Lecture: What Is Sustainable Graphic design? (April 2021)

 27th August 2021 at 11:49pm
Word Count: 124

Define Sustainability

When I talk about sustainability, I'm talking about these mindsets.

  • The Triple Bottom Line
    • separate but additive; each space has potential for sustainability, and the goal is for hitting the overlap of all three sustainabilities, but you can focus on one without the others (there in lies the problem).
    • This is "sustainability in practice"
  • Nested: Economy within Society within Nature
    • holistic; everything is a decision within nature.
    • If you frame everything this way, you can't accidentally leave out a kind of sustainability.
    • Everything Is Connected

Here are some other Definitions of Sustainability

  • Any action that does not degrade the systems supporting it
  • Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
  • Leave the world better than you found it, take no more than you need, try not to harm life or the environment, make amends if you do. / Paul Hawken
  • Do unto others as you would have them do to you. / The Golden Rule (or the ethic of reciprocity), Originally attributed to Confucious
  • Equity over time. Think of it as extending the Golden rule through time … Do unto future generations as you would have them do unto you. / Robert Gilman, the Context Institute
  • Living and working together for a common good. / The Japanese principle of “Kyosei”
  • Don't eat your seed corn. / Farmer Colloquialism
  • Improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of life’s supporting systems.
  • Understanding the interconnections among the economy, our society, and the environment.
  • Living within limits
  • Accounting for the present AND the future
  • Leaving the world better than we found it
  • Affluence without guilt, not sacrifice and restriction / Alex Steffen, founder of WorldChanging.

The Sustainabilitist Principles

The Sustainabilitist Principles is a modular manifesto; a collection of the ways of thinking to sustainably design as I considered them in 2009. The goal: create an object whose form embodied the principles it conveyed.

The Sustainabilitist Principles started out as the books on my desk. Where did "sustainable designing" lay within them… I mapped connections between ideas… wrote down repeating ideas… pondered interconnections over time and space of similar principles… how could I clarify access to these ideas for the next designer?

The final output of this direction brought necessary pieces together in an intentional, ephemeral form for an exhibition. We don't need another book or poster series to explain these principles: the objects themselves could do it if put together correctly!

The books were my actual books. The screen printed definitions were printed on the front matter of found paperback novels. The interconnecting embroidery floss was used in the longest possible pieces to maximize reuse of the thread afterward.

This was my first truly successful piece of "sustainable graphic design." It was also my last "answer" to a question in grad school: "What does sustainable Graphic Design look like?"

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Related:

What does sustainable Graphic Design look like?

A prompt.

What does it look like? Should it matter that it looks different or the same?

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This question continues to fascinate me. Alongside the Sustainabilitist principles, I had works that I felt fell into 4 types of "answers":

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Related:

Sustainable Graphic Design Does Not Exist

Sustainable design does not exist was at first pessimistic. Is design all just trash? does design create waste period, so nothing is sustainable? Anything we make is unmaking so much else; so all design is unsustainable.

But! Sustainable design does not exist came to signify an alternative; it didn't exist because it was ephemeral! because it reused existing objects in a new way! that it left no trace! that it was part of a vernacular process! suddenly this felt like a prompt for new works; new questions! A useful constraint for future work.

Where does this thinking lead us? We can think of all our designs as living within the context of nature, and we can think of how they might look or what they might be made of or what audience a design might be serving… Is there a clearer way to articulate what "Sustainable Graphic Design" is?

Defining Sustainable Graphic Design

In the 2013 book Flourishing: A Frank Conversation about Sustainability, John Ehrenfeld writes “The key to doing something about sustainability is that you first have to say what it is that you want to sustain.” To define sustainable graphic design we must first define what it is we are sustaining.

If sustainable graphic design is design in service of what we want to sustain, how do you decide what's worth sustaining? (because, if we pick the wrong thing, say we want to sustain the status quo, then that is what sustainable graphic design is — hmmm!?).

Ehrenfeld answers that for us too. He wants to sustain “that all humans and other life should flourish.”

Designer Bruce Mau had a similar goal for the Massive Change project: “Our project is the welfare of all life as a practical objective.” (design for the welfare of all life)

This is what we'll use as our definition of Sustainable Graphic Design for the remainder of the talk: Sustainable graphic design is “graphic design in support of all life flourishing,” or, “graphic design for the welfare of all life.”

Sustainable Graphic Design is Different

All life flourishing is not the traditional goal of business, culture, and design. Sustainable Graphic Design defined this way is different than "regular" cultural production.

Throughout western art and design history new or “different” thinking and tools correlate with new or different aesthetic outcomes.

Sustainability brings with it all manner of new technologies, new social structures, new tools. Should Sustainable graphic design then carry with it additional new forms and aesthetics?

An example: Selecting a font

Does a font’s appearance matter as much as the energy and material and social ills it saves? Is selecting a font that uses minimal ink the best way to select a font? Would a font that is condensed, that uses up less space (saving paper over a print run; exposure to chemicals to the printer) be better? Can we combine the these? The thinest, most condensed, lightest ink coverage font is the most sustainable? This can easily be taken absurd lengths.

