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  Why not make soap the way the ants would? Soap manufacturers could retain centralized intelligence (the concept of “soap”), but develop local packaging, shipping, and even molecular effects. For example, shipping water (in the form of liquid detergent) increases transportation expense and is unnecessary, since there is water in the washing machine, laundry, tub, river, or lake where the washing is done. Maybe soap could be delivered in pellet or powder form and sold in bulk at the grocery store. Water needs differ in different places: different kinds of pellets and powder might be used for places with hard water or soft water, still others for places where people pound clothing on rocks, feeding soap directly into the water supply. A major soap manufacturer was beginning to think this way when it paid attention to the fact that women in India were using its soaps (which had been designed for washing machines) to wash clothing by hand, sprinkling the harsh soap onto the clothing with their fingers and then pounding the clothes on rocks at the side of the river. And the women could afford to buy only a small amount of soap at a time. Faced with competition from a more versatile product, the soap company developed a gentler product and began to produce it in small, inexpensive packets that the women could open on the spot. Such thinking can go much further. For instance, manufacturers could reconceive soap as a product of service, and design washing machines to recover detergent and use it again and again. A washing machine could be leased preloaded with two thousand loads’ worth of internally recycling detergent—not nearly as big a design challenge as it sounds, since only 5 percent of a standard measure of detergent is actually consumed in a typical laundry cycle.

  Biologist Tom Lovejoy tells a story about a meeting between E. O. Wilson, the great evolutionary biologist who has written extensively on biodiversity (and on ants), and George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, around the time of the Earth Summit in 1992. Wilson was there to encourage the president to support the Biodiversity Convention being put forward by the majority of the world’s countries as a signal of their dire concern over this issue. When Wilson had finished describing the great value of biodiversity, Sununu responded, “I see. You want an endangered species act for the whole world . . . and the devil is in the details.” To which Wilson responded, “No, sir. God is in the details.”

  When diversity is nature’s design framework, human design solutions that do not respect it degrade the ecological and cultural fabric of our lives, and greatly diminish enjoyment and delight. Charles de Gaulle is reported to have said that it is difficult to manage a country that produces four hundred kinds of cheese. But what if, for the sake of market growth, all the cheese makers of France began to concentrate on producing individually wrapped squares of orange “cheese food” that all tasted exactly the same?

  According to visual preference surveys, most people see culturally distinctive communities as desirable environments in which to live. When they are shown fast-food restaurants or generic-looking buildings, they score the images very low. They prefer quaint New England streets to modern suburbs, even though they may live in developments that destroyed the Main Streets in their very own hometowns. When given the opportunity, people choose something other than that which they are typically offered in most one-size-fits-all designs: the strip, the subdivision, the mall. People want diversity because it brings them more pleasure and delight. They want a world of four hundred cheeses.

  Diversity enriches the quality of life in another way: the furious clash of cultural diversity can broaden perspective and inspire creative change. Think how Martin Luther King, Jr., adapted Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings on peaceful transformation to the concept of civil disobedience.

  A Tapestry of Information

  Traditionally, companies have relied on feedback for signals that influence change, looking backward to assess previous failures and successes, or they have looked around them to discover what the competition is up to. Respecting diversity means widening the scope of input too, to embrace a broader range of ecological and social contexts and a longer temporal framework as well. We can consult “feedforward,” asking ourselves not only what has worked in the past and present, but what will work in the future. What kind of world do we intend, and how might we design things in keeping with that vision? What will a sustaining global commerce look like ten—or even a hundred—years from now? How can our products and systems help to create and sustain it, so that future generations are enriched by what we make, not tyrannized by hazards and waste? What can we do now to begin the process of industrial re-evolution?

  If that laundry detergent manufacturer continued to think in this direction, it would move beyond the question of creating a detergent that is convenient to use and gentler on human hands to ask, Is it gentle on the Ganges? Will it foster diverse aquatic life? Now that we know what kind of soap the customers want, what kind of soap does the river want? Now that it is packaged for individual applications, how can the packaging be designed as a product of consumption that will readily biodegrade on the riverbank, contributing nutrients to the soil, or be burned safely as fuel, or both? What about fabrics that don’t need soap to get clean, that are designed to enjoy a “lotus effect”? (Nothing sticks to a lotus leaf.) One by one, the elements of a product might be redefined positively against an ever widening backdrop, until the product itself evolves and is transformed, and its every aspect is designed to nourish a diverse world.

