Measuring Design ‘Sustainability’

While we started this project with a lot of uninformed optimism, we quickly entered into stages of uninformed pessimism, then informed pessimism – not sure that we could really make it work or have the kind of positive influence we were searching for. When it came to actually analyzing how successful our work was really going to be, we came head to head with several problems: what industries or sectors of the process do we look at? What information do we include in evaluating our work? What, exactly, are the real physical effects made by the changes we wanted to make? And how do we keep on top of the constant innovations being made by engineering sectors?

Thanks to help from various industry resources and UBC Sustainability experts, we’ve been able to analyze and establish an ongoing Grading System for each subset of our work – right from the energy involved in material sourcing to the amount of bleed used on every press sheet. In this constantly evolving process, it’s possible to view rough environmental costs and savings of each project we undertake. With Cultural considerations we might ask: are we increasing the health of our local economy or taking money out it? Are we adding to the blurring of cultural differences? Are we improving quality of life? Are there chemicals used in any processes that affect health? Considering Materials we evaluate the energy and waste created by material sourcing, manufacturing, and transportation, as well as the printing and finishing techniques used to produce the end materials.

Subset Information Criteria

For an example our Grading system at work please see our Case Studies section. For rough calculations of the changes you could be making with your own projects feel free to contact us for a free consultation.