Can a designer influence change in our sustainable behaviours?

Before I begin looking into this question, I would like to discuss my opinions about the subject, from there I can the look into the many different aspects of the question and go into more depths about certain elements of this question.
Can a designer influence change in our sustainable behaviours? My initial impression is, yes, human beings have the tendency to follow in each others footsteps, it only takes one person to make a difference or show them the light and then naturally other people will begin to follow suit. We see people trying to make a difference everywhere we go, even in the supermarkets you are given the option to buy material bags that you can re-use and if you dont then you are charged a small amount for the plastic bags. When we look at food companies, they have started to down grade their packet sizes to reduce the amount of materials produced. Fuel prices are in constant fluctuation causing people to not drive as frequently, advertisements promoting the use of bus services in an attempt to reduce the amount of vehicles on the road. The world has noticed that a change is needed but they do not know how they can help. This is where designers come into play as they can either in-directly help by making more people aware of sustainability, or directly help by making sure that any products they make was made with sustainablilty in mind.

The first thing I'm going to do is break down the question into its basic components.
So what is sustainability? According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, whether indirectly or directly, the suvival of human beings depends on the natural environment. Sustainability is the balance of humans and nature. It is crucial in order for them both to exist in harmony.
'Sustainability is important to making sure that we have and will continue to have, the water, materials, and resources to protect human health and our environment'
Already I can see that sustainability is a pretty big problem and it affects everyone. It affects everything from buying your food to global warming. The balance is off because of our constant use of fossil fuels. This is a major problem because fossil fuels release carbon dioxide. The 'Biomass Energy Centre' site explains it well. The burning of any carbon based type fuel converts carbon into carbon dioxide. If this carbon dioxide is not captured and stored somewhere, then it is released into the atmosphere which is very bad. Carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels absorbs the heat that comes from the earth which stops it from being released into space. Carbon dioxide is known as a greenhouse gas as well as methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour. This has an almost domino effects on how we live. The carbon dioxide stops the heat the earth emits from dissapating into space, the earths temperature gradually rises, the ice caps melt which raise the sea levels and cities start to flood.

There are things we can do to help this however, for example, the Herman Miller company keeps the environmental impact in mind when they design a product. They follow four main principles when designing a product:

Material Chemistry and Safety of Inputs - What chemicals are in the materials we specify, and are they the safest available?
Disassembly - Can we take products apart at the end of their useful life to recycle their materials?
Recyclability - Do the materials contain recycled content and, more importantly, can the materials be recycled at the end of the product's useful life?
LCA - Have we optimised the product based on the entire lifecycle? 

This is the reason why they do it: Our commitment to designing for the environment extends beyond a single token product to incorporate a comprehensive, holistic approach. All future Herman Miller products will be evaluated within the rigours of our DfE Protocol. During the new product design process, the DfE team meets with the designers and engineers to review material chemistry, disassembly and recyclability, as well as incoming packaging and potential waste generation.
By looking closely at these and related issues, as well as conducting rigorous durability testing, our goal is to ensure that all new Herman Miller products will help to create great working environments, while also respecting and protecting our natural environment.
 If I Google the Herman Miller company, I can see that they mainly produce office chairs and desks, things that don't even remotely look like they have been made with recycled materials.

I also managed to find this animation which covers the issue of sustainablilty which shows that even animators are able to help the cause.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5NiTN0chj0
In the animation, it explains what sustainablity is and how is affects us. The animation dictates that there are four basic principles for sustainability and if we follow them then it is good for our planet and by extension, good for us as we are part of the planet. The four principles are: 
1. Reduce our dependance of fossil fuels and heavy metals
2. Reduce our dependance on synthetic chemicals that persist in nature
3. Reduce our destruction of nature
4. Be sure we are not stopping people globally from meeting their needs

Another thing I found was a company called Bullfrogfilms. This company does short green animations about the environment and are under the sponsorship of the World Wide Fund for Nature in the UK.
I think this is really good as it helps people understand the problems we face in a way that does not require a lot of reading yet it gets the message across quickly and easily.
Most people will most likely be thinking, how does this affect me? Well the Sustainable Development Commision answers that question:

How does it affect me?

The way we approach development affects everyone. The impacts of our decisions as a society have very real consequences for people's lives. Poor planning of communities, for example, reduces the quality of life for the people who live in them. (Relying on imports rather than growing food locally puts the UK at risk of food shortages.)
Sustainable development provides an approach to making better decisions on the issues that affect all of our lives. By incorporating health plans into the planning of new communities, for instance, we can ensure that residents have easy access to healthcare and leisure facilities. (By encouraging more sustainable food supply chains, we can ensure the UK has enough food for the long-term future.)

