We talk to smart designer and The Big Green Idea win­ner Leyla Acaro­glu about newly developed The Secret Life of Things web­site, video and edu­ca­tional tools, aimed at edu­cat­ing Aus­tralian TAFE and Uni­ver­sity stu­dents on the bene­fits of eco-design.

Big Green Ideas win­ner and The Secret Life of Things cre­ator Leyla Acaro­glu wants to change the way we think about eco­design | Photo cour­tesy of Big Green Ideas

The Big Green Idea is a Brit­ish Coun­cil fund­ing pro­ject. It awards five Aus­trali­ans a grant of $10 000, to fin­ance a pro­ject that will help change beha­viours and atti­tudes towards sustainability.

How can smarter design help to min­im­ise the envir­on­mental impact of a product?

Good design decision-making offers great oppor­tun­it­ies for redu­cing the car­bon (and over­all envir­on­mental) impact of a product so that when it gets to mar­ket, the con­sumer will auto­mat­ic­ally have a reduced eco­lo­gical foot­print. Life-cycle-based decision-making is an effect­ive tool that design­ers and product developers can employ to cre­ate more envir­on­ment­ally bene­fi­cial products. It looks at the entire life of a product from the extrac­tion of raw mater­i­als, man­u­fac­tur­ing, trans­port, use through to the end of life options so that smarter design res­ol­u­tions can be integ­rated in the product.

Is there a large cost mar­gin between the cre­ation of sus­tain­able and non-sustainable products?

The Secret Life of Things is an edu­ca­tional resource pack that include a vari­ety of multi-media resources that design edu­cat­ors and stu­dents can freely access

Def­in­itely not! There is a mis­con­cep­tion that greener products cost more, but the real­ity is if the designer has been given the free­dom in the brief to explore the options in the design solu­tion, then in most cases the res­ult­ing product is often less expens­ive! Greener products often employ less mater­i­als (dema­ter­i­al­ise) bet­ter coup­ling of mater­i­als, more effi­cient pro­duc­tion pro­cesses and resource­ful trans­port­a­tion and pack­aging options. Greener design is not just about some fancy ‘eco’ mater­ial, its about good decision mak­ing and effi­ciency – which can often lead to sub­stan­tial sav­ings for both the pro­du­cer and the consumer.

What kind of beha­vi­oural changes do you hope to inspire through the project?

Image cour­tesy of Big Green Ideas

Firstly I want to help dis­pel the myth that green is a lux­ury that costs more, and that should only hap­pen when a cus­tomer asks for it. Every product should be designed to have the least [amount of] envir­on­mental and social impacts. Pro­du­cers should not wait for con­sumer back­lash before they go green and design­ers should not wait for their cli­ents to request it before that start to invest­ig­ate ways of redu­cing the impacts of their products. Such simple strategies can be employed to reduce impacts; it just needs to start with ini­ti­at­ive and innov­a­tion. Secondly, I really hope that more design­ers will be inspired to over­come the per­ceived chal­lenges of eco-design and start to be innov­at­ive in their design solutions.

We’ll be run­ning more inter­views with Big Green Idea win­ners over the next few weeks. Let us know about the cre­at­ive, behaviour-changing pro­jects you’ve been inspired by and we’ll run stor­ies — share your dis­cov­er­ies below!