As many of you already know, developing a truly sustainable product in any category, one that is implemented without shortcuts along the way, delivered profitably, on schedule and within cost is like threading a needle in the dark – underwater.

Having spent half of my design career in consultancies and the other in corporate environments, it's been my experience that designers and design teams tend to find themselves in the 'middle' of the product development activity. This is particularly true for consulting designers, whose clients usually handle the balance of the product delivery activities. Designers have critical relationships with just about every other discipline; the middle just makes sense.

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Being in the middle, however, can blind designers and product developers to the upstream supply chain where all things come from - as well as from the downstream retail environment where the products end up. My time as Director of Product Development with Brookstone was a kind of finishing school in the parts of the product supply chain beyond the 'middle'. Creating over 100 unique products a year for 300+ retail stores, it was necessary to assess scores of factories and their contributing suppliers first-hand, learn how to sort the good from the bad, how to spot a compromising shortcut before it happened and to manage them all through product delivery. Sprout Creation, the company I have since co-founded, was built with a hands-on, end-to-end supply chain mind-set — with a sustainable development focus.

We've learned that many of the most effective sustainability decisions are the earliest ones: material choices, features that effect power consumption, assembly trade offs or the merits of one factory vs. another. For instance, designing for disassembly and eventual recycling is important, but choosing recycled or highly recyclable materials up front makes a much larger difference in the lifetime environmental impact of the product. The only real way to get involved in those early decisions is to physically go up stream - as far upstream as possible. A factory visit is good, meeting their sub-assembly and component suppliers is better, but going to the source of a material is best. The further upstream you go, the more you will learn, the more effective your downstream decisions will be.

Early in the development of our first product, the Vers 2X, we spent a lot of time with our wood cabinet makers understanding their processes, machine and labor capabilities and helping them make manufacturing decisions that best fit our goals. We then went 'upstream', up the supply chain to understand the MDF manufacturing process, and then upstream again to the timber supply to understand where the wood itself comes from, what type was used, how old it was and how it's transported, stored and ultimately introduced to the manufacturing process. We did the same with our printer - we went upstream to their pulp tray supplier and then on upstream to the source where the paper is recycled. On the loading dock saw the bales of old newspapers, magazines and discarded phone books from around the world; first-hand proof that our paper stock really was the post-consumer recycled stuff we had asked for. There are often more sustainability insights to be gained on a loading dock then from the guided factory tour.

If you're fortunate to be part of an organization that gives you time on the ground with your suppliers, don't stop there — push for as much upstream visibility as you can get. If your not meeting your suppliers, demand access - your organizations' sustainability efforts will be better for it.

How many times have you done something ‘green’ and found out that your good intentions had unintended consequences? I recently fell victim to a potentially dangerous misconception.

As part of my objective to eliminate the use of solvent based paints at Sun Microsystems, I began to move toward very low-VOC (volatile organic compound) water-based paints and powder coatings. Powder coatings seemed to be one of the most green options. Powder coatings are inert, can be applied efficiently, the waste material is easy to recover and is not considered a VOC. I have been to many powder lines and have seen applicators spraying powder while wearing no dust masks or other safety gear. Then I heard about TGIC (triglycidyl isocyanurate).

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TGIC is a low-molecular-weight, multifunctional crosslinker which enables polyester TGIC formulations to contain 90% or greater resin within the binder system. Because they enhance the weather-resistance of polyester, TGIC coatings are comparable to polyester urethane coatings. They also offer faster or lower temperature curing than polyurethanes, and unlike urethane coatings, TGICs maintain excellent mechanical properties at film builds above 3 mils – with no outgassing. Additionally, TGIC coatings provide superior coverage of sharp edges – that’s important in the manufacture of computer components. Sounds good right?

So what’s wrong with TGIC? It nicely enhances the coatings and improves coverage. The issue is that it is TOXIC. TGIC is a Category 2 mutagen. As a result it is now classified as a toxin and cannot be used in certain regions. TGIC is known to cause skin sensitization in some people, which can lead to severe skin rashes. Respiratory sensitization is also a concern.

Exposure occurs by breathing in dust containing TGIC, by skin contact and by ingestion. Ingestion can be caused by contamination of hands, food and drink, and following inhalation. As a result beginning this year many companies in the European Union have stopped applying this material, and this practice will propagate to other regions as well.

