A review of Design is the Problem by Nathan Shedroff

I don’t know a single designer who would disagree with the title of Nathan Shedroff’s Design is the Problem. Contemporary designers build their practices on a legacy of conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, and oil-based disposables. When you break it down, every piece of trash in the world’s overflowing landfills is due to a designer’s bad decision.

When I was a design student, we used to gripe incessantly about the need for a textbook for sustainable curriculum, which is why Design is the Problem had immediate relevance for me and was amplified by the recent addition of Industrial Design Programs to our annual Knight Schools Ranking.

Design is the Problem is part textbook and part glossary, useful for anyone to reference terms and methodologies. Shedroff covers everything from the theoretical (systems design and strategic innovation) to the very practical (Life Cycle Analysis and Green Building Rating Systems). As most professionals could back up, language is often the biggest barrier to communication, a fact that Shedroff imparts in the language and terminology of sustainable design. In this way, Design is the Problem may be just as useful to someone working on the periphery of design as designers themselves.

That being said, Shedroff may advocate too heavily in favor of metrics to truly determine best practices. As a designer who believes that innovation is the only path to sustainable solutions, I instinctively cringe when I see a trend towards an emphasis on metrics. For example, the LEED guide in paper form invokes the Ontario Building Code. And while the former is meant to inspire responsible design it is difficult not to draw similarities to the latter, which stifles architectural innovation, deterring density construction like laneway housing and creative material choices in the city. Likewise, the material-centric LEED guide supports solutions that can be quantified on paper, and ignores the passive heating and cooling systems which are the cornerstone of green building.

In terms of making a case for business and design, Shedroff falls short, partly because of the limitations of the chosen medium (printed book) in an intellectual landscape that is so dynamic. Systems thinking, for example, has been extensively theorized and practiced by the world-renowned firm IDEO, which publishes numerous blogs, books, academic papers, lectures, workshops, and even productivity tools for systemic thinking. The Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto coined and trademarked the term “Business Design”, running cross-disciplinary think tanks between MBAs and industrial designers. These two very important theories form the backbone of sustainable practice, and without a good understanding of either, it would be very difficult for a designer to ride the line between sustainable design and a hack greenwash. While Shedroff explains his choice to print a tangible book, explaining that “readers still value physical products more than virtual ones”, I would argue that an electronic, open source version would be much richer, allowing readers to expand and contribute to what is still a very new conversation around sustainable theory and practice.

The hidden implication of the title becomes obvious in the content of the book. If design is the problem, Shedroff claims that it must also be the solution. For designers, this may seem like an unbearable cross to bear, but as more and more literature is published that paints this as opportunity over burden, more designers will surely pick up the torch.


Design is the Problem
By Nathan Shedroff
Softcover: 319 pages, $36.00 USD, March 2009.
Publisher: Rosenfeld Media