The Designers Accord - a kind of brain trust for the latest thinking on green design - is rapidly gaining steam, encouraging designers of all disciplines to collaborate on sustainability. By Emily Rabin Cowan

The first-ever panel discussion of Designers Accord adopters drew a massive crowd that spilled out from the front tables to standing-room-only in the back of the room at SLM's recent Sustainable Brands '08 conference in Monterey, Calif.

For the newbies, the Designers Accord is a coalition of designers, business leaders, and others working together to create positive environmental and social impact. Consider it a kind of brain trust for the latest thinking on green design.

“We’re not about asking design firms to create a “green” product or portfolio. Instead, we want to get to the point where sustainability is put on par with brand identity, technical design aspects, and strategic business goals.”
~Valerie Casey, head of global practice at IDEO and founder of the Designers Accord

Launched in July 2007, with 450 designers agreeing to a set of sustainability principles, the Designers Accord has, as of this month, swelled to 100,000 adopters from 100 countries, spanning all design disciplines. I seriously hope I’ve got your attention now.

Throughout the session, the conversation kept swinging back around to the importance of collaboration - which you tend to hear a lot about in business meetings before everyone goes back to their department and shuts the door. But these design leaders really mean it. For example, panelist Lucas Daniel of gravitytank told the story of how he persuaded fellow Designers Accord adopter Terry Swack into chipping in on a product-planning project for one of his clients (the two met at Sustainable Brands ’07 last fall).

“It’s this back and forth communication and collaboration that’s beginning to raise all the boats at once,” Daniel said. “We’re wasting energy consulting for clients according to our own individual definitions of sustainable design. We need to engender the overall narrative by sharing stories, examples, and case studies.”

Designers Accord founder Valerie Casey, who moderated the panel, agreed. “If you’re not spending all your time figuring out what sustainability means to your firm, you can focus on moving the conversation forward,” she said.

Design problems are getting more complex. It’s the open-source approach of sharing and learning that makes the dialog easier.
~ John Creson, Addis Creson

That’s the consulting side – but what about corporate? Panelist Peter Falt, of BMW Group DesignworksUSA, had this to say:

“BMW has its own sustainability policy, so we benefit from the resources and knowledge bank of the parent company. But there’s no strict sustainability mandate for brand design – it’s just guidelines. The Designers Accord gives us additional support and access to designers outside the corporate culture.”

For panelist Lynelle Cameron of Autodesk, the maker of design software, the issue is about leveling the playing field. “In giving our customers the tools to make smarter design decisions, our mission is to simplify and democratize sustainable design,” she explained. “The Designers Accord comes into the democratize piece, helping us get the message out get the message out to all our customers, not just the green-design leaders.”

Cameron also touched on the idea of collaboration vs. competition. “The open source model goes against our natural business instinct toward proprietary design guidelines,” she noted. “But the design is, by nature, a very interdependent and interconnected discipline.” The Designers Accord, according to Cameron, manages to walk that fine line, “maintaining competition in a very collaborative sense.”

Ah yes, competition. Panelist Eric Park of Ziba Design concedes that designers and the companies that employ them are still learning to navigate this one. “Everyone is still working through what’s right to share and what should be shared,” he said. “Certainly the larger corporations are wrestling more with that collaborative mindset, but we’re all figuring out the way forward.”

For more research, practical lessons, and key takeaways from Sustainable Brands '08, click here!