Image courtesy of AIGA Los Angeles

"My mother knitted sweaters for us, and when we grew out of them she would unravel the wool and knit them into bigger ones." Mick Hodgson

Arcwire: The Designers Accord asks all designers globally to talk about environmental impact with each and every client, and given the positive response this seems to be something designers have been looking for. You mentioned that designers have been clamoring for something similar to the LEED standards developed by the US Green Building Council.

Mick: Exactly.

Arcwire: So maybe we start our discussion with how similar is LEED to the Designers Accord? Or is it not?

Mick:  Well I think it’s much harder for designers to set those standards in place. I’m on advisory board for AIGA’s Center for Sustainable Design , and we’ve talked about this quite a lot. With buildings it’s more easily quantifiable. The sourcing of the materials is pretty straightforward, you know where your lumber’s coming from. You know if you’re using virgin wood or not. You can measure the whole energy consumption of a building and the carbon footprint. With graphic design it’s slightly more difficult. I mean the obvious thing -  are we printing on recyled paper?

Arcwire:  Which is probably the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind.

Mick:  Right, because so much is used, so much is wasted. I was just at my storage unit this morning, and found boxes of promotional pieces that we’d printed 15 years ago. Those are going straight in the bin, unfortunately.

Arcwire:   When you flash back to that, were you thinking about sustainability back then? Was that on the radar at all, recycling?

Mick: Well, I was born in England relatively soon after the Second World War, and back then it wasn’t a queston of being green or sustainable, or conscious of recycling. Things just were re-used then. My mother knitted sweaters for us, and when we grew out of them she would unravel the wool and knit them into bigger ones. Because she’d come through the war, and at one point wool was hard to get.

But also, you know, the milkman came every day, and he delivered the milk, and you put the empties at the door and he took them when he brought the full ones. It was a whole system, the same with beer bottles and everything. Nobody thought twice about saving envelopes or reusing them. And that was pre 1979, quite a long time ago.

So I’ve always thought about that.  But I can’t claim it was always in the back of my mind when I was designing 25 years ago. And then paper was paper, you didn’t think about the recycle content. The whole recyled paper thing kind of started off and got a push from French paper, they did a series called Speckletone, all craft paper. So for awhile if we said recyled paper to a client they just thought of flecks. Bits of dirt in it.

Arcwire: Now we can create products that are high quality for the user, and less impactful on the environment. Does this give designers more flexibility in choosing materials? The Designers Accord has just come out, will it help designers address these issues?

Mick: I think Compostmodern was a big launching point, an opportunity to have it be known by a lot of designers. I think it’s what a lot of people were looking for. There are people who’ve been trying to design in a sustainable way, or who have been designing in a sustainable way, some of them very successfully. Brian at Celery Design has done great stuff.  But being so specialized that that’s the only work they do, and everybody who comes to them is looking for a second use on anything they produce.

And then there’s a lot us, and I would put Ph.D in this second category, who’ve been as forward in our mind as we felt comfortable pushing it with clients. We’re doing some work for a really great guy who’s doing some biodiesel, and he said, “I’ve met with four other companies, but you’re the first person I’ve talked to who seems to understand what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”

Arcwire:  Obviously there’s a synergy in green businesses of all stripes coming together, but what about other types of clients, are designers leery about bringing it up? Or are clients looking for greener design?

Mick: Obviously Inconvenient Truth was the great turning point for all of us, because it got to more people than we could ever talk to. You couldn’t deny it anymore. At the Opportunity Green conference at UCLA, Jon Picard, who was covered in the LA Times ten years ago for his work, was speaking, and he said, “The moment has arrived, the time has come.”

Whereas at Compostmodern two years ago, and other conferences about sustainability and environmental design, there’s been a lot of, “Well it sounds great, but couldn’t get my client to do it.” And at Opportunity Green which wasn’t just about design, but about sustainable businesses, he said, we’ve got to act while it’s hot. The time is now, because it won’t be hot forever, it’ll fade back a bit. But when you’ve got Walmart doing what they’re doing, and a lot of major corporations doing what they’re doing, it’s exciting.

Arcwire:  Speaking of ‘the time is now,’ you wrote to me that it’s essential for designers to combat global warming, but your fear is that “as a profession we’re a long way behind, and we have to work really hard to help ourselves, and our clients to understand what it is we do.”  How is the Designers Acccord going to help?

Mick:  I think that if by adopting the principles of the Designers Accord that designers feel empowered to go into a meeting with a client, and say, “We’re going to look at the carbon footprint of this product, and the environmental impact of what we’re doing here,” then that’s great. Even for us a year ago, that was a secondary conversation.

Though I was already having that conversation with a lot of clients. We have a client who wants to do mantra ties on beaded bracelets, and I said, “Yeah, but why are they in a plastic bag?” So she’s making them, and the plastic’s gone.