The chief and most monstrous characteristic of our time is that the methods of manufacture which we employ and of which we are proud are such to make it impossible for the ordinary workman to be an artist, that is to say a man responsible not merely for doing what he is told but responsible also for the intellectual quality of what his deeds effect. The ordinary workman has been reduced to the level of a mere tool used by someone else. However much skill he may have in his fingers and conscientiousness in his mind, he can no longer be regarded as an artist, because his skill is not that of a man making things. He is simply a tool used by a designer and the designer is alone the artist.

Designer Saul Bass created many of the world’s most iconic logos, as well as numerous memorable posters and title sequences.

Made from "plastic resins and inorganic fillers," the book itself is durable and, as the picture from a recent Algonquin camping trip shows, waterproof

Rather than a general overview of the book or William McDonough’s architecture firm or the amazing work it has done with everyone from Ford to the Chinese government, I’d rather talk about some of the conceptual distinctions that authors McDonough and Michael Braungart introduce.

Waste = Food

Outside of human activity, there is no such thing in nature as “waste”: every output of one natural process is the input for another. McDonough and Braungart urge us to “eliminate the concept of waste” and consider how things might be designed such that when we were done using them, their component parts and materials could be incorporated (ideally ad infinitum) into other processes, whether these are the organic processes of biodegradation or phyto/mycoremediation, or the technical processes of industrial upcycling.

Monstrous Hybrid

Drawing on Jane Jacobs, McDonough and Braungart characterize products that do not adequately separate their biological components (e.g. wool, hemp, rice husk) from their technical components (e.g. metals, plastics). When materials are mixed in this way, it becomes difficult or impossible to separate the components out at the “end” of the product’s lifecycle, and the valuable materials (both biological and technical) are landfilled and lost to further reuse.

Product Plus

You want a plastic bottle, but you get a plastic bottle with antimony; you want some paint for your house, and you get paint with chromium. Such undesirable add-ons define a “product plus”: something you want, plus something you weren’t aware you were getting and definitely don’t want. Often such hazardous chemical are added to products in order to offset the detrimental effects of other component substances, but Cradle to Cradle advocates just not including them in the first place. The book shares several stories of companies who redesigned products to exclude such unwanted addons and found that the overall result was a cheaper production process, as the need for special toxic chemical management and storage regulations and storage policies were avoided.

There are a number of other such concepts, like “feedforward” (instead of feedback) and the idea of seeing industrial production as just another sort of nutrient metabolism process, that the book goes into, all of which I find fascinating and all of which lend themselves to application to other fields. I can’t recommend the book enough.

Three images, drawn from research by Elaine Toms (citation in PDF above, all images taken from PDF above) comparing the “recognizability” of three different version of the same document, which in this case is a Chinese restaurant menu. The first two versions were recognized most often by study participants

two presentations of Chinese restaurant menu items, one with original formatting

However, the third, while recognized less often, was recognized twice as fast by participants.

third presentation of menu content, using original formatting but with non-meaningful information

In another experiment by Toms that Lombardi touches on, content from one genre (e.g. content from a menu genre) was formatted in a fashion typical for a different genre (in Lombardi’s example, as glossary entries).

When participants were asked to identify the genre they selected the genre of the format, not the content. So in this case they would have said this is a page from a glossary. This again reinforces the impact that form has on our understanding of a document.

restaurant menu content formatted as glossary entries

The take-away for web design is that when the information you’re presenting has a “native shape” — one that users will be familiar from the real world — don’t overlook it as a powerful and intuitive way of conveying meaning.