Hosted by FRAME and Haworth, Sustainable Realities explored what’s needed to make the commercial meet the aspirational in designing sustainable workspaces.
‘Who among you is trying to design more sustainably,’ FRAME’s editor at large, Tracey Ingram asked an intimate crowd of interior designers and architects at the Patricia Urquiola-designed Haworth showroom in Amsterdam, with almost every single hand going up in response. She followed up with: ‘Who is having challenges with trying to design sustainably?’ and was met with an equal number of hands. It was further evidence that sustainability isn’t just a topic of conversation in the spatial design world, but is something the community is actively grappling with.
The theme of the night was ‘sustainable realities’, with a pair of keynote talks delivered by Ayça Doğan-Hartong, design director at CBRE Design Collective Netherlands and Dirk Zwaan, architect at Fokkema & Partners. Remarks from Patrick Abramoff, vice president global alliance international (EMEA and Asia Pacific) and managing director Benelux at Haworth, complemented this notion and captured the parallel experience brands and designers are having to become fully sustainable, describing Haworth’s own sustainability efforts as a ‘journey’. Doğan-Hartong and Zwaan spoke specifically about how workplace design represents the intersection of balancing sustainability with many different concurrent challenges like wellbeing, ergonomics, budget constraints and commercial needs, and what the role of the designer is in doing so.
Life-centric design
To attain this balance, Doğan-Hartong spoke on the notion that we need to move from human-centric design to life-centric design, with the role and responsibility of the designer playing a pivotal part. ‘We have to rethink how we do our jobs,’ she said.
Designing more sustainably isn’t only about convincing the client that they should push their ambitions further, but it's getting other stakeholders involved early in the design process. ‘Our job is also to make sure we think about the future, inspiring and teaching clients, suppliers, constructors, contractors – everyone who is involved – and convincing them by using examples and case studies, showing them what is possible.’ While designers have specific knowledge and expertise in designing such spaces, they cannot realize them alone. ‘We're the specialists, but we need other specialists to secure this process,’ she said. ‘We don't want a design that works only for the designer and for the client, but one that also works for the environment.’
Achieving 100 per cent circularity
Just as Doğan-Hartong proposes the reimagination of the role of the designer, Zwaan suggests rethinking the design process. ‘When you start to see waste as something valuable, you can change your way of thinking about the design process,' he says.‘If you realize the construction sector is responsible for half of all global CO2 emissions it’s clear that we have to change our way of working,’ said Zwaan. 'We have to go from a linear to a circular process.' It requires rethinking the design process, starting with the idea of dismantling instead of demolishing – this premise guided Zwaan and his team to achieve 89 per cent circularity in the design of the Nationale Nederlanden offices in Rotterdam and The Hague.
Reusing materials requires the designer to be much more creative; Zwaan gave an example of repurposing t-shirts found in the office building’s storage as acoustic panels – taking the no-waste assignment very seriously. For various reasons, it isn’t always possible to reuse everything, he admits. ‘When you do have to put new materials in think about it wisely; use EPDs and look to bio-based, renewable and recyclable materials,’ he said. But above all, Zwaan reiterated the importance of being agile: ‘You really need to be flexible in this. Architects and designers need to adopt a flexible mindset to achieve 100 per cent circular spaces.’
With Doğan-Hartong's and Zwaan's works representative of how design work can fully embrace circularity, questions from the audience reiterated one of the biggest challenges designers face: ‘How can you convince other clients who may not be as ambitious?’ Zwaan responded: ‘It's our responsibility as architects to tell clients, even if when they don't have sustainable ambitions to say, why not? When clients tell me about their circular, sustainable ambitions. I say: okay, that's nice, but why not higher? We have a duty to tell – and show – them what's possible.’
