Notes Design

Last week the International Energy Agency ("IAE") called for serious investment into alternative energy and carbon sequestering. At the same time, United States Senate blithely blocked environmental legislation with many elected officials indicating that our suffering economy could not bear such a cost. While the gulf between these two modes of thinking seems irreconcilable, a reframing of terms may go a long way toward closing the philosophical distance.

Having studied economics as an undergraduate and then worked on Wall Street for nearly a decade, I feel relatively attuned to the economy and economic thought. Having read and studied design for the last four years, however, I've begun to realize that much of what I studied and practiced (in both design and economics) was based on misunderstandings and taxonomic differences between science, economics, politics, and design.

While it is tempting to treat sustainability as a production or a materials problem, such a view neglects the realities of our global economic system. To truly do "sustainable" design, the solution must reach beyond the drawing board and into economic reality. Economists and scientists have actually already paved the way toward robust arguments for sustainable energy and design, but to understand them it is first necessary to profoundly reframe the lens through which we view the world.

Politicians and naysayers will often object to sustainable initiatives on the grounds that they limit "growth" and increase "costs." While these arguments remain difficult to refute on a commercial level, two simple observations are enough to defuse or derail even the most economically sophisticated political arguments against sustainability. Market forces cannot align with the common interest of humanity so long as prices reflect costs and benefits that occur in: (A) displaced locations and (B) periods of time other than the present. This piece of knowledge casts an "inconvenient" shadow over our current system of production, but in doing so provides hope not only for the environment but also for our economic future.