This one started as a crisis more than a project. Working through what sustainable graphic design was actually supposed to look like, I arrived at a low point: it felt like sustainable graphic design didn’t exist — that everything I made was just going to end up as trash. Rather than sit in that, I tried to flip the statement itself. The Sustainabilitist Principles is a modular manifesto — a collection of the ways of thinking to sustainably design, as I considered them in 2009. The goal: an object whose form embodied the principles it conveyed.
Starting from the books on my desk
The work started with the books already on my desk. Where did "sustainable designing" actually live inside them? I mapped connections between ideas, wrote down the ones that kept repeating, and pondered how similar principles echoed across time and space — then asked how to make that access easier for the next designer.
An answer that isn’t another poster
The piece moved through formats as it developed — a collection of diagrams, a zine, a poster — before settling into the sculptural wall installation photographed here (which I also think is just a poster), alongside a website version. The final form brought the necessary pieces together in an intentional, ephemeral installation for an exhibition. I didn’t need to design another book or poster series to explain sustainability’s principles — the objects themselves can do it on their own just assembled INTO a poster. The books were my actual books. The definitions were screen-printed onto the front matter of found paperback novels. The embroidery floss connecting everything was cut into the longest possible lengths, to maximize how much of it could be reused afterward.
This was my first truly successful piece of sustainable graphic design — and also my last “answer” to a question I’d been chasing through grad school: what does sustainable graphic design look like?
The manifesto
Environmentalism’s goal was environmental sustainability. Post-environmentalism’s goal must be true sustainability.
I propose a new term for the followers of post-environmentalism: Sustainabilitists. We sustainabilitists take over where the environmentalists leave off, moving sustainability from the realm of the environment into all realms. The following principles move our ideas and actions toward the truly sustainable — and in keeping with its own principles, the manifesto and its concepts stay in a constant state of flux.
- Agility
- Change
- Constraint
- Cycles
- Diversity
- Durability
- Education
- Elegance
- Entropy
- Ephemerality (see Durability?)
- Flexibility
- Knowledge
- Meaning
- Momentum
- Quality
- Services
- Solutions
- Systems
- Thrift
- Time
- Wealth
Keep an open mind and don’t blindly follow the principles. Don’t worry about "sameness" or "correctness" — solutions will differ in each scenario and situation. That’s not worse, or wrong.
Originally written in 2009, based on work for an MFA thesis.
Research trail
This piece turned out to be the underpinning for most of what came after. The instinct to just do less — reusing the Green Acres template rather than redesigning Ecovention Europe from scratch — traces back to it directly. Spontaneous Lamp is an even more direct extension of the same question in object form: materials that come together to become something, and can just as readily go back to their raw parts once the need has passed.
The full write-up on Bjornapaedia goes deeper into the grad-school journey that led here — the earlier, more purely visual experiments (The Greenest Green, Understanding Sustainability, A Sustainable Landscape), the pivot toward reuse in Hello, My Name Is…, and the thinking that followed once this piece answered the question it started with.