Low-flow toilets, recycling your Mazda, rebuilding New Orleans, Foo Go and Brad Pitt: What do all these have in common? Sustainable design. The need to integrate sustainability into design practices is becoming increasingly more apparent — from objects as small as appliances to applications as large as towns — due to design’s ability to overcome difficult obstacles with measured creativity.

“Sustainability” is a word that may not mean much to a lot of people, and to many people is a synonym for “environment.” Building or producing with the environment in mind is still a relatively new goal for many companies. Yet sustainable design is increasingly becoming a consideration for every project and every designer, not just a design specialty. In fact, for those in the know, sustainable design is simply good design.

Sustainable design can be defined broadly as designing physical objects to comply with the principles of economic, social and ecological sustainability. It ranges from designing small objects for everyday use through to designing buildings, cities and even the earth’s physical surface. According to the World Commission on Environment and Development, sustainability is understood to be “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

For example, using less materials (lightweighting), fewer (making it easier to recycle) and, if possible, avoiding toxic substances and choosing renewable or recycled/recyclable are issues to consider in design for sustainability. Careful selection of materials and manufacturing processes can often (though not nearly always) create products indistinguishable in price and performance from non-sustainable products.

Dematerialization could include some of the above — lightweighting, for example — but also designing things to be multifunctional, or finding a different way to deliver the same benefit through a service or product-service combination, variously referred to as selling performance or results, or more recently as “product service systems” (PSS).

As well, some disposable items can be designed to self-destruct. A good example of a mismatch between the life of a product and the life of its packaging is the average sandwich wrapper. While most wrappers may end up in landfills for a few hundred years, according to Design Council, UK-based Foo Go uses pre-packaged sandwich wrappers that will biodegrade within 14 weeks, using water-based carboard, inks and coatings and windows made of corn starch. While the pre-packed sandwich provider has received much praise for its contribution to the environment, the costs for the 14-week biodegradable packaging are five times more than ordinary packaging.

Or take appliances and automobiles, which can be designed to be taken apart easily so they can be repaired, serviced, upgraded, remanufactured or recycled, such as through modular design or smart materials. Further, they can be constructed from recyclable materials such as steel, aluminum and glass, as well as from renewable materials such as wood and plastics from natural feedstocks.

Even mild design efforts, such as low-flow water appliances, can greatly increase the sustainable content of manufactured items.

Arguably the sustainable design example growing quickest in interest and popularity lies in green building technology. Green buildings are designed to conserve energy, water and resources with limited polluting of indoor or outdoor environments.

“Ten years ago,” BusinessWeek recently noted, “…using less energy inherently meant making do with less — less heating, less cooling, less of the symbolism and grandeur that define great architecture. Yet by the turn of the millennium green had become glamorous, and today it’s even economical. The cycle of innovation for sustainable building technologies is now staggeringly short, given how long it takes to complete a building.

“In short, we are close to the tipping point at which green design becomes the default option for smart building.”

For example, announced in July 2006, Delta Airlines’ new Terminal A at Boston’s Logan International Airport features a roofing membrane and paving designed to reflect heat from the building and special storm-water filtration devices to remove suspended solids and total phosphorous, thus combating the accelerated heat island effect and storm-water runoff issues typically caused by impervious surfaces on runways, parking lots and large roof areas. Some of the project’s other sustainable strategies include the following: water-efficient plumbing and irrigation; extensive day-lighting and high-insulation glass; energy-efficient electric lighting; construction waste recycling; and the use of recycled, local materials.

With 10 percent of all materials on the +640,000-square-foot Terminal A job coming from recycled sources and 75 percent of construction waste being reused, recycled or otherwise diverted from area landfills, the project has saved many thousands of tons of raw materials.

Adrian Smith’s designs for Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower and the United Arab Emirates’ Burj Dubai — both under construction, with the latter set to be the tallest building in the world — have already earned him international attention. Yet this year, Smith’s collaboration with designer Gordon Gill on architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Pearl River Tower has also been the subject of escalating excitement in the architectural press. Pearl River Tower is a “zero-energy” project for a Chinese company that uses a unique wind-harvesting technique, powerful turbines and other sustainable technologies to generate most of its own energy.

Similar, autonomous buildings use available resources such as rainwater, solar power or wind turbines to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and other resources. Often, they can be constructed of recycled materials, as well, reducing their total energy requirements for construction.

And sustainable design is becoming more prevalent in objects and systems larger than appliances, automobiles and even buildings. Urban and rural planning can benefit from including sustainability as a central criterion when laying out roads, streets, buildings and other components of the built environment.

Over the summer, for instance, New Orleans’ municipal government floated ideas about focusing rebuilding Hurricane Katrina-destroyed houses in “dry” areas. Believing that only sustainable design would allow their ecologically fragile communities to survive future storms, harder-hit residents appealed to national and local foundations to recruit leading urban planners to help them plan green. That effort, which began with initial workshops earlier this month, will lead to an official proposal for government-funded rebuilding projects — a document called the Unified New Orleans Plan (UNOP).

Housing being the primary issue currently on many residents’ minds, Frederic Schwartz of New York’s Schwartz Architects, one of 13 firms working with civic groups over the winter in formal planning sessions, recently explained to Plenty magazine, “the challenge is to find a way to build homes quickly, and make them last — and that’s where sustainability comes in.”

One green UNOP idea involves clustering homes together to reduce short car trips and spread the costs of new technologies (E.g., solar panels) across several homes.

Building from prefabricated materials is also efficient, as it reduces time and truck traffic involved in construction. Designer Matt Berman, who lately has garnered significant attention by winning the Brad Pitt-sponsored Global Green competition for sustainable New Orleans housing, has a design for a low-lying neighborhood that involves prefabricated modular houses, exterior stairwells that absorb sunlight to illuminate homes, and plazas with plenty of bike storage.

Deborah Gans, another UNOP team adviser from New York, stressed the importance of designing with New Orleans’ particular ecology in mind. “You can use things that come naturally to the area that everyone understands,” Gans said to Plenty. Such steps include building houses to face east for optimal daylighting, using natural ventilation to harness bayou breezes and, as Berman did in his winning design, building houses under tree overhangs to provide shade.

Any business that strives to remain competitive will recognize the opportunities involved with the new demands for environmental quality. Of course, for companies to get involved, they must be sure of their economic survival. Decision-making about sustainable technologies will involve risk, uncertainty and surprise about likely economic implications, and about possible social and environmental impacts. Yet the need to integrate sustainable design into design practices is becoming increasingly more apparent.

Design has a valuable role to play in sustainability — objects as small as appliances and as large as towns — due to its ability to overcome difficult obstacles with measured creativity.

Simona Rocchi, Director of Sustainable Design at Philips Design, agrees. Design, she says, “explores the new and is the bridge between technology, society and business. It is sensitive to cultural conditions, social trends and the potential of new technology, and is able to translate this into valuable propositions for business by envisioning solutions grounded in new ways of production and consumption.”

Resources

Design Council: Sustainability

Green Wonders of the World
by Andrew Blum
BusinessWeek, July 21, 2006

Terminal A at Logan Airport Becomes World’s First LEED®-Certified Airport Facility
Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, Inc. (HOK), July 12, 2006

Architect’s dream project
by Kevin Nance
Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 22, 2006

It’s (Big) Easy Being Green
by Alec Appelbaum
Plenty magazine, October 2006

Philips: A sustainable design vision