Are designers lazy when it comes to sustainability?
The Saturday Indesign 2019 Debate was a chance to argue out a proposition fraught with difficulty on professional and personal levels: that designers are lazy when it comes to sustainability. The intellect, sensitivity and wit of a leading cast of speakers served the audience well.
For the ‘for’ team, Hunn Wai (Co-founder & Creative Director, Lanzavecchia + Wai) delved into the relationship between the culture of consumerism and design, tracing the origin of their troubled union to the post-World War 2 era. Designers became the twin tip of the spear, the other being marketing, for industry’s mission to conquer markets and the populous. It was a perfect closed loop, he said, in which happiness and fulfilment were just a purchase away. But consumers have been lazy in mindset, with malleable ideas of fulfilment and joy. And as the people who manifest consumer desires, so have designers – being “lazy in thinking, lazy in terms of wanting more responsibility, lazy in self awareness,” he said.
Kicking off the ‘against’ side of the argument, Razvan Ghilic-Micu (Associate, HASSELL) took opposition to the proposition that in spite of there being an ecosystem around us to help us deliver planetsaving designs, we choose not to care. In reality, we don’t have enough information about how to improve our output, he asserted, but we’re working on it. “And we should never stop working on it.”
He said, “We are faced with complex choices, but we like really simple solutions. We buy into environmental folklore everyday, like that great feeling we get when we drink through a paper straw. But folklore is not based on scientific reality, because that is complex.” We should be putting complex life-cycle thinking into our designs, he suggested, and the fact that this is already happening in projects shows that we’re not lazy. “Buckminster Fuller said you never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something you have to build a new model that makes the existing reality obsolete,” said Ghilic-Micu. He challenged the audience with a call to arms to keep pushing harder.
Continuing the ‘for’ team’s argument, Joshua Comaroff (Design Consultant, Lekker Architects) likened the overconsumption of industrial designers’ output with our appetite for architecture. He proposed that architecture is on the wrong side of history with regard to sustainability. “We are building more buildings, and like fast fashion, we use them for shorter periods and renovate them more frequently.” And they’re unquestionably bad for the environment. He challenged the very concept of the ‘sustainable building’. “Green buildings are like low-tar cigarettes,” he said. “They are somewhat less harmful than regular cigarettes, but if you keep with them, sooner or later you are probably going to suffer… This is where our fatal laziness lies.”
He continued, “Sustainable architecture is not only not universally practiced, not only low in its overall standards for performance, not only non-compulsory – it is a classic example of what the philosopher Satre referred to as ‘bad faith’. It is a comfortable myth that allows us to damage ourselves while still feeling relatively justified doing it.” Bath faith, he said, is the worst kind of laziness. It’s not a passive form of laziness either, he noted, suggesting that architects are not like Garfield the cat. “It’s acting without facing moral consequences while constructing a partial truth to avoid facing the really bad news.”
In his closing argument for the ‘against’ team, Tan Szue Hann (Managing Director, MINIWIZ Singapore) pointed to brands exhibiting at Saturday Indesign that embody an ethos of sustainable manufacture: Flokk, Tappeti and MINIWIZ, for example. These companies are not lazy, he said, and nor are the designers who specify their products. And while sustainability rating tools do come under scrutiny and critique, they are neither born from laziness, he asserted. He argued that designers and architects are constrained by many demands that often get in the way of achieving the sustainable outcomes we desire: budget, schedule, building codes, value engineering, and return on investment among them.
“I don’t see enough of a whole-scale reconsideration – to ethically resist,” charged Comaroff during the rebuttal period. Only a handful of the conscious design elite are doing their best to offset the fantastic laziness, bad faith and evil of the rest of our profession, he suggested. Commentator Sarah Ichioka (Director, Desire Lines) referred to the Bucky quote used by Ghilic-Micu. She asked, “How are we as designers going to act in a way that’s about making that new system rather than chipping away in tiny ways at the old system we don’t like?” She added, “How can we bring our whole selves to the table to address these issues?”
She noted the many awards, industry positions and activities of the speakers. “How can we use our positions,” she asked, “to reposition the designer in relation to much larger circles of influence? How can we bridge between the scary context you’ve raised and the designer as individual actor, and think about design intervening within systems in a way that really embraces our agency? Don’t put yourself in a box,” she asserted to the audience. “You have so much more power than you think you do. We have to start thinking and acting in such a way.”
The arguments left the audience – the decider of the winning team – divided by the difficulty of the problem, and the MINIWIZ Polli-Ber Brick trophy had to be split into two and shared.
From the outset, we knew there would be no solving the weighty issues behind the proposition within a 45-minute segment. But there would be the chance for engaging dialogue, drawing on the intellect, sensitivity and wit of a leading cast of speakers. Our thanks to our stellar returning debate team and our guest commentator Sarah Ishioka for stirring what we hope will be a continuing discussion for all in the design and architecture industries.
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“Green buildings allow us to be lazy... [T]hey allow us to continue to over-consume in the belief that over-consuming sustainably is in fact sustainable.” Joshua Comaroff.