Greengaged

During day four Crafting Mass Production at greengaged last week (full coverage coming soon), Anna Gerber told the story of our day spent with newly founded design agency Workshop, at their letterpress studio in East London. I'm pleased to be able to share a short video of the day, kindly edited by Varvara Zaytseva.

Featuring in the film (in order) are Anna Fidalgo (Crispin Finn), Lawrence Zeegen (Kingston University), Sanky Sankarayya (All of Us /  D&AD), Adam Cheltsov (Sara De Bondt Studio), Greengaged competition winners Matt Mear and Holly Webber, and Workshop Founders Alexander Cooper and Rose Gridneff.

Photographs of the letterpress workshop can be viewed on our greengaged flickr channel and full coverage here .

photo by: Walter Parenteau

What any print designer is interested in is the product that they can hold in their hand at the end of the day; and yet design must now consider the bigger system which that finished product fits within and is born out of. In print terms, about 4.7 million tons of fresh, unused paper is thrown away by UK print companies each year as sometimes large unused off-cuts. 4.7 million tons is an unimaginably large amount; production of each ton of paper requires in the region of 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and more energy per ton than glass or steel. Do the maths on the large numbers by all means, but it’s clearly very significant.

On average, paper represents 80% of the carbon footprint of a piece of print, which makes paper one of the largest contributing factors to the environmental performance of a company. Before all the print buyers and designers evacuate the room, there are intelligent approaches that don’t mean doing away with print, by instead making its production much more effective!

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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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In the second part of the Greengaged event, “Wasted Talent”, the twenty-five piece group of designers, writers and academics arrived at Powerday waste recycling centre on Thursday morning. We were warmly met by Chris and John from Powerday, who after a brief introduction split us into two groups for an informal tour around the facility.

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To celebrate the launch of Greengaged, event organisers (left to right) Sophie Thomas (co-founder, thomas.matthews), David Kester (CEO, Design Council), Sarah Johnson of [re]design and Anne Chick (Director, Sustainable Design Research Centre, Kingston University) took a ten minute rest in the Greengaged Skip!

In prime place outside the Design Council in Convent Garden, the Greengaged Skip was created by Goldsmiths University graduate Oliver Bishop Young, with [re]design. You can view further photographs of the Greengaged Skip after the jump and on Flickr.

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