On the 26th July after 130 days (8000 nautical miles) at sea the Plastiki – a boat created with 12,000 plastic water bottles – sailed triumphant into Sydney harbour. The expedition mission; to bring the horrific state of plastic waste in our oceans to the attention of the world. Through out the voyage David De Rothschild, the founder of the expedition has been reporting his experience through multi media platforms and last September Greengaged was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to wake him up in San Francisco at 4am and chat to him via Skype about the design of his revolutionary boat and his aims and ambitions.

Read and download the whole interview here

In China, Greengaged are working with partners including the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), British Council China and the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Network China (DESIS-China) to run sustainable design events. The Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), the lead organiser of the Icograda World Design Congress in Beijing, is committed to sustainable design and will be hosting Greengaged-China as a session of the congress. Running also as part of the British Council's "China-UK Creative Entrepreneurs" events lineup, the Greengaged-China workshops will take place in Beijing from 20th-28th October.

In response to the theme of the conference,  the objectives of Greengaged-China will be:

• To initiate a dialogue on sustainable design between international sustainable design experts and Chinese design community.
• To engage the wider design industry in getting involved, becoming informed and sharing expertise and opinions.
• To explore how creative entrepreneurs can contribute to a sustainable future.

For more information on the programme see the events page

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Greengaged-中国北京

Greengaged致力于传播产品、平面、传媒、时尚，服务等各领域的可持续设计策略，促进设计对环境产生积极的影响，激发设计师在可持续领域的设计和创新。Greengaged在2008伦敦设计节成功推出一系列的可持续专题活动。今年，Greengaged走向国际，将策动一次全球设计界的绿色行动！

在中国，Greengaged协手中央美术学院，英国大使馆文化教育处，社会创新与可持续设计联盟等合作伙伴，将在北京举办系列可持续设计活动。中央美术学院作为中国顶尖的设计院校和今年icograda世界设计大会主办方 ，积极推广可持续设计， 特别将Greengaged作为世界设计大会的可持续设计专题活动推出。同时，Greengaged也将作为创意企业家网络的交流活动，与年轻的中国创意企业家们分享结合设计创意和绿色商机的成功经验

「 Greengaged-中国北京 」 的目标是：

• 引发国际设计界和中国设计界在可持续设计方面的对话讨论。
• 引起各界对可持续设计更广泛的兴趣，分享专家经验和观点。
• 探讨如何发挥创意人才的企业家精神，开辟绿色设计市场，设计可持续的未来。

更多信息 events page

As many of you will be aware, famed designer Philippe Starck launched 'Design for Life' last month, his very own reality show not too dissimilar in format to The Apprentice. Aired on BBC2 as the Greengaged week was underway at the Design Council, the third episode of the series attempted to explore how design could solve ecological issues. In response to finding herself infront of the show, Greengaged co-founder and sustainable design guru Sophie Thomas raises her criticism. You can read the full feature here and also listen to an audio recording of the feature too.

Exciting news! Greengaged has been nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt People's Design Award 2009! A huge thank you to everyone - curators, speakers, tech team, twitterers, volunteers and all our audience members for raising the Greengaged profile Stateside.

Please login to the website, add a comment about any events you've been too, and vote before October 20, 2009. The winner will be announced live online from the National Design Awards gala in New York, on October 22 at 10:00 p.m. EST. "What is good design? You tell us!" Vote Greengaged for the 2009 People's Design Award!

On October 12th 2009, London's Ecological Literacy Initiative EcoLabs are running their inaugural "Teach-In" - a student conference aiming to help the design industry embrace ecological literacy & systemic change. Several hundred of students are scheduled to attend the event at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, whilst the entire event will also be streamed online to dozens of participating design institutions around the world! Speakers include John Thackara (Doors of Perception), Andrew Simms (New Economics Foundation), Richard Hawkins (PIRC), Ben Gill (BioRegional), Jonathan Crinion (Crinion Associates), Emma Dewberry (Open University) and Stephanie Hankey (Tactical Technology Collective. Questions from remote audiences will be taken, via Twitter @2012Imperative.

