This past January, Peter Merholz was talking with Allan Chochinov from Core77 about whether Adaptive Path was interested in joining a new movement around design and sustainability. Peter then asked the Adaptive Path staff if they thought it made sense for our company, that mostly traffics in bits and pixels, to credibly support green causes. This received little response. I think this was because we hadn’t quite decided, as a company, what being green meant. Sure we cared about the environment: about half of us take transit to work, about a quarter bike, a fairly stingy amount of us (six) drive. Thanks to Robert, our Office Manager, we have instituted an office composting program, we use 100% recycled paper, and so on. We have good intentions, but are we green?
It was at this time that Valerie Casey contacted Adaptive Path about joining the Designers Accord. From their web site:
“The Designers Accord envisions a creative community where the principles of sustainable design are seamlessly integrated into all practice and production.
“Our mission is to catalyze innovation throughout the creative community by collectively building our environmental intelligence. For this cause, we advocate inverting the traditional model of competition, and encourage pooling knowledge so that all may benefit and build on marketable and sustainable solutions. We believe this will lead to greater innovation.
“Our approach for accelerating adoption of sustainability principles in the creative community by:• Providing a productive public and private way for designers to take action
• Asking all adopters to engage in the conversation about social and environmental impact with every client and customer, and integrate sustainable alternatives in their work
• Creating a global community of peers who openly share passion and ideas around environmental and social innovation
• Building a knowledge-sharing network to share best practices, design methods, resources, and tools through an online platform
• Educating ourselves and the public about the environmental impact of consumption”
Adaptive Path had a spirited discussion about the Designers Accord and what it could mean to our company and our design practices. Did we have the authority to discuss sustainability with our clients? We are champions of good experience design, what would happen if we also raised the banner of sustainability? What would we do if the goals of sustainable design conflicted with good experience design? These were important questions and my colleague, Alexa, blogged it. Nevertheless, with overwhelming support we decided to sign-on to the Accord.
Signing on the the Designers Accord kick started some other initiatives that had been plodding slowly in the background, namely off-setting Adaptive Path’s carbon footprint. But the Designers Accord asks for much more. It asks us to include carbon off-setting language into our contracts with our clients, it asks us to lower our carbon footprint each year, and it asks that we consider how design can produce a more sustainable world.
So is Adaptive Path now an environmental company?
No. We are still driven to help companies create products and services that deliver great experiences that improve people’s lives. But now what we are also looking at design problems through a green lens to see how consideration for the environment affect our solutions. Our consideration for the environment will never supersede our passion for good experience design but it has the potential of promoting secondary design considerations and giving additional heft to arguments for features or capabilities.
I am pleased to announce today, which is Earth Day, that we have not only off-set the 454,455.6 lbs. or roughly 228 tons of carbon generated by our operations and consulting in 2007, but that our Managing Experience 2008 San Francisco conference is our first event that is carbon neutral.
Which brings us back to the original question Allan Chochinov posed to Peter last January, is Adaptive Path green? I would reply not yet, but we are looking forward to learning how to be.
If your interested in learning more about the methodology we used to identify and off-set our carbon footprint you can email me.
Here are some good resources in the meantime:
http://www.designersaccord.org
http://www.carbonfund.org
http://www.treesftf.org
Entries(RSS)