Industrial Designers Are Key to a Sustainable Future by Core Jr

The first Sustainability Deep Dive from the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), held online in June 2020, drew hundreds of designers, students, and educators from more than 25 countries.

Back for a second year, IDSA's Sustainability Deep Dive 2021 (June 9-10) will continue the organization's mission of inviting industrial designers and business leaders to establish new methodologies in their studios and corporate settings to ensure the ongoing health of our planet and safeguard a sustainable future for all.

The event also will stay virtual, with tickets starting at just $25 for full and equal access to the live event and the recorded sessions.

The Importance (and Sustainability) of Virtual Sustainable Design Events

"As we are coming out from the pandemic's grip, we cannot afford to let this once-in-a-century opportunity to make a systemic change pass us by," says Stephan Clambaneva, IDSA, Sections Director on IDSA's Board of Directors. "We are going to see more technological advancement in these next 10 years than in the previous 50. But we need a balanced approach: a people-planet-profit approach ensuring a measurable triple bottom line."

Grouphug Window Solar Charger and box (GroupHugTech.com). Krystal Persaud, GroupHug Founder and CEO, will present at IDSA's Sustainability Deep Dive 2021.

Clambaneva and Jason Belaire, IDSA, the current Chair of IDSA's Board of Directors, served on the content team for the inaugural event focused on sustainable design strategies, processes, and product experiences. Why this Deep Dive has become so important to the design community and the IDSA brand, and why it will continue, according to Belaire, "is that we are at a critical point where we need to be curating real-time, knowledge-based experiences where designers have a safe place to generate conversations around sustainability, circular design, and social impact issues."

The second Sustainability Deep Dive will expand upon the first's success, with organizers including Dr. Sasha Alexander, IDSA, Director of the Academic Program of Industrial Design at Western Sydney University in Sydney, Australia; Matt Barnes, IDSA, Senior Industrial Designer, Packaging Solutions at Veritiv, Atlanta Design Center; Ethan Smith, IDSA, freelance designer focused on regenerative strategy; and Shruti Parikh, IDSA, Associate Director, Product Development at Takeda in the Greater Boston area and Vice Chair of IDSA's Sustainability Section.

Besides virtual events being "easier to scale, more affordable, and more strategic from a data and analytics perspective," says Parikh, the organizers also found that by reducing costs for all involved and other barriers to access for attendees, such as travel, they could reach audiences they were not reaching before.

2022 BMW ix electric SUV (BMW USA). Daniela Bohlinger, Head of Sustainability at BMW Group Design, will present at IDSA's Sustainability Deep Dive 2021.

Virtual events like the Sustainability Deep Dive, "will color future decision-making and influence new opportunities for co-design and thoughtfulness in collaboration in all ventures," says Dr. Alexander. For example, virtual conferences over the past year allowed academic staff at Western Sydney University "to redirect all usual conference attendance funding towards students-in-need during the pandemic with no local family and no means of alternate support. A small but impactful gesture so they could continue their studies even in lockdown."

Dr. Alexander adds that this Deep Dive in particular reminds him "that the future is about people and how well we harness and build upon trusted relationships in responding to life challenges collectively. The interconnections and interdependencies bring responsibility and reward."

Introducing the Presenters

The emcees for this year's event are Kevin Bethune, founder and Chief Creative Officer of dreams • design + life, and Sayeh Dastgheib-Beheshti, IDSA, Chair of the IDSA-Toronto Chapter, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of a Silicon Valley start-up currently in stealth mode, and a researcher focused on sustainability.

"In this Deep Dive, designers can get insights into new ways of thinking about resource use, resilience, and social justice to help them create better solutions for their own challenges," Dastgheib-Bahesti says.

"I am looking forward to hearing Chandra Farley speak about the social justice aspect of energy equity, since often sustainability is framed only as a material usage issue," she notes. "I am also looking forward to Louise Manfredi's presentation on bridging the gap between how sustainability is taught in higher education and the expectations of industry in hiring designers for creating sustainable products."

