The Designers Accord

THE SUSTAINABILITY UNCONFERENCE

The Greenermind Summit is an unconference co-hosted by Net Impact SF and IDSA-SF on June 11-13th to bring together Bay Area sustainability professionals in a fun, engaging, and interactive weekend of discussion and collaboration.

On Friday March 12th, 2010, the first Designers Accord Town Hall meeting in Asia was held in Tokyo, Japan. Hosted by The 4th International Conference of Design for Sustainability and greenz.jp, there were five speakers and 80 guests representing educators, business leaders, and students that came together to participate in the sustainability dialogue.

The Design Hub was an ideal venue for the Town Hall where its purpose is to connect and foster Japanese design amongst the local design community. Yoshihiro (Yosh) Kanematsu, creative director at greenz.jp, introduced the evening’s theme “Design x Sustainability x Open Source,” and explained how the four Japanese speakers are pioneers in adapting to the open source movement and implementing their creativity in actual projects.

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The first student-led Designers Accord Town Hall took place on Friday, March 12th, at California College of Arts in San Francisco. It was the perfect setting for this rainy evening, and the hangar-like space filled quickly with over one hundred design students and community leaders ready to engage and discuss their thoughts surrounding the timely topic of design for social change.

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On Wednesday, February 24th 2010, the first ever German Town Hall Meeting was held in Berlin with over 120 guests. It was an evening intended to introduce the Designers Accord, share projects, and discuss initiatives. The International Design Center Berlin was an ideal venue for the Town Hall. It’s a non-profit organization that was founded more than 40 years ago, in the back then divided city. It has long since emphasized topical issues and social questions in design. The lectures and presentations were as diverse and broad as the evening’s key-topic, sustainability. The different approaches to sustainability introduced in the open-mic-session lead to further discussion, exchange and networking with a glass of wine and a pretzel. It was midnight when the last guests left, having not only heard bigger ideas on sustainability, but wiser on what is actually going on in Berlin on a smaller scale.

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I promised that I would never hold a Designers Accord conference (because of the sheer numbers of design conferences, but especially because of the ever-promiscuous green conferences). However, it has become obvious that a significant part of the discussion about incorporating sustainability as a critical lens in design is missing. We spend so much time reworking our professional practice (or at least the rhetoric around it), but another major opportunity lies in shaping the value systems of the next generation of designers. What if the leading thinkers in design education came together to craft a new proposal for the future of the design?

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Check out the Designers Accord wrap-up of the events and accomplishments of 2009. Special thanks to our media partners: Core77, Fast Company, and GOOD, and to our strategic partners: Design Ignites Change and The Biomimicry Institute.

We also extend great thanks to our generous 2009 grantmaker: The Summit Foundation. Much appreciation sent also to our design education Summit sponsors: Autodesk, Adobe, Sustainable Minds, and KODA.

“I have gone from feeling like I am playing in the band on the Titanic to more desperately trying to stop the captain claiming the benefits of a melted polar iceberg.” (Martin Willers, PEOPLE PEOPLE)

Hear what’s going on in Stockholm around design and sustainability. Core77 posted the summary of the lively session from the Designers Accord first Town Hall outside the United States.

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The Designers Accord Global Summit on Sustainability & Education held October 23rd & 24th in San Francisco, marked an important step forward for the sustainable design movement. For two days a high-powered group of about 100 designers, educators, writers, business strategists, technologists, and futurists were assembled by the leadership of the Designers Accord to “tackle the critical issue of sustainability, consider how best to prepare our educational community to make real change, and imagine what’s next in design education.”

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In October 2009, the Designers Accord will convene 100 individuals from the world’s most distinguished academic and professional institutions, for two days of highly participatory discussion, planning, and action around the topic of design education and sustainability.

This group of thought-leaders, design educators, and experts will discuss, challenge, and conceive of a new path for undergraduate and graduate design programs to integrate sustainability.

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When it comes to sustainability, there are a whole slew of difficult topics that designers want to tackle but rarely get a chance to discuss in the open. The Chicago Designers Accord Town Hall called them the “elephants in the room” and engaged in a no-holds-barred discussion around the secret thoughts we all have but rarely share. Over 70 designers, critical thinkers and change agents made their way to gravitytank on August 19th for Chicago’s first Designers Accord Town Hall meeting. Actually… scratch that, two designers drove out from Detroit, so it’s really the Midwest’s first DA Town Hall meeting.

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