You have gotten involved in designing durable goods that can be disassembled and reused. What are the coming trends in this area, and how has it changed since you began those types of projects?

The delightful thing that’s happened is that most of the examples we have worked through in terms of changing the design of products have resulted in cost savings for the producers, because the products get simpler. If they’re designed for disassembly, oftentimes their assembly becomes simpler. For example, if something is screwed together with 50 screws, when you stop and think about having to take it apart, you start to question every screw. And you start to wonder why things couldn’t clip into each other and get held together by one screw instead of five screws, things like that. So all of a sudden the whole idea that you would take something apart makes the design of putting it together simpler. Another thing we’ve found [in designing goods for reuse] is that we’ve reduced regulations by looking at all of the chemicals that go into products and using chemicals that are safe.

Can you give an instance of how you’ve reduced regulation?

Textiles is a good example. In textiles we’ve looked at thousands of chemicals. By using only the ones that are safe, we find that the product doesn’t need to be regulated, because there’s nothing there that’s dangerous. Take, for example, a textile from the manufacturers Rohner and Designtex, where we used 38 chemicals instead of the hundreds that would be used normally. What happens is the water coming out of the textile mill isn’t contaminated. And the product itself isn’t contaminated. So all of a sudden the whole regulatory environment is changed. You don’t have to handle materials specially because they’re dangerous. You don’t have to file lots of reports on your handling of various materials because you’ve essentially removed them from the design frame.

How can we spread this approach so we seriously cut back on the use of dangerous chemicals?

On the design side, there are a lot of tools that will be in the hands of designers. So if somebody’s deciding they want to make some plastic red, we’ve already cataloged the different reds that aren’t dangerous that could be used for plastics. A designer can quickly access the database with these ingredients that are positively identified, so you don’t just say, “Give me plastic, and make it red.” You can say, “Give me this plastic because it’s recyclable, and make it that red because it’s safe.”

What lessons did you learn when you were creating sustainable product designs for Nike?

I think seeing your customer as part of your family is really important, seeing that you’re in a relationship with your customer when you sell them a product. And it’s not an abstract thing; there is a physical transaction that’s occurring that has an emotional connection.

So, for example, say I sold you a pair of shoes, and now you’re finished with them and they’re these sweaty old crummy things. What are you supposed to do with them? It would be easy to throw them in the wastebasket, just throw them out. But if you’re part of the family, you could say, “Well, maybe I’m going to get some money back from these shoes. I could get a discount on my next pair if I bring them back.” And you could ask, “Why would a company give a discount in exchange for old shoes that they then have to grind up or recycle and take care of? It’s really just a cost.” But the fact of the matter is, companies like Nike could really be seen as companies that provide shoe services. In fact, they’re servicing your needs for foot coverings. They can also be seen as design and marketing companies. They’re not really manufacturers. They job out manufacturing. So, if 75 percent of a company’s budget is marketing and you develop a way, through the actual materials of the shoe or the product itself, to have the customer come back to you for their next product, then it makes recycling look like a real small part of your marketing budget. And all of a sudden the product becomes part of your marketing for the next generation. That’s the real value in this. It’s not going to be the molecules and the value of those molecules per se. It’s the relationship between the customer and the supplier that is the valuable thing.

You’ve been called a utopian. How optimistic are you now?

I think we have to stay optimistic if we’re designers, because designers wake up every morning trying to make the world a better place. So the idea is to say, “Things could be better if we apply ourselves in different ways.” On the one hand designers are optimistic that, as a species, we’ll rise to the occasion and see that we have a fundamental design flaw: We don’t recognize that our processes could integrate with natural systems in delightful ways instead of destructive ways. So I’m optimistic that we’ll smell the coffee at some point and start to rise to the occasion. As far as whether it’s too late or not, there are certainly harbingers of doom and gloom everywhere that we see and hear about on a daily basis. It sounds like the train has left the station on a lot of these things. And a lot of these things are going to take decades to transform and to heal. The climate change and melting [of glaciers and polar ice] issue is obviously something that’s apparently under way and cannot be turned on a dime. These things are going to take decades to clean up and reverse. That will be done by design.