LUNAR’s John Edson and Margie O’Driscoll of the American Institute of Architects discuss the changing roles of industrial designers and architects as pros pursue the “big questions” that are shaping new directions for their disciplines.

Margie is Executive Director of the San Francisco chapter of AIA.

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LUNAR’s Travis Lee and John Edson talk through recent developments in sustainable design and materials, and chat about Travis’ experiences during his assignment in Hong Kong.

Recycle your old consumer electronics and help build the market for sustainable materials:

• Best Buy will recycle your old electronics gear
• ReCellular is a great place to recycle on old mobile phone.

Learn about LUNAR’s free Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainability here.

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In this Icon-o-Cast video, LUNAR’s Robert Howard discusses design education and “design thinking” with Kim Howard-Saxe, director of the Innovation Lab at the Nueva School. Recorded at the Maker Faire 2009.

Learn more about the Nueva School Innovation Lab here.

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This year, LUNAR will be presenting in two cities on opposite sides of the world. LUNAR California Interaction Designer, Ron Goldin, will be discussing how designers can utilize emotional design for positive change in Redmond, WA at Mircrosoft. LUNAR Europe co-founder, Roman Gebhard, will be speaking at the Deutsches Museum Verkehrszentrum, Theresienhoehe in Munich. He will be introducing the Designers Field Guide to Sustainabilty along with real world examples to show people in the product development community how they can apply this thinking to their work.

We will be posting their talks after the event, so check back soon!

Patagonia’s roots were in climbing hardware (Chouinard Equipment Company in the early days.) Founded by Yvon Chouinard, a renowned climber, the company’s first move towards sustainability came in the early 1970s when it became a leader in a movement called “clean climbing.” Pitons being hammered into and removed from rock were scarring pristine faces. Although pitons made up 70% of the company’s sales, Chouinard discontinued producing them and initiated a revolution in climbing. He launched a line of aluminum hexentrics and stoppers that could be wedged into cracks in the rock and removed without damaging it. Although he took a risk by dropping pitons, Chouinard was able to change the way climbing was done without impacting his business’s revenues.

After leaving climbing hardware for outdoor clothing, Patagonia’s mission became to give “maximum attention to product quality” while “striving to do no harm” to the environment. Although Patagonia’s actions are among the most environmentally conscious of any company’s, they chose to qualify their “do harm” statement with the “striving” qualifier. This is a more realistic approach as mankind’s existence will impact the environment. The key is to ultimately minimize it to the point where it is sustainable.

Patagonia makes all their decisions within the context of the environmental crisis. Without a value like this, it’s easy for a company to forget about environmental consequences of business decisions. Although they seek immediate and dramatic changes whenever possible, they realize they must sometimes pursue an approach of incrementalism.

In 1991, Patagonia conducted a life cycle analysis of the key fabrics used in their industry. Although one would presume polyester and nylon would be the worst environmentally due to being petroleum based, cotton and wool didn’t fare much better and in some cases were worse.

They found that although cotton fields comprise only 3% of the world’s farmlands, they use 10% of the world’s insecticides production. As a result of this finding, Patagonia decided to switch to organic cotton. To expedite the change, they decided to sell “clothing made with organically grown cotton” rather than “organic clothing” as they had not yet found organic dies that met their quality standards. By compromising, Patagonia was able to immediately influence the rest of their industry to use organic cotton and help get the organic cotton farming industry on its feet.

At the time of the lifecycle analysis, Patagonia’s fleece jackets were made from virgin polyester. They switched to polyester made from recycled PET soda bottles. Between 1993 and 2003, they diverted 86 million soda bottles from landfill.

By instituting company values and missions that address environmental issues, performing life cycle assessments and designing and producing in alignment with the results, any company can join Patagonia as a sustainability pioneer.

What other companies have initiated compelling sustainable business models?

