the design sector and other segments of the creative economy can stimulate Massachusetts’ economy.