Thoughts on Sustainabilitist Aesthetics

 19th July 2021 at 2:34pm
Word Count: 1505

Thoughts on Sustainabilitist Aesthetics

What comes to mind when you read the phrase “sustainable graphic design?” Is there a particular aesthetic? Is there a particular kind of client? Is there a particular visual trope or particular look or feel? How about a particular message?

Despite ruminating over this question for years, I’ve never quite been satisfied with my half-answers, and I still haven’t found a solid solution. I am currently inclined to believe that there is no single way that sustainable graphic design looks, nor a single “correct” way that it is made (what materials it might be, or what processes it includes can be easily sorted into good, bad, ugly, less bad, etc. — but one golden solution does not exist). However, I do believe there are some particular messages and clients that are not okay if you are a sustainabilitist.

Where does a designer start in sorting this out?

A Place to Start

John Ehrenfeld states in the book Flourishing “The key to doing something about sustainability is that you first have to say what you want to sustain.” Ehrenfeld wants to sustain that “all humans and other life should flourish” (pg 23). Using Ehrenfeld’s thinking, Sustainable Graphic Design is design made for clients that believe all life should flourish, design made to promote messages about sustainability-as-flourishing, and design made with materials and processes that promote and sustain the state of flourishing too.

Graphic designers are form makers. Sustainable graphic designers must make formal decisions. How does the sustainable designer concern themselves with the forms and aesthetics of a solution? Are there visual choices that are more sustainable? What form says “I believe that humans and all life should flourish?” Are aesthetics as they relate to sustainability even important?

These are complicated questions.

Sustainability and Beauty.

“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 material medium.” — Alain de BottonThe Architecture of Happiness, pg. 100

In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton provides some insights useful in trying to solve aesthetic quandaries around sustainability and formal beauty. Beautiful design embodies and sustains the values you hold dear.

Following Botton’s thinking, sustainable designers should see the non-sustainable as the less-than beautiful, even the ugly. Only truly sustainable things — meaning objects and forms that inspire sustainable ideals — should count as beautiful. Beautiful things ARE sustainable things, and vice versa.

Burgeoning sustainabilitists wishing to de-clutter their lives may come across [a piece by Bruce Sterling](http://viridiandesign.org/) that echoes similar sentiments. Sterling outlines four criteria for sorting through the objects you own so as to decide what to keep and what to discard as a part of your new, sustainably designed life.

  • Beautiful Things
  • Sentimental Things
  • Utilitarian Things
  • Everything else.

If an object in your possession fits into the first three categories (beautiful, sentimental, or utilitarian things), then it is worth keeping. If it falls into “Everything Else” you must be rid of it. Sterling is interested in these categories from the point of view that sustainabilitists should have the right stuff — right meaning the best functioning, most meaningful, prettiest stuff. By virtue of being objects that you really need or want to have around just by being so lovely to look at, these things rise above just plain detritus to become more valuable, more sustainable objects (even if it just means you replace them less often).

When Alain de Botton talks about beauty in design and architecture, I think his “beauty” encompasses all of Sterling’s top 3 categories.

But, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This starts to explain why “what does sustainable graphic design looks like?” is such a hard question to answer. It also explains why Sterling found the need to break his list of criteria four separate entities, and not just “beautiful things” and “everything else.” To me, a nice hammer is functional, utilitarian, and beautiful. To you, it might just be functional. The paintings and drawings I find beautiful are what another might find ugly. The things I find sentimental are probably unique to me. Not everyone has the same idea of what should be sustained as not everyone thinks the same things are beautiful.

Is there really no “correct” aesthetic choice?

Visual Experiment.

A guest came to class to present his work. He designs and builds furniture exclusively from reclaimed materials. The students were very excited about his ideas, but as a group deemed the furniture aesthetically undesirable. The found materials spoke too loudly, and everything looked “Reused” — some of the time in a negative way (purely from an aesthetic stand point). To the students, this proved problematic as it occurs again and again in green and sustainable design projects: the work wears its heart too much on its sleeve; it looks too eco-friendly and unrefined. This was not what they wanted for their work nor for Sustainability as a whole. In their projects, many of the students were actively trying to make work that avoided looking specifically Reused, energy-efficient, or “green.” The work was meant to just be “good graphic design” — that it should look like other design, yet be more “good” in that it also embraced various aspects of Sustainability.

Toward this end, student’s projects took on different shapes, forms, and styles. Of general interest was to avoid the current tropes of “greenness” or “eco-friendly-ness.” To find new visual themes for sustainable design to draw from. Some formal solutions were influenced by their concepts, some forms directly influenced by materials (though not in as earnest a way as the furniture maker’s works), and some just looked like regular old graphic design. Some were fantastical; some were practical. Regardless of their speculativeness, none of the project directions ended up being “wrong” as a sustainable design project. All the student’s projects have in some way attempted to solve what it means to be “sustainable graphic design,” and many aesthetic and conceptual approaches were used.

Each student sorted out for themselves what might be both a sustainable and a beautiful design solution. The one thing all works this term did share in common was the message — not a style, not a material, but a recurring message. The message revolved around variants of “include sustainable thinking more authentically in your life (and through your life, into your design practice).”

My students’s works this term have shown me that a “correct” style may be irrelevant when it comes to what sustainable graphic design should look like. Maybe it is just the message that matters.

Other Places of Interest

In looking to artists and designers from previous movements, innovators we’ve historically documented are known for novel visuals, but got to those novel visuals by exploring new ideologic territory and experimenting with different ways of thinking. Avant garde visuals stemming from these movements were the result of the ideas (or ideals) to come out of their novel thinking, not really the main ideas themselves. Our past is not about style for style’s sake, but style that illuminates a theoretical position (or at least style that is arrived at from a thought process, from a set of values, or from some set of hypotheses).

How do I reconcile what my students have shown me — that all styles can be sustainable — with these thoughts? Sustainability is a new way of thinking, so shouldn’t it carry with it a new style?

I want there to be a concrete solution as to what sustainable graphic design looks like. I want it to be different and special. I want it to be better. However, perhaps that is undesirable; perhaps it is against the ideals of sustainability. Part of flourishing is the opportunity for many diverse solutions to a problem. Nature never typically solves any problem in just one way. Successful, resilient systems have many redundancies — that is what makes them resilient. Why shouldn’t sustainability be able to have many styles and aesthetics? Why should there only be one way something looks to be “sustainable?”

Alain de Botton repeatedly references a line from the French writer Stendahl: “there are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness” (pg 100). Perhaps my thinking on sustainable graphic design’s look must take it’s cue from this. Anything that looks in such a way that it helps promote the flourishing of nature’s interconnected systems will look correct. That doesn’t require a particular style, material, or typeface — just the right ideals or messages.

Works Cited:

  • De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. Vintage Books. New York, NY. 2006.
  • Ehrenfeld, John and Hoffman, Andrew J. Flourishing: A Frank Conversation About Sustainability. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA. 2013.
  • Sterling, Bruce. The Last Veridian Note. Nov 2008. ViridianDesign.org. January 2015. http://www.viridiandesign.org/2008/11/last-viridian-note.html

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