I recently presented at the INNOVATIONZ forum for the Designers Institute of New Zealand. The presentation was entitled ‘No More Bling:Greenshift’ and I touched on how I felt the current economic situation will affect sustainability thinking in design and business. I presented my view that we as a country should use this ‘recession period’ to make some progress towards putting some substance behind our ‘clean and green’ image and to move beyond the green wash.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that the tougher the financial climate, the further environmental issues slip down the agenda. When a recession hits, companies slash expenditure in R&D and cut back on investment in cleaner technologies and processes.
I believe this is exactly the wrong way to think about it! This recession period can actually be the opportunity for companies to make some serious strides in the sustainability direction. In times of rapid economic growth all the focus is on expansion and promoting growth. In a recession we have the opportunity to turn our attention to rebuilding the way we do things through innovation and sustainability.
This current economic period will sort out those companies that are serious about sustainability from the green washers. If a company genuinely believes that sustainability can make it more efficient and successful it will continue to put resources into making reductions to its environmental impact. If on the other hand it sees sustainability as an optional piece of window dressing it will cut back its investment.
In my mind companies would be stupid to do this. There’s now such a strong body of evidence to support the business case for sustainability – it simply makes good business sense not to waste resources, rather to be as efficient as possible. In my experience manufacturing companies can expect to make easy savings by identifying and reducing their sources of waste - this doesn’t cost money it saves money!!
With recession, consumers obviously have less disposable income. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that those people who buy sustainable products won’t continue to do so. From a market perspective - people’s concerns for environmental and social issues don’t disappear overnight. What will perhaps change is how much responsibility they’re prepared to take themselves. Now more than ever consumers will expect companies to take responsibility for developing environmentally effective products and services.
I believe we need to design products that provide consumers with real and quantifiable reductions to environmental footprints which hopefully also benefit them from a financial perspective. A product concept which fits into this genre is the ‘Smart Towel Rail’ developed by a group of students in the multi-disciplinary Innovation and New Product Development design class run by the INNOVATIONZ group. It heats and dries the towel only when it senses that it is wet – once dry, the energy is automatically cut from it. In my eyes this is a fantastic product – it is convenient, saves the consumer a few hundred dollars a year in energy costs, and of course reduces the user’s carbon footprint. There is plenty of scope to develop innovative products that encourage sustainability – consumers are crying out for conservation without compromise.
