4 April 2007
Sustainability and the design-industry
As I met a friend yesterday who is deeply into game design and so loves all the 3D design stuff he told me about a presentation held by autodesk he attended recently.
Though I knew that it takes quite a long time to render scenes for movies like pirates of the caribbean; yesterday I noticed that the energy needed to do so is quite enormous and so if there are little mistakes, as one ruler in the 3D application was set wrong and the whole render farm render one night for 10 seconds or something, this isn’t very sustainable and environment friendly at all.
As designer we are using computer almost each and every day as it is an essential part of our job; but I think it might be a good idea to get a bit more into sustainability, as our role is maybe underestimated. We can tell clients, maybe it is better to use this and this material and then develop a design that fits to alternative papers or other environment friendly ways.
As a small collection, here are some links to get a bit more into this topic about sustainability and the role of designer’s helping to produce a lot of paper based materials:
Lovelyasatree is a website providing a lot of information around print production and how to act responsible.
The AIGA is of cource one of the most important institutions for designers and has also a lot of interesting informations around sustainability. I think as a designer it is always a good ideo to keep in touch with develpoments going on initiated by AIGA. See AIGA’s sustainability resort.
Here an example of a video production that is in my opinion sustainable, as the production cost are not that high and the message of the spot is clear, too:
Sometimes I wonder when environmental associations start to protest against expensive cinema productions, endless floods of promotional paperwork and so on…
I hope they won’t as I love movies and also effects and stuff, but in my opinion it is important to know how to improve the own design processes towards higher sustainability.
As I found the website of design can change today, I add a little thing to this entry. Visit the website of designcanchange. It is a nice flash website that shows the causes and effects of pollution and global warming. Furthermore the website shows ways to start to solve the problem, especially with a designer’s point of view. Great thing!
