SmashLAB: Designing change
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Image by www.designcanchange.org
Four years ago, graphic designers Eric Karjaluoto and Eric Shelkie were looking for ways to make their studio – Vancouver based interactive design firm SmashLAB – more sustainable. “We’d both watched An Inconvenient Truth,” Karjaluoto tells Granville. “We needed to do something.”
Karjaluoto and Shelkie started out with a commitment to minimizing their studio’s environmental impact, but they were hungrier than that. They wanted to make a difference outside their studio, as well. That’s when they turned to what they were good at: designing websites.
In its first year of operation, Smash LAB’s Design Can Change website [4] – an “initiative aimed at uniting the world’s graphic designers to use their influence and purchasing power to combat climate change” – inspired 1,500 graphic designers around the globe to pledge more sustainable business practices. Since then, the site has received over 100,000 visitors, with pledges from designers in more than 80 countries.
It was enough for SmashLAB and Design Can Change to make Time magazine’s annual Design 100 – a list detailing the 100 people and ideas behind today’s most influential design, a list that includes the likes of Yves St. Laurent, Ikea and Holt Renfrew.
“There is a power we designers have; we have the ears of decision-makers,” Karjaluoto says. Which is just how he and Shelkie believe graphic designers really can combat climate change. “We’re getting them to change how they create what they create, heading off waste before it happens. It’s about building smarter stuff.”