Episode 3 – Lisa Zimmermann

Lisa Zimmermann joins Eric to share her research and teaching tips in sustainable design from her day job as Lecturer at Griffith College in Dublin, Ireland. She laments how much we still don't teach in design school – from where paper comes from to the life cycle of the products we make, and how changes in our design curriculums don't come fast enough to match the quickly changing times.

About our guest

Lisa Zimmermann is a German-Irish design researcher and educator specializing in "climifying" the profession of Communication Design.

While her passion for advertising, copywriting and design persists until today, she realized early on that she couldn't work for traditional ad agencies for moral reservations towards working for clients she doesn't consider ethically sound.

Her initial research into Sustainable Graphic Design Practice in Ireland, undergone during an M.A. in Design Practice led her to specialize in this niche area of Graphic/Communication Design. According to her findings, Sustainable Graphic Design can only be achieved through close collaboration of the design, print, paper technology, and IT sectors, and she made an effort to work in all four of them, to gain a deeper understanding of their point of view and pain points. An M.Sc. in Environmental Sciences at Trinity College Dublin led her to undergo research in environmentally friendly paper sizing options – paper sizing is the process of coating paper with starch and chemical ingredients to make it possible to print on it.

Lisa currently lectures a broad range of students in the Design faculty of Griffith College in Dublin, Ireland in the areas of web design, typography, communication design, and digital tools/software skills. But rather than just integrating sustainability principles in the existing modules she teaches, she is also developing a "Certificate in Sustainable Communication Design" program aimed at professionals.

Lisa is passionate about her dog Milo, gardening, learning, cold-water-swimming, and her new podcast "Conscious Communication Design" (available on iTunes, Spotify, etc). She also hosts workshops on Digital Environmentalism and wants to expand her network, so please get in touch!

On the web

lisazimmermann.com

Music in this episode

The musical guest is Kurt Bielema performing "Passing Phase".

Theme music by Casual Motive

Climate Design Assignments

At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.

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Episode Transcript

Eric: On this episode of Climify. I'm joined by Lisa Zimmerman. Lisa Zimmerman is a German, Irish design researcher and educator specializing in clarifying the profession of the communication designer. She currently lectures abroad at a broad range of students in the design faculty at Griffin college in Dublin, Ireland.

She specializes in the areas of web design, typography, communication, design, and digital tools and software. But rather than just integrating sustainability principles into the existing modules, she teaches, she's developing a certificate and sustainable communication design program aimed at. Professionals.

You can also find Lisa as host of the conscious communication design podcast, which is available on all regular podcast platforms. You can also learn more about Lisa on her website. Lisa zimmerman.com. That's lisazimmermann.com And on Twitter and Instagram @CCDByLisa.

[00:02:45] Eric: Glad to have you here. Lisa, we're excited that you, you're in Ireland and we're excited that you, despite the time zone difference, found the time in the day, to talk with us here on Climify, so I just wanted to start things off by, letting everyone know who you are and getting the basics, what you do and, where do you live?

[00:03:15] Lisa: Thanks, Eric. And thanks for having me. Um, I think, um, if I were to describe what I do around, I, I usually say I'm a design researcher and also educator. Um, so my background is in communication. Yeah. And I specialize in sustainable graphic and web design, which I kind of call a conscious communication design for myself.

But that's true too, like terminology mostly.

[00:03:43] Eric: Trademark that, right?

[00:03:44] Lisa: Yeah. Well, see, it's mostly due to sustainability having that like ambiguity, um, with, you know, often being interpreted as like a business term. And then I don't really like the term graphic design either because hardly anyone really works as just a graphic designer anymore. It's kind of like it's the, you know? The old term for a profession that doesn't really exist anymore.

Like nowadays you're not just a graphic designer. You are also. You know, UX or web designer or whatnot, like it's, that's why I prefer communication design as a term. But then in the end, when it comes to sustainable graphic design, this is kind of like a coined term that we can find online when we're looking for, you know, what, the thing that we do, like you and I.

So that's kind of why I need that term. And um, whenever I write or publish something online, I would always use, you know, sustainable graphic design, but I'm kind of trying to add web design to that as well. So sustainable web design, and it's kind of like, uh, another niche area, but there's more and more written about it as well.

And that's fine. It's, it's very important for us as well. Um, to consider the website of things because most graphic or communication designers are doing web-based products as well.

[00:05:02] Eric: And there's probably a lot of people. And I was in this category when I first was doing more UI /UX work, where I felt a lot better when I was doing it because I wasn't making these things that then, you know, we're headed probably to the landfill, but there's a lot more environmental impact with things that you make that are hosted on it.

[00:05:23] Lisa: Exactly, exactly. And we need to consider their impact as well. Um, there's something I heard recently is if you have a very, if you have very little impact or the product that you're producing or designing has very little impact, it impacts almost gets like, uh, accelerated by, um, you know it but let's say an email, for example, it's very low in, uh, in, in file size.

It's, what's, it's a couple of kilobytes. So, it is seemingly unimportant. If you think about, you know, storing an email, sending an email, keeping it in your inbox, not deleting it. Um, but then of course this adds up and because we're not considering it as much because it's such a little impact. Um, but that's why emails are dangerous.

Really.

[00:06:13] Eric: How many millions, billions of people have are doing that? Right? It's just

[00:06:17] Lisa: Yeah.

[00:06:18] Eric: not to leave them in an

[00:06:19] Lisa: And especially this year, I find with everything that we do online or the, like, for example, my lectures are being recorded online, whether I'm doing them in person or not, they have to be like recorded in a stored in a cloud. But I just kept thinking, God, it's like hundreds of hours of me talking in an online cloud.

And I haven't been warned by the system so far that any of those recordings have been deleted. So that must be. Hundreds of gigabytes at this stage of my online recordings and it's not just me. So yeah, it does make you, you know,

[00:06:53] Eric: Now what's the climate footprint, all the zoom classes we've been teaching?

[00:06:57] Lisa: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a tremendous amount of data that needs to be stored.

[00:07:04] Eric: So, I'm wondering then, you know, you, most folks that I've met that are doing what we're doing, and social and environmental justice in the design world, or even outside of the design world has had some sort of like an epiphany or something happened to them that caused them to get involved. So, I'm interested in how you got involved in sustainable design and sustainable design education.

[00:07:29] Lisa: Yeah, I love that question. And I'm sure you get some really interesting responses from other people there as well because it's something that is in the end, quite personal. I think whoever, uh, focuses on, uh, sustainability, uh, probably does it out of, you know, uh, yeah.

For, for personal reasons, mostly, uh, for most people I'd say, um, I think I've always been very good at questioning everything myself. Yeah.

Even when I was a kid questioning and not necessarily answering, but questioning was very good at that. Um, but myself, my own morals and beliefs, uh, but also my surroundings. So, um, I became vegetarian, I was 10 years old, for example, and then, uh, um, later o