A Better World By Design, a Big Success

This past weekend Providence played host to the first ever Better World By Design Conference. A Better World by Design posed the question of how can we use technology to improve the world? By bringing together a wide range of attendee’s from the business and media world to industrial designers and architects, A Better World By Design was an innovative and rousing event that championed novel ways of dealing with poverty, the environment and many other social crises.

Talks were given by dozens of industry leaders, panel discussions were held by established professionals, with topics ranging from Sustainability in Architecture to Green Consumer Products. Along with the panel discussions, Cameron Sinclair and Iqbal Quadir delivered inspiring keynote speeches on how responsible design and capital flows can positively impact the developing world. Our own Matt Grigsby was involved with a panel discussion, aside Dawn Danby from Autodesk and Steve Hamburg from Brown’s Environmental Studies program and conducted a workshop on triple bottom line businesses. The Material’s Petting Zoo highlighting a sampling of the latest and greatest eco-friendly materials on the market today.



By bringing together such a diverse group of attendees and speakers, the three-day event was a major success. The turn out was great and people were highly motivated and enthusiastic about how design can change the world for the better.

For more information about the event visit A Better World By Design.

Petting Good Materials in Boston

Ecolect held yet another successful Materials Petting Zoo, this time at the cutting edge, Boston-based design firm Continuum. Ecolect team members were on site to provide first hand material expertise and to field questions from the audience. 40 members of Continuum listened to a presentation by Matt Grigsby who outlined the origins and goals of Ecolect and the growing need to design more responsible and environmentally conscious products.

The leading design and branding consultancy is based in Boston has additional offices in Seoul and Milan. Continuum has a strong commitment to the environment and recently launched Colorblind, the ongoing consumer-focused sustainability project. With their strong commitment to environmentally positive design, Continuum was the perfect audience for another Ecolect Petting Zoo.

The atmosphere was fun, lively, and inspirational, with designers, engineers and other eager staff actively engaged, eager to see what material design alternatives are available. With the great talent at Continuum’s design studio, expect to see great environmentally friendly products on the market soon!

For more information about Continuum and their project Colorblind, visit www.dcontinuum.com/colorblind

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.