Sustainable Innovations

This Wednesday Nathan Shedoff visited our class to lecture on sustainable innovation. Mr. Shedoff was a great speaker, and it was obvious that he had both great passion and great knowledge on the subject about sustainability. One thing he focused on was that design can no longer be isolated from the rest of the world, designers can no longer simply create works in their ivory towers. In this modern world, designers, as well as engineers, also benefit from knowing business and of course sustainability. They are expected to understand the costs and effects of the products they create, to make responsible items.

While that was all very interesting, the thing I found most profound was that he advocated cheap sustainability. Of course, he didn’t say that we should be cheap with our sustainability, but that the most creative answers, the best innovations, usually came when a project budget was small. Tighter pocketbooks led to smarter and more efficient thinking. This is a lesson that America should take note of. When we hear the word sustainability, most people immediately think of the great costs of installing solar panels or retrofitting entire systems just to make them greener. However places such as Brazil are creating sustainable public transportation systems on a shoestring budget. They use buses instead of digging a new subway system. It’s the simplified version of what we would come up with in America, and it works just as well.

A bus stop in Curitiba, Brazil. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

As a society, I think that Americans need to learn that sustainability doesn’t have to be flashy. It can be as simple as building more bus stops. On our march to a greener world, we can begin by taking these little steps instead wanting to immediately leap forward to that utopian world of completely self-sufficient houses all attached to their own wind turbine. If we take little steps, slowly acclimate ourselves to a new sustainable culture, it will be a much more long-lasting future.