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.