Jeremy Faludi: Sustainability professor on why most sustainable design fails before it starts

0:00Sustainable design is about making a more abundant, just future for everyone. It's about fixing the problems in the world and also making a positive impact. Making your products or services or systems as beautiful throughout their entire life as they are in that moment that the user receives them. Design is a problem-solving discipline. We research user needs, we explore solutions, we make things, and we ship them. But one important stakeholder is often missing from the conversation. It's the world that we live in. What toll do the products we design impose upon our environment? Sustainability is an essential part of the discipline of design, but not understood by most designers.

0:54If only we had a manual to get us up to speed. Our guest today, Jeremy Faludi, has spent a lot of time researching, writing, and thinking about environmental impact and design. He's a researcher and author of Sustainable Design, From Vision to Action. Jeremy's spent decades helping companies move beyond good intentions to evidence-based decisions, from working with Stanley Black & Decker to pioneering biomaterial 3D printing at Delft University of Technology. How much power do you think large language models use? The answer is surprising. We explore why a hairdryer company wasted nine months of engineering time on plastic reductions, how systems thinking reveals the true environmental impact of our designs, and the materials research going into sustainable 3D printing.

1:31This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more.

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2:41We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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3:24And now, back to the show.

3:31Jeremy Flutie, welcome to the Design Better Podcast. Thank you very much. Good to be here. It's really nice to have you. We've crossed paths a lot over the years. We both came out of Stanford product design world. And before we hit record, we were kind of talking, have we met in person? Have we not? A little unclear, but certainly we've exchanged emails a lot. I've sent students your way who have sustainability questions. So we've known each other for quite a while. So it's a pleasure having a chance to talk with you in a more extended way. Yeah, definitely. I'm looking forward to it. So you have a new book out.

4:03And I think a good portion of our conversation will focus on that. Do you want to talk a little bit about the book and what drove you to do that kind of labor of love? Aaron and I both know it's a lot of work to make a book happen in the world. So, yeah, tell us what drove you to do that. Yeah, I mean, it's basically the book that I wish I had had 25 years ago when I was getting into this stuff. Because a lot of the books on sustainability are very high concept. You know, they're like all about the principles, but they lack the nitty gritty, like how do you get this stuff done on the ground and how do you integrate it into your existing product design workflow?

4:42So that was the main thing. And then there was also secondary things like I see so much greenwashing out there and I don't think that most greenwashing is evil. I don't think most of it is malicious. like a lot of people do. I think 90 % of greenwashing is just well-intentioned ignorance. It's the result of sort of using weak design methods, using normal design methods while thinking green thoughts and hoping that that will magically lead you to actually more sustainable designs. But the problem is that you're still making decisions by hunch and hearsay unless you're using real sustainable design tools that can help you make evidence-based decisions.

5:30Could we level set on a couple things? Could you define greenwashing for our audience who may not have heard that? And maybe just also talk about the idea of sustainability and why that's important. I think anyone who's paying attention today knows that there are huge environmental problems and social problems. And sustainable design is about making a more beautiful, abundant, just future for everyone. It's about fixing the problems in the world and also making a positive impact in the world. Making your products or services or systems as beautiful throughout their entire life as they are in that moment that the user receives them.

6:18making things beautiful on the back end as well as the front end, so that they're not looking beautiful for the user, but then causing all sorts of deaths by climate change and toxic chemicals and labor exploitation in the background. It's making the world better, happier, and more abundant for everyone. And then greenwashing is making it look like your product is green without actually being green. And that can be potentially two different things. That can be saying something that's not true, or it can be saying something that is true but not meaningful. Like a long time ago, I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago, there was a company that I did a short consulting gig for where they make hair dryers.

7:13and they were all proud of themselves because they had done this redesign where they had reduced the amount of plastic in the hairdryer case by, I forget, maybe 20 % or something. And this was going to be their big announcement. They were going to put a bunch of marketing energy and money behind it. And they had spent, I don't know, six months or nine months or something of design and engineering time making this happen. And I ran the numbers on it and like what actually made the big impacts for their product. And this plastic savings was like a rounding error. I mean, the energy used by a hairdryer over the life of the hairdryer causes 10 times the environmental impact of all of the manufacturing put together.

