Better Living Through Sustainability

As a designer, my job is to make stuff. Usually a lot of stuff. Ephemeral stuff. Often stuff that soon becomes trash. As a sustainabilitist, I want to make and consume less stuff. How do I reconcile these two extremes? Making better stuff, adaptable stuff, non-replaceable stuff is part of the solution. Another is asking the question “Does this make the present (& future) measurably better?” For most stuff, my designs included, the answer is no. But, for sustainability's sake, the answer must be yes.

I noticed today that the acronym I am using for this site, BLTS, can be easily misconstrued as something different … This epiphany came to me while working on some different versions of a Better Living Through Sustainability identity update. I had a giant BLTS up on my screen, trying to figure out something clever to do with it, when my girlfriend, Nancy, walked by and said “I love those.” I of course then said, “what, my website?” And Nancy said, “no, Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato Sandwiches.”

So, Sustainability for Graphic Designers ended up getting canceled due to lack of interest. This has ended up being fine, as I have a ton of work to do, but I was looking forward to discussing the issues on my mind with a room of others. Instead, along with all the client work, I'm working on some updates to a presentation I gave last month at the AIGA response_ability conference about vernacular principles and how to apply them to contemporary sustainable design. Check back in the near future for links to the R_A stuff, as well as my updated materials.

I'm teaching a class at MICA over the summer—as long as enough people sign up—called “Sustainability for Graphic Designers.” Here is the course #, time and description, as well as a link to MICA's continuing studies registration page. [note: they apparently are calling it sustainable graphic design … but that won't be exactly what I've envisioned the class being about]

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Sustainable Graphic Design (GD214)
3 credits — $1080
Meets 5/21/2010 – 6/25/2010 on Tuesday, Wednesday, & Friday from 12:00 PM to 4:45 PM.

Sustainability is an all-encompassing topic with pragmatic, conceptual, and aesthetic implications to both society and the environment. This course is intended to be an introduction to the various facets of sustainability and how sustainable principles can be applied to design. We will explore current trends, theories and ideologies (ranging from the realistic to the fantastic) along with practical design needs (the fundamentals for specifying more sustainable papers, inks and printing). In covering the basics of sustainability, we will not forget our critical, artistic eye—sustainable design must still be good design.
note: Degree seeking students may take this course in place of Graphic Design I with chair's permission.

learn more &/or register here:
http://bit.ly/cigwVh

I throw away too much—I don't compost anything (though I blame my landlord for this, it is purely an excuse). I gave up fairly quickly at attempting to convince my landlord to do any of the things I say I believe in. My showers are too long. I gave up my car and ride a bike, but don't convince others to do the same—& I also take rides from people all the time, oh and I fly around the country and still rent cars when “necessary”. I am a terrible consumer. I buy new things. Stupid new things. Not even all sustainably grown, manufactured, etc. things. I still buy random things made in random factories by random people with random, potentially questionable labor and materials. I don't really shop at thrift or 2nd hand stores anymore.

My personal feeling is that open source communities and creative-commons licensing are part of the way innovation and design will most quickly move forward. They are themselves sustainable practices that build upon themselves. They also democratize the ability of people to access them. With that in mind it is nice to read that some rather large companies are sharing the ideal. GreenXchange attempts to do just this, and two of its largest current supporters are Nike and Best Buy. Not bad.

Nice lecture by John Thackara from a conference in france. Having followed his writing and thinking for some time, it was nice to actually get to see him present his thoughts. Enjoy.

My thesis work is now documented and up online at this address: http://graduate.mica.edu/gdmfa/thesis2009/bjornard/index.html

Everything will eventually live on this site, but has simply not yet been uploaded. Bear with me, finishing Grad School and starting life again is hard work.

It turns out that one of my favorite books, How Buildings Learn, was also a BBC mini-series. Stewart Brand himself has uploaded all six of the episodes to google video. If you're interested, I've collected the links here as well.

My thesis show was from March 27th until April 6th. I am now in the process of selecting, editing and cleaning up my gallery installation photos. For those of you unable to come to Baltimore for the actual in-situ showing and have mentioned that you wish to see them do not fear, they will be up soon!