It’s Not Easy Being Green*
What do you do if you want to learn more about sustainability? We initiated a project called It’s not easy being green to start a journey around the world to explore the meaning of sustainability for design. During 184 days, we offered inspiring lectures and hands-on workshops to teach and learn about sustainability by meeting, discussing and working with local creatives. Why do we do this?
Please, read more below.
Trouble. Getting yourself involved as a designer is very important. To students with a lack of ideas Paula’s art teacher once said: «You have to get yourself into trouble.» Of course, we didn’t start traveling to get in prisoned but to learn more about local situations you can’t stay home with Google as your best friend. Getting information from firsthand account is extremely valuable for the credibility of our work. Getting out of your local comfort zone also helped us to stay creative with the daily improvisation in getting things done.
Develop. Joseph Ki-Zerbo, an African politician and writer once said: «We do not develop, we develop ourselves.» This pro-active approach to teaching and learning is something valuable to us since in changing today’s world we need all the hands we can get. Also, doing (good) things allows you to collaborate and helps to understand why people do the things they do. Especially for us designers, who can do (almost) everything, it is important to get a feel for where we should help or where we should better stay out.
Change. Besides discussing change we also had to change ourselves. Traveling often means changing our schedule and expectations. First, due to the climate, language and culture differences things often went a lot slower than we were used to. Second, planning is good but it’s important to keep time and budget the unplanned such as unexpected meetings or surprising situations. The worst surprise was probably the nuclear catastrophe (aka Fukushima) that hit Japan during our travel, one of our most wanted destinations.
Witness. In today’s visual era it has become important to witness for yourself what is important to you. Web based photos and videos have made an endless amount of things and situations accessible for a large audience but there is still a difference between an image of an item and the item itself. Painter Magritte demonstrated this very strongly with the painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Facing people, places or things yourself is a multi-sensorial experience connected with a certain time and place. Not surprisingly, personal moments become meaningful and are more easily remembered.
Planet. We didn’t start this project to save the planet. Our planet doesn’t need us people and can live very well without us. Michael Braungart, one of today’s sustainability gurus, once joked- «One planet meets another and says: «Hey, I have this thing called Homo Sapiens». The other planet says: «Don’t worry, I had that and it disappeared.» – In the end we are doing this for everyone. In a global human society we should not only care about our friends or family but for everyone. We are optimists and believe that all together we should be smart enough not to mess up our civilization.
*Paula Raché & Aart van Bezooyen: Designers
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