The Designers Accord is a set of voluntary principles and guidelines that seeks to "make sustainability a part of the very first conversation in the design process," according to its creator Valerie Casey of IDEO. It is based on two simple concepts: speak about sustainability to each and every client, and share your knowledge with others.

In this piece we explore how this simple idea is poised to create a revolution in the world of design. By pooling together best practices, instead of guarding trade secrets, the hope is that designers will find faster solutions for the environment. This paradigm shift has the potential to radically change virtually every aspect of our lives that is touched by print, graphic, new media, and industrial design.

Introducing the Accord at the Compostmodern Conference  in January, Casey said, “Every one who agrees to the Designers Accord agrees to a very simple concept: Every single client who comes to our studios or offices, you engage in a conversation about environmental impact and sustainable alternatives.”

“The second part of the Designers Accord is to take each of our knowledge bases and pool them together so that we don’t have to learn from zero. The idea is that it may be impossible for each of us to raise our environmental literacy high enough to do anything by ourselves, but if we can bring our forces together and share knowledge between firms, and design institutions, we’ll actually be able to create more innovative and more complete solutions.”

The Accord was launched to immediate acclaim, obviously answering a need of designers eager to educate themselves about sustainability and address these issues with unwilling or unknowledgeable clients. It has been quickly adopted by thousands of designers from over 20 countries; major design firms including Celery Design Collaborative, frog design, Ph.D and more than a hundred other firms worldwide; as well as both the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA,) the oldest and largest membership association for designers, and the Industrial Designers Society of America, (IDSA), which together represent tens of thousands of designers in America alone, with dozens of chapters and hundreds of student groups across the country.

Gaby Brink, AIGA SF environmental chair and producer of the Compostmodern conference, believes “most designers are willing to embrace sustainability in a meaningful fashion and are hungry for the information and resources that will allow them to make a difference in their day-to-day business lives.  Compostmodern is based on the idea that most designers agree to sustainability in principle, and that getting a foothold — something you can actually use — is the real challenge.”

The Designers Dilemma
The idea grew from an earlier “Kyoto Treaty of Design” that Valerie Casey created when she realized she was reluctant to speak to a major client about sustainability. She wasn’t sure how they would receive it, or even if she knew enough about the subject to say the right things. But as Paul Hawken wrote to her in an email, “once you see the problem, it’s impossible to unsee,” and she felt she had to do something.

Speaking at the Compostmodern Conference, Casey described how she was struck with what she calls the Designer’s Dilemma, the continual search for an incremental improvement that will have a revolutionary effect. She said designers are “often looking for the ‘ipod of the blank’…A client came in once and asked for the ‘ipod of the diaper.’”

But after seeing An Inconvenient Truth she realized that continually chasing ‘ipods’ would not address critical environmental concerns; and that if sustainability were reduced to a trend, then ‘Eco-Fatigue’ would set in before real change could take place.

“We as designers traffic in contemporary styles in culture. But the environmental conundrum we’re in is not a trend, it’s a condition.” Even though, she says, “We’ll never go back to the same level of having to educate clients and the consuming public about why this is important,” designers are uniquely positioned to effect real change because their work touches on virtually every product in our lives.

That, says Casey, gives designers “a lot of work to do, and I do believe it’s our responsibility to do that.”

A Call to Arms
“This movement started as a call to arms for designers to engage in the environmental movement with optimism and creativity,” Casey writes on the website.

The Accord is open to anybody who agrees to follow a basic code of conduct which Casey describes as: “Do no harm. Keep teaching, keep learning. Share knowledge, contribute to a commons, and take our theory into action.”

The guidelines state, “We ask all designers, globally, to proactively engage in a dialogue about environmental impact with each and every client, and to evaluate sustainable alternatives in design.”

The rationale for holding this collective conversation is to “compell the world's manufacturers, distributors, and services providers” to evaluate sustainability in the products and service they create for their customers, “the global consuming audience.”

“We are critically accomplished as designers,” says Casey, and “the definition of design is hugely broad. So what we’re saying with this Designers Accord is, bring the issue of sustainability into that conversation, make that one of the key decision-making factors.”

With designers as a crucial interface in virtually every product that gets made around the globe, their potential impact is enormous.