The next thing to look at is recyclable materials and how designers have used them to benefit the environment. I covered the topic of plastic shopping bags earlier in the blog but I would like to go more in depth on this subject.
According to the ConservingNow site

• Plastic bags don't biodegrade, they photodegrade - breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food web when animals accidentally ingest them.
• A plastic bag can take between 400 to 1,000 years to break down in the environment.
• Plastic bags cause over 100,000 sea turtle and other marine animal deaths every year when animals mistake them for food.
• Plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris most often found in coastal cleanups, according to the nonprofit Center for Marine Conservation.
• Nearly 90% of the debris in our oceans is plastic.

and according to the Northern Territory Environment Protection Authority
 Based on using ten lightweight plastic bags per week over a 2-year period, the greenhouse gas impact has more than three times the greenhouse gas impact of a reusable ‘green bag’.
A lightweight plastic bags consumes about 4.5 times more energy in its manufacture than reusable ‘green bags’.
Remember, however, that to get the full greenhouse gas benefit from a reusable ‘green bag’, it must be reused over 100 times.
Starch-based biodegradable (or ‘compostable’) bags consume less than one-third of the energy to produce as plastic alternatives, but emit marginally more carbon dioxide (CO2 - a greenhouse gas) as they decompose. However, unlike single use plastic bags, biodegradable bags will completely breakdown.
All of these products have come with sustainability in mind.

I found this image on Google which explains sustainability rather well. Sustainability consists of three areas. Social, economical and environmental. All three must be in harmony to have sustainability. Social consists of the standard of living for everyone, education, the community and equal opportunities for all. Economic consists of profit, saving money, growth of the economy and research and development. When these two are balanced, they create a new area called Economic-Social which affects business ethics, fair trade and the rights of workers. However, if we combine Social with a second topic such as Environmental which deals with things like the use of natural resources, environmental management and pollution prevention, we get a new area called Social-Environmental. This composes of environmental justice, natural resources stewardship and locally and globally. As well as this, we can mix economic and environmental together to get Environmental-economic. This section deals with energy efficiency and supsidies/incentives for the use of natural resources. All three of these main sections must be balanced if we are to have a healthy and long lasting life style.
I found an interesting article on the light bulb that relates to sustainablity.  Typically, lightbulbs are not even thought of as furniture, having more in common with the bricks that build our walls or the parts that make our washing machines work. They are function rather than design; necessity rather than luxury. 
The incandescent bulb – the one we all think of when talking about lightbulbs – looks remarkably similar today as it ever did. Patented in 1880, Edison’s bulbs had glass domes and chunky bases that have changed little design-wise over more than a hundred years.
However, the lightbulb as we know it is simply not sustainable. Approximately 90% of the power consumed by the average incandescent bulb is emitted as heat rather than as visible light.
Designers are key to changing consumer behaviour and converting people to sustainable products and practices. They can offer a different vision, one not driven solely by low prices, which allows the public to consume more responsibly without compromise to their lifestyle.
This is not about making the next big thing, which encourages people to just buy more stuff, it's about creating products and services that fundamentally alter our behaviour and take us towards a more sustainable way of life.
A design company called Plumen, took it upon themselves to redesign the energy saving bulb so that people will be motivated to purchasing them because they want to, not because they have to.

I really like this as it shows how designers can influence a change in our behaviour with something so simple such as a change in shape.
Another area we could look at are alternative methods of power such as solar and wind power.  Solar power systems derive clean, pure energy from the sun. When you install solar panels on your home, you help to combat greenhouse gas emissions and global warming and reduce our collective dependence on fossil fuel. As 'SolarCity' put it: The average SolarCity solar power system will offset 30 tons of carbon dioxide over 30 years, saving the equivalent of avoiding 60,000 miles driven, planting 2,400 trees, avoiding 80,000 gallons of water used in electricity production and avoiding 16 tons of burned coal. These alternate power sources were created by designers who wanted to make a difference in our sustainable behaviours. Solar panels are used extensively or generating electricity and power throughout the world. Though the initial investment is quite high, the fuel is cheap and abundant produces hardly any pollution unlike the burning of the fossil fuels.  The solar cell technology is extremely old and work started on this way back in the 1800’s. The French physicist Antoine – Cesar Becquerel is credited with the solar panel research, in 1839. While he was experimenting with a solid electrode that was dipped in the electrolyte solution he was able to see a photovoltaic effect. He even saw a voltage develop when the sunlight fell on the electrode. The solar cell creation for the first time is credited to Charles Fritts, who used junctions that were created when the semiconductor was coated by a very thin layer of gold.

