The Designers Accord

As Baby Boomers slowly inch towards retirement, the United States will see a unique housing boom as more Americans than ever will be in need of residences that respond to their changing needs. In the next 15 to 20 years, the number of residents aged 65 and over will double in the U.S. And in the same period, the number of residents aged 85 and over will triple. Increasingly, this demographic will need places to live that are accessible to a range of abilities and convenient to their families and caretakers, but homes that still help them retain their all-important autonomy. FabCab is a company that specializes in creating affordable, modern prefab homes for our graying population, yet designs them in a way that appeals to people of all ages and abilities.

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A few weeks ago we published the three case studies in our Ask Nature Biomimicry Challenge, where teams from Taller de Operaciones Ambientales (TOA), IDEO and Smart Design tackled design problems for real-world clients alongside biologists from the Biomimicry Institute. We’ve covered the solutions, but we wanted to check in with the clients as well: Did they see biomimicry as a new tool that could help advance their businesses?

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A windmill, a solar-powered dome, and dryer hidden behind a piece of art are just some of the dozens of ideas that people have for air-drying their clothes instead of tossing them in the dryer. These ideas have been uploaded as part of a new crowdsourcing contest: The winner takes home $4,500 in prizes and corporate sponsor Levi’s gets new insight into how its consumers think about saving water and energy. Behind the challenge is Myoo Create, a new company that works with brands to launching sustainability-focused crowdsourcing challenges that engage consumers and spur innovation.

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Gathered around a large, sun-drenched table in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco on a Friday afternoon are financial advisers, activists, marketers, designers, coders, lawyers, and a half-dozen more local entrepreneurs. There are representatives from the microlending empire Kiva, social justice organization MercyCorps, and a solar-energy company based in India. At the table’s head is David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, widely considered to be the bible of social entrepreneurship, who casually addresses the group as they tuck into deli sandwiches and takeout sushi.

This is not some kind of exclusive golden-circle conference. This is a typical day at Hub SoMa, a 8600-square-foot shared workspace for socially focused enterprises, where a visitor at any hour of the day will witness similar exchanges between the several dozen startups, business incubators, and non-profits that inhabit the space.

Read the full case study in sustainability on Fast Company

You’ve probably seen ads for IBM’s SmarterCity initiative, a program that uses the company’s information technology to help municipal governments create healthier, more intelligent urban environments for their residents. Using their ability to collect and analyze data, IBM is able to provide information about elements of daily city life ranging from weather and traffic to water usage and air quality. But what they’ve done with that data has largely been used to make policy and economic decisions. IBM appealed to our What Would You Ask Nature? biomimicry challenge, asking how they could use nature to understand how these overlays of information could help guide residents toward making better personal decisions for the good of the city. A New York-based team at Smart Design accepted their challenge.

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No matter how lofty their mission, most large organizations are not designed for agility, and therefore many have the same big issues that come with dispersed growth. The United States Green Building Council, who most notably founded the LEED certification system that rates structures by sustainability, is no different: With 80 local chapters nationwide, they struggle with challenges like making group decisions and the ability to keep members motivated and involved. But the USGBC wanted to investigate redesigning their organization in a way that was more closely aligned with their mission to protect and celebrate nature. In their words, they wanted to be more “resilient and organic” in how their organization communicates with stakeholders.

For our What Would You Ask Nature? biomimicry challenge, IDEO’s Boston office took on this hefty problem from the USGBC, which would essentially require a system-wide redesign for the way that their members communicate.

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As cities redevelop to provide greener, more efficient living and working environments for their residents, the greatest innovation happens in ecodistricts, small pockets of a city where planners can experiment with more sustainable practices. Portland-based Brightworks, a sustainable development company, has been helping neighborhoods create long-term plans so that they can receive funding under the City of Portland’s EcoDistricts Initiative, a new program that hopes to accelerate sustainable neighborhood development throughout the city.

In the average American closet, 25% of the clothing goes unworn. Meaning even as we venture out daily to malls, replenishing our stock with of-the-minute additions, a quarter of all our clothing nationwide is sitting idle and unused–sometimes with the tags still on. It was such a closet that confronted James Reinhart one November morning in 2008. Reinhart, a Harvard Business School graduate, suddenly saw his rows of clothes as a vast trove of opportunity. “There was tremendous waste happening,” he says. “I’d call them ‘underutilized assets’ in business terms.” He realized that a convenient, affordable, fun way to exchange clothing with someone just like him would be a service that could provide not only an economic impact, but an environmental one as well.

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