Cleaner Greener China

September 17, 2009

Frog Celebrates 40 Years with China Events (Sept 24 – 27)

Filed under: Greener People, Greener Products — Tags: , , — Rich @ 2:10 am

Frog Design 40 Years

In the past 40 years, our work include: Apple Macintosh computer, Sony’s Trinitron television, Lufthansa’s brand and fleet image, Disney’s Cruise Lines and Consumer Electronics, and Louis Vuitton’s brand aesthetic etc.In honor of frog’s 40 year anniversary, we will host a series of programs in China to celebrate!

In honor of frog’s 40 year anniversary, we will host a series of programs in China to celebrate!
frog design mind event

Date : Sept 24, 2009
5:00 to 6:00 pm Open ceremony and cocktail party
6:00 to 8:00 pm  FDM event- Convergence of Business, Design and Technology

Confirmed Speakers:
Melora Zaner-Godsey, Principle User Experience Director of Microsoft’s Mobile Services China
Itamar Medeiros, User Experience Manager, Autodesk
Shawn Sheng, Senior UX Designer, Emerging Market Platform
Michael, HP + Design Lead
Moderator : Eric Allhusen, Associate Technology Director, frog design

For registration, please specify if you would like to attend by writing  “FDM” in the subject line of the email and  RSVP to Jennifer.cheng@frogdesign.com

Day 2 (Sept 25): Green Talk, Green Party
6:00 to 7:30 pm Panel Discussion on Green Ideas, Green Opportunity and Green Challenge in China  co-hosted by Greennovate  (logo placement)

Confirmed speakers:
Grant Horsfield, Founder and CEO, naked retreats
Renee Hartmann,  Cofounder and COO, eno
Elizabeth Campbell, Chief of Staff to JUCCCE Chairperson
Hartmut Esslinger, founder, frog design
James Lee, Shanghai International Studies University
Jethro Chan, Creative Director, 1221 Design & Communications
Moderator : Mihela Hladin, Founder and Managing Director of Greennovate

Seats: 100.
For registration, please specific if you would like to attend by writing “Green Talk” in the email subject and  RSVP to Jennifer.cheng@frogdesign.com

7:30 to 10:00 pm Green Party
Dress Code: green shirt

For Registration, please specify if you would like to attend by writing  “Green Party” in the subject line of the email and  RSVP to Jennifer.cheng@frogdesign.com

Day 3 (Sept 26): Brunch Talks – “A Fine Line: How design strategies are shaping the future of business”
12:30 to 2:30 pm
Confirmed speaker :
Kunal Sinha, Executive Director- Discovery, Ogilvy & Mather Greater China, Shanghai
Friedhelm Engler, Design Director from Patac
Hartmut Esslinger, founder of frog design
Moderator: Ying Zhang, General Manager, frog shanghai

Venue: Post, 2/F,No.10,The Club House of the Lakeville Regency,Lane 168 Shun Chang Road, luwan district,Shanghai 200021 China
For registration, please specify by writing “Book Reading Brunch” in the subject line of the email and  RSVP to Jennifer.cheng@frogdesign.com

For interested media and journalists: Hartmut will be available after the event if you would like to interview him.

Shanghai Exhibition from Sept 24 –27

frog Zone
Our global iconic projects and social impact programs over the past 40 years will be showcased. Selected products will be displayed in the exhibition hall.

Interaction Zone
Select partners including Autodesk will display their latest software and case studies in our exhibition hall.

Design Excellence
We invited 100% design store to select independent artists, furniture designers and product designers to display their original and creative designs in our product gallery.

Exhibition Open Hours:
Sept 24: 2:00 to 9:00 pm
Sept 25: 2:00 to 10:00 pm
Sept 26: 10:00 to 8:00 pm
Sept 27: 10:00 to 4:00 pm

Venue : Jumen Lu 436, Shanghai
See you at frog 40 in Shanghai, China!

May 11, 2009

China’s Addition to Everything Disposal and Neatly Wrapped

Filed under: Greener Products, Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Rich @ 12:45 am

If you have spent any time in China, and have taken a moment to look around, the fact that there is a lot of prepackage waste in China.