So what can we do? There are other options available. The safest bet is to specify TGIC-free powder. While TGIC will likely be your supplier’s first choice for a durable coating, there are other options like Primid, and PT910 (currently under review in the EU). We are learning significantly more about base chemical toxicity through the works of groups like MBDC and others. Still, as designers, we need better tools, and we need a community to share information to help us make better choices. It is my hope that through tools like those provided by Sustainable Minds we can better educate designers and also build a database of knowledge that will lead to a better future.

If you are aware of processes or materials that may only be green under certain conditions, or are new and exciting options to traditional materials, I ask you to please respond to this post with your comments and findings.

Design a better future.

T.J. Gray, left, and Ashley Brown, principals of Rocket Fish, an industrial design company in Portsmouth, designed the Starbury sneakers, which retail for $14.98. The affordable basketball shoe is endorsed by New York Knicks guard Stephon Marbury.

If you shoot hoops you're probably aware of the Starbury line of shoes, endorsed by basketball star Stephon Marbury. The owners, Steve & Barry’s LLC, market the line as inexpensive, high-performance basketball shoes.

You may have also read about the controversy surrounding exactly how “sustainable” these shoes are.

Starbury shoes target an underserved market segment: inner-city kids.  Their product addresses the social injustice of young underprivileged street players not being able to afford top-performing athletic shoes.<!--break-->

Starbury sports a simple message: "Its about the kids." The company provides affordable footwear, which allows youth to enjoy sports without having to shell out for a pair of Air Jordans.

Most reviews of the Starbury line have been positive, contrasting Starbury with Nike, singled out as the black-hatted villain for its high margins on traditional retail sales.

Starbury also states their fiscal goal are agressive.  Their strategy pivots around omitting the significant costs of extravagant marketing, enabling a retail price of just $14.98 a pair when launched, and now, some 18 months later, just $8.98.

But I’m wondering, are we thinking about all the kids involved? Certainly, an article in The Nation quotes experts who doubt that the shoes are entirely free of exploitative labor. Their doubts are expressed in subjective terms; I thought I’d turn to the numbers for some clues.

My approach: to explore this from a comparative-product, systems point of view, taking into account the social aspect of design and sourcing as opposed to less objective, purely marketing approaches. Too often, words like 'sustainability' provide a fuzzy, gentrified view of the environment and ignore the people they are affecting.

Companies can determine their cost-to-profit ratio using a basic multiplier formula: the raw cost of materials times a standard industry multiplier gives them enough to pay for design, manufacturing, shipping, and marketing…and make a decent profit.

To illustrate the Starbury marketing case, let’s compare them to a conservative look at Nike's Freight On Board (FOB) using a multiplier of 8 to back out its cost on a traditional retail price:

$125 MSRP divided by multiplier of 8 = $15.63 FOB per pair of shoes.

So Nike charges $125 for a pair of shoes that cost $15.63 to produce. Let’s now give Starbury the benefit of the doubt for thin internal margins and cut that multiplier in half:

$15 MSRP divided by multiplier of 4 = $3.75 FOB.

A multiplier of 4 is the slim manufacturing margin in the footwear category, even when working at large volume.

Of course, these are estimates, but likely close to what we might expect resulting from their respective products.   If we assume similar materials, technologies, and volume breaks, the production factory was significantly squeezed to pull this off. A 2x difference could be acceptable in these FOBs, but a 4x+ gap seems logically problematic.  

So, which kids is Starbury helping?

Likely not those in Eastern Asia, where the shoes are manufactured. From a global view, is this 'socially just' product a net positive?  What other design and material externalities might be present to manufacture these?

My point is to highlight the need for critical systems and environmental thinking in league with social responsibility, not just marketing hype. To paraphrase Jack Kerouac, “Words, words, the stars are words. Give me the numbers.”

Such an analysis may show that an improvement for inner-city kids in the US actually decreases the world’s social outcomes.

Marketing departments don’t typically get involved in such abstract analysis. But it’s something that R&D should absolutely bring into their own analytical thinking.