Now I would like to look at the oppsite side of this story and look at how you could argue that designers cannot influence change in our sustainable behaviours. I found an interesting essay that poses exacly this question.

To further support the topic ‘A designer can’t influence change in our sustainable behaviour’ I have found this quote from author Stuart Walker. In this extract Walker is describing how design, and other professions, have become categorized and separated. On the other hand sustainable development is about bringing everyone and everything together to make the world better. I feel that this quote, although lengthy, does help my research because it shows me that design must change and become less professionalized and more inclusive in order to influence us all into becoming more sustainable.

“Professions tend to categorize, separate and distinguish activities and product design has become a defined, professionalized discipline. By contrast sustainable development points towards approaches that are holistic and more inclusive. We must encourage diversity and variety, trial and error, and experimentation. The narrowing of our understandings into a specific discipline and within the boundaries of a specific ‘profession’ is not consistent with the integrative, inter-disciplinary and experimental approaches that are needed here.”

Walker S, (2006) Sustainable by Design: Explorations in theory and practice, Earthscan, London.


This second extract is much more relevant and useful for my research as it describes how we can all make a difference in becoming more sustainable. It is not about an individual influencing everyone else. In order to actually make a difference, we all need to come together as a community to make the big changes. Furthermore, at the bottom, the thing which has the most influence over changing our sustainable behaviours does not appear to be designers, but technology itself:

“The switch to more efficient petrol and diesel car engines, as well as the move towards electric vehicles, should make a big difference, Dr Harrison believes. But unless we approach the whole topic of energy in a holistic way – applying smarter technologies to generation, transmission, storage and end usage – sustainable goals will not be reached, he warns. The growing number of devices generating digital data coupled with greater computer power to analyse this explosion of data – is another crucial element helping companies and people operate more sustainably.”

Matthew Wall, BBC, Can tech deliver a sustainable future for Planet Earth?

We could simply say that no matter what we do now, it does not make a difference as the damage that has already been done cannot be undone. I would like to turn your attention to this article that explains how there is no stopping the ripples of our way of life that is destroying sustainability.

Scientists have been saying for a while that we have until between 2015 and 2020 to start radically reducing our carbon emissions, and what do you know: That deadline’s almost past! Crazy how these things sneak up on you while you’re squabbling about whether global warming is a religion. Also, our science got better in the meantime, so now we know that no matter what we do, we can say goodbe to the planet’s ice caps.

For ice sheets — huge refrigerators that slow down the warming of the planet — the tipping point has probably already been passed, Steffen said. The West Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48 cubic miles) a year since the 1990s.

Here’s what happens next: Natural climate feedbacks will take over and, on top of our prodigious human-caused carbon emissions, send us over an irreversible tipping point. By 2100, the planet will be hotter than it’s been since the time of the dinosaurs, and everyone who lives in red states will pretty much get the apocalypse they’ve been hoping for. The subtropics will expand northward, the bottom half of the U.S. will turn into an inhospitable desert, and everyone who lives there will be drinking recycled pee and struggling to salvage something from an economy wrecked by the destruction of agriculture, industry, and electrical power production.
As well as this, we cannot hope to change everybodies minds and alter their way of life since most people will not change easily. The world has long been in battle with itself and each other and will certainly not work in peace in order to save itself from itself and will take more than a few designers to influence the world into changing its sustainable behaviour. The most we can do is change so that the outcome is not as bad as it could be. Defortestation plays a large part in the sustainablity issue we face as the WWF site explains it:
Forests have a vital role to play in the fight against global warming. Forests absorb and store carbon in their trees and soil. But if forests are cleared or disturbed, this carbon is released as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Up to a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation and forest degradation.
We have to reduce emissions from deforestation if we’re to prevent catastrophic climate change.
Unfortunately, it often makes more economic sense - at least in the short term - to manage forests unsustainably or clear forests for agriculture, roads and infrastructure than to conserve them or manage them responsibly. This basically means that even a large corporation like WWF are saying that the balance of sustainability is so off centered that it would make sense to deforest certain areas to make for better things, even though that would cause yet more global warming.


In conclusion, I think that a designer can influence change in our sustainable behaviour because there are more things that can be done to help sustain the balance. There are designers out there who are clearly making the effort to help and more and more people are being made aware of the situation we have found ourselves in. We as a community are looking at our way of life and searching for ways of making it greener. With other energy sources such as solar and wind power, sustainability problems can be saved and is being saved.