JKR

There is plenty of substance to Aquapax. The cartons are made from sustainable and renewable forests, and the water is very pure. The format will appeal to all those bothered by the plastic bottles they discard each day. I’m guessing its substrate is currently un-recyclable in the UK, but similar packaging is recycled in Japan, we just don’t have the infrastructure.

The format was presumably the brand’s ticket to listings in Waitrose, but the attractive design will have played a big part too. So substance aside, I wanted to note the neat stylistic trick it plays. Visual tricks are not just sleight of hand, they are the crafts by which artists and designers make their work pop. Van Gogh used colour theory to give his paintings an unsettling visual buzz, for example, dotting green with its colour opposite cadmium orange to create an optical ‘fizz’. In a happier style, Hockney’s latest landscapes also place opposite colours together to make the paintings sing.

The simple trick in Aquapax design is to create a rich ‘maximalist’ design, then knock it back with tints. Effective packaging (in terms of standout) tends to be simple and focused (less is more and all that).

But Aquapax wants you to know it has depth and meaning. The tinting trick allows for simple standout and a richer overall design. It reminds me of Chris Ware’s intricate cartoon style (below) which always rewards closer inspection, but it’s also a very striking pack. The craft in the design implies a crafted and non-corporate approach to the contents. Maximalism with minimalism; a neat trick and a nice pack.

Below are a few other brands from the ‘don’t be evil’ category, just for a snapshot of what others are up too…

Biona: “We believe in great tasting, thoughtfully prepared food to complement an ethical lifestyle.”

Union: ” ‘Union’ exemplifies our coffee sourcing philosophy, in terms of the quality of the coffee and the quality of the relationships with the hardworking families who grow it.”

Divine: “Divine is the only Fairtrade chocolate company which is 45% owned by the farmers. While Fairtrade ensures farmers receive a better deal for their cocoa and additional income to invest in their community, company ownership gives farmers a share of Divine’s profits and a stronger voice in the cocoa industry.”

“The 2011 Annual is TASCHEN’s most sustainably produced title to date. Its carbon footprint is 82% less than the 2010 edition. Both the design and production of the book aimed to push the boundaries of environmentally conscientious publishing.”

So run the opening lines of the introduction to this year’s Annual on the D&AD website. You can read the whole story here with further information from designers Pentagram here.

Last year there was a little kerfuffle over the green credentials of the Annual’s heavyweight production values. There was a rather misguided suggestion that it might be greener to ship it as an iPad, which while a rather silly thought, does give some indication of what a massive thing the Annual has become, physically speaking.

This year’s has gone to great lengths to be more sustainable. It’s compostable for example, although who would want to compost it, I am unsure. But production details such as this: “The decision was made to leave the paper uncoated, further reducing the weight. Producing the paper in Austria  - where 70% of electricity comes from Hydro power  - also had a dramatic impact on overall carbon reduction” show the depth of thinking involved.

As such, I think it’s great. It feels only slightly smaller than last year’s effort and the design is also a great deal more elegant. It is only right that a publication offering the very best of design and communication should lead the way in sustainable thinking, but I also concur with the sentiment behind producing a book at all, as voiced by D&AD president Sanky: ‘‘I grew up in a house FULL of books. Books change the sound of a room, the smell, the light and most importantly what could happen in the room. Books, we need them.” And the Annual is still something of a bible for the creative industry – it would lose something if it became digital rather than permanent and tangible (I realise this view shows my rather outmoded view of what digital is, but for me, digital still puts a layer between reader and content that books do not).

Interestingly, the lead packaging design to win an award in the Annual was the fantastic sustainable work produced by Puma. This design is also very impressive, but wears its green approach loud and proud – it’s the catalyst for the design’s look and feel. This is cool, but I think its more admirable in a way to take the approach the Annual itself has followed – the book does not feel like a compromise or ‘all about green’. It just is. And by being so shows that we can, potentially, have our cake and eat it. Inspiring stuff!

There is a great infographic with all the stats to be enjoyed here.