Images: Loozekannon @ Photobucket; John Lei for the NYTimes; Rich Beauchesne

From 1998-2002, I was at the MIT CADlab working on my Ph.D., focusing on how life cycle assessment (LCA) can be wisely used in design for the environment. Early design stages are critical in shaping the environmental performance of a product over its life cycle, yet they create particular challenges for environmental assessment. I focused my research on this question: “How can product design teams quickly evaluate and trade off competing product concepts using the scarce information available at early conceptual stages?“

My exploration of this topic was informed by a core practical requirement: environmental evaluation techniques must be operable within the constraints of real-world product development and provide credible, timely information that is sufficient for decision-making.

Why early design stages? Typically 75% of the manufacturing cost is committed by the end of conceptual phase in the design process. This means that decisions made after this point in the design process can determine only 25% of the product’s manufacturing cost. Likewise, the environmental performance of a product is largely locked into the product early in the design process, when critical decisions are made on key product attributes such as materials, energy requirements, and longevity, which ultimately determine the life cycle performance of the product.

Design effect in manufacturing cost

Adapted from “The Mechanical Design Process”, David G. Ullman, McGraw-Hill 1992.

Environmental ‘lock-in’ by design activities over the product development process and life cycle

Adapted from “Design + Environment – a Global Guide to Designing Greener Goods”, Lewis, H., Gertsakis, J., Grant, T., Morelli, N. and Sweatman, A., New York: Greenleaf Publishing 2001.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a powerful decision support tool that systematically and quantitatively fuels a holistic, systems view of products, with great potential to both guide the selection of design options and provide a spectrum of useful insights on opportunities for improvement and innovation. But detailed LCA is costly, time-consuming, and data intensive. Early design stages lack the detailed information needed for thorough assessments and require quick decisions on diverse, numerous and loosely-defined product concepts, making the early use of detailed LCA impractical.

This set of ideas and challenges framed my thesis work on ‘streamlining’ LCA to bring life cycle thinking and quantitative analysis into early conceptual product design. Going ‘wild’, I looked to discover new ways to quickly generate, use and re-use LCA data and knowledge at early design stages, ultimately exploring new territories in the land of artificial intelligence. The ‘learning surrogate LCA’ concept was created and successfully tested.

Here’s how the learning surrogate LCA works:

1. An artificial neural network (ANN) is trained on product attributes and environmental performance data from pre-existing full LCA studies.
2. The product design team queries the trained artificial model with high-level product concept descriptors (e.g. material types and amount, recycled content, type of energy source, in-use power consumption, type of fuel and fuel consumption, life time drive distance, driver behavior!).
3. The team quickly obtains an approximate environmental performance assessment (e.g. life cycle energy consumption, global warming potential, acidification potential, waste index) for a new or re-designed product concept, without requiring a new LCA model, and under the guidance of environmental experts who train, validate and maintain the ANN-based LCA models. The product design team can then use the predicted environmental performance, along with key performance measures from other models, in trade-off analyses and concept selection.

Proof-of-concept testing showed that the ANN-based learning surrogate LCA models were able to: (a) match detailed LCA results within the accuracy of typical LCA studies, (b) predict relative differences of distinct product concepts, and (c) correctly predict and generalize trends associated with changes for a given product concept. As a data-driven modeling approach, the learning surrogate LCA needs data – lots of product LCA data. The increasing demand and supply of product LCA studies will provide this needed data, hopefully sooner rather than later!

Learning surrogate LCA concept

Adapted from "Approximate Life-Cycle Assessment of Product Concepts Using Learning Systems", Inês Sousa, Ph.D. Thesis, Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002.

Learn more about this work: “ Approximate Life-Cycle Assessment of Product Concepts using Learning Systems”  published in the MIT Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2000.

Sustainable Minds:  It’s my new adventurous journey that logically followed. It started at one of Lauralee Alben’s Sea Change Design Workshops where I met Terry, my Co-founder. Read her blog post next for the next installment:

Part 2: The genesis of Sustainable Minds – Things happen in threes

Also read Part 3: The genesis of Sustainable Minds – How we met Philip White and Okala

Image credits:

Fig 1. Design Effect in Manufacturing Cost
credit: Adapted from “The Mechanical Design Process”, David G. Ullman, McGraw-Hill 1992.

Fig 2. Environmental ‘lock-in’ by design activities over the product development process and life cycle
credit: Adapted from “Design + Environment – a Global Guide to Designing Greener Goods”, Lewis, H., Gertsakis, J., Grant, T., Morelli, N. and Sweatman, A., New York: Greenleaf Publishing 2001.

