"Take the thing that you think everyone would agree on, and turn it around." That's the advice Valerie Casey, green-eyed third child of Irish immigrants, got when writing her first high-school paper, on My Fair Lady. "I actually remember the thesis statement: 'Henry Higgins wished he was a woman.' It was too much! But I remember getting an A on it."
Casey, 36, has since followed her own charmed and counterintuitive path. She was the youngest-ever associate partner at international design firm Pentagram, an executive creative director at strategic-creative consultancy Frog Design, and is now global head of digital experiences at industrial-design powerhouse Ideo. She has masterminded projects as diverse as a Neutrogena product line for Johnson & Johnson; Barnes & Noble's entire digital-interaction strategy, including its intranet and in-store kiosks; the controllers and user interface for XM satellite radios; and digital strategies, Web sites, mobile applications, and games for Dell, HP, MTV, Nike, Samsung, and Virgin.
But most recently, she has lent her star power and professional expertise to a nonprofit venture: the Designers Accord, formerly (and now informally) known as the Kyoto Treaty of Design. Its adopters pledge to reduce their organizations' carbon footprints, raise social and environmental impact with every client and every product, and -- rare in a fiercely competitive industry -- collaborate with one another.
Casey's project is being hailed as one of the most innovative approaches yet to greening the profession. In less than a year, more than 100,000 firms and designers from all disciplines -- one global generation of designers, better than half from outside the United States -- have signed on to the Designers Accord. Its message is spreading virally, from the industry to its corporate clients and to schools that are training design's next generation. In short, it is on a path to change the culture of the creative community from bottom to top, and with it, the way everything is made, from toothbrushes to airplanes.
The Designers Accord is neither a governing body like the American Institute of Graphic Arts (the largest industry organization) nor a third-party certification standard like LEED. It is an agreement to reroute design, manufacturing, and even the economy toward a livable ecological future. "Our goal isn't to create a thing. It's to re-create our mind-set," Casey says over iced tea at San Francisco's Ferry Building Marketplace. She is strikingly beautiful, cool, and poised in jeans and silver Dior flats. "There's nothing like the high of going into Best Buy and seeing something you've designed. But there's also a sugar crash afterward, when you realize it's not exactly what you planned and someone's going to buy it and throw it away."
The Designers Accord began with a manifesto, "The Designers' Dilemma," that Casey published in Frog's online magazine last summer.
"I really expected the world to turn on its ear and say, 'My God, this is brilliant!' " she says with a grin. "Instead, I got these pittering little emails from guys in Canada that I kept in a Word document for posterity." But things took off when Casey sent the piece to eco-luminary Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism. "I felt that with her stature both at Frog and at Ideo she could do a whole lot to galvanize and catalyze a sense of unease that I had seen in the design community," Hawken says. "You see these windswept brushed-aluminum suppositories that can be launched into space -- they get into MoMA and win awards -- but we aren't designing for our children's children who don't want to live in The Road [Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic novel]. When I wrote The Ecology of Commerce, what I said was we don't have an economic problem, we don't have an ecological problem, we have a design problem. The environmentalists tell us this problem is about limits. But design tells you about possibility."
For the accord itself, possibilities are growing. This summer, its social Web platform, built pro bono by Boulder, Colorado's HiveLive, launched, and a series of town-hall meetings are planned over the coming year; they'll be regional, to build local communities and to keep budgets and carbon footprints to a minimum. Designers are uploading case studies, sharing best practices, and posting resources. One Silicon Valley designer blogged about asking a vendor whether a certain material was recyclable. "That is only the second time that I have been asked that," the supplier replied. "The first time was yesterday" -- by another Designers Accord backer.
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