Glass: There are many different types of glass, but I’ll just focus on soda-lime glass, which is the type most commonly used in containers, windows, etc. Glass is heavy and often gets a bad rap for that, but if recycled properly it is one of the few infinitely recyclable materials in common use today. It is also one of the few materials with a well developed recycling infrastructure in almost every developed country. It can be fragile, but can also be made to be durable with various geometries and wall thicknesses (think about how long old Coke bottles stay in circulation). Glass can be considered, for all intents and purposes, to be non-reactive, so it won’t off-gas or leach like plastics. There are some pretty destructive practices involved in mining basic ingredients for the mass production of glass, but if the product is made from recycled glass, that is not a concern. There is also an issue with the extreme longevity of glass. You’ll see quoted here and there that it takes a million years for glass to completely biodegrade, but the actual time is much longer than that. The bottom line is that once we take minerals from the earth’s crust and transform them into glass, they’re basically glass forever. This is another reason that using recycled glass is very important. The glass we have already created is not going anywhere, so we should make something out of it in order to reclaim this “technical nutrient”. So the bottom line is that recycled glass is a good choice for a product that won’t be transported much, is not subjected to high impact, and is sold in a region that has recycling facilities.

Ceramics: Again, many different types of ceramics, but for this we’ll talk about clay based ceramics commonly used for flatware, mugs, vases, etc. Ceramics have most of the downfalls of glass, but lack one of the most important upsides: ceramics cannot be recycled. They can be down-cycled, which involves grinding them up and dispersing the power into a slurry used to create other ceramics, but the resultant is usually weaker than the original. Glazed ceramics have the same chemical stability of glass (glaze is essentially, although not exactly, a thin glass coating over the ceramic). It also has the same extreme longevity issue, which is why we keep digging up ceramic garbage that people tossed out four or five thousand years ago. Ceramic is lighter than glass, but usually because it is porous. This means that to make products equally durable, you have to make them thicker so they usually weigh about the same (like a drinking glass and a coffee mug). One of the big benefits of ceramic over class is that ceramic is a good insulator due to its porosity. It’s also very good with extreme changes in temperature (glass will break if the temperature on one of its surfaces changes much faster than the other). So, ceramics are a good choice for an application that requires extreme longevity, good insulation, or excellent resistance to changes in temperature, but if you’re going for a cold, smooth, hard, high quality feel, I’d stick with glass.

Although an appealing concept, I doubt personal manufacturing will ever become pervasive. It doesn’t make economic sense for everyone to own personal manufacturing infrastructure, particularly people of limited financial means. Will an ordinary person really design and build enough products to justify the cost of a personal fabricator?

One of the great benefits of mass production is its efficiency. A small percentage of the purchase price of a mass-produced product covers the investment in tooling, assembly lines and human expertise. Well orchestrated mass production results in desirable, high quality and low cost products that enhance the quality of life for all segments of society.

Mass customization makes mass production even more desirable by allowing customers to purchase products more tailored to their individual needs. Products don’t exist until the customers configure them. The Dell mass customization process permits its customers to choose the specific computer feature set they want – RAM size, hard drive capacity, DVD drive type, etc. The customized product is still mass produced but is composed of combinations of standard components and parts that offer the customer a wide range of product variations. In the case of a car, thousands of variations could exist.

Mass customization can also involve the customer in the “hands-on” design of product. Nova Cruz, the company that manufactured the Lunar designed Xootr scooter, had developed the capability to enable customers to design custom plywood decks online. By moving a series of points on two parallel lines, customers could create a digital profile of the scooter deck they wanted. The deck would then have been routed on a computer numerical controlled (CNC) router and assembled to the standard Xootr chassis.

Although the prospect of personal manufacturing is an exciting one, I believe it will appeal primarily to inventors, hobbyists, engineers and designers. Ordinary people will opt for mass production enhanced by unprecedented advances in mass customization.

What do you think about the future of manufacturing?

In this Icon-o-Cast video, LUNAR’s director of interaction design, shares insights into how to develop an effective set of product “facial features” — those signals that tell users what a product does.

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In this Icon-o-Cast video, LUNAR’s Bob Lane demos his ingenious Curie Motor for Gretchen Anderson. Bob’s device was featured recently at the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Learn about French physicist Pierre Curie.

Learn about the physics of Curie temperature and see a heat-based Curie Motor here.

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