  Working with a major European soap manufacturer on a shower gel, we set ourselves the design challenge of responding to the question, What kind of soap does the river want? (The river in question was the Rhine.) At the same time, we aimed to fulfill customers’ desire for a healthy, pleasurable shower gel. In the initial approach, Michael told the manufacturer that he wanted to define the product in the way that medicine was defined, proactively choosing the best ingredients. Given the nature of the product, the client company was more receptive to this approach than, say, a chemical company manufacturing house paints might be. Michael and our colleagues identified twenty-two chemicals in a typical shower gel, a number of which were added to counteract the harsh effects of other cheap chemical ingredients. (For instance, moisturizing agents were added to offset the drying effects of a particular chemical.) Then he and the team set about selecting a far smaller list of ingredients that would have only the effects they sought, designing out the intricate checks and balances of conventional formulas and resulting in a product that would be healthy for both the skin and the ecosystem of the river where it would end up.

  Once the list of proposed ingredients was compiled—a total of nine—the company initially refused to go forward with the product, because the new chemicals were more expensive than the ones it had been using. But when the company considered the entire process, not only the cost of the ingredients, it came to light that the new soap was approximately 15 percent cheaper to make, thanks to simpler preparation and storage requirements. The gel went on sale in 1998 and it is still on the market—but now in a pure polypropylene packaging after Michael and the researchers found that antimony from the original PET bottles was leaching into the soap.

  A Diversity of “Isms”

  Ultimately, it is the agenda with which we approach the making of things that must be truly diverse. To concentrate on any single criterion creates instability in the larger context, and represents what we call an “ism,” an extreme position disconnected from the overall structure. And we know from human history the havoc an ism can create—think of the consequences of fascism, racism, sexism, Nazism, or terrorism.

  Consider two manifestos that have shaped industrial systems: Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848). In the first manifesto—written when England was still trying to monopolize her colonies and published the same year as the Declaration of Independence—Smith discounts empire and argues for the value of free trade. He links a country’s wealth and productivity with general imp
rovement, claiming that “Every man working for his own selfish interest will be led by an invisible hand to promote the public good.” Smith was a man whose beliefs and work centered on moral as well as economic forces. Thus, the invisible hand he imagined would regulate commercial standards and ward off injustice would have been working in a market full of “moral” people making individual choices—an ideal of the eighteenth century, not necessarily a reality of the twenty-first.

  Unfair distribution of wealth and worker exploitation inspired Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto, in which they sounded an alarm for the need to address human rights and share economic wealth. “Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers . . . they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the foreman, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.” While capitalism had often ignored the interest of the worker in the pursuit of its economic goals, socialism, when single-mindedly pursued as an ism, also failed. If nothing belongs to anyone but the state, the individual can be diminished by the system. This happened in the former USSR, where government denied fundamental human rights such as freedom of speech. The environment also suffered: scientists have deemed 16 percent of the former Soviet state unsafe to inhabit, due to industrial pollution and contamination so severe it has been termed “ecocide.”

  In the United States, England, and other countries, capitalism flourished, in some places informed by an interest in social welfare combined with economic growth (for example, with Henry Ford’s recognition that “cars cannot buy cars”) and regulated to reduce pollution. But environmental problems grew. In 1962 Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring promoted a new agenda—ecologism—that steadily gained adherents. Since then, in response to growing environmental concerns, individuals, communities, government agencies, and environmental groups have offered various strategies for protecting nature, conserving resources, and cleaning up pollution.

  All three of these manifestos were inspired by a genuine desire to improve the human condition, and all three had their triumphs as well as their perceived failures. But taken to extremes—reduced to isms—the stances they inspired can neglect factors crucial to long-term success, such as social fairness, the diversity of human culture, the health of the environment. Carson sent an important warning to the world, but even ecological concern, stretched to an ism, can neglect social, cultural, and economic concerns to the detriment of the whole system.

  “How can you work with them?” we are often asked, regarding our willingness to work with every sector of the economy, including big corporations. To which we sometimes reply, “How can you not work with them?” (We think of Emerson visiting Thoreau when he was jailed for not paying his taxes—part of his civil disobedience. “What are you doing in there?” Emerson is said to have asked, prompting Thoreau’s famous retort: “What are you doing out there?”)

  Our questioners often believe that the interests of commerce and the environment are inherently in conflict, and that environmentalists who work with big businesses have sold out. And businesspeople have their own biases about environmentalists and social activists, whom they often see as extremists promoting ugly, troublesome, low-tech, and impossibly expensive designs and policies. The conventional wisdom seems to be that you sit on one side of the fence or the other.

  Some philosophies marry two of the ostensibly competing sectors, propounding the notion of a “social market economy,” or “business for social responsibility,” or “natural capitalism”—capitalism that takes into account the values of natural systems and resources, an idea famously associated with Herman Daly. Clearly these dyads can have a broadening effect. But too often they represent uneasy alliances, not true unions of purpose. Eco-effectiveness sees commerce as the engine of change, and honors its need to function quickly and productively. But it also recognizes that if commerce shuns environmental, social, and cultural concerns, it will produce a large-scale tragedy of the commons, destroying valuable natural and human resources for generations to come. Eco-effectiveness celebrates commerce and the commonweal in which it is rooted.

