I'm Richard Poynton of Profit & Planet in Weybridge, Surrey. I'm an industrial biologist and Chartered Environmentalist, working in food and consumer goods.

My interest is in ways of redesigning our provision of food and consumer goods and services, to meet the needs of "developed" world consumers, within the capabilities of our one planet's resources and regenerative systems. For me this means redesigning our underlying systems of customer value provision, not just the products and services.

Yesterday's seminar Futureproofing Business, Sustainability & Success, was very interesting. Robin Murray invited me to set out briefly on the "blog", the points which I made orally from the floor, which I do as follows:

1. Wanted Urgently - A Forum for Dialogue!
There is a need for an adequately publicised and accessible dialogue forum. People in industry and people in design who share compatible (not necessarily common) visions of the business need to share and progress ideas about new systems and design solutions for consumer value provision, for continuing to live well, but doing so within the resource and regenerative capacities of our one planet.

There are visionary people in industry who need to meet designers to help them to realise their vision of systems, products and services. Similarly there are no doubt visionary designers looking to meet fellow thinkers from industry, from whom they can obtain the context for realising their design ideas.

The Design Council seems to me the obvious focal point for such a forum and possible the body to make known its existence and to broadcast its value.

2. Sustainability and Development:
I made the following two points in response to Prof. Manzini's presentation:

a) "Sustainability": I agreed that we should restrict our use of this term to describe value adding solutions which (as far as current knowledge allows) appear to be compatible with the capacities of our one planet. We should avoid using this term for minor improvements in efficiency in economics and environmental protection.

I suggested that sustainable solutions should at worst be neutral in their net impact on the planet's resources and on its regenerative cycles (again, as far as current knowledge permits) and that preferably, sustainable solutions should, in their net impact, be positively restorative of these resources and regenerative cycles.

b) Development:
Typically, we think of "development" as being more, i.e. bigger in quantity. If instead, we see development as being better in quality, without being "more", particularly if we take this to mean better adapted to our needs for living on one planet. We reverse the current constraints on development and make the opportunities for design and for new thinking and practice as huge as are our need and our opportunities to harmonise consumption with the planet's capacities.

T. R. Poynton, CEnv, MIEMA
trp@pandp.datanet.co.uk

CATEGORY: SUSTAINABILITY