Sustainable design is simply good design
Sustainable design is the activity of balancing environmental and social impact with making profit. It is simply a subset of good design. Just like usability, accessibility and getting the right functionality at the right price. A good product needs to be fit for purpose and enjoy a long and useful life. Deeper sustainability considerations like low embodied energy, efficiency and social impact don't matter a dot if the product is rubbish. For Onzo that translates into helping users understand their energy use to help them save. Once products have served their time they should all be recycled. It's their end-of-life insurance policy. The job for any half decent R&D team is to make sure the friction of recycling is minimised for the end user. Innocent Drinks bottles are a great UK example. Made entirely from recycled material they are themselves 100% recyclable. All our products are designed to be recycled. Our products fit through a standard letterbox making it easy for users to post them back to us when they die. Just like old mobile phones and ink cartridges. Hardware postability, for example, is not an easy thing to achieve unless the vision for the original design specification was right in the first place!
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Posted by Neil Tierney
on Nov 21st,
12:00 p.m.
in Design
|
Comments (3)
Yes, I agree Neil. Sustainable design creates a 'good' product. Design should as a matter of course consider all the factors. Each designer should take responsibility for there design work and get it right from the start.
There are alot of occassions where designers are just abdocating or avoiding their responsibility by saying they could not address it.
The best place to address the key issues is during the design specification phase as you have noted. That way the customer and the clients expectations are set along the right bearing from the very first point.
To ensure that those specifications are correct design teams need buy-in and investment from senior management. Onzo’s leadership has this vision and is a core reason behind Lightweight Medical agreed to pool their resources with Onzo as the surviving brand.
http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2231509/onzo-pledges-smart-meters
The Onzo team are sure to benefit from the skills that the LMD team have. We are looking forward to seeing the results of the collaboration.
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