Sustainable design is more than a philosophy for the work space. It should also become a philosophy for living, driving the decisions we make every minute of the day. For some people it is like dieting; sometimes you go overboard and sometimes you forget about it altogether.

I like to integrate more and more sustainable design philosophies in my personal life as well. I have the most fun uncovering what is behind the immediate impact of our choices; asking “what all happened before I made this decision, and what will have to happen because I made this decision?”

Let me talk through some of my thought processes, and how they apply across the life/work divide.

Let’s talk about food OK, so you are hungry and want to eat something. What do you do? Should you go for fresh, local, organic, all Whole Foods, or that delicious burger that is staring at you from the billboard?

There is no simple answer, but some things are clearly not sustainable — for example, fresh produce that is flown in from around the world. And yet this is still what you can find at Whole Foods.

A green destination is inevitable for every American company. How that is achieved is the point of this blog post. At the outset, I’ll just say this: those companies that follow the defined path toward sustainability may survive, but those that chart their own course will become leaders, and thrive in the new business environment that is upon us.

It’s easy enough to find the soon-to-be well-trodden path; a Google search or quick meeting with a consultant will reveal literally hundreds of cases, articles and essays that can be used to put your company on the path of sustainability. However, the fact is that the optimal path is different for every company. Organizational drag, budgetary considerations, and the technologies employed will affect the complexity of the mission to make the company and its products more sustainable.

A basic law of the organization is that it makes its own survival paramount. In that, it’s no different from any evolutionary model. For that reason, it is vital to understand the organizational landscape in order to accomplish anything worthwhile. Understanding this landscape provides a starting point, a direction, and a route, highlighting obstacles and opportunities along the path to sustainability. In short, the organization is its own environment, within the larger environment we all inhabit.

This is the third of three blog posts by our managing editor Jeff Binder exploring the concept of sustainable interaction design as put forth by Eli Blevis of the School of Informatics at Indiana University, in a paper entitled Sustainable Interaction Design: Invention & Disposal, Renewal & Reuse.* In the first he reviewed the basis of sustainable interactive design and the second examined the principle of linking invention and disposal.

According to Eli Blevis, that’s the second principle of interaction design -- promoting renewal and reuse. Blevis gives us an example in a familiar product:

On April 29^th, we hosted our first workshop to great acclaim. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve had more than 200 people participating in our alpha and beta product development. Workshop participants included designers and engineers representing a number of these organizations.