Furniture Design Ideas

These are, by no means, the only frameworks in use. There are several more and, undoubt­edly, there will be new ones soon. Some of the others are focused on government compliance, such as the GRI (Global Reporting Initia­tive—see Figure 3.23), ISO 14000, ISO 16000, and SA 8000 standards. All are relevant and form a piece […]

The Sustainability Helix11 is the result of collab­oration between Natural Capital Solutions[28] [29] and students from the Presidio School of Manage­ment.[30] It is a framework for evaluating overall organizational commitment and progress in sus­tainability. Unlike many frameworks, it is decid­edly business-positive, and it describes a clear path from wherever an organization might score initially toward […]

Created by Edwin Datcheski to redefine the concept of what is “beautiful,” Total Beauty is a quantitative framework that offers a point sys­tem to calculate total impact of products and ser­vices in environmental terms (see Figure 3.19). Energy and materials from renewable sources Minimum of 10 times efficiency from 1990 levels FIGURE 3.19. /Ш http://www. […]

The Natural Step is a framework (see Figure 3.17) promoted by an international organization that proposes four fundamental system condi­tions to help stabilize the global biosphere. This approach is general, and the ecological and economic benefits of the Natural Step are often difficult to measure (which isn’t so different than many of the other frameworks). […]

Social Return on Investment (SROI) strategies attempt to measure social-economic impacts like LCAs measure environmental impacts (see Figure 3.14). This is a very new approach, and there are no still no standards or agree­ment about how best to do this. It also suffers the challenge of which social issues to measure, since any list will […]

When a customer purchases an item, it moves from the manufacturing category to the use category. For some products, the impact during the use phase may be small (such as for furni­ture). For others, however, the majority of their impact may occur during this phase (such as appliances and clothes). But this still isn’t the […]

The most exacting and accurate framework for assessing solutions is Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), an entirely quantitative approach (see Figure 3.9). There are several variations of LCA tools, but conceptually they are largely the same. LCAs are usually expensive, time­consuming, and difficult (if not impossible) to perform, but they deliver the most accurate and useful […]

In the words of the Biomimicry Guild, nature can be “model, measure, and mentor.”[14] This means that nature can be used as a guide to translate functions into biological terms. We can strive to discover and emulate nature’s pro­cesses and materials, evaluate solutions against nature’s own principles, and learn from nature as a source of […]

Like the Cradle to Cradle perspective, Bio­mimicry takes its inspiration from natural pro­cesses (see Figure 3.4). Promoted by Janine Benyus, Biomimicry isn’t so much a framework as it is an approach to re-imagining the design and development process. It is a perspective that searches for new ways of creating sustain­able materials, products, services, and other […]

Also known as eco-effectiveness, Cradle to Cradle, or C2C, is a popular framework that demands significant change, for good reason, but represents a high bar to reach for most organizations (see Figure 3.2). It is a powerful perspective on the cyclic nature of waste and food, as well as the need to keep technical and […]