Design makes a tremendous impact on the produced world in terms of usability, resources, understanding, and priorities. What we produce, how we serve customers and other stakeholders, and even how we understand how the world works is all affected by the design of models and solutions. Designers have an unprecedented opportunity to use their skills to make meaningful, sustainable change in the world—if they know how to focus their skills, time, and agendas. In Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable, Nathan Shedroff examines how the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how designers can bake sustainability into their design processes in order to produce more sustainable solutions.
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. This program melds the unique principles that design offers business strategy with a vision of the future of business as sustainable, meaningful, and truly innovative as well as profitable. Nathan is one of the pioneers in experience design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and requirements and explores common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful and has played an important role in the related fields of interaction design and information design. He is a serial entrepreneur, works in several media, and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers. Nathan speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including Experience Design 1.1, and Making Meaning, co-written with two members of Cheskin, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultancy, which explores how companies can specifically create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers. Nathan is also the editor of the Dictionary of Sustainable Management, a website and now printed book. In addition, he maintains an extensive set of resources on experience design. Nathan earned a BS in Industrial Design, with an emphasis on Automobile Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. However, fear of Detroit, coupled with a passion for information design, led Nathan to work with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness. Later, he co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry. Nathan was nominated for a Chrysler Innovation in Design Award in 1994 and 1999, and a National Design Award in 2001. In 2006, Nathan earned a Masters in Business Administration at Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, the only accredited MBA program in the USA specializing in Sustainable Business.
