Sarah Rich posted an excellent summary of Saul Griffith’s presentation at Compostmodern 09 on Dwell’s blog. In response to Griffith’s t-shirt that read “Design won’t save the world. Go volunteer at a soup kitchen, you pretentious f**k” and his survey of our worldwide energy and emissions crisis, Rich said, “Saul Griffith knows how to deliver grim planetary outlooks with irreverent humor.”

Rich outlined Griffith’s lecture for those who could not attend this year’s Compostmodern conference:

1. Get used to numbers. It’s not possible to calculate the impact of a product or building you design without knowing some math.
2. The client is no longer the client, the planet is the client. Always. Designers must work with clients to understand that priorities revolve around doing what’s needed in order to reduce energy consumption and prevent further warming.
3. We need an heirloom culture, meaning that designers should be creating products that last so long they can be handed down from generation to generation.
4. We need to transform into a share economy, in which objects that we only use on occasion are co-owned or borrowed from a central source, reducing the number that need to be produced while benefiting from the service the object provides.

Full article here.