Sustainable Design --- Nathan Shedroff

Guest speaker Nathan Shedroff gave a thorough presentation on sustainable innovation. In the very beginning he explains that Design, Sustainability, and Business all connect with each other. When put together, makes meaning and experience in all fields. Many questions arouse from sustainability. What is a more sustainable world look like? What is a more meaningful world look like? What is a post-consumer world look like? All these questions yet we do not have an answer. But we need to. And that is what design is for, to create answers to all these unanswerable questions. A sustainable design also has to consider multiple factors such as financial, social, and ecological factors.

As we saw in Nathan Shedroff's presentation:

"In a stable economy, sustainability is the competitive advantage strategy. In a down economy, sustainability is the turnaround strategy. In a collapse, sustainability is a survival strategy." Hunter Lovins, 2009

There is no such thing as sustainable design. But there is such thing as more sustainable design. "Don't design things today that make tomorrow worse."

We always go back to the iphone because it was such a successful sustainable design. It's fashionable, some what "affordable", it's portable, and it can substitute as a phone, mp3 player, camera, watch, GPS, planner, etc. Instead of bringing 5 billion different devices, we only need one iphone to substitute it all.