It was the source of inspiration for my recent post, Wasting Away on China’s Airlines, and the author of Garbage is piling up in world of disposables was equally inspired by:

We are not only contributing to the expanding and encroaching landfills, but also doing it in ever-more creative ways.

During my weekend train trip to Hangzhou, each passenger was given a bottle of water containing purest H20 from glaciers in the Tibetan Plateau.

I marveled at the stupendous energy consumed in shipping the water from glaciers to the bullet train – to say nothing of the devastating environmental impacts – and genuinely hope the claim was a lie.

A problem that is quickly becoming a very serious landfill issue:

Statistics from last year show that 125 million tons of waste were created in 655 Chinese cities in 2007, representing an annual increase of 8 to 10 percent, apocalyptically comparable to the GDP growth.

As 40 percent of the garbage is simply buried in the suburban or rural areas without any recycling, ever-encroaching landfills are closing in on two thirds of these 655 cities, which are themselves expanding fast.

“In Beijing, as existing landfills are all operating beyond capacity, in four or five years there will be no place to bury the garbage,” said Chen Yong, director of Beijing Municipal Administration Commission, in a recent interview with South Weekend.

With landfills that are brimming, I shutter to think of alternatives, but a few ideas I have are:

  • Removing paper cups from coffee shops/ tea houses
  • Reducing the number of over wrapped nuts, candies, and teas that are pervasive everywhere
  • Banning the use of styrofoam containers
  • Charging for condiments at fast food restaurants

April 10, 2009

Asia Eco-Design Electronics Site From Center for Sustainable Design

Filed under: Greener NGOs — Tags: — Rich @ 11:11 am

While doing some research for my latest article in Supply Chain Asia, I came across the aede project site of the Center for Sustainable Design.

The Asia Eco-Design Electronics (AEDE) project supports electronics companies in Asia that are required to meet increasingly stringent legal and customer requirements related to environmental and social issues from the EU, Japan and the US.

Stock full of research, what I really liked about this site is that it is a repository for those in the electronics industry looking to improve the sustainability of their products.  An issue I have spend a considerable amount of time speaking to friends Jon Li and David Williams of Asentio Design about (see my interview of Jon on sustainable design here).

Conversations that have lead me to believe that the educational capacity of this site is greatly needed:

Q&A with Jon:
1) When contacted by firms to design products, how often are you being asked to design products and packaging together?

Rarely since products we work on are consumer electronics and often passed on to marketing or some other department at end of development process. We are trying to push our clients to design a consistent and holistic experience and thus direct the packaging design… But still no buyers yet.

2) Are your clients asking you to research ways to reduce their environmental footprint via new eco-friendly materials, reducing packaging size/ bulk, other?

No, our clients have yet to date requested anything green. Any requests to reduce anything is driven by economics.

3) How concerned are firms with extending product lifecycles? Is the average product life increasing, staying the same, reducing?

Unfortunately, not concerned at all.. Especially in the mobile phone industry where the fierce competition and the consumer appetite has driven product lifecycles to 6 to 9 months. If you don’t have anything new, you’re history.

4) When developing new products, is there any interest/ pressure to use previous products as a base from which to develop products (i.e. reduce the need to re manufacture the entire product)

Again, unfortunately not in the consumer electronics industry that we’re in. Processing power and memory size increases so quickly that it’s difficult to reuse last year’s technology in new products. Of course there is a lot of reuse of technology as a company extends its offering across price points.

Which was elaborated on by David:

Development of products is a long time so often, components are bought in before the idea is hatched… basic components

tech roadmaps rather than design needs to get in the game early where companies source thier components for simple lifestyle products..there are much fewer players to co-ordinate

Further.

when a product is planned.. it has many parts, each of which will have its own roadmap..the company will buy or develop these parts ahead of time. To put that together requires lots of parts that we may not specify in detail. If we made memory chips – it would be a different story. We would be much closer to the production and raw materials. We can propose better physical materials, plastics, components… but ultimately our client will make the final choice of vendor

Only reinforcing the need for, and importance of, the aede project and its objectives.

