The design community is invited to co-create for the collective good with the debut of The Living Principles for Design website, the online home for the sustainability framework created in October 2009. The new portal is intended to give the creative community a place to share and showcase best practices, tools, stories and ideas for enabling sustainable action, popularizing the efforts of those who use design thinking to affect positive cultural change.
Originally conceived through AIGA, The Living Principles framework aims to clarify the multiple, interrelated dimensions of sustainability and guide purposeful action in everyday design and business practice. Drawing from decades of collective wisdom, theory and results, the framework weaves environmental, social, economic and cultural sustainability into an actionable, integrated approach that can be consistently communicated to designers, business leaders, educators and the public.
The effort-and in turn the website-depends on the creative contributions of every discipline to grow and flourish. "The Living Principles community site is a unique forum where leading design organizations and curious individuals are coming together to move the sustainability conversation forward across disciplines and around the world," says site creator Gaby Brink, founder and executive creative director of Tomorrow Partners, a strategic design agency. "Our aim is to celebrate the efforts of all our partners."
Presented by Mohawk Fine Papers, The Living Principles site has already brought together many global organizations to collaborate across disciplines and continents and promote a consistent and holistic understanding of sustainability thinking in design. Partners and endorsers include Cumulus, Design Ignites Change, Design Management Institute (DMI), GreenBlue, International Council of Graphic Design Associations (Icograda), Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), O2 Global Network, Organic Exchange, Society for Environmental Graphic Design (SEGD), The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC) and Winterhouse Institute.
The growing list of partners strategically extends to all design fields. "The goal is to reach beyond the traditionally separate disciplines of design," noted AIGA Executive Director Richard Grefe. "These partners have adopted The Living Principles framework to promote sustainability throughout their organizations and encourage their stakeholders to use it to drive business decisions." A slate of ambassadors who advance the Living Principles best practices and champion them through their thought leadership include sustainability luminaries like Joel Makower, Nathan Shedroff and Adam Werbach.
Contributors are invited to address any relevant sustainability topic through articles, suggestions for best practices, case studies, opinion pieces, reviews, presentations, podcasts, events, videos and student work. To ensure the quality of its educational resources, editors will review certain content before it is published, while ensuring that user-generated content is dynamic and collaborative.