Having watched this thread slowly build for a few days, I’m quite glad that Core haven’t moved it into the ‘designers accord and green design’ discussion area as I think this sort of topic should become a general design discussion. We shouldn’t have to label it as green design or any other specialised design area - sustainable, eco friendly, enviro conscious etc, it should become the norm in terms of what we as designers do. We don’t call the environmentally poor design work produced in the 80’s & 90’s and in many cases what is produced today as doing ‘un-green’ design. ‘What do you do?’, ‘I’m an un-green designer’ that would be too negative, so I’m inclined to agree with the title - green design is just a fashion.
I think the problem has been, that whilst many of us want to do good, previously, we haven’t had the tools to work out how green we are being. For example if I manage to save size and weight in a product, that must be an environmental saving, because I can ship more, saving fuel etc, but to reduce size and weight I have to use different materials, which require much more energy to process, how can I tell if the savings I’ve made are really a benefit over the material sacrifice. Does it balance out, or have I in fact actually made a negative environmental impact?
This site looks really useful and I will be investigating further - the stuff coming out from solid works mentioned on the site sounds really exciting too.