  To make the process of engaging the various issues less abstract, we have created a visualization tool that allows us to conceptualize and creatively examine a proposed design’s relationship to a multiplicity of factors, such as those we have been discussing in this chapter. It is based on a fractal tile, a form with no apparent scale that is composed of self-similar parts. This tool allows us to honor the questions raised by people in positions that lean dramatically toward one sector or another (Economy, for instance) as deserving of respect when taken in context. The fractal is a tool, not a symbol, and we have actively applied it to our own projects, ranging from the design of individual products, buildings, and factories to effects on whole towns, cities, even countries. As we plan a product or system, we move around the fractal, asking questions and looking for answers.

  The extreme lower right represents what we would call the Economy/Economy sector. Here we are in the realm of an extremely pure capitalism, and the questions we ask would certainly include, Can I make or provide my product or service at a profit? We tell our commercial clients that if the answer is no, don’t do it. As we see it, the role of commerce is to stay in business as it transforms. It is a commercial company’s responsibility to provide shareholder value and increase wealth—but not at the expense of social structure and the natural world. We might go on to ask, How much do we have to pay people to get our product on the market and make a profit? If they are firmly entrenched in this corner—in the grip of an ism (pure capitalism)—they might consider moving production to a place where labor and transportation are as cheap as possible, and end the discussion there.

  If they are committed to a more stable approach, however, we press on. We move over to the Economy/Equity sector, where we must consider questions of money and fairness; for instance, Are employees earning a living wage? (Here, again, sustainability is local: A living wage is going to be different wherever you live. From our perspective, it would be whatever it takes to raise a family.) Moving into the Equity/Economy sector, the emphasis shifts more toward fairness, so that we are seeing Economy through the lens of Equity, in a sense. Here we might ask, Are men and women being paid the same for the same work? In the extreme Equity corner, the questions are purely social—Are people treating one another with respect?—with no consideration of economics or ecology; this is where we can discuss issues such as racism or sexism.

  Moving up to the Ecology corner of the Equity sector, the emphasis shifts again, with Equity still in the foreground, but Ecology is in the picture. Here the question might be, Is it fair to expose workers or customers to toxins in the workplace or in the products? Is it fair to have workers in offices where undefined materials are off-gassing, exposing them to potential health risks? We might also ask, How is this product going to affect future generations’ health? Continuing into Ecology/Equity, we consider questions of ecosystem effects, not just in the workplace or at home, but with respect to the entire ecosystem: Is it fair to pollute a river or poison the air?

  Now deep into the Ecology sector: Are we obeying nature’s laws? Does waste equal food? Are we using current solar income? Are we sustaining not only our own species but all species? (The ism position in this corner would be Earth comes first, a tenet of “deep ecology”; do these things without worrying about Economy or Equity.) Then on around to Ecology/Economy, where money reenters the frame: Is our ecological strategy economically fecund too? If we are designing a building that harnesses solar flows to make more energy than it needs to operate, the answer would be yes.

  Finally, Economy/Ecology: this is where eco-efficiency is coming from, where we find people trying to be less bad, to do more with less while continuing to work within the existing economic paradigm. Still, as we have seen, eco-efficiency is a valuable tool in optimizing the broader eco-effective approach.

  The Triple Top Line

  The conventional
design criteria are a tripod: cost, aesthetics, and performance. Can we profit from it? the company asks. Will the customer find it attractive? And will it work? Champions of “sustainable development” like to use a “triple bottom line” approach based on the tripod of Ecology, Equity, and Economy. This approach has had a major positive effect on efforts to incorporate sustainability concerns into corporate accountability. But in practice we find that it often appears to center only on economic considerations, with social or ecological benefits considered as an afterthought rather than given equal weight at the outset. Businesses calculate their conventional economic profitability and add to that what they perceive to be the social benefits, with, perhaps, some reduction in environmental damage—lower emissions, fewer materials sent to a landfill, reduced materials in the product itself. In other words, they assess their health as they always have—economically—and then tack on bonus points for eco-efficiency, reduced accidents or product liabilities, jobs created, and philanthropy.

  If businesses are not using triple bottom line analysis as a strategic design tool, they are missing a rich opportunity. The real magic results when industry begins with all these questions, addressing them up front as “triple top line” questions rather than turning to them after the fact. Used as a design tool, the fractal allows the designer to create value in all three sectors. In fact, often a project that begins with pronounced concerns of Ecology or Equity (How do I create habitat? How can I create jobs?) can turn out to be tremendously productive financially in ways that would never have been imagined if you’d started from a purely economic perspective.