At last count, the Academy of Art University held the keys to 31 properties scattered throughout San Francisco.
In Spring 2009, Denise Hoa was among the Academy of Art University students who participated in the "Sustaining San Francisco" design challenge, in which students from several Academy of Art University departments worked together to conceive and execute projects related to the theme of sustainability.
By Bill Picture
Published: November, 2009
But faculty and administrators say they wish to offer graduates more than just an academic advantage in today’s marketplace. They also wish to bestow them with a strong sense of environmental responsibility that they hope will be reflected in both the work and work habits of these future artists and designers.
To that end, the Academy of Art’s administration started with institutional changes intended to reinforce the green habits that most students picked up at home. For starters, some of the buildings are as old as the school itself, which was founded in 1929. Outdated lighting systems were replaced with more energy-efficient ones, on-campus recycling and composting efforts were seriously beefed up, and a 30-strong fleet of cleaner-burning bio-diesel shuttles was put into rotation for intercampus trips.
Next on the Academy of Art’s to-do list was tweaking the existing curriculum to reflect the desire of both companies and consumers to minimize their footprints. That began with opening students’ eyes to the many sustainability-related choices that they can expect to encounter in their professional lives. In the case of graphic designers, those include everything from minimizing paper consumption and making smarter materials choices to disposing properly of old computers.
“Those are some of the immediate choices that they, as designers, will have to make,” says Phil Hamlett, director of Graduate Graphic Design at the Academy of Art. “I call it ‘watching your own shop.”
“But where [graphic designers] have the potential to make the biggest contribution to sustainability is with the work that we do for our clients,” he explains, “because we mediate a lot of what the public sees and hears.”
Selling an image
Companies are going to great lengths to be more sustainable, largely because consumers are demanding it. But a sustainable product or service is worthless if the company can’t sell it.
For instance, a Sonoma County vintner recently worked with industrial design students from the Academy of Art University to find a more efficient and greener way to deliver its wine to restaurants than the traditional 75-centilitre glass bottle. Students eventually came up with something similar to a giant juice box.
Assuming the vintner decides to go this route, the tough job of convincing consumers that a giant juice box is better than the bottle they’re used to seeing will fall in the laps of the vintner’s in-house marketing department, along with a graphic designer.
Graphic designers are, for lack of a better description, the salesmen, helping steer consumers in a specific direction with visual cues. Knowing how to really sell a client’s efforts to be sustainable and recast that company in a greener light for consumers can help a graphic designer land a job.
“It’s a skill and a knowledge base,” says Hamlett. “And it’s an edge that they can take with them into the marketplace.”
In addition to helping ensure professional survival, being sustainability-savvy also affords graphic designers a unique opportunity to affect change. Once behind the steering wheel of a project, a graphic designer has the power to influence millions to think, act, choose and, perhaps most importantly for the client, buy sustainably.
“It’s our job to help create empathy and, to some degree, to help change values,” Hamlett explains.
Across the academic board
Hamlett says that principles of sustainability are being integrated into the curriculums of college design departments across the country.
To help those students, along with working professionals, get a better handle on how they, as designers, can help put sustainability into action, a four-part framework was developed by Hamlett and his colleague Gaby Brink, founder of Berkeley-based design agency Tomorrow Partners. Together, Hamlett and Brink co-chair the Center for Sustainable Design at the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ (AIGA), a professional organization for design.
“The Living Principles,” which were unveiled at AIGA’s national conference last month, encourage designers to look at a project’s economic, social, environmental and cultural bottom-line.
“It’s big-picture stuff,” Hamlett says.Hamlett and Brink also organize the biennial Compostmodern conference, a weekend-long series of salons and workshops intended to explore the role that designers can play in creating an ecologically and socially responsible society.
Compostmodern has become the premier event in the country dedicated to sustainability in design. This year’s event, which took place at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre in February, drew roughly 600 attendees and featured a number of sustainability experts, including Saul Griffith, an award-winning inventor, and Dawn Danby, the Sustainability Design Program Manager for Autodesk. So that designers outside of the Bay Area could participate in the event without increasing their carbon footprint by flying or driving to San Francisco, each of the presentations was available as a paid webcast.
An easier sell
Because most students entering college have been primed by their parents about being environmentally conscious, Hamlett says that the more advanced principles of sustainability have been easier to drive home.
“At this point, pretty much everyone gets why it’s important to recycle and compost, and why you should turn off the lights when you leave the room,” he says. “We all get it. We all understand the relationship between paper and dead trees. The students get it, they’re very passionate about it, and they want to know what else they can do.”
“And that’s good,” he continues, “because the younger you are, the higher the stakes of concern. Unfortunately, this is the reality in the 21st century.”
For more information on the Academy of Art University, visit www.academyart.edu.
For more information on the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Center for Sustainable Design, visit sustainability.aiga.org.
In-class brainstorming sessions help graphic design students learn how to sell a client's efforts to be green to consumers, a skill that instructors say will give them an edge in the job market.
More and more, consumers are opting to purchase goods and services from sustainable businesses, so companies are turning to designers to help recast them in a greener (and thus more profitable) light via advertising, as shown here.
