Dreaming in Green

The Greener Gadgets Conference in New York earlier this year was mostly a pragmatic affair, with presentations from representatives of big companies and design firms and projects like One Laptop per Child. The day ended on a different note, with the results of a design competition, run in conjunction with the industrial-design-focused Web site Core77. After a day of wrestling with the vexing practical details of making the world a greener place, this was a forum for more sweeping ideas, both large and small. New York Times

New York Times Article:

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Dreaming in Green
By Rob Walker
Published on April 20, 2008

Consider the third-place finisher, Green Cell. Entrants were asked for three images and 500 words. The first Green Cell slide presented the problem: the seemingly endless array of chargers required to power up the myriad battery types that power all of our gizmos. Inconvenience aside, this profusion contributes to landfill, as we cycle through new devices with new sorts of batteries. The second slide offered a solution: a standardized rechargeable battery type — branded Green Cell — that you could pop out of your old mobile and into your new one without worrying about compatibility. (“We could agree before,” says text next to the familiar image of AA batteries. “Why not now?”) The third slide showed a hypothetical battery-vending machine. The real message wasn’t about a product or a brand; it was about a system. Why are there so many power-supply variations anyway? As Allan Chochinov, the editor in chief of Core77, put it from the stage at the Greener Gadgets conference, “This is a great articulation of ‘How dumb are we?’ ”

The designers who submitted the idea are three recent Rhode Island School of Design graduates — Theo Richardson, Charles Brill and Alexander Williams — each of whom has a junior-level day job in art or architecture, but who also have a side collaborative group they call Rich, Brilliant, Willing. This is more of a creative outlet than a going business at this point, so the folks who got in touch with them asking where to buy an iPod-compatible Green Cell or offering vending-machine services sort of missed the point.

Then again, you might wonder: What is the point of a product proposed by three guys who aren’t remotely in a position to make it a reality? Actually, purely conceptual or “fictional” products are commonplace in the design world and, as Chochinov has argued, can have value that’s very real. Green Cell, he told me, is one example of “a graphic gesture” that shows the power of design to reveal an idea, a problem and maybe even a solution with unique clarity.

One Greener Gadgets judge, Ryan Block, the editor of Endgadget, observed that the concept is “a gadget user’s dream” but that “it’s never gonna happen,” because the various electronics and computer companies relate to one another through competition, not cooperation. This and other practical considerations and limitations of Green Cell popped up in some online critiques. And indeed, if something similar had originated in the skunk works of a big company, or even at a start-up angling for venture capital, it most likely wouldn’t get far. But that, in fact, is the point: the nonmarketplace context of hypothetical products frees the designer to leapfrog practical-minded meetings about market share and profit margins and the like and to land at the bigger questions: is this something companies should do — or must do? Or maybe even be legislated to do?

Other entries skipped marketplace issues in totally different ways. The winner was the EnerJar, a build-it-yourself device (promoted by a schematic distributed free online) that lets consumers see the “power draw” of an appliance. And Theo Richardson, of Rich, Brilliant, Willing, says that exercises like this allow designers like him to grapple with the question that the current mania for eco-thinking raises for the discipline of industrial design. “Immediately this first issue,” he says, is “why are you creating more?” He is, of course, pleased with some of the responses, which have included what must be the ultimate praise for an industrial designer: “How has no one thought of this yet?” He concedes that given the one-month time frame and other limitations, they could not fully address some of the problems that various critiques raised. (Green Cell would be rechargeable at home, not just by way of public vending stations; a handful of standard sizes might be necessary instead of just one, and so on.) “It perhaps wasn’t as clear as it could be,” Richardson says. “But clear enough to spark discussion.” And in this case, that’s the whole idea.