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Core 77 semi-recently posted an interesting, longish interview with Nathan Shedroff, chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and the author of several books on design. His most recent book is Design is the Problem, which is about “how the design industry can approach the world in a more sustainable way.”

The interview itself is broad — Shedroff expands on ten or so related concepts, each one germane in some way to his overall view of “sustainability.” Whether or not you’ll find his take on every topic persuasive in every detail, they are as a whole uniformly interesting and well-measured. No small task, considering the breadth of opinions he delivers: he discusses everything from the maligned value of business to the proliferation of NGOs to rampant occidental capitalism.

His points are also admirably rooted in practical reality. One of my favorite moments from the interview comes in response to the question, “What should business be doing to change the world for the better and what can designers do to encourage this to happen?” The quote below is his answer to the latter half of this question, abridged in several places where the lack of context rendered it unintelligible.

Designers need to start making changes ourselves, with or without a mandate, in the things we make. We can choose to not talk about materials substitutions or other improvements in impacts if our managers don’t want to hear about them and, instead, we can highlight the improvements they do want to hear about — like improvements in efficiency. We can learn to speak “their” language authoritatively and speak to risk mitigation and gains in owner’s equity.

We need to talk about this to our peers, managers, and clients with an encouraging, quiet, and strong imperative that isn’t sensationalized. If they turn-off at the mention of climate change, switch to cute, fluffy polar bears drowning. If they don’t respond to that, explain that the market for their goods tanks when customers are out of work, afraid of the food they eat, or their homes are flooded.

Probably worth a read.
(Photo credit: Core 77)

Working designers take heed: you are going to have to promote value-driven design by means of business appeals. This is an important part of the BlogLESS belief system. It’s why we spend so much time trying to locate practical arguments that our clients will understand to promote ethical design (although we are admittedly prone to occasional spats of moralizing).

Here are a handful of posts that might help the next time you have to sell a client an ethical design that they find counter-intuitive:

1. Being Good: the elixir of corporate youth: How do you keep a big old company vigorous and growing like a fresh young startup? Paul Graham says it’s simple: be good.
2. Picture-Poor Service: When everyone is a potential photographer, it’s worth remembering: a picture is worth a thousand customers.
3. If it wasn’t broke, I wouldn’t have noticed: BP’s failure to coordinate their brand with reality hurts them.
4. Turning opt-out inside out: Can unethical tactics become blueprints for ethical success? DLB puts on its lab coat and dissects opt-out schemes to find out.
5. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything: Being unethical just plain takes more effort to maintain than being ethical.
6. DRM and the Social Contract: If DRM is necessary (or just unstoppable), what’s a fair way to do it? DLB looks for inspiration in an example of a successful compromise between publishers and users.