Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Strategies for Designing?

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle¹ – often referred to as the “3Rs” (Not to be confused with Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic) have been an imporant aspect of environmental stewardship since the seventies. Now that we find ourseleves in a contemporary climate crisis, how can we use the 3 Rs as design strategies? How does “reduce, reuse. recycle” contribute to an evolving sustainabilitist design practice; not just personal actions in one’s life.

Waste = Food

To help frame and understand the 3Rs as a design aid, the concept of “waste = food” was employed. As a premise, “Waste = Food” has been most contemporanesouly popularized through Cradle to Cradle.² Michael Braungart and William McDonough want us to understand that our concepting of waste is incorrect; we have a problematic relationship with waste. Nature produces no waste; outputs from one system are always inputs for another. Our current design and consumer cultures do not operate in this way. Karrie Jacobs points this out quite bluntly in her essay Disposability, Graphic Design, Style, and Waste: designers make garbage. Waste is just what we make – our inputs have only one output, trash! And trash must be sent away; not used for making more design. Maybe we can change that.

To internalize this students were given “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” as a set of design prompts. Reduce helps us with the waste side of our equation. Reuse and Rcycle help our previous waste befome new food. How can our creative waste from one design process become food for others? Reduction asks to think about different ways of minimizing. Reuse looks at how to use what we have to do more. Recycle questions the regular way of manufature. How do we utilize our materials in manmufactirig more items. How do we take finished products back to raw materials for new designs?

Reduce

Focus on strategies for reducing material and energy impacts. Reduce means to minimize outputs, conserve inputs, utilize tact and strategy in the form, the content, and the quantitites of objects.

Our “reduce” exercise asked students to choose a poster or other project and think about how to “reduce” it. This could mean reducing its size, its color palette, its amount of content, etc. And how can you do that reduction in granular steps. Show us how that reduction plays out. How far can you reduce? do you have to make things at all? What are the impediments to reducing?

• Reduce form.
• Reduce content.
• Reduce colors.
• Reduce material.
• Reduce energy.
• Reduce choices.
• Reduce size.
• Reduce number of typefaces.
• Reduce nodes on a vector path.
• Reduce hierarchy.
• Reduce […]

Project prompt: Bring a poster you have already designed. The files for the poster are a useful starting place. Iterate thgouth as many kinds of reduction as you can think of. Can you gradually reduce the size of the poster? How small can a poster get before it stops being a poster? Can you gradually reduce the ink coverage? How about the ink colors? Gradually reduce the information/content itself? Create a matrix of reduction to show all the different ways you can literally and figuratively reduce a design. Think about what opportunities this gives you moving forward on this project and in others in the future.

(Is minimalism the most “sustainable” aesthetic then?³)

Reuse

Strategies for making solutions last longer and finding other uses when finished. Reuse is a normal process in many fields. As graphic designers however, its not the most common methodology. We chose to apply the idea of material reuse to poster designing. students were asked to bring in old prints and we would make new aphoristic posters with or old work. Reuse focuses on materials in their present state. Reuse is using stuff as it is but for a new purpose. Reuse should constitute less work and less energy than recycling. Reuse ≠ Recycling. What are the impediments to reuse? What can we reuse in design? How can reuse be made conceptually useful? We reuse code all the time in digital projects; why not more 2D formal and visual elements? its not uncommon to reuse typefaces but why not other symbols, pictures, layouts, etc.?

Reuse is an interesting idea for a graphic designer: If designer’s do make so much waste ala Karrie Jacobs; then there should always be plenty of physical ephemera to reuse. This also seems to me that it might allow for reduction – if we are making more by hand; certain limitations exist, at least in terms of what is easily reproducable; the quantity of available forms; etc.

Project prompt: Bring old prints and posters and mockups to class. Create an aphoristic poster that has a waste = food or other sustainability related message only made from the prints and posters we brought to class. We will literally reuse existing designs for this poster prompt. Make one poster during our time in class; make at least one more on your own outside of class.

Recycle

Reclaim as much residual value as possible, prevent virgin materials and ideas from being needlessly extracted and used. The important idea of recycling is that you take a material and return it to its raw state. This is fundamentally different than reuse. It is about getting a material back to a raw state. How does one explore the “raw materials” of grpahic design? how does one return a poster or similar to its raw materials? Students collected past projects – visuals, typefaces, etc. – and we shared them all with each other. We then made new aphoristic posters recycling each other’s “raw materials.” What are the raw materials of a design that can be reclaimed to make design anew? Type? Color? Image? Shape?

Return a manufactured, processed material back into a raw material. Recycling implies taking something back to an initial, raw, pure state and then creating fresh, new things from the “renewed” raw material. This can be high energy; high effort. When you can’t reduce and you can’t reuse then you recycle. It is meant to be a last resort. What are impediments to recycling? Can we make recycling conceptually useful?

Project prompt: Create a central, shared folder or repository. Everyone must contribute “waste” digital files left over from past projects to the shared folder. Analyze what’s in the folder, and begin to think what the raw forms of the “materials” of our shared folder are – letterforms? color palettes? what? Create an aphoristic poster only made by recycling whatever you want from our shared dump of design “waste.”

Conclusion?

When you recite the three R’s, they are in an intentional order – easiest to hardest; pre- to post-; low input to high input. Reduce should be the initial focus. In our waste = food equation; if we minimize waste; if we reduce waste; do we reduce the opportunity for future creative food? In general, that’s probably not a concern since we are already over producing – at least in ways that don’t allow for sharing and reuse later. So, we reduce our initial wastefulness. Then the “waste” we do output can be much more easily seen as food instead of trash! Karrie Jacobs was onto something; but maybe she wasn’t seeing this opporunity for cultural reuse; creative reuse.

Reuse and Recycling are new areas to explore for the average graphic designer. You see reuse a lot in furniture, construction, art. Time to start seeing it in visual designing. Start to understand that waste = food, that everything is connected.

Fin.