Green Design In the Real World: IDSA Boston’s Real Green Conference, Nov. 8th

Think green design is just a fad? Come to the Real Green Conference to see sustainable, green design first hand. The conference is a one-day event hosted by IDSA Boston that focuses on organizations that are taking green design beyond just theory.

Guest speakers include Nick Rodrigues and Andrew Motta from Artists for Humanity, Gordon Goetsch, founder of Windtricity, and The New Vision for South Africa Foundation, and Pete Lankford from Timberland. There will also be a talk from members of the joint venture between Recycline, PagePD and Evo about the design and production of recycled products. Ecolect will also be hosting the Eco-materials Petting Zoo showing off all of the latest and greatest green materials!

The Real Green Conference is being held at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design on Saturday, November 8, 2008.

Admission Prices:
Online: Students $10, IDSA Members $20, Non-members $40
@MassArt: Students $20, IDSA Members $40, Non-members $60

For more information see the Boston IDSA’s website

Bay Area’s Best

The San Francisco Chapter of IDSA is at it again with a bigger and better Bay Area’s Best Event honoring some of the best designs today. Partnering with Business week, the IDSA will award the prestigious International Design Excellence Award to the top designs at the event.

The festivities well be held at the swanky night club Mighty, there’ll be free snacks and drinks and throwback costumes are highly encouraged.

The event will go down on October 23rd from 7-11pm at Mighty, 119 Utah St, San Francisco, CA.

Tickets on sale now click here for more information.

Ecolect’s Materials Petting Zoo at IDSA Rhode Island’s Nextup Conference!

On Thursday September 25th, designers, business owners and individuals gathered together for ISDA Rhode Island’s Sustainability Conference in Providence. Presentations were given by four speakers; Meaghan O’Neal of TreeHugger.com, Sean Brennan & Kelly Sherman of Continuum, and Emily Pilloton of Project H Design spoke on the importance of understanding consumer behavior and choices. Emily discussed her current ongoing project, Hippo Roller, a water transportation device. Meaghan educated us about a new form of eco-friendly graffiti, and Sean and Kelly spoke passionately about the importance of the consumer mindset and understanding how consumers think about the environment. Most importantly, all of the guest speakers discussed ways of designing to guide consumers in choosing greener options. Afterwards, guests and speakers took part in an engaging discussion of causes, relevant issues, and solutions. Everyone congregated on the green roof of the historic and sustainably redeveloped, Peerless Lofts Building for cocktails and a small version of Ecolect’s Materials Petting Zoo, the cutting-edge traveling exhibition of environmentally considered materials.

Project H
Tree Hugger
Continuum

SF IDSA Digging Deeper Conference

Last Tuesday evening nearly 200 designers, consultants, architects, students, and other industry professionals gathered at the San Francisco Temple Club for an evening of presentations, panel discussion, green design dialogue, and eco-material petting. The event was an after-work conference hosted the the San Francisco IDSA chapter. The conference was titled “Digging Deeper: Building Blocks for Sustainable Design”. The mission of the panel discussion was to dig deeper and stir up the questions less comfortable to approach about sustainability and to discuss how to move forward into the next level of sustainability within design influenced professions. The conversation had a heavy focus on our impact as professionals in the field of design and our responsibility to represent educated sustainable design to our clients. The panel, with representatives from the field of design to life cycle analysis to trendspotting, went as far as to mention our responsibility to reject some product requests from clients if they are deemed unnecessary and to react with options for innovation in a more sustainable direction.

The six person panel was comprised of Ted Howes, panel moderator and Director of Sustainability at IDEO, SF; Travis Lee, Sustainable Engineering Lead at Lunar Design; Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation, Joep Meijer, founder of The Right Environment; Fransciose Serralta, Strategic Research and Planning Director at Peclars Paris; Nathan Shedroff, chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco; and finally Dawn Danby, Directory of Sustainability at Autodesk;



As Ecolect, we made our presence by hosting an “eco-materials petting zoo”. We featured 20 chosen materials from the Ecolect website that have unique properties with a leading sustainability performance. The zoo was a hit! We observed people petting, reading, inquiring, and even sharing their newly found material inspiration. The “zoo keepers” were Ecolect Co-founder and President, Joe Gebbia, Materials Correspondent, Elizabeth Redmond (myself), and all-the-way-from-Italy Ecolect intern, Alice Bertola.

Also, presenting and speaking on the panel was Ecolect’s LCA collaborator Joep Meijer of The Right Environment. Joep linked up with the Ecolect team nearly four months ago and is now our primary LCA collaborator on all Ecolect Consulting, through which we are actively working with a fortune 500 toy company to green 4 product lines. Joep is also actively helping us define the framework for our soon to be released Ecolect Eco-Materials Nutrition Label which we shared with many of you attendants.

For those of you who attended last Tuesday and have questions for us, want to share something with us, or simply want to reach out…leave us a comment. For those of you who missed the evening’s event, we hope to be in a town near you in the near future with our travelling eco-materials petting zoo.