When they come to deal with sustainability issues, design people tend to swing between two extremes. On the one hand, being responsible citizens, they worry greatly about their personal ‘carbon footprint’, and consult one of the 300,000 carbon and footprint counters and calculators that are today available on the Web.
However, perhaps because these different carbon counters always give conflicting results, design people also tend to drop all quantitative considerations when turning out a new, oh-so-sustainable design. Instead, they become idealistic and emotional, and are emphatic that their mission is to save the planet through design. Numbers are nowhere to be seen.
Wouldn’t it be better to strike a midway position? Here design people would quantify the benefits of environmentally-conscious work when such benefits can really be measured. But when there isn’t very firm evidence for such benefits, they would refuse to collapse into well-meaning ethical fudge.
More and more design managers have turned to crunching numbers. Sometimes they do this to reassure themselves; sometimes they do it to look professional; more often, we hope, they do it for substantive reasons. Whatever the motive, though, the kingdom of Excel now embraces all kinds of subjects: project budgets, salary increases, new IT – you name it.
It’s only a pity that the new numeracy in design very rarely embraces environmental issues. Attempts to calculate carbon footprints are bound to be rather fruitless, for the concept is riddled with confusions: should one take into account the energy required by using CAD in the studio, for instance? Yet if we are talking real, measurable savings in raw material inputs, or water used in production processes, or in the expense of disposal, then let’s do the required accounting and, in these cost-obsessed times, display our prowess to the management board.
Tags: responsibility, sustainability
