The Abrams Clean Tech Report

 

Greener By Design Coverage

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

Greener World Media is right in the midst of the final day of what is their flagship conference, Greener By Design -Greener Products For Leaner Times, and it’s one I recommend nobody miss if you can still squeeze in time to go today before the conference ends. “On the bleeding edge of product design” is how one attendee described the conference to me, and that pretty much sums it up.

Greener By Design is for anybody tasked with rethinking their industry, rethinking their company’s strategy, rethinking their product lines, rethinking what goes into their product lines, to the rethinking of product design – from the chemicals to the materials to the composition of the materials.

Part classroom, part thought leadership forum, Greener By Design is a fascinating place to plant yourself for a couple of days. You’ll get a chance to listen and you’ll also get a chance to role up your sleeves and interact.

Joel Makower, Pete May, and the rest of their team have assembled some of the best creative minds in design, and it shows. From Amnon Levav’s presentation (Amnon is MD of SIT International, btw), which was more like a class, as we were all put to work — to listening to Peter Arnell, chairman and chief creative officer, Arnell, walk us through the design process of the Peapod — one can’t help but come away feeling like you’ve had an opportunity to step outside of the box and see things through a new lens.

The Peapod, for example, was taken from concept to the street in 6 months. Just the idea of it – a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle – one that doesn’t go about 25 miles per hour, is fascinating. What city or neighborhood street allows you to go above 25 anyway? Peter told us yesterday that he has pictures of people with big smiles on their faces when they saw the car go by on the road. The car literally makes people smile — it’s got a smiley face of a grill, and it’s utterly charming. “Adorable” is the word Peter used. One things for certain: we definitely need more smiles in this world, so let’s hear it for the Peapod.

One thing came across loud and clear — across the board yesterday: green has won its place front and center in the design process. Concepts such as “dematerialization” (where you might introduce a service instead of a product); or “revalorization” (where you recover value from a product’s life cycle -think Patagonia, or Xerox’s asset recovery program), and “detoxification” (think Method Home) hit me as I sat down in my first session.

It also was very clear that companies continue to develop their relationships with their retailers, finding it incredibly advantageous in the product design process to work closely with their retailers, to get from one product innovation to the next.

Key conversations from the conference you’ll want to check out, as well as companies of note:
- -Joel Makower in conversation with William McDonough. Check out McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, if you haven’t already.

-David de Rothschild’s Plastiki, a boat made entirely out of Self reinforcing polyethylene terephthalate (SRPET).

-Check out Ohio State’s Center for Resilience. Very interesting.

-Go see what Sustainable Minds is doing. Fascinating company.

-Take HP’s Voodoo laptop. Now take just the box it comes in and consider that. Part of the design process the team went through was to unconstruct the “box” – so the team created a box that would purposefully be reused by consumers — no SKUs on the outside, no logos. The box has since been used for filing everything from office materials to kitchen utensils.

-Walmart continues to push the envelop in sustainability. It’s expected that the company will be coming out at some point soon with some semblence of a universal sustainability index for products. While Walmart’s Rand Waddoups, senior director of business strategy and sustainability at Wal-Mart, wasn’t at liberty to speak further about the subject when he got asked about it by Marc Gunther, what he did say is that the company will next be asking suppliers about the chemicals in the products being supplied to Walmart. “The vision is that every product has behind it information to allow us to be much more intelligent – bringing clarity to the question of ‘what is sustainability?’”

Full coverage of the conference can be found here. And if you weren’t able to make it this year- I’d highly suggest you add it to your to-do list for next. Greener World Media is soon to hit its 10 year anniversary mark, so stay tuned. The organization has more in store.

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