"There is a tremendous gap between what is understood about climate change by the scientific community and what is known by those who need to know, the public. Nowhere is the need for knowledge greater than for people in design education, who must be leaders in transforming the way that we use energy in daily life." James Hansen (Director: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, July 2009).

On behalf of Greengaged I will be at the Teach-In, capturing the action live as it happens via twitter (#2012Imperative), and later feeding back a review of the day here on greengaged.com. For more information visit Teach-In.co.uk and to participate in the live discussions, follow the project on Twitter @2012Imperative.

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 .

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!

Of course, since ink first hit paper, printers have tried to place more than one job on a sheet to make the printing process more efficient and cost effective, something which some printers are able to do more successfully than others. As the industry has grown the services offered by ‘Print farmers’ and large format printers have used also approaches to be able to ‘piggy back’ jobs. In recent decades however, the increasingly massive range of paper stocks, ink options, finishing, and tightening turnaround times has made this process very difficult to balance on all but the most standard of jobs. Often the solution for a printer would require compromise in the merging of different jobs, making them fit onto the same stock for example. As a result, for many printers, space is still left on each sheet, space which is immediately destined to be waste, often at huge cost to the printer, the designer, the client, and of course the environment.

Looop

One answer to this problem could be offered by looop™, an online portal connecting printers and designers throughout the UK: all of whom are more interested than ever in higher efficiencies, lower costs and benefits to the environment. The looop™ system will network together a massive range of printers who advertise unused space on a given sheet size and paper stock, allowing two or more separate jobs to be combined. Individual job requirements will be connected to the scale and possibilities of mass production!

Designers and print buyers will select printers and sheet sizes from the looop™ interface, or will be able to request availability for a particular specification in order to be approached by a printer. Following delivery of the job, the designer will leave their feedback to act as a visible measure of quality for the broader community, as per the scoring system used on sites like eBay. The other benefit to designers is that the printer’s offers will represent a significant reduction of 40% on general trade prices, and the range of print spaces on offer gives the designer more choice in paper and ink options.

looop™ doesn’t promise to deal with all the environmental standards, and it would be wonderful to see it evolve further following its launch: to see it flag up on the site the certification standards achieved by the printers, or detailing the locality and distance of printers to the area for delivery, for starters. It is also perhaps of more use to designers doing small print jobs and so may be of use to designers at the beginning of their career than agencies doing larger projects. However it does offer the print and design industries an accessible method to start reducing waste, which is a positive step forward, the presses are rolling.

looop™ is free for designers to sign up for and will launch for registrations from the beginning of October. Take a look at the looop™ site for further information, or follow them on twitter @Looopprint.

You can also find out more about paper issues through the website Lovely as a Tree.

On Wednesday, Greengaged warmly welcomed Michael Pawlyn, founder of Exploration Architecture to the curatorial stand. Before being joined by his speakers Melissa Sterry, Belina Raffy, Julian Vincent and Andy Middleton, Pawlyn began his day entitled "Biomimicry in Design: Learning from Nature" with his definition; "Biomimcry is looking at nature as a source of new sustainable solutions.”

The days first speaker, Melissa Sterry, Founder and CEO of Societás, began by outlining the key trends of the next few decades. Through the use of a fast moving and fascinating slideshow, Sterry identified our emerging needs as: biodiversity, food and water scarcity, changing weather patterns, natural resource depletion and wastestream recycling. She proposed that buildings in the future will no longer be concrete jungles, instead they will be inspired by organic forms. She further outlined some emerging principles for 21st century design, including: Living design (design with less chemical elements), symbiosis, closed loops (there is no waste in nature, there shouldn’t be in construction), organic origins (as nature intended), micro-energy (self-powered design) and muti-tasking design. Sterry continued to describe how it is time to throw away the rule book, bring a multitude of disciplines together (i.e. architects, scientists, chemical engineers) and move into a radical new period. She did notably acknowledge that this kind of futuristic architecture (and thinking) is currently only happening in small pockets.

