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Can Design
Change the World?
A new book—an
outgrowth of a popular Web site—focuses on simple and complex
innovations that could solve global crises
10/26/2006
By
Reena Jana
The three-year-old Web site Worldchanging.com
has quickly established itself as a source for original, sophisticated
reporting on green technology and humanitarian tools and organizational
models, among other altruistic topics. The editors' focus is on
how people can cross-fertilize innovative ideas and collaborate
on solutions to a variety of international environmental crises
ranging from the quest for alternatives to Big Oil to the dearth
of clean water in developing nations.
Worldchanging's executive editor, Alex Steffen,
has now edited a book version of the site, Worldchanging: A User's
Guide for the 21st Century, which will be published in November.
Part encyclopedia of socially conscious companies and movements,
part picture-book (it includes gorgeous color photographs by leading
photographers such as Edward Burtynsky), and part how-to instructions
on becoming a greener consumer or business, the nearly 600-page
volume is an invaluable resource you can use without booting up
your computer (and so use electricity) to access Worldchanging.com.
And to justify the dead trees required to
produce the tome—and set a compelling example for readers—publisher
Harry N. Abrams printed each copy on 100% recycled, chlorine-free
paper. Abrams also purchased wind credits (from www.renewablechoice.com)
equal to the amount of electricity needed to manufacture the book.
Look Good Doing
Good
The book also serves as a snapshot of today's eco-chic, politically
aware pop culture (think of Bono's Project Red initiative for proof
of the current reach of the do-good, feel-good zeitgeist). And Worldchanging
joins a growing wave of accessible resources aiming to educate the
masses on the dire state of the environment and various international
societal and political crises.
Former Vice-President Al Gore's global-warming
documentary and best-selling book of the same title, An Inconvenient
Truth, is the most obvious example. (It's worth noting that
Gore wrote the foreword to Worldchanging.) The late-summer
launch of hip, trendy Good magazine, which focuses on the
marriage of socially conscious capitalism and idealism, is another.
And other recent titles, such as Design
Like You Give a Damn, published in June by Architecture for
Humanity, and the soon-to-be-released documentary film on climate
change, The Great Warming, featuring Keanu Reeves and Alanis
Morissette, reinforce the concept that popular culture is becoming
a vehicle for samaritans to recruit others to various causes.
BusinessWeek.com's Reena Jana recently chatted
with Alex Steffen about Worldchanging's concrete goals, the
inspiration for the book, and how businesses and consumers might
benefit from the examples presented in the volume and on Worldchanging.com.
Edited excerpts from their conversation follow.
Worldchanging.com features dizzyingly varied
subject matter, from sophisticated nanotech to DIY lamps made from
discarded laundry-detergent containers. One thread is the idea is
that cross-disciplinary design is the means for improving dire world
crises. Why do you think innovation and design are as potent as,
say, diplomacy or political or legal reform?
Actually, I think that innovation and design
aren't the same thing, but part of the same constellation of approaches.
We focus on people who are working on radically different solutions
for many problems. Some are classic design projects. Others are
about better ways of thinking, and others are about political action.
What's interesting is that many different
fields are converging at this moment. We live in a culture of innovation.
At this moment, across our global culture, there's a shared impulse
to solve problems. To paraphrase architect Buckminster Fuller, you
don't solve problems by complaining. Why not address the problems
directly rather than talk abstractly about, say, a refugee crisis?
Our book is about learning what people in
fields other than your own have done and then using what you've
learned to improve your own problems. Traditionally, different fields,
such as architecture and automobile manufacturing, were siloed.
Product design and communications, poverty
alleviation and urban planning were all separate things. But we
think if we can combine approaches, we can become radically more
effective. I like to refer to Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture
for Humanity, who uses the term "open source architecture,"
referring to the open-source movement in computing but then applying
it to a new way to make a building.
The book aims to be a call to arms, to
provoke individuals and corporations alike to act and solve a wide
spectrum of arguably unrelated crises. Isn't that a bit ambitious?
An alarming part of my job is to confront
how disheartening and how advanced our current crises are. There
are serious climate problems, challenges of extreme poverty and
epidemic disease. There are dramatic social inequities and human
rights violations around the world. People are hearing those alarm
bells.
I think it's not enough to be smart and talk
about the problems—now it's becoming crucial to address how
to change them. Our site and book are trying to disseminate knowledge
from various arenas to spur imaginations and prod them to action.
We hope the book will be a resource for people ready to do something
and reimagine the world.
Of all the products and inventions in the
book, which ones do you think have the potential to have the most
far-reaching social and economic impacts?
One that is most iconic is the LifeStraw,
a clean water provision device. It's easy to think of clean water
in the abstract, but how do you make it possible in places where
there is a lot of dangerous contamination? LifeStraw filters contaminated
water instantly, so it is clean by the time it touches a person's
lips. It could spark a real revolution.
There won't be a need to build purification
plants, and the LifeStraw will be able to help those in most immediate
need of clean water in a way that's cheaper and more instantly effective
than any alternative. I also think the concept of pop-apart cell
phones is going to have a huge impact. Hundreds of millions of people
around the world have cell phones, and we also change them and upgrade
constantly, meaning we throw out perfectly working phones and contribute
to toxic e-waste.
One design problem that phone makers who want
to recycle or reuse phones face is that it is time-consuming to
take a discarded handset apart and put its components in the right
bins before they can be reused. So phone designers are starting
to design for disassembly. The idea is to make phones that will
take only a couple of seconds to take apart. If the idea gets more
widely adopted, we could actually move toward the ideal of a zero-waste
manufacturing economy.
Green architecture gets a lot of press,
and smart companies are starting to see that green buildings can
not only help preserve the environment, but also help a business's
bottom line—not to mention garner press. Can businesses even
push themselves beyond LEED in terms of saving the environment and
their own dollars?
Traditionally, environmentalists have been
perceived as being antitech, antibusiness, and antiprosperity. We're
now seeing a new kind of environmental movement that's interested
in embracing science and technology for better solutions, and that
includes businesses.
We talk a lot about a bright green economy.
But the most negative force that has the largest environmental impact
is inefficiency. Businesses need to get smarter about delivering
what people want, without wasting resources. They need to realize
that no one makes money by making more waste.
As for green architecture, LEED was the goal
only a few years ago. But now people who are on the cutting edge
are going beyond LEED, such as the development of totally self-sufficient,
zero-energy-footprint flats in London, developed by Yorklake and
BedZed. Businesses should realize that they will make more money
if they push farther than LEED.
Some claim that buildings cost less up front
by being built green—using materials from the site to cut down
on transportation costs such as fuel, for example. I think we're
now headed toward the goal of zero-energy, zero-waste buildings.
Sure, it sounds really dramatic. But once we get a compelling, good
example, the whole field of green architecture will shift.
Some companies don't have the resources
to build a fancy new green building or develop a new green technology.
What are alternative possibilities to producing "worldchanging"
products?
I think some of the most impressive worldchanging
designs aren't just things, but ways of thinking. The idea of car
sharing from Zipcar is a brilliant innovation. A company such as
Netflix does no green marketing, but it is a worldchanging business.
It saves the resources that would have gone to the construction
of a Blockbuster-like store.
And it saves consumers from using gas to drive
to the video store. It saves plastic boxes, their manufacturing,
etc. Netflix offers consumers the service they want, at a fraction
of the ecological impact of the previous business model. It's important
for companies to rethink processes. They don't need technological
innovations. Services and not just products can be worldchanging.
Jana is a reporter with BusinessWeek.com
in New York.
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