Recently I had the great privilege of hearing Michael Braungart’s keynote speech on “cradle to cradle” at the Green Industrial Design conference in Holon, Israel. “Cradle to cradle” is a revolutionary approach to sustainable development, co-developed with William McDonough and published in their book of the same name (2002). I’m a big fan.
This philosophy radically challenges “over-population” as the root to all the current environmental problems. Its newness is in the concept that if we redesign the way we make things – transitioning from the current system of “cradle to grave” into a new cyclic system of “cradle to cradle” – then it wouldn’t matter how much we consume. That way, we can continue to consume, but after the products’ usage has ended, if designed correctly, they can become raw materials for future products.
Some call this a new industrial revolution. Only this time, doing it the right way.
Coming from SIT, and being hooked on its elegant principle of “the problem is the solution”, I reveled in this provocative concept. If products we consume will actually nourish the earth – so the more I consume, the more I do for my surrounding – it would really be a perfect world.
“The problem is the solution” is a specific principle behind the broader philosophy of Creative Problem Solving which turns win-lose relationships into win-wins. This is because problems can usually be defined as a conflict between two beneficial parameters. You’d like to maximize both, but the problem is that maximizing one means minimizing the other. This is a classic win-lose situation. An efficient system, according to traditional approaches, is when both parameters are optimized. Creative Problem Solving, on the other hand, seeks to creatively transcend this conflict to create a new win-win relationship between the system’s parameters. In SIT, we call this creating a Qualitative Change. The Cradle to Cradle concept addresses exactly this, or in Michael’s words: “it’s the difference between being efficient and being effective. Efficient means doing things right and effective is doing the right thing.” Recycling, which is actually down-cycling according to Michael, is only optimizing the system. But finding a way to make things different, so that 100% of them can serve as raw materials for the next cycle, is doing the right thing!
It’s not that radical if you think of nature, of course. There, the more a tree blooms, the more compost there will later be. For nature, it doesn’t matter how many apples the tree “produces”.
My second delight in Michael’s lecture was his cry to the designers in the audience to redesign, and to do it right this time!
But this time, my delight was short-lived, as it immediately reminded me of another rousing cry made by CEOs who declare innovation as a strategic engine for growth, but leave their poor R&D manager or marketer sitting in front of a whiteboard trying to think – “How the heck am I going to innovate?!”
As an SIT. facilitator, this is where we usually step in to help the R&D manager or marketer. And we do this by offering a structured innovation method that supplies the “How” for turning her CEO’s demand into a pipeline of successful new actions, products, strategies etc. It’s a little like having a muse on demand.
But then it made me wonder – is a similar set of tools available to the designers sitting in the audience around me? Even if a designer, system architect or a material engineer today wants to comply with the Cradle to Cradle guidelines and principles, turning “cradle to grave” products into “cradle to cradle” ones - how are they going to get there?
My educated guess is that designers around you would probably use a solution (customer) centered approach rather than a problem (product) centered approach such as SIT.
As you brilliantly wrote, SIT offers a more structured and efficient way for designing for efficiency.
The challenge for us, if we want to add our two sand grains for leveraging global sustainability, blinks in neon lights:
How to make diffusion of SIT - at a larger scale - more efficient, so more and more designers will fill their whiteboards with more “cradle to cradle” value offers?
How does a specific initiative such as a SIT Institute of Sustainable Design sound?