I feel a little embarrassed talking about the social aspect of commercial design. I think this reflects a wider shift over the past couple of decades. Back in the seventies, ‘good design’ (e.g. work that was socially aware, that did not over-use materials, that offered an appropriate solution, rather than a fancy one etc. etc.) was the benchmark for quality. Some still carry the torch of course, but I would observe that where design used to be framed in societal terms, it is now typically framed in cultural ones. So many of us (including myself) are happy to praise surface sheen, and not poke about too deeply. Corporate social responsibility is now a department not a guiding spirit. Just a hunch, but it might explain why I don’t expect a post on more sustainable packaging for the lunchbox to quicken many pulses, and indeed that the entire subject is ripe for ‘god, more nanny state nonsense’ cynicism. But bear with…

The New York Times ran an interesting piece a couple of weeks ago that looked at how schools were effectively guilting kids into bringing lunches not wrapped in plastic or foil, and were encouraging the replacement of paper sandwich bags with reusable tuperware. It was eye opening on a few levels. Firstly from a U.S. perspective, this was viewed (even by a liberal paper) as asking a lot of long suffering parents. “What if you ran out of Tupperware?” it wondered. So their system is basically even more spoilt than ours. And the guilting out approach probably contributes to any society being made up of big babies who cannot make the right choice of their own free thinking. It shifts the responsibility. It’s also interesting that while the lunchbox contents need to appear sustainable, back at home the bread, spread etc. etc. come from the usual landfill bound packaging candidates. But on the other hand, if you teach kids young about their packaging footprint, one hopes the lessons will stick.

So what’s my point? I guess that we are not too far removed from the States, culturally, which means we can expect similar packaging initiatives here. I would imagine this has a commercial dimension. For those parents in competition with other parents at the school gates to be seen as socially aware, buying the right things to go in the lunch box will be a driver of choice. It follows that any pre-packed foods – the smoothies, yogurts, biscuits (but one imagines not the turkey twiizzlers) will be ahead of the curve if their packaging is seen to be reusable at best, sustainable as a bare minimum. Perhaps it’s time for a water brand to sell big reusable vessels which can be decanted into a reusable aluminum bottle (branded, naturally)? Or for smoothies to come in chalk substrate polymers which can bio-degrade. Which might sound pie in the sky, but one can be sure legislation will come along any day now, so the smart brands might as well capture a little ‘thought leader’ kudos by being pro-active. See, I managed to drag the social implications back to commercial ones in short order.

Finally, back to those U.S. parents faced with the Herculean task of buying a couple of extra tupperwares. Just to note that not much in design or society is ever really that new, consider the history of reusable lunch boxes. At the turn of the nineteenth century,  kids used old biscuit and cigar tins which they redecorated themselves. This ‘re-use, re-cycle’ approach would now be a ‘Guardian reader’ parents idea of cutting edge folksie style guess. Later, for grown ups, along came Dome lunch boxes – an American classic from the late thirties. They were a robust design for working men, with capacity in the lid for a Thermos, and protected food in a way the previous thin handled ‘pales’ could not.

These two strands informed the children’s tin lunch boxes common in the Fifties with the Aladdin company and others producing ones decorated with heroes of the day such as Hopalong Cassidy. They are now considered design classics but they were phased out in the seventies because playground mums feared the robust tins had potential as weapons, hence the flimsy (arguably less sustainable) plastic ones we see today. So there you go – bloody do-gooders with the best intentions making an arguably misguided choice for the rest of us. Playground politics and packaging have enjoyed a long relationship.

FastCo have run an interesting piece on the Ikea sustainability scorecard. The scorecard rates each Ikea product against various measures – carbon footprint, shipping process, recyclability etc. The intention is not to share this information externally, but to use it as a stick to drive improvements – each product’s score should improve over time. The marketing carrot here is clear – the ability to announce constant improvement. And indeed aiming for ‘better’ has to be preferable to not caring one way or the other. The stick here will certainly lead to greener products relative to Ikea’s current footprint.