8:03And, you know, only a small percentage of the manufacturing impact were from the plastic. So even though the claim that they were making was true, it was bullshit. It was meaningless. And so I had to tell them, I hate to break it to you guys, but you just wasted like six or nine months of development time and money, fund your engineering teams and your design teams, and you're about to waste how many more millions of dollars on this marketing campaign that you have planned. Whereas if you had talked to me before, then I could have done this analysis before and I could have shown you the numbers of where your impacts are so that you could put your time and money to where it will actually make effective change.

8:50How did they receive that? It was a little rough. It's true. They did not hire me again. So I don't know. Jeremy, a lot of folks, you know, if we're sustainably minded, we might think about how the product was manufactured and how we use it, but we don't think of it from a sort of product lifecycle or more systems thinking kind of perspective. Maybe you could talk about that a bit because, you know, it's not just when you buy the product and use it, where does it end up and what systems does it affect too? That's a really important thing. And so we actually have two chapters in the book about systems thinking, one of which I recommend for basically everybody doing any kind of sustainable product design because it's the simpler version of systems thinking where you start out just thinking about your product, but then the whole bill of materials that goes into it and the whole life cycle, like you were saying, from material extraction and transport manufacturing to what the user does with it and what happens at the end of its life.

9:56And it's really important to look at the impacts of your product through that whole life cycle so that you can see where the priorities are, you know, where the big impacts are. Like I was saying with the hairdryer, this company was focusing on the manufacturing side, but really the impacts were in the user use phase. That's different for different products. For furniture, the impacts are mostly in the material choice, you know, in the raw material extraction and processing. With other products, it could be big impacts in the end of life. It just depends by your product. And in some products, it's actually not even your product itself that is the biggest impact.

10:41Like, some of my research is on green 3D printing, and there's a lot of argument about how 3D printing is or is not compared to other manufacturing methods. But for aerospace industry parts, you know, like fancy lightweight titanium brackets in an airplane or something, the impacts are not in the part itself. The biggest impacts are in how much fuel the airplane uses during its life. And so even if 3D printing had 10 times the environmental impact of conventional manufacturing, it would still be a better choice for you to make your products and systems. And, you know, like some of my students did a redesign of an in-flight coffee maker for a company, not this year, but the year before.

11:33So the biggest environmental impacts of that coffee maker are not in the coffee maker. They're in the jet fuel that the airplane is burning. And if you're thinking about things at the system level, you can spot those and set your priorities correctly so that you spend your time and money in a way that will actually be effective. How does sustainability connect with digital design? I think a lot of our listeners are in the software space or digital design space, and they may have the feeling that, okay, I'm not making physical objects, therefore, there's not a strong sustainability component to what I'm doing.

12:13Is that a correct assumption or is there a flaw there? It's definitely not a correct assumption for several reasons. Like, first of all, all software runs on hardware, right? So your code will cause a machine to use energy, and it will also cause the machine to use resources. A lot of people would love to keep their laptop longer or their phone longer, but they feel like they have to upgrade in order to run the latest OS or to run the latest version of their gaming software or whatever software they have. So software often drives environmental impacts through the hardware that it requires and the energy that it uses.

12:59And then even more directly than that, a lot of software touches the real world as well. You know, if you're designing an e-commerce website, well, your customers are buying physical stuff through your website. So you could steer your users to buy greener things, like buy used things, buy refurbished things, or even just buy new things that are made in a more sustainable way. And software can have a huge impact. I actually think the biggest innovation in public transit in the last 50 years is Google Maps doing public transit directions on your phone. because before that, it was even hard to figure out what bus you want to take to a neighborhood across town in a city that you already live in.

13:52If you're not used to taking a bus over there, you know, you need to look up the schedule and where the stops are and all this kind of thing. And then how you walk from where the stop is to your actual destination, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. With Google Maps on my phone, I can and have countless times used public transit in a city I had never been to before, in a language I don't even speak, sometimes with languages that don't have an alphabet. bet. So it's this amazing enabler of sustainability in real life. Or for example, like if your travel website, you could recommend local places to people or trips that they can make by train and not flying or not by car or whatever.

14:41Or software also helps buildings be more energy efficient. I don't know if you have a Nest thermostat at home, but the whole shtick with that product is better energy efficiency. And that saves people money. In fact, sustainability very often saves companies and people money. There's just this weird mental recategorization that people do where as soon as it starts saving money, people no longer categorize it as a sustainability initiative. They recategorize it as a cost-saving initiative, which is weird. But anyway, or like product service systems. A lot of software these days has changed from buying the software to subscription payment models.