Fig 3. Learning surrogate LCA concept
credit: Adapted from "Approximate Life-Cycle Assessment of Product Concepts Using Learning Systems", Inês Sousa, Ph.D Thesis, Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002.

When I was 19 years old, I was feet away from my best friend as he took a chance and lost his life to a whirlpool in a western mountain stream of ice-melt. The choices he made that day cost him his life. Today, we stand at a threshold as a young adolescent species, clever enough to rule the world, and foolish enough to throw it all away. I believe truth is found in paradox, and that our choices about sustainability require us to embrace paradox.

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Early lessons in paradoxical thinking came from my family.
 
My father advised me to go to church with my friends. He said that I should go to many churches with many friends before making up my mind. From him, I learned to see the world paradoxically; to see the true within the false, the false within the true, and to suspend judgment. This led me to understand our ancient wisdom traditions and modern science as two sides of the same coin, telling the most powerful story ever told – the universe story. It is our creation story — from the original flaring forth into the deep future, it unites us in common heritage of a living earth within a purposeful and sacred universe that is evolving towards increasing complexity and beauty.
 
My grandfather taught me how to hunt and fish, giving me a fierce love of the outdoors. From him, I learned the fisherman’s dilemma: that we have to work in order to fish, but then we don’t have enough time to fish; and when we’re out of work, we have time to fish, but no money. The sustainability dilemma is similar: our global industrial growth is the force slamming the door of sustainability shut, and “green” business is the force that can wedge the door open. Humans everywhere take care of the world around them when basic human needs are met and they have hope for a future, otherwise they destroy their future to survive the moment.
 
But it wasn’t until I returned home and told my mother that my best friend (who had lived with us in our home his last year of high school) had died in a mountain stream that I finally broke down crying. From her I learned that mind is more than brains, it includes our gut instincts and a loving heart. Crossing the threshold into sustainability depends on caring about the future of children around the world and not yet born, and embracing an ethics that makes it criminal to reduce the durability, resiliency, or biodiversity of Earth’s ecosystems which make life possible.
 
Standing as adolescent humanity at the threshold of sustainability, paradox teaches us to embrace multiple truths. Sustainability requires a big heart, “green” business, and a really good story to unite us. Small choices by each of us are all connected and add up to ultimate consequences. We must not live in fear of the future, but must raise our spirits with a fierce determination and awareness of fearsome consequences. We must raise our children in such a way that children for generations to come will be able to pry the door of sustainability further open, and pass on the promise of the future.

I was sitting in a humid conference room at our assembler’s factory in Dong Guan, China wrapping up one of the hundreds of loose ends that seem to puddle at the final pre-production stages of a product, when it hit me – this is my product, my company, I get to decide…

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My business partner Tim and I started our company, Sprout Creation, to leverage our collective retail and product development experience to simply create better products. We launched the Vers brand in 2007 (versaudio.com); a line of handcrafted, real wood audio systems for iPod, systems that were ‘better’ in every way that we could imagine – better sound and better design with minimized environmental impact. We were actually surprised how much we could accomplish in our first try, knowing all along that this would be a process of continual improvement.

In our view, there’s no such thing as a ‘green product’ – all products require energy and resources to produce, have to be transported, used, repaired and ‘managed’ at the end of their life. Our goal was to simply be ‘less brown’ wherever we could – reduce our impact in as many places along the supply chain as possible, no matter how small -- and still deliver a quality product that could ‘sustain’ the business at the same time. ‘Green’ may be the grand vision, but ‘less Brown’ is how you actually get there.

The topic in the conference room at the moment was the twist ties that held the accessory wires together in the box. I asked if the wires could be, you know – tied in a knot instead? The answer was, ‘sure, no problem’. Seemed like a simple enough decision to make, the cost savings to the product was so small it couldn’t be counted. Based on that decision, though, we will have NOT used 5 miles of twist ties by the end of this year. Not glamorous stuff, but the right kind of decision to make when ‘less brown’ is your goal – sometimes all you have to do is ask.

Dozens of similar decisions followed, many of them harder to make than eliminating twist ties and often not ‘free’, but each of them was ‘less brown’ in some way.

We have a lot of work to do still, but we’re well on our way.

Image Credit: Sprout Creative