But as FastCo point out, Ikea’s real ‘green’ issue is that their products are not built to last fifty years. Broadly disposable products are not working off a particularly green base. So while measurements lead to more sustainable management, the real issue is arguably being dodged.

If the measurements are an internal project they can be used subjectively and wider ‘truths’ can be the first casualty. What’s the answer? The Sustainable Apparel Index and other industry wide initiatives gathering momentum at least offer the ability to objectively compare brands. But with issues this complicated, simple comparisons do not always work.

Is the best approach one that looks wider than one’s own navel and one’s own numbers? Leading by example is arguably more impressive and more useful. Nike might not have a spotless green record, but they are continuing to innovate and offer up their learning for others to share.  This Nike shoe is a ‘performance’ basketball design made from manufacturing waste off the factory floor. Check out their Better world site, where this and other innovations are explained and shared. Perhaps effective sustainable design is less about making one’s figures add up nicely and more about big steps that are used to bring the whole category on. What do you think?

Ever thought you’ve stumbled on the answer to a complex issue and become very excited. Then, the more you think about it, the more deflated you get, as you realise the solution just throws up more issues?

There was a really good piece recently in The Guardian by Justin McGuirk about how dull much sustainable design and eco messaging is. And how, in shades of brown and beige, it underwhelms and confuses, turning us off rather than seducing us into making responsible purchasing decisions.

The article began by pointing out that designers, who might generally consider themselves a rather benign breed, are actually rather toxic. After all, we are in the business of generating more and more ‘stuff’ at a high cost to the planet. A sobering thought and hard to argue with, even though we set out to bring the world, to paraphrase William Morris, things which are ‘beautiful and practical’. Which brings us to the article’s conclusion, one that for a moment seemed to be the solution I’d been looking for:

“The answer, it seems to me, is to buy fewer things that we value more: to design products that endure and that we can repair more cheaply than replace. And the real way to win the public over to sustainable design is not with a war of words but by tapping into their desires. We want things with sex appeal, not ones that look as though they are made of Weetabix.”

Ah-ha, I thought. How obvious, how insightful, what a great way to think about it. The answer isn’t sustainability; it’s longevity and desirability. What a great mantra. Then the light bulb that had gone on in my head started to flicker like a wonky eco-bulb. Because tapping into our desires is what got us into this mess in the first place. In pursuit of design that delivered the beautiful, we ended up producing the fashionable. And fashion is all about disposability. The iPad certainly taps into our desires, but in a couple of months it will be upgraded and the ‘old one’ will lose its caché. In a surprisingly short time it will be highly un-green rubbish, as the software starts to flag, and a shiny new model beckons. Desirability and disposability are close relatives for our easily turned heads.

It’s all very well thinking that we can produce items of quality that will last, but how does that work for say food packaging? While refills are an option, as Kenco are showing, it will take much to change this to make it the norm. If the supply chain won’t fundamentally change, then the best we can hope for is greener materials and suchlike.

Also, long lasting desirable design is typically pricey. Wishing for a world of beautifully made design could be considered elitist from the perspective of those on a tight budget. I would love a house full of Eames chairs, but given my budget, I go for the cheap Ikea version. Which doesn’t last too long. And anyway, I am shallow enough when it breaks to be happy to get a new one in a new look.

The real challenge for sustainable design isn’t practical, it’s emotional (as the article says). It’s about people and the selfish choices we make. It’s about why we collectively rejected cardboard boxes of Roses chocolates at Christmas, because we want the more desirable, (longer lasting) but less ‘green’ tin. Desirability, sadly, is as much part of the problem as it is part of the solution. Perhaps in my excitement I read more into the words than was intended. Perhaps the author is just asking sustainable design to be a bit less drab. But just for a moment, I wondered if building things to last that would be eternally cherished was an answer people would vote for with their hearts and their wallets. Then I thought about technology brands. And cars. And convenience. And I though ‘nahhh…’

Anyway, if you are still with me, I recommend the article. While it raises more questions than answers, the points it covers (many more than there’s time for here), are really thought provoking.