Speck Design partners with GM on a revolutionary energy journey. Discover the drive behind GM's "zero, zero, zero" vision and our role in shaping the future.

We should care less about greenwashing, not because it's okay but because there is a more nefarious player lurking on the environmental scene. One that is all too conveniently shadowed by what boils down to poorly thought-out or deceptive PR practices.

Speck makes an untraditional but strong business case for product developers and brands to adopt circular design practices for profitability across numerous metrics.

As any product designer knows, the decisions you make throughout the development process have an incredible impact and far-reaching implications. Nothing could be a better example of this than planned obsolescence. However, it is still a widespread design practice, especially in technology, and it is in direct conflict with the concepts embodied in the circular economy.

The purpose of this blog is to save you time and money with our research. We broke down our findings into five main business categories, then four specific receiver sub-categories: BIPOC-owned, Women-Owned, LGBTQ-Owned, Sustainable, and American Made, then gifts for him, for her, for them (gender-neutral), and kids respectively. Most of these vendors sell more than one item, making them all worth a look regardless of who you are shopping for. What's best is they are all small, independent businesses selling their goods and their dreams too. If that doesn't give you the warm and fuzzies, we don't know what will.

In the final blog of our Sustainable Technology series, we focus on the importance of environmental empathy and what designers are actually preserving by developing it. Plus, we look at embracing constraints as a way forward towards more innovative, sustainable design outputs and hope for the future. 

In Part II of our Sustainable Technology series, we explore how systems interconnectivity drives negative consequences from innovations and how designers can shift their thinking to avoid them.

Product and technology innovation is a notoriously double-edged sword, often creating as many negative consequences as it does benefits. In our three-part blog series, we will explore how designers can use The Law of Unintended Consequences and The Gaia Theory as jumping-off points for Systems Thinking as a way to stave off possible perverse environmental consequences from the products they design.