Greengaged

As Greengaged 2009 gets underway at the Design Council, I'm pleased to share our first Greengaged video. Featuring the voices of co-founders Sophie Thomas, Sarah Johnson and Anne Chick, and the Design Council's Chief Executive David Kester, this short film offers a brief insight into the aims and 2008 success of Greengaged.

There are still a few places left for events this current week, so do check the incredible line-up, via our events page, and register for the last few places! 

A few months ago, Greengaged curator Anna Gerber and the team at Three Trees Don't Make a Forest were invited to visit London's “local” paper mill: Tullis Russell in Fife, Scotland. Joined by Sion Whellens of Calverts and Luke Nicholson of More Associates, Anna explains how 'the trip made a real impact on us all and got us thinking a lot about how industrial processes are instrumental to and in everything we design. Inspired by the trip, and as part of the Crafting Mass Production event for this year’s Greengaged at the Design Council, Gerber gathered a team of designers to spend the day at Workshop’s new letterpress studio in East London last week.

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photo by: Kate Andrews

So, how can design save the world? Maybe it's about more than switching to groovy eco materials (bamboo laptop, anyone?).

Maybe we need to redesign the systems of society that produce unsustainability. A prime example is banking. It's a system based upon credit - spending today what we may earn tomorrow, creating problems of accelerated use of resources, waste, a lack of resilience (did you know that over two thirds of households in the UK are less than one month from bankruptcy?). And despite carbon neutral policies and Equator principles you could argue banking barely has a sustainable or responsible bone in its body. But as we explore banking we can start to find alternatives.

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On Wednesday, 23rd September, Michael Pawlyn, founder of Exploration Architecture, will host day three of this years greengaged hub, Biomimicry in Design: Learning from Nature. Join Michael Pawlyn, a pioneer of biomimetic architecture, and other prominent thinkers in this rapidly emerging area of design for this day of astounding talks and inspiring workshops. If ants can make zero waste, solar powered, sustainable architecture; how can we apply their ‘intelligence’ and 3.5 billion years of research and development to human focused, sustainable design?

Read more about the day after the jump... and click here to book your place now! 

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As part of our Crafting Mass Production day, we are planning a letterpress workshop run by Alex Cooper and Rose Gridneff of Workshop in Hackney, with four high profile designers, from 10am–4pm on Wednesday, 9 September. Together, the designers will produce a single piece of work, which will be printed in an edition of 500 and will be given away as part of greengaged.

There are two available places and we would like to invite you to join in. Email us at here, telling us why you want to participate in no more than 100 words, and win a chance to spend a day collaborating with well known designers in a letterpress workshop. The competition closes on Friday 28 August.

+ Workshop
+ Three Trees Don't Make a Forest
+ Anna Gerber

Did you know that recycling one tonne of paper can save 7000 gallons of water, 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, 3 cubic yards of landfill space and 4000kw of energy!? On Friday afternoon, non profit enterprise Three Trees Don’t Make a Forest held a three hour sustainable print and paper workshop to explore how different print processes affect recyclability, and how you can reduce the impact through the design process.

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Following an introduction to her work as Design Week’s green columnist in the early ’90s and the publication of the first green graphic design book, “The Graphic Designer’s Greenbook: A Handbook and Source Guide on Design and the Environment”, Anne Chick (Director of the Sustainable Design Research Centre, Kingston University) took the opportunity this week to introduce her rebranding work with Remarkable.

Ever thought you could write with a plastic cup? Or store your pencils in an old tire? Well, Remarkable are a product design company where UK waste is recycled and made into fun, exciting & innovative products. In their Worcester-based factory, video cassettes become pencils and juice cartons become notepads, demonstrating a different (and very green) approach to both recycling and product design.

More photographs of the Best Practice Case Studies on Flickr.

In November 2008, Professor Michael Braungart will launch a new UK edition of ‘Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things’, the prolific and best-selling manifesto “calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design.” Greengaged are excited to announce that the new edition will be published by Random House, and in the new introduction Michael writes;

“In the nineteenth century various writers used the phrase ‘the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world’ - and to them this meant that the way we raise our children would do more to change the world than empire-builders and new industries. The hands that rocks Cradle to Cradle today fit the phrase, I think, as our agenda is also about finding nurturing solutions very different to the often outrageous initiatives that harm the environment, sometimes by the same sort of institutions. Cradle to Cradle tried to put human being in the same ’species’ picture as other living things - and to us, a misuse of material resources is not just suicidal for future human generations but catastrophic for the future of life.” (Braungart, M. 2008. Cradle to Cradle).

On Monday evening, Professor Michael Braungart will close the penultimate day of Greengaged, with a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts that will highlight fields of materials assessment, waste and energy balances, and life-cycle design. Braungart’s lecture will be followed by a conversation with science and culture of materials writer Philip Ball.