The Designers Accord

The Designers Accord is made up of more than
100,000 members of the creative community,
representing 100 countries, and each design
discipline. Half of the members of the Designers
Accord are outside the United States.
Almost every major design firm has adopted the
Designers Accord. The list includes: IDEO, frog
design, Continuum, Smart Design, ZIBA, BMW
Designworks, and Pentagram.
Corporate adopters include Autodesk, Adobe,
Johnson & Johnson (Consumer Product Design),
Steelcase, GOOD magazine, Sappi, Mohawk Paper,
and New Leaf Paper.
Among the educational institutions that have adopted
the Designers Accord: California College of the Arts,
Savannah College of Art and Design, USC design
department, Pratt, School of Design at Tecnologico
de Monterrey, University of Art and Design Helsinki,
and Swinburne University.
The two largest American design organizations–
AIGA and IDSA–and the global organization of design
colleges and universities, CUMULUS, endorse the
Designers Accord.
The Designers Accord is a California not-for-profit,
and was formed in July 2007.
To find out more, visit: www.designersaccord.org or
contact Valerie Casey at valerie@designersaccord.org

Creating Positive Impact through Collaboration
The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators,
and business leaders, working together to create positive environmental
and social impact.
Adopters of the Designers Accord commit to five guidelines that provide
collective and individual ways to take action. Becoming a member of the
Designers Accord provides access to a community of peers that shares
methodologies, resources, and experiences around environmental and
social issues in design.
The vision of the Designers Accord is to integrate the principles of
sustainability into all aspects of design practice and manufacturing. Our
mission is to catalyze innovation throughout the creative community by
collectively building our intelligence around issues of climate change and
humanity, and tackling those challenges with optimism and creativity.
We advocate inverting the traditional model of competition, and encourage
sharing best practices so we can innovate more efficiently and quickly.
We will:
Ask all adopters to engage in conversation about social and
environmental impact with every client and customer, and integrate
sustainable alternatives in their work.
Create a real-world and online network to enable conversation about
opportunities and challenges in creating sustainable products,
services, and businesses.
Fast Company magazine believes the Designers Accord “is on a path to
change the culture of the creative community from bottom to top, and
with it, the way everything is made, from toothbrushes to airplanes.”
BusinessWeek writes that the Designers Accord is setting “a new standard
for sustainability in design.”
GOOD magazine, Fortune, the New York Times, Dwell, Environmental
Leader, AdAge, and Creativity magazine, among others, agree that the
Designers Accord is revolutionizing the industry.

A packaging rant and kvetch

Christmas time is such a good time to get back in touch with what's going on in the world of packaging. Now that I have a child I'm exposed to many more types of packaging as well so my horizons have become very broad.

So here's the rant: I have purchased high-ticket items from Tiffany that weren't packaged with the security measures taken by many toy manufacturers. Case in point is the packaging shown here.

This is a toy car product from the Parents brand. Of course made in China. Imported by a firm in Quebec. To be fair - the cars are great. Gabriel loves them.

HOWEVER - it took me a interminable amount of time to get into this incredibly wasteful and frankly stupid package. It features multi-thickness and layers of corrugate; a tranparent acrylic lid; a cord handle; and, the piece de resistance - a whole whack of twist ties and little reinforcements to keep everything in place.

For God's sake - we're supposed to be greening the world. Get your act together packaging people. Recommend you check out the Designers Accord on the web. Designers can influence this process by not recommending ridiculous display and security redundancy for a simple little product such as this.