Michael Pawlyn described three projects that he had worked on that used natural forms. The first and most famous was the Eden Project in Cornwall. Using bubbles as its inspiration, its construction is based on the ideas of famed futurist and architect Buckminster Fuller. They didn’t want to use glass because they couldn’t make the squares big enough, so instead they used ETFE which was lighter and could be inflated. The other project was an eco rainforest which re-created a rain forest but unfortunately didn’t get built. The third is a concept for a huge building in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, which is inspired by the Namibian beetle... this little critter harvests its own water in the desert, and since Las Palmas imports all its water, it was a fitting inspiration.

Belina Raffey led the group in some improvisational exercises about giving and accepting ideas. These became more complicated and varied throughout the day, including throwing imaginary balls and breaking into imaginary spaces. Raffey teaches these exercises to executives and at business schools.

Then Michael Pawlyn handed small groups a series of photographs of bugs and organisms, and these greengaged participants had to then pitch a design idea based on that organism ....Bombadier beetles, lotus leaves and humpback whales were all turned into inventive, somewhat preposterous design ideas.

The next speaker of the day was Julian Vincent, Professor of Biomimetics at the University of Bath, and Associate Chief Editor of the Journal of Bionic Engineering. He has invented a system of thinking and looking at biomimicry called BioTRIZ. He wants to turn ideas in a biological context into an engineering context. His view is that; "Biomimicry is the implementation of good design from nature." There are three levels to the development of his theory:

• Level l is “what can I copy and how”. Velcro started it all, inspired by burdock seeds sticking to a dog’s fur. The lotus leaf is another inspiration: after raining the water on the leaf divides into droplets. Exterior paint that cleans itself was inspired by that.
• Level 2 examined how problems are solved in biology. He and his colleagues looked at thousands of examples of this. He gave an interesting example of honey comb shaped insulation which solved a design problem based on changing the shape of insulation.
• Level 3 asks “what do I want to improve?” In this step, one analyses what “stops me making that improvement.” His TRIZ system is an intricate problem solving technique based on 40 inventive principles.

The final speaker was Andy Middleton, creator of the Do Lectures. He gave an inspirational talk about the urgency of changing our thinking: stating how we only have 1000 days (until 2012) to reduce the world’s carbon output by 10%. His thrust focused on the need for community, building on better local resources and truly focusing on people's needs. He is a great believer in grass roots solutions, expertise and collaborative projects.

Michael Pawlyn discussed the ABLE project in Yorkshire. Originally a small initiative started to involve handicapped and reformed junkies in a recycling project, it ended up as a fish farm, with vegetables being grown to feed the fish and the people, with all kinds of outgrowths. In an effort to treat waste not as a problem, but as a positive initiative to try something new, it developed into an eco-system and business project that is inspirational and all encompassing.

See more photographs of Michael Pawyln's Biomimicry day.

Michael Pawlyn will be speaking at the Barbican on October 8, 2009 about a Sahara Forest project. 

photos by: Rhea Daley-Serieux

Showcasing great examples of award-winning British design, the "Window on Design" at the Design Council offices in Covent Garden had a green inspired project on display during the Greengaged 2009 week! For those of you who didn't get the chance to see the display, we wanted to share the project with you.

Founded by Richard Sabin and Mark Laurence, BioTecture Ltd is dedicated to designing and implementing green wall systems for buildings and the built environment. BioTecture’s modular green wall system* have enabled sphagnum moss, spider plants and salad leaves to be grown up the sides of office blocks and schools and even inside shops. The green walls can help keep spaces cooler in summer and warm in winter.

* Green or living walls consist of vertical planting held in an irrigated growing medium.