EDITOR Fred Sampson wfreds@acm.org

Merging Design,
Business, and Sustainability:
The Designers Accord

Allison Arieff IDEO | aja@modernhouse.com

Valerie Casey
IDEO | valeriecasey@gmail.com

In early 2007 Valerie Casey launched the Designers Accord ( www.designersaccord.org) to encourage design and innovation firms to focus on creating positive environmental impacts. Recognizing the near impossibility of changing both consumer and business behavior, the Designers Accord asserts that the firms that design everything from graphics and packaging to user interface to physical products are ideally suited to get the design-for-impact conversation rolling. By collectively agreeing to discuss environmental impact and sustainable alternatives with every client, designers will be able to change the way products are designed, and that in turn will change the way business works and consumers behave. As the expanded Web presence of the Designers Accord approached, I spoke with Valerie about this groundbreaking initiative.

ment that our ability to make changes is amplified when we work together.

With the Designers Accord, we’re creating a cooperative competition model. I believe this is where design is headed—innovation and impact through collaboration. Designers can create greater impact if we work together instead of individually as we’ve traditionally done. This will be a radical change.

Allison Arieff: The Designers Accord seems to coincide with an upsurge in interest in collaborative models for business and innovation. Tell me how it works.

Valerie Casey: The Designers Accord (DA) started as a call to arms for designers to meaningfully contribute to the environmental movement, and to infuse it with optimism and creativity. It is now a major coalition of designers, educators, researchers, engineers, business consultants, and corporations, who are working together to create a positive environmental and social impact.

This movement has scaled so quickly—with now tens of thousands of adopters throughout the world—because there is a general acknowledge-

Allison: What compelled you to put this idea out there? What put you over the edge?

Valerie: The inception of the initiative was actually quite simple. My revelation—or, the “spear through the heart” moment, as Ray Anderson of FLOR calls it—happened as I was sitting on a 50-seater jet, crossing the country for the third time in a month. I had just pitched a packaging project for one of the world’s largest delivery services. Earlier in the week I had discussed new diaper design with one of the world’s largest paper-product manufacturers.

I was acutely aware of each company’s middling environmental record, but I was ill-equipped to engage in a productive conversation with either of them about their environmental impact, or to propose sustainable alternatives. I was anxious about bringing up this sensitive issue and risking losing their business. The negative rhetoric about the cost of green alternatives and accusations of greenwashing has made many companies bristle before a meaningful conversation can even begin.

That was the winter of 2007. I decided to educate myself and my design teams about green

May + June 2008