This is useful for critiquing design choices; it tackles outcomes from a resource perspective; can show a different "visual languages;" but does it embrace “the welfare of all life?”

Sustainable Graphic Design looks Ideological & Critical?

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby write in their 2001 book Design Noir: The Secret Life of Objects that “all design is ideological, the design process is informed by values based on a specific world view.” With “the welfare of all life” as our world view, how does that shift what and how we graphic design?

Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby are proponents of “Critical Design,” design that “provides a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural, technical, or economic values.”

Sustainable graphic design is not just design that helps people and our planet, but design that is also critical of existing social, cultural, technical, AND economic structures; since many of these things are harming all life, not helping them to flourish.

Example: Green Acres

Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses, and Abandoned Lots was a book I worked on with my friend and curator Sue Spaid, for the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, OH. Green Acres featured artists using farming as their art practice.

The goal: make the resultant book "sustainable." These were sustainability focused artists, how could I represent their ecological inventiveness in a printed book? The things that made the production of this book "sustainable" were that it was printed on demand, and used recycled, unbleached paper.

Visually, the book's design was meant to be _critical_; the juxtaposition of small art farm graphics vs. giant commercial farm references via a constrained square grid and the aerial commercial farmland photography. (» Critical Design)

While the book intends to say something different, it conforms to common standards of "good" modernist layout. Other than a minor production method improvement, it's the same … ! Is it Sustainable Graphic Design?

Good Formalism

We judge graphic design using visual criteria for "formal goodness" or "beauty" from the systems we must be critical of.

The principles of "good" modernist design are so embedded in culture that they are the principles of "good" graphic designing.

— Jerome Harris

Contemporary formal goodness evolved from late 19th through mid-20th centuries western art traditions. The formal concepts of Modernist Capitalism do not so far seem to lead to all life flourishing (it's usually the opposite!).

What new criteria for formal goodness or "beauty" are necessary for Sustainable designs!?

(And, if a modern design is made by modernists, then sustainable design is made by sustainabilitists?)

What is beautiful design anyway?}

In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton writes: “To call a work of architecture or design beautiful is to recognize it as a rendition of values critical to our flourishing. A transubstantiation of our individual ideals in a material medium.” This would then seem that however our ideals are materialized into graphic design yields “beautiful” graphic design. Botton specifically mentions "values critical to our flourishing." If we merge Botton's idea with our "all life flourishing" focused graphic design then sustainable design IS beautiful design. This doesn't imply a style or aesthetic, but instead a shared set of values. We get other criteria to help judge the goodness of a design, not purely formal, but the content, the context.

Sustainable designers must see the non-sustainable as the less than beautiful. If your design doesn't account for the welfare of all life, whatever the external aesthetics that wrap it, your design is ugly. Edwin Datschefksi calls this “the hidden ugliness of traditional products.” Basically, the non-sustainable is (& can only be) ugly.

So: A design is both sustainable AND beautiful when its form declares that humans and all other life should flourish.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

— Margaret Wolfe Hungerford, Molly Bawn, 1878

How can both "Sustainable Design = Beautiful Design" AND "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" be true?

“There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness”

— Stendhal

It's not a new idea that beauty isn't the same for everyone

"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."

— David Hume, _Essays, Moral and Political_, 1742

How Does a sustainabilitist account for pluralities as to what constitutes “beautiful?” How do we begin to share "all life flourishing" as an overarching socio-cultural value?

But! If you design for the welfare of all life, it doesn't matter what the design looks like, the design will be beautiful!?

An Idea: Signs Signaling Sustainability

Instead of what does sustainable graphic design look like then, a more important question is what values underpin your sustainable graphic design? Or, what values does your sustainable graphic design signal out to the world?

How does your design makes tangible, makes understandable, something about sustainability?

This is doable no matter the project; no matter the prompt. There are myriad aspects of climate change and sustainability one might signal. Each even in their tiniest part we can think of as contributing to "all life flourishing."

This is another opportunity to find the context for which "beauty" exists in a design without resorting to superficial, external styling. We can focus on values or ethics in the unique contexts of each new project.

Amager Bakke Vapor Ring

A concept that was never made due to some weird problems; but that sent me down this direction: The Copenhagen waste to energy plant is so clean its exhaust stack puffs only CO2 and water vapor. (Its also a public ski hill and hiking mountain) Upon capturing 1 ton of CO2, exhausts it as a smoke ring. Help you visualize this otherwise intangible aspect of sustainability!? (Bjarke Ingels Group)

(FACT CHECK NOTES FROM ISABEL!?)

Images? what else?