15:26You can also do that for products. Like Zipcar is a car share system where you don't buy your own car. Instead, you have this app that lets you use various cars that are parked around the city. And that radically reduces the environmental impacts of cars because every one car that is shared between 10 different people, that is cutting the environmental impacts of manufacturing by 90%. Unless you have so many cars in so many locations that it's more than all of your users would have bought, but that's unlikely. systems like zip car or bicycle share scooter share all that stuff they require fancy software to track the products and unlock and lock and manage them and running that software also helps the company make the decisions like how many of these scooters are we going to buy are we actually going to make things worse by having too many scooters around and then they become trash or people abuse them and throw them around, stuff like that.

16:34And so software can drive social sustainability. Like Facebook could just redo its algorithm to build community cohesion and happiness. In fact, that's a thing that has been done. If you look up this case study of Taiwan in 2014, Taiwanese government's approval rating was under 10%. Like people were physically occupying their parliament building to protest. And they put out this social media platform called V Taiwan that was this discussion platform that let people raise issues and talk about them and argue about them. But its algorithm specifically highlighted posts that bridged across disagreeing groups in the discussion.

17:22And it effectively crowdsourced the writing of laws. And so in a matter of weeks, they solved some problems that years and years of debate had not solved. Jeremy, one issue that folks might do, even if they're interested in sustainable goals, is that it's not always intuitive how to make a product more sustainable. I remember a debate, this was maybe a few years ago, in dark mode versus light mode in an OS, like, does the dark mode save more energy? Does the light mode, you know, and it's not necessarily a straightforward answer. But other than your book, which I assume would be a great resource for more kind of systems level thinking, where can people turn to think about product design more sustainably?

18:05The book does have a ton of resources for things like that. Like we have a lot of lookup tables and explanations and exercises, you know, step by step. Here's how you analyze what parts of your system or product are using the most energy, not just the most power, so that you can again make evidence-based decisions on where to focus your time and effort to improve them. And then we also have lists of other resources at the back of each chapter. So, you know, we've got like three different chapters on energy use for general energy literacy and energy efficiency and energy generation, you know, like if you want your product to generate renewable energy and just power itself, like if you want to build a solar powered keyboard or something, our book can help you calculate how big would the PV panels need to be?

19:03How big a battery do you need? And even calculate whether you should do that at all. Like are the embodied impacts of manufacturing that solar panel and battery actually worse or better than the energy that you would save from using grid electricity. It's hard to talk about sustainability and not talk about AI because the energy consumption of AI queries is gigantic. And it's really kind of changing the way we think about energy. There are a lot of companies who are investing in nuclear and other energy systems. There's lots of hope for nuclear fusion to come online. We'll see what happens with that.

19:50But what's the conversation in the sustainability community about AI and energy consumption? It's actually not the queries for AI that take a ton of energy. It's actually not.

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20:50If you've ever felt like the hardest part of being a leader isn't the work itself, but actually getting everyone to work together, well, we've got something coming up for you. Eli and I have partnered with our friends at September Works on the September Workshop Leadership Excursion. It's a two-day gathering in Sonoma on September 28th and 29th. And let me set the scene. This is wine country at its most beautiful, rolling hills, golden light, the kind of place where you can finally hear yourself think and walk away genuinely inspired. The format is intimate by design. Just 40 leaders are going to be there.

21:27It's no stage. It's not really an audience format. It's very conversation first. It's the kind of room that challenges you to think bigger about your work and your craft. And Eli and I will be there in person the whole time. So this is a real chance to hang out with us and swap ideas and get into the good stuff together. The lineup is incredible. A few are voices that you've heard right here on Design Better, including Paul Dichter, one of the lead writers on Stranger Things. Bill Burnett, the author of Designing Your Life, Designing Your Work Life, and Creating a Meaningful Life, and Andrew Evans of The Magic Patio.

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24:05Jeremy Faludi:This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head. There's turkey and then there's the fryer's deep fried turkey breast. New from Boar's Head. Deliciously golden fried on the outside. perfectly seasoned all the way through, bursting with savory flavor, juicy. Okay, I need to stop. My mouth is watering. This isn't just any turkey. It's a taste that'll take you back. A taste born from a backyard tradition. I'm talking fold-out chairs on the lawn, neighbors catching a whiff and popping their heads over the fence, kids being told to stand back, that feeling of the first slice being carved. And now you don't need a backyard fryer.

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