Reuse, Reduce, Recycle, Restore.

Nathan Shedroff, author of Design is the Problem, is recognized as a pioneer in experience design – “an approach to creating successful experiences for people in any medium” (http://www.nathan.com/ed/index.html). Shedroff defines sustainable design as “design and development that meets today’s needs without preventing those needs from being met by future generations,” although he also states that there is no such thing as sustainable design. Sustainable design allows for something to be efficient today, efficient tomorrow and even efficient decades from now. Or in other words, what is efficient for an individual today must still be efficient for that individual’s children, grandchildren and so on.

Since sustainable design does not technically exist, society must instead focus on more sustainable design in order to envision what the idealistic more sustainable, more meaningful and post-consumer world would be like. This more sustainable design consists of multiple design strategies, all which fall under the categories of reducing, reusing, recycling and restoring. One design strategy, which falls under the reducing category, is dematerialization. A key example of relying on dematerialization as a more sustainable design strategy is the currently popular device, the iPhone. Why would an individual prefer to carry around all of the following devices: a cell phone, an audio/MP3 player, a PDA, a digital camera, a GPS system, a watch and an e-Reader, when just one device can provide all of the above?

(http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone?mco=MTAyNTQzMTI)
(http://www.nathan.com/thoughts/DesignIsTheProblem.pdf)

That is where the iPhone comes into play – and it could be the explanation as to why the iPhone is so widely used in today’s society. One could easily imagine how much less material is required in producing just one iPhone versus the amount of material required to separately produce all of the previously mentioned devices whose features already come installed with the iPhone.

So as the usual American learns during their elementary school years, Shedroff overall emphasizes the ideas of REDUCE, REUSE, RECYLE (and RESTORE). Although America comes nowhere close to Cuba when it comes to sustainability and the idea of creating a completely sustainable community is unrealistic, the newly defined area of experience design is the first step to achieving the more sustainable world that people long for.