- Posted by: Alberto Villarreal
- Category: Design, LEED, sustainability
The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability, by LUNAR
The LUNAR Elements team has recently published “The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability”, a tool designed to help all designers and engineers, no matter what their level of experience, design more sustainable products.
A quick note about the guide: None of these tips is a turn-key solution. They are very complex issues that often warrant added thought and discussion. Together, they provide a good start, and can help form a checklist of considerations to take along the design path to ensure that no sustainable opportunity has fallen through the cracks. Reviewed often, they can help us to make sustainability a fundamental part of our design and engineering processes.
Click here to download the guide in PDF format.
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on August 23rd, 2008 at 8:21 am
Thank you for sharing this resource. It looks like an excellent idea, and any quick keys to help us become more sustainable in our products is a great tool.
on August 26th, 2008 at 5:49 am
Thanks for posting Alberto!
on September 16th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
This is a great idea, love the knowledgeshare. This should be made available through the designers accord! Though it’s pretty confusing and (dare I throw the first stone) …ugly. Maybe they could just make the plain text available? Shame to see really useful information get over-designed like this!
on September 25th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
nice try….but this is so basic as to be virtually useless. what designers need to be doing is spending some time to understand the lifecycle of what they are designing. sustainable design is all about comprehensive design. little tweaks, like making stuff out of recycled materials, will not get us there.
on February 10th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
As someone currently pursuing a master’s thesis project in green design, I completely disagree with heidrun mumper-drumm’s comment. This is a comprehensive, easy to use tool for designers who are unfamiliar with the basics of green design. Not only are these principals valuable for the environment, but through their application more efficient, innovative products can be generated. Maybe he didn’t take the time to read the whole doc.
on February 23rd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Given the last post, I thought that maybe I had been too dismissive of the Field Guide, and reread it. However, I think I am correct in saying that the Guide doesn’t go far enough. To quote Amory Lovins: “Incrementalism is now the high-risk strategy.”
For example, making things out of recycled, recyclable or biodegradable materials will only get us so far-especially if they are used in a system which does not provide for recycling or composting.
Avoiding potentially hazardous materials like pthalates and bisphenol-A is a given. But what about the hundreds of other toxins in the materials we use? How do we account for and eliminate those? I wish the Guide would advocate for the use of lifecycle analysis in everything we design so that these compounds would have a greater chance of being accounted for, and then safeguarded against, or replaced with less- or non-toxic materials.
Strategically designing packaging in parallel with product is great, but it’s still a one-way stream [to the dump, or the recycler if you're lucky] if the manufacturer doesn’t get it back.
Maybe we can consider this Field Guide to be a gentle nudge to design, a push towards a design approach that considers environmental & economic sustainability. Designers who adopt this design thinking will then be encouraged to move more aggressively, beyond incrementalism, if possible.