A determined and diligent group in Vancouver has launched a new site that encourages and educates designers on the issues around sustainability and design. Often, designers feel powerless in having any meaningful effect on their business and the clients they work with, other than the usual “materials” issues–paper, inks, coatings, adhesives, etc.. This is a great start but a broader view on how designers should consider themselves in the bigger picture is necessary.

smashLAB has done some hard work in creating a vital site with some good slide shows that serve to educate on the issues and give real, meaningful solutions for designers. Check it out. For full-disclosure sake, we should add here that they approached us during development to feature our Seattle Monorail Project on this site as an example of design that can have meaningful effects and lead to large scale change. (That the silver bullet died later due to political missteps and management errors must be noted, but the campaign was a tremendous success.)