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Designing from the bottom up?

It seems we’re going through a purple patch of the ‘greening’ of design right now – from Bill McDonough’s now well know ‘Cradel to Cradel ‘ design ideology (watch the great video from TED here for a 20 minute insight) through to GM’s plug-in Chevy Volt – a car designed around its ‘green’ powertrain. The sign that sustainability has really ‘arrived’ on the designer agenda is best summed up by this month’s issue of Wallpaper* Magazine – the uber-trendy lifestyle magazine, beloved of architects and designers the world over. The May issue is crammed full of sustainability-friendly content, with editor Jeremy Langmead devoting his leader column to explaining how the online eco-edit design exhibition lead to a total re-evalutation of currating an exhibition – cutting carbon footprints and bringing things together on-line, rather than flying lots of people and things around the world.

So design is green a-g0-g0 – great – but here’s the rub: designers, who are generally billed as ‘problem solvers’, have actually created many of the problems in the world that we’re now rather belatedly looking to fix. The key question we as designers (in the wider sense) need to be asking is can we continue to ‘design’ our way out of the problem by simply making more stuff? I implore you to read Allan Chochinov’s brilliant “1000 words : A manifesto for Sustainability in Design” over at Core77 for more on this.