The Greening of Design, from A to D

The greening of design is gaining interest, and I'm not simply talking about our fast-approaching conference on the topic, Greener by Design. Last week, Business for Social Responsibility and the design firm IDEO released a new free report (download - PDF) showing how companies are infusing sustainability into their design processes in ways that have led to innovative products that offer value to consumers.

The report offers an "A-B-C-D Approach to Making Better Products," as the subtitle promises. And while the real-life process may not be quite that alphabetic, or simple, the report offers a useful framework for how to think about product design and development through the lens of environmental sustainability, including some key questions that never seem to get asked.

The report begins with the observation that product design challenges are becoming increasingly more acute, due to companies' need to extend their product relationships up and down the value chain, including upstream sourcing and downstream recovery; increased regulations and demands for product transparency; the growth of global product recalls; and the wider range of factors companies must consider in product design and management, such as toxicity, recyclability, and renewability.

As the report's authors note, many of these factors "lie outside the expertise of traditional designers and product managers." Moreover, companies developing sustainable design practices are recognizing that success in green product design involves going beyond integrating new tools into traditional design practices. It involves a whole new way of thinking about products.

The report outlines the "sustainable design intelligence" needed for an organization to design better products and create lasting business and customer value, including the aforementioned "A-B-C-D" approach that breaks sustainability into four behaviors:

• Assessing material impacts of projects and design capacity in an organization

• Bridging functions and people to make valuable, tractable product redesigns

• Creating generative internal and external learning projects

• Diffusing lessons and accountability mechanisms that build literacy and affect better decision making around the organization

They write:

Leading companies are transitioning away from a "pipeline" model of product development, in which groups throw and receive designs "over a wall" without understanding the upstream and downstream implications. The alternative, more "integrative product design" process featured in this report draws together disconnected groups and helps them strategize development of the competencies needed to improve products. It empowers eyes and ears around the organization to identify and manage sustainability issues emerging on the horizon.

What's the upside of all this? The report outlines a range of business benefits: better product performance, strengthened market position, improved compliance, reduced risks, increased organizational agility, improved morale and productivity, and "serendipitous innovation," such as when green thinking uncovers unnecessary complexity that adds costs, or when suppliers identify better-performing, cost-improving options.

The report offers examples of how the A-B-C-D framework has worked in companies like Clorox, Herman Miller, and Nike. Some of these stories have been well-covered elsewhere, but in the context of the BSR-IDEO framework, they take on a new dimension.

Part of what these companies' stories have in common is that they managed to break out of the siloed product design process, building cross-functional teams that go beyond technical and customer specifications to engage a broader swath of the company. That's a big barrier for many companies, where design specifications is left to engineers, designers, and a handful of others, often without regard to sustainability commitments and goals. (We'll be having a session at Greener by Design on how big companies have managed to cross that chasm.)

In the end, the biggest need for companies in aligning their product design process with their sustainability goals may be to redesign the company itself: its ability to share knowledge and insights across brands, divisions, business units, and job functions in a way that brings the best and brightest ideas to the table.

And maybe even to redesign the table itself.

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Comments

[Peter]

48 pages. Wow.

I used to present logos by holding 'em up and saying 'Here it is'. Then I got wise and added the document with all the blurb on the why, who, where... etc. The latter seemed to get a better hit rate, and oddly no one ever asked if the consumer would ever be issued with this information as the delivery van zipped by.

It seems a shame that in this day and age that, without a lot of process, product is now seldom going to be the driver, no matter how pertinent.

Wouldn't it be nice to get back, at least a little, to the old aircraft designers' adage that 'if it looks right; it'll fly right'.

[R. Paul Herman]

First, of all, I really enjoyed this article! Thanks!

In many respects, General Electric's Ecomagination initiative is an excellent example of this. Jeff Immelt has been able to integrate environmental goals (e.g. GHG reductions for each business unit) into performance measures and bonuses for management in very much the same way GE integrated company values in the 1990s as an important part of performance objectives.

In the release of their 2007 report, GE set yet another far-reaching objective in vowing to reduce their overall water usage by 20% from 2004 levels by 2012. GE has already saved over $100mm in reduced energy costs since the beginning of the Ecomagination initiative. Meanwhile they raised the bar on revenue deemed to be sustainable to $25 billion ($14b in 2007 and raised $5 billion from the original target set for 2010); GE's investments in clean tech now total over $1billion. Essentially, by aligning strategy to solve human problems (health in GE Medical, wealth in GE Money, earth in GE Wind and Infrastructure), here's a model example of a company that can serve growth markets and likely act as a recession hedge in a world of constrained natural resources - which was reflected in the growth rates in last quarter's earnings report.

In some industries, sustainability initiatives might benefit from collaboration among direct competitors. For example, in semi-conductor production, a fabrication facility construction is $2bil and up. Energy usage in the fab is not the competitive advantage, while the energy usage of the computer chips are. Hence, AMD, Intel and TI (and others) have been collaborating to increase energy efficiency, seek out reductions in toxins and persistent chemicals, and benefit the entire industry - while they still compete against each other.

[Andrew Deitz]

Up to 90% of a product’s carbon footprint occurs in the design phase. I am surprised more companies have not made the connection between carbon intensive commodities and price volatility. Integrating reliable carbon metrics into design is a crucial part of communicating the benefits of green design to stakeholders.