The Sustainability Deep Dive 2021 speaker lineup also includes:

· Daniela Bohlinger, Head of Sustainability at BMW Group Design, on "Sustainability as the Driver of Change"

· Al Iannuzzi, Ph.D., Vice President, Sustainability at The Estée Lauder Companies, on "The Making and Marketing of Sustainable Brands"

· Kelsey Moffitt, Senior Industrial Designer at Loop Global, on "Guiding Manufacturers toward the Future of Sustainable Packaging"

· Christian Engene, Sustainability Lead at Above, on "Design That Addresses Global Challenges"

· Kari Herlevi, Project Director, Circular Economy at Sitra, on "Designing the Waste Out with Circularity"

· Ren DeCherney, Business Development Manager at International Living Future Institute, on "The Living Product Challenge: A Visionary Path for the Future of Products"

· Krystal Persaud, Founder and CEO of Grouphug Solar, on "Design for Dystopia"

· Tim McGee, Founder of LikoLab, with "Life-Centered Design Handbook"

· Theresa Millard, Creative Director, and Jeff Zeman, Principal, of TrueNorth Collective, on "Sustainability Is a Journey—Taking Those First Steps"

The Future of the Sustainable Events

While in-person design conferences in general are expected to return, there is something to be said for sustainability-focused events staying virtual or incorporating a hybrid model to lessen environmental impact. "Personally, I'd like to see a hybrid of both options in conferences moving forward," says Matt Barnes, one of this year's Sustainability Deep Dive organizers. "Technology provides the opportunity for these events to continue to have a virtual arm, allowing engagement both in audience and virtually from home/office."

Le Labo handcrafted fragrances are sold in refillable glass bottles (The Estée Lauder Companies' 2020 Citizenship and Sustainability Report). Al Iannuzzi, Ph.D., VP, Sustainability at The Estée Lauder Companies, will present at IDSA's Sustainability Deep Dive 2021.

For four hours each day on June 9 and 10, 2021, you can join IDSA's Sustainability Deep Dive from wherever you are in the world for networking, knowledge exchange, and building a better future with other sustainability-focused designers.

Sponsored by Indeed and Pepsico, IDSA's Sustainability Deep Dive 2021 will take place on June 9 & 10 (4 hours each day). Learn more and register for the live event and recorded sessions at IDSA.org/SDD2021.

Interested in supporting this event or other IDSA events? Contact Carrie Green.

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Crowdfunding Smash: A $50, 10x13 Steel Plate Lands $1 Million and Counting by Rain Noe

The latest crowdfunding smash on Kickstarter may also be the simplest object ever sold on the platform. The Misen Oven Plate is just a 10" x 13.5", 6mm-thick piece of steel with rounded corners. And it just shot past the $1-million mark.

Cooking utensil company Misen says that your average oven fluctuates wildly in temperature, exposing its contents to a rollercoaster of temperatures that can yield inconsistent results.

So, Misen says, they've borrowed a trick from pro chefs to even out the temperature, which is to merely add a steel plate below (and/or above) the dish being cooked.

I don't doubt (much) that the plate might be useful; it's just sobering, as someone trained in industrial design, to see a product with almost no design applied to it achieve such wild success. The campaign was seeking just $25,000, and they're now 4,000%-plus funded, with 27 days left to pledge.

The plates run 50 bucks a pop, or 80 for a pair.

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Industrial Design Students: Oskar Zieta's Ultraleggera Chair Presentation is a Good One to Learn From by Rain Noe

Superleggera

In an effort to top Gio Ponti's Superleggera ("super lightweight") chair, Swiss designer Oskar Zieta used two production methods Ponti could never have dreamed of in 1957: Laser-cutting and FiDU.

FiDU is a German acronym for Freie Innen Druck Umformung, "free internal pressure forming" in English. It's essentially hydroforming, but using air as the inflator. Zieta, who developed the method, used it to create the aluminum frame for his handsome Ultraleggera chair.

The seat and backrest are laser-cut aluminum, and careful design yielded an overall weight of 1,660 grams (3.66 pounds) vs. Ponti's 1,700 grams (3.75 pounds).

You could argue that shaving 40 grams off of something is a parlor trick, but there's more to this chair than that--particularly for Industrial Design students, who should definitely watch the attendant product video. It checks a lot of boxes for what would get you high marks on one of your school presentations:

- It discusses and demonstrates an understanding of the chosen material

- It cites the trendy natural sources of inspiration (shells, skeletons, sentences like "we admired the wings of dragonflies," etc.)