April 8, 2009

Frog’s Green Gadgets

Filed under: Greener Products — Tags: — Rich @ 9:58 am

compost

for me, one of the best things about following my interest in sustainability is finding products that truly are innovative, are developed with a sustainable mindset, and are not citchy… as can all too often be found on a lot of consumer driven “sustainability” sites.

So, when I was passed Frog’s Green Gadgets file I knew I was given something special to see, and that I needed to pass it on.

By far, my favorite product is the Compost All product (seen above), but there are a number of others that are equally impressive and I hope will stimulate others to develop products at a higher level of awareness.

After all, it should not simply be about replacing one “brown” item with a green one, but pushing the “green” boundaries on all products forward.. something Frog does so well.

fo

March 23, 2009

Approaching Sustainability

Filed under: Greener Companies, Greener Products, Uncategorized — Tags: , , — Rich @ 3:04 am

For the March edition of Supply Chain Asia, I was asked to write a piece on the relationship between sustainability and supply chain.

Approaching Sustainability, is the first in a series that I will be working on, and my goal was pretty simple.

Lay a foundation for understanding that sustainability is a topic that is far more than the environment, and will require much more than adding solar panels to the roof and hybrids to the road.

That to achieve, or to take steps towards, real sustainability we as a collective need to begin creating products that are designed better, have a longer life cycle, require less resources to make and transport, and have an afterlife that is more interesting than a landfill.

February 1, 2009

The Importance of Design, and Designers, to Sustainability

Filed under: Greener Companies, Greener People — Tags: , , , — Rich @ 10:31 am

While the focus of sustainability is closely linked to “energy usage” and waste, the conversation on the role of design & designers has yet to take center stage.

The recent article Design is an Avocado: The Layers of Green Design by Brian Dougherty (an excerpt from his recent book Green Graphic Design) though does a great job of introducing the role that designers can play:

1. Designer As Manipulator of Stuff

Within this conception of graphics, green design is a matter of finding and using better physical materials. Designers may research things such as recycled and tree-free papers; or try to find nontoxic inks; or devise folds and structures that result in less waste. When most designers think of green design, these are the common themes.

2. Designer As Message Maker

graphic designers also help clients strategize about how to build strong brands and craft communications that resonate with their target audiences. As such, we are message makers. The messages designers make, the brands we build, and the causes we promote can have impacts far beyond the paper we print on.

3. Designer As Agent of Change

As designers, we are trying to help clients change the way people think and/or the way they act. In this sense, designers are uniquely positioned to shift not only our own actions, but also the actions of many others who are touched by our work-including our audiences and our clients. We may be hired to change the user’s experience of a client’s brand. But in the process of doing this, we have the power to change the brand itself. We have the power to influence the substance of a product or service. Green design at this level is about being a force for positive change

For me, and I am not a designer, where I see the biggest opportunity for developing products that are more “sustainable” starts with designers, but it is also in getting designers to speak to logsitics professionals, packaing firms, and PR firms.  To create an environment where the cradle-to-cradle chain is working with each other to understand that constrations, and thus the opportunities , will result in the greatest yield.

September 1, 2008

Packaging Changes Coming in China

Filed under: Greener Products, Policies and Issues, Uncategorized — Tags: , — Rich @ 2:15 am

Just in time for mooncake season comes news that China is about to do something about its propensity to overpackage everything.

For the first time in Chinese legislation, packaging is required to be designed in a simple style in order to prevent resource wastage and environmental pollution.

This is part of the draft circular economy promotion law, which will be deliberated for the last time by lawmakers this week and is likely to be passed before the weekend and will be officially put into force next year.

A cultural issue, this policy change will hopefully be clear in its guidance and there will be a lasting enforcement mechanism for any/ all laws.

To see more on this issue, watch the clip below.  It was put together by a former intern of mine, and a currently writer for Crossroads, and offers a lot of insight into the problem of packaging in China.

YouTube Preview Image

Powered by WordPress