July 8th then, 6 - 8 PM
Green Depot
222 Bowery
New York, NY
Cost: FREE

If you haven't been yet, and even if you have, join o2NYC for a tour of Green Depot, our new favorite place for DIY design projects for home and office and occasional art installations.

Small, local, open and connected
An Evening with Ezio Manzini

Where: The Cherry Lane Theater
38 Commerce Street
West Village, NY City
When: Wednesday, May 6, 2009
6:00 - 8:00 PM
Tickets: $20 + $.99 fee.
$9 + $.99 fee for students
Register Here

Whether you've been tirelessly working away on sustainable design strategies for years, or have only recently joined the movement, you must be wondering, what do we do NOW? Design for positive social and environmental impact - let's admit it - it is easier said than done, even when the economy was booming, and the demand for shiny green things was on the rise. The more we seemed to dig deeper and learn about the environmental and social consequences of design, the more we struggled with the moral quandaries built into our systems of production and consumption. Sure, we could do better, but would better get us to where we need to go? Now that the global economy is on the precipice, can we rethink and reframe our goals? What IS our exit strategy?

Ezio Manzini, author of Sustainable Everyday, Professor in Industrial Design at the Politecnico di Milano, and founder of o2 Italy, will join us for an evening conversation. Ezio has been on the journey towards sustainable design for over 20 years, and has noticed a growing trend to move beyond first measures of eco-efficiency, to seek larger vision of sustainability.

Ezio will share his current vision for sustainability, to define our exit strategy as a community of designers:

"Research on eco-efficiency has been successful, but has not improved the overall picture. Current products and services, taken one by one, use far less energy and materials than those of some decades ago. However, no indicator of aggregate consumption indicates a decrease: even in countries where research on eco-efficiency has been most successful. Overall consumption of environmental resources continues to grow. This clearly tells us that increasing improvements in the current system are not enough. The transition towards sustainability requires a systemic change. It is not a question of doing what we already do better. It is a question of doing different things in completely different ways.

There is an emerging demand for visions of sustainability. This requires scenarios to show that is possible to move form the “less of the same” perspective to the “better and different” one. That is, the one where is proved that there are feasible, socially acceptable, even attractive, alternatives on different scales for various aspects of people’s lives.

Where will this vision come from? The emerging features, as the cases of socio-technical innovation on which they are based, are characterized by four keywords: small, local, open and connected. We know that these same keywords are characterizing the contemporary society, when we look at it as a network society.

To do that the role of the design community (can be crucial to feed the social learning process with the needed design knowledge: new scenarios (on sustainable ways of being and doing) and specific design contributions (to the development of viable solutions)." - Ezio Manzini

Join us for a rousing conversation!

Learn about LCA from Jacob Madsen
Date: Thursday April 2nd
Time: 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Venue: Smart Design
601 W 26th Street, Suite 1820
RSVP in advance: j [at] o2nyc [dot] org

Jacob Madsen
Energy and Climate Change
ERM

LIfe cycle analysis often generates surprising findings, telling us which product is greener. The Hummer or the Prius? Cotton diapers or disposable? Paper or Plastic? Join us for one of the leading LCA experts. Jacob Madsen works for ERM and is an expert in Life Cycle Analysis, and was instrumental in building SimaPro, one of the leading software tools for conducting "hard core" LCAs.

For those that attended an Intro to LCA with Lloyd Hicks, you are already familiar with his work. Jacob was one of the people behind the recent LCA study of Tropicana, and other famous studies comparing cloth diapers to disposables, or revealing the true lifecycle costs of a pair of men's boxers for Marks and Spencer. Jacob will share his practice with the o2NYC community.

Jacob's Bio:
Jacob Madsen is a senior project manager in ERM’s Energy and Climate Change Core team. He is leading the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Carbon Footprinting practice in North America. He possesses over eight years experience in LCA and environmental engineering and management, in both R&D and consultancy.

Jacob is an experienced project manager gained by conducting numerous LCA’s and other environmental projects. He is currently managing several of ERMs high profile LCA and Carbon Footprinting projects in various sectors including the food and drink sector, paper and pulp sector, clothing and textiles sector etc. Jacob has actively participated in the development of LCA and he is also member of different working groups within UNEP and SETAC dealing with topics such as Life Cycle Costing, Input/Output LCA and Sustainable Consumption. He is a LCA software expert and has developed and conducted SimaPro trainings besides developing new tools to measure sustainability such as Input/Output Analysis and the Ecoindicator 99 methodologies

When: Thursday March 26th, 2009
Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: Cook + Fox/Terrapin Bright Green
641 6th Avenue

We're pleased to welcome Terry Swack from SustainableMinds.com. We've been watching the company's progress and are happy to welcome Terry to NY for a demo of the current version of their LCA design tool.

Who should come? SustainableMinds.com was developed for product designers to learn about life cycle analysis, and is based on the Okala Principles developed by the IDSA. If you are interested in building life cycle thinking into your design process, please join us!

Thanks to Cook + Fox/Terrapin Bright Green for hosting the event! Refreshments provided by SustainableMinds.

Join o2NYC as we begin a learning group whose goal is to understand Life Cycle Assessment, and to develop our skills as design professionals to provide the systems thinking approach and holistic understanding that LCA provides.

As a concept, a product lifecycle makes intuitive sense. Designers conceive of a product or service, and source materials that are mined from the earth, refined, manufactured, packaged, marketed, sold, used, and then either retired in landfill, or in a better world, recycled back into the system. Cradle to cradle, here we come. In practice, knowing the full impact of a product's impact on the environment be the first thing we do as designers when developing a new product idea. A comprehensive approach that takes in all phases of a product lifecycle is the best framework for letting us know which action to take in redesigning for green - which approach is the most environmentally friendly.

Yet as a practice, life cycle assessment is both daunting and complicated, but this may be a case of LCA reflecting the complexities of how we make things today. Let us know if you are interested in joining or are a practicing LCA expert willing to share our knowledge.