- In addition to describing its basic utility, it highlights a sort of bonus benefit experienced by the user when the chair is not serving its primary function, i.e. an offline consideration, which is that it's exceptionally easy to move around

- It demonstrates eco-friendliness and ease of recycling

- It cites performance testing numbers

- It demonstrates use cases across different age groups

If your own presentation featured all of the same elements, it'd be a hard-nosed professor indeed who'd give you a bad grade. (Just don't mention that you're setting out to top Gio Ponti.)

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Startup Industrial Design Firm Promotes New "Designer-at-Risk" Business Model by Rain Noe

Sterling Langley describes themselves as "a new boutique industrial design company." Their website features no portfolio of work, but they came across my radar because they've put out a press release promoting their new "Designer-at-Risk" (DAR) business model.

The wording is similar to the "Construction-Manager-at-Risk" (CMAR) model, which this emulates. If you're already familiar with CMAR, skip the next eight paragraphs, where I'll explain CMAR first.

The CMAR model sort of falls in between the Design-Bid-Build process and the Design/Build process. In the more traditional Design-Bid-Build method of construction, a client hires an architect or designer, who takes on liability for the design; the client pays them for the design; the client then takes bids from contractors to execute the design.

In the best-case scenario, D-B-B allows the client to vet competitive construction bids. In the worst-case scenario, the client selects an incompetent contractor who has way underbid, the designer and the contractor disagree or have poor communication, people start calling their lawyers, and the project gets stalled.

With a Design/Build firm, both the designer and construction teams are under the same roof. It's one-stop shopping with just one contract covering all of the work. Because the designers and builders are the same entity, in the best-case scenario there should be no disagreement between them nor construction cost surprises down the line, and the project should move more quickly than with D-B-B, as there is no pause for the bidding process between designing and building.

The downside to Design/Build is that there can be a lack of up-front cost transparency. With no bidding process, some Design/Build firms pitch a client with general estimates, with the detailed design work and actual cost calculations produced only after they're hired.

Another knock I've heard on Design/Build firms (and which I want to discount) is that they're less creative, relying on predetermined cost-effective "modules" that they've learned work well, and which they just plug into your design. I don't believe that this criticism can be accurately applied across the spectrum; I have to believe that it's all down to the individual designers' integrity.

Construction-Manager-at-Risk or CMAR sort of falls between these two procedures. The client hires an architect, as with D-B-B, and also hires a CMAR firm early in the design process. The CMAR is meant to collaborate closely with the designer to determine accurate costs, and as the model's name implies, the CMAR provides a Guaranteed Maximum Price (GMP), and takes on all responsibility if the project goes south. Generally speaking, if you go with CMAR you can be sure they're not just working with the lowest-bidding subcontractors, but are giving you the prices for competent subcontractors who can do the work properly, since it's the CMAR's tail on the line.

The only knock I've heard on CMAR is that cost transparency is essentially up to them, i.e. that things can be marked up behind-the-scenes. But as with the Design/Build criticism, this isn't something I can easily corroborate, and again I have to believe it comes down to individual integrity.

(If you are directly involved with either of these three practices and feel I've misrepresented or misunderstood some of the finer points, please do let me know in the comments, and please provide some mechanism whereby I can reach you with follow-up questions. I'd be happy to print clarifications here.)

Sterling Langley says they're going with a Designer-at-Risk model to drum up work, i.e. they "needed a creative solution to entice their clients to provide them with the opportunity to produce new peripheral products." As for what the DAR model entails:

[IN a CMAR model] the CMAR is assuming all the financial burden and the financial risk to complete the project as designed within the building construction schedule. Sterling Langley LLC developed a similar but new model for industrial engineering titled Designer-At-Risk or DAR.

Unlike a CMAR that requires monthly payments or a weekly cash draw for the percentage of work completed, the DAR is compensated only if the client accepts some of the final project's intellectual property that includes new features, new functions and new benefits, as presented.

"The client is always in a Win-Win situation," says Lloyd Aronoff, the principal. "If our client does not accept any of our intellectual property designs containing new features, new functions or new benefits, all costs for our application engineering, prototypes, material, labor, documentation and travel remain with Sterling Langley LLC."

"We would rather absorb all of our costs from a non acceptable product challenge than lose the client entirely. It is our goal to have the same client consider us again, for their next new peripheral project opportunity."

Do you all think this will catch on?

