Charlie Sheldon is one of SBi's many valuable speakers on industrial design and its role in sustainable efforts. As the chair of the Industrial Designers Society of America's (IDSA) Bay Area chapter, he leads efforts to educate designers in sustainable design tools and empowers them to push beyond traditional industrial design (ID) to more strategic design considerations. As head of Link Studios, a design and build consultancy and small scale furniture producer, he helps companies come up with quick win-win sustainable strategies in their product lifecycle or supply chain. Lucas Daniel of gravitytank asked Charlie for his unique perspective on the role of design in our current economic climate - and where he sees designers playing a pivotal role moving forward.

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Lucas: To start, please introduce yourself.

Charlie: My name is Charlie Sheldon. I'm an industrial designer by training and schooling and that's the majority of the work that I do during the day. I migrated over to design from a background in biology, ecology and philosophy. I'm the chair of the IDSA's Bay Area chapter, which is a national professional organization for industrial designers and I run a small design and build company called Link Studios.

Lucas: Can you give us a glimpse of what your talk at SBi is about?

Charlie: It will be about sustainable design, no surprise there, but more specifically about the opportunities in mass markets. There can be misconceptions about where to make sustainable change for mass markets. I'll talk about why that is and what lenses those behind sustainable efforts within a company can look through to avoid jumping to the wrong conclusions when trying to execute a sustainable strategy.

Lucas: Is this what you focus on at Link Studios?

Charlie: At this point we don't have the scope or scale to impact things in the way we would like, but a lot of times we work with larger companies that do and that's where we find our leverage. We do a lot of product development, some design engineering, and then a lot of work with how to source things appropriately with larger companies, mainly in the furniture genre.

Lucas: How have you seen some of the learnings that you've been able to do at a smaller scale apply to larger scale processes?

Charlie: Because we are small, whenever things are slow, we are naturally in an R&D mode, and build products on a very small scale. When we are hired by companies we move into a consultancy mode, and take whatever we've learned from working with them and drop it back in our R&D. Then on the next project we can insert those learnings. A lot of times that comes down to a bunch of different workarounds. Let's say on a small scale you're able to turn out 10 products in a matter of a couple of months, then you can experiment with all sorts of packaging. Because we're doing such small runs, we end up having a large scope of experimentation that we can apply to client projects.

Lucas: There are lots of examples of mass market products with negative impacts. What are examples of paradigm changing mass market products?

Charlie: I think right now there are a lot of areas in product design where there are easy gains in terms of sustainability. You see this in the packaging of large volume consumer products like Tide, or things that are on the shelves of every supermarket. The idea of concentrating home cleaning products, or anything that has a high water content, really cuts down on shipping and makes a huge impact. From a simple design change, it saves costs and creates huge levels of efficiencies. But packaging is an easy win. You can redesign just about any packaging to have less impact and start to shift the consumer perspective on what good packaging is.

That's such a competitive advantage. Outside of any lessening of environmental impact, that's cost saving in every way. You can fit more into a box, the freight on board cost drops, the amount of back stock that retailers have to carry goes up - across the board - it's a win-win situation.

If you look at transport as a product life cycle phase and analyze what things are necessary versus sufficient conditions to get something to market, and whittle away at the unnecessary parts, you end up saving everybody a good amount. Things like transport are on the radar because of fuel costs whereas things like product take-back, ease of disassembly, and the ability to readily recycle to produce a clean waste stream, those things aren't as on the radar. They aren't as easy of a win-win as controlling the amount of packaging you wrap a product in.

Lucas: As chair of the IDSA, you represent a large community of product designers. With all the talk of change right now, is there anything different in the product design community?

Charlie: I wish I could tell you that I see something that's distinctly different on the horizon, but I don't. The economic questions that are looming have almost eclipsed the inertia that was gaining in the sustainable movement. It scares me a little bit, but I also think we might step back during that initial reaction. The Bay Area and the US in general are in a prime seat to incorporate all of the sustainable thinking into a new economic paradigm.

I don't think we're going to be doing traditional ID anymore. I really don't. There's tens of thousands of programs and planned programs over the next ten years in a number of other countries - all through Asia - that are focused on traditional ID. I think the time for strategic design to prevail is coming up. There's going to be so much re-thinking going on because of the economic crisis and the shift towards sustainable strategies as a business necessity is coming. Unfortunately, the constraints of the average industrial designer are very strong. I'm glad that more traditional ID jobs might be moving away from this area, because it will force everyone else that is involved in ID here to move a rung up and really start thinking strategically about how to design.

Lucas: What is the traditional ID job?

Charlie: The traditional ID job is extremely client-driven and limited in its flexibility to openly change the direction of the client's initial desires. Marketing data over-rules design decisions. A business climate of increased time to market doesn't leave much room for the person who is doing the ID to make any large scale decisions. It doesn't even leave time to do solid research in some cases. There's not much flexibility to impact anything more than the styling and the usability of the product. You can't come in and say "I didn't do any designing last week. Instead I researched totally tangential things and I don't think you should design this product for these reasons." I hope the door to have that strategic conversation is opening.

Lucas: What is the IDSA doing to help support this transition?

Charlie: Earlier this year we did a program called Digging Deeper, which was a two-part series of events. One part delivered tools that designers could apply to whatever they were designing within the constraints of the client-driven short turn-around time ID phase of a product development cycle. The other part of the evening was spent giving a strategic vision of where to look for these huge innovations and paradigm shifts.

We tried to create a number of lasting content pieces so that if people hit a wall when they were designing something, they have all these reference points. It gives them ways to design a consumer electronics product so that it could be disassembled easier, basically guidelines and rules that can be deferred to when you are in a jam and you need to figure something out quickly.

For next year, we want to set up a series of sustainable design events where we lay out very specific learning objectives and go through them in more focused individual sessions so we can go a little bit deeper into the best design methodologies for certain specific product genres.

Lucas: What would you say to designers who were on the fence about coming to SBi?

Charlie: I think designers need to look away from the design profession for input. If we want to make impact, we need to go and learn what big brands are doing, how they operate, what terminologies they use. This is a perfect opportunity to do that. We live in a world which is moving towards collaborative group thinking and these are the groups we are going to collaborate with. Because it's not a specific design conference, it's going to have more value to a designer. It's going to have more exposure and a newer set of tools that are going to give any designer a wider range of knowledge and practice. Look at the list of brands that are going to be there. These are large corporations. Lots of money goes through them. They are economic kingpins that will allow a designer to have more impact.

Lucas: Is there anything specific you are looking forward to at the conference?

Charlie: I'm looking forward to the Birds of a Feather dinners. There's going to be a few, I'm in the process of organizing one for IDSA people. They're basically an informal dinner. You sign up for it on the SBi web site. It's a random assemblage, but in that kind of forum, the conversations and face time you get with other good thinkers from all over the charts and their backgrounds is really valuable. The other cool thing is that we're going to combine a few of them and pull in a number of other groups. The IDSA one might fold in with the Designers Accord one. It should be very fun. I'm also really looking forward to the multitude of speakers. I'm trying to figure out how to schedule all of it. It seems like it's going to be a very tiring three days, but very worth it. I'm excited.

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