Reverberation Crosswalks

Reverberation Crosswalks are fun, brightly colored crosswalks. Just paint on cement and asphalt they still signal a sustainable vector forward. The neighborhood around this intersection is now more walkable. You can't not notice the crosswalks. They contribute to life flourishing in the city. This concept is cheap; fast; easily replicated; can be customized for region, culture, available materials, etc. (Graham Coreil Allen)

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

Low Tech Magazine's solar powered website signals how we might visualize energy usage; how we might enable new systems of powering our tools; questions if we really need constant connection; and how aesthetic choices correlate to physical resources even in the digital sphere. (Kris De Decker & Marie Otsuka)

DC High Water Mark Project

The DC water mark project visualizes increased flooding and water level rise. The water level rings articulate "oh shit, this place might be underwater pretty frequently given our current projected future!" By signaling this, perhaps we can act accordingly and redirect our present towards a future where that is no longer true. Without _seeing_ your house or office or favorite park area submerged, even symbolically, you cannot envision an alternative. (Curry J. Hackett / Wayside Studio)

Tattfoo Tan, *S.O.S. Steward*

Enrolled in various courses and acquired certification for sustainable/green knowledge. To flaunt new found titles, created merit patches to be worn on gray coveralls during events and gardening sessions. <http://tattfoo.com/sos/SOSGreenStewardship.html> (Tattfoo Tan & S.O.S. Steward)

Cradle To Cradle

The cradle to cradle books are signs signaling sustainability. C2C is a "technical" nutrient — the entire book is made to be taken back into a production process — the pages are plastic, the ink reclaimable. The Upcycle is instead a biological nutrient, made to decompose and return to the cycles of nature. Paper, ink, binding, is all made to biodegrade… This fully signals the ideology of Cradle to Cradle. (Michael Braungart and William McDonough (with the design Paul Sahre))

Conclusion

“There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. It is never twice the same, because it always takes its shape from the particular place in which it occurs.”

— Christopher Alexander

The qualities that do promote the welfare of all life are, like the quality without a name Alexander presents, ineffable. And like the quality without a name, the aesthetics that correspond with this — the graphic design visuals that might show the welfare of all life — shift and change with different contexts. A wild garden, a biodegradable book, a thriving farmers market.

In prepping this lecture I was looking for the thread that connected my works together. That thread I thought was: what does sustainable graphic design look like? Everything I make continues to be an attempt at providing more answers to this.

But, I used to be hung up on the visual aesthetics. I wanted sustainable things to LOOK DIFFERENT to have their own aesthetic… but what I've learned is that the way sustainable graphic design looks isn't as important as the values underpinning the designs themselves. Anything that helps promote the flourishing of nature’s interconnected systems will look "correct" formally. That doesn’t require a (externally decided) particular style, material, or typeface.

Example: MICA Grad Zine

This is an interim piece for the MICA graduate admissions office. Visually the goal was to convey the diversity of graduate programs, as well as some of the current chaos of our present. Different graduate directors were trying to convey the values of their programs, could the visuals contribute to that. AND, there was an ask for the piece to embrace "sustainability."

So, the design decisions are all spurred by those constraints. Free, open, accessible culture is an important value of mine, and that makes its way into this via the imagery selected and the open source fonts. This also gave me ways to find "art historically" relevant images, and repurpose them to my meaning making.

The printing solution was designed to minimize printing waste — the front and back of this "poster" are printed all as one plate, so the press sheet goes through the press once, then is flipped over, and goes through the press again, voila. This means front and back of the pages were able to all be printed with one plate per color instead of two or more… All of these "values" intermingled here together, do they add up to a sustainable design? a beautiful design?

A Final Example: Ecovention Europe

Fast forward from Green Acres. Sue Spaid, now living in Belgium, has a new exhibition: Ecovention Europe, ecologically inventive artists working in Europe, and there is another book.

In the interim since Green Acres, I heard designer Sara de Bondt discuss the Radical Nature catalog designed for the Barbican in London. De Bondt's studio wrote a sustainable printing manifesto as part of the research for the catalog's production.

De Bondt's "manifesto" reminded me about constraints for framing design decisions: How might I re-examine the design choices of _Green Acres_ through new constraints? Could I improve the sustainability (and the sustainable aesthetics) for _Ecovention Europe_?

One of the items in De Bondt's printing manifesto is "use less ink." This meant selecting colors more carefully. The palette of _Ecovention Europe_ uses no color that adds up to more that 100% ink coverage. (_Ecovention Europe_ uses CMYK: and color palette swatches start at 100% pure C, M, Y, or K, and then are mixed in equal percentages to keep 100% or less total coverage: 50% + 50%; 33% + 33% + 33%; etc.). This resulted in a color palette that was fairly special for this book. Reducing ink also led to a graphic solution, bitmapped city aerial photos as the decorative section markers. The appearance of a filled area is kept, but less ink is used comparatively.

Text columns in _Green Acres_ ended at full paragraphs breaks to make editing easier. This gave a formally-nice rhythm to text columns, but it was an inefficient use of space. With _Ecovention Europe_, I reduced this space by running all the text the full column heights. This had the secondary benefit of minimizing superfluous decoration: In _Green Acres_, superficial decorative elements filled those blanks left by text columns ending mid-page.

I even tried to reduce decision making through reuse. The grid for _Green Acres_ had a lot of conceptual reasoning invested into it, and so I reused the page templates, type choices, grid setup, etc.

As a conceptual exercise, this was great. But, did it make much of a difference? How could this be done differently and improved upon again next time? Is there an alternative to making this book at all? (Should this exist? I didn’t ask that question before we began!)

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