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German ID Studio's Killer Concept for a Desktop Meteorological Instrument by Rain Noe

Fischer is a German company that manufactures handmade precision weather and climate measuring instruments. One of their product categories is the weather station, which combines a barometer, hygrometer and thermometer. These are pretty sober-looking instruments:

They've got just a few where the designer(s) seemed to loosen up a little:

Perhaps seeking to break out of their stuffy aesthetic, at some point Fischer got together with German industrial design studio Jaeger.ID, which produced this fantastic concept for them:

The no-nonsense description on Jaeger.ID's page reads:

"It is aimed to be used in modern living interior environment. A requirement during the development of the product design was the combination of technical features with a pleasing and innovative shape. Part of the development was the mechanical design of the individual components.

"To meet various customers taste, two different color variants have been worked out."

Alas, as far as I can tell by scouring Fischer's site, the Jaeger concept doesn't seem to have gone into production. Which is a pity; I think a lot of folks who don't like the scientific aesthetic of Fischer's offerings would happily purchase one of these.

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Furthering Your Industrial Design Education: Apply Now for Offsite's 12-Week Summer Course by Rain Noe

For those looking to further their industrial design education, you've got nine days left to apply for the next wave of Advanced Design's Offsite program. Conducted online, the summer session is broken into two cohorts, depending on your experience level:

Cohort 01: Breaking Into Design

Cohort 01 is a 12-week, five course program focused on building foundational skills to break into the field of industrial design held during the summer of 2021. Students will learn the hard skills required to begin sketching, building objects in 3D, and rapid prototyping to test and validate their ideas; alongside the soft skills of form development, the design process, and the history of industrial design. Cohort 01 is for anyone who wants to pivot into industrial design—whether you've graduated high school or you're a seasoned professional looking to make a career change.

Cohort 02: Leveling Up

Cohort 02 is a 12-week intensive program centered on reframing what design education can be. Offsite aims to prepare students and newly graduated young professionals for real world design work with the help of 7 industry leaders and an exclusive mentorship program. The 12-week program caters to teach students skills related to: design within business, design discourse, sketching to communicate, product visualization, professional self presentation, and design for manufacturing. Students who have completed the 12 weeks of instruction will be ready to take on their next career move, whether first internship or next job.

AD has released a short video that provides a teaser as to what the recently-wrapped Spring Cohort's sessions were like:

The tuition is $2,500 for 01 and $3,000 for 02. You can learn more about the application requirements as well as the specific courses offered here.

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Great Industrial Design Student Work: Jade Echard Transforms Oyster Shells Into Durable Material by Rain Noe

Before we understood or cared about environmental damage, industrial design could be called a noble profession. At its best it produced useful objects for the masses, and using mass production made those objects affordable while creating thousands of factory jobs.

With that system no longer sustainable, Paris-based industrial designer Jade Echard is providing the model for an alternative. Ostra, the project Echard developed last year while gaining her Masters in Industrial Design at Central St. Martins, is a holistic approach to product development that tackles environmental issues while also considering the supply chain and local economies.

"Around 430 billion tons of oysters are harvested each year," Echard writes. "Their shells represent more than 70% of their weight, resulting in tons of shell waste. Most of it is untreated or dumped in landfill where it rots, releasing methane (a greenhouse gas). At the same time, they contain one of the most valuable components used in many industries but usually mined: Calcium Carbonate.

"By exploring the potential for transformation of this organic waste - thanks to an ancient Roman recipe for Concrete - OSTRA aims to rethink oyster shells as a valuable, sustainable and local resource of biomaterial by developing a range of products in the context of a circular economy. In doing so, the project helps to reduce the pollution load to the environment while also reducing production and transport costs and displacing harmful or extracted materials.

"OSTRA is an alternative material and a system for critically engaging with a complete supply chain. The project involves local communities, creating a network of people (farmers, restauranteurs as material suppliers, scientists, designers, and so on) around waste oyster shells.

"I am currently developing the material in collaboration with Dr Michael Cattell, a specialist in dental technology and biomaterials at the Institute of Dentistry - Queen Mary University of London. From this research, I have developed a tableware range made from oyster shell material which can be used by the same restaurants from which the shells were originally sourced."

Echard now has her Masters in hand and has returned to her homebase of Paris, where she's seeking an ID gig. Would-be employers can contact her here.

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Reader Submitted: Spotlight On European Industrial Design Work: JETSURF XRACE Board & Airless Wheels by Martin Žampach

Design of the JETSURF XRACE a sharp and clean-looking racing board with a focus on uncompromising performance.

View the full project here

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