Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child.

-Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World

Good design makes or breaks anything.

A piano.  A city center.  A paper clip.  A computer.  A toothbrush.

A love affair with a car is a love affair with design.  Anyone who has lived enough years can tell you what well-made shoes can do to your day.  Design of a ballot can influence who wins an election.  Design of public transportation and freeways can influence who can access neighborhoods, what gets passed over, what gets plowed through...

We often think of design as the blueprint for the components to make something what it is. 

But design is also how things are structured, including our systems.  When we talk about structural racism, we’re talking about design- a system that is not broken, but has been designed that way.  From every hierarchy of value placed on one thing over another, educational access and instruction, inherited and perpetuated wealth disparities– there is a design and structure to the inequity.  This makes it both extremely challenging to change, because it’s the very “house” we live in, and yet also points to the possibility of transformation.  

A structure can be dismantled, redesigned and rebuilt.  

And just like you can't carry water in a cup made out of butterfly net, no matter how determined or well-intentioned you are, design is as much about the need it fulfills as how it is made.

The same goes for materials- much of the time materials are seen as the stuff that makes the thing, without as much awareness of what made the material itself. 

As we alighted a bit in our June issue on clothing, we are in a crisis of consumption in the disposable and often toxic materials used in materials and design for almost every product we consume as humans. Many materials have been altered at their chemical level to no longer be able to be integrated back into the earth. 

For all of human ingenuity and materials design, most of the economy and production still relies on resources that are either nonrenewable, non-degradable, volatile or carcinogenic.

As William McDonough & Michael Braungart state so well in their seminal Cradle to Cradle: pound for pound, there are more ants in this world than humans. But we don’t necessarily know it, because they are so integrated:

“Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals and soil.  Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.”

Enter Biomimicry Institute.
An organization helping nature-inspired design towards a more balanced ecosystem.

This month we highlight:

Through their design challenges and online resource catalog AskNature, the Biomimicry Institute gives people the resources they need to make the leap from curiosity to implementation.

Hot off the Press!

Biomimicry Institute announces 2020 finalists for Global Design Challenge & Ray of Hope Prize 

If you haven't already, sign up for the Holes in the Wall Collective's CSA to support the Biomimicry Institute and 11 other organizations throughout the year, or donate to them directly.

The future is one big design challenge.

There is amazing design everywhere. But who is making it, by what process, and with what materials? 

As Victor Papanek remarks:

It is about time that industrial design, as we have come to know it, should cease to exist.  As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial “toys for adults,” killing machines with gleaming talifins, and “sexed” up shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist. Design must become an innovative, highly creative, cross disciplinary tool responsive to...true needs...and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly designed objects and structures.  

Could our trash be our fuel?  Can design lead us to less trash in the first place? Could design help us change our habits and recenter our values?  Could a company as big as Amazon stop using cardboard and pack in low weight durable crates that get picked back up like milk bottles of old? If there is COVID vaccine, who will own it? How useful is a design made for global health if most the globe cannot access it? What would happen if the value index in companies was measured instead as a sustainability index– if their environmental imprint and impact was subtracted from the gross profit and stock index and disseminated back to the communities affected most?

We are proud to support the Biomimicry Institute and all the organizations and people looking at holistic and structural design who are not only asking these sorts of questions but putting them into viable living answers.