Michael Braungart after meeting with legislators  in Sacramento to discuss green initiatives the state is considering.

Eco-effective products and their processes should not only “do no harm,” but actually benefit the environment, people and the economy. That uncompromising design philosophy was outlined by Michael Braungart, the German chemist, and William McDonough, the American architect, in their seminal 2002 book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

Inspired by those principles, the non-profit Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute was launched in San Francisco last year to help California crack down on harmful chemicals in consumer products, mandated by a groundbreaking 2008 “Green Chemistry” law, and promote safe manufacturing standards everywhere. So far, some 90 American companies and more than 300 products have gotten the “C2C” stamp of approval and 400 companies in the Netherlands.

To ramp things up stateside, Braungart recently joined McDonough on a whirlwind tour of Northern California—his first visit to the U.S. in six years, promoting a new “C2C” website and a more streamlined, transparent certification system.

Although he’s known here for collaborating with McDonough, Braungart’s been an eco-activist for the past 25 years, first as a “Ph.D. who could climb chimneys” for Greenpeace Chemistry, which he helped create, then as a founder of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency, an environmental chemistry research group that now has offices around the world. In addition to holding a professorship in Rotterdam, Braungart’s focusing his efforts on EPEA and the design consultancy he runs with McDonough, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, continuing to work with companies to profoundly change the way they make things.

Joanne Furio: You met with legislators recently in Sacramento, introducing C2C to a new administration and new law makers. How were you received? Read more…

Ruediger Otte and Roman Lindebaum’s Greenwich Tea Time table. Image: courtesy the designers

The notion of a single designer creating an object that is finished when it rolls off the assembly line is as antiquated as Ford’s Model T. Increasingly, the decision-making power is being put in the hands of consumers, who are being asked to vote for potential product releases, customize their new purchases, and even design their own wares through open-source Web applications. It’s a broad-reaching and often grassroots movement in which individuals, from laymen to pros, are participating in the creation or modification of mass-produced objects, blurring the line between the role of designer and consumer. In his first curatorial effort, the industrial designer Yves Béhar—the founder of fuseproject, whose products include the $100 XO laptop, a jewel-like Bluetooth headset, and, most recently, hip glasses for needy Mexican children—explores these developments for an exhibition called TechnoCRAFT, opening at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for Contemporary Art on July 10. Recently, Behar spoke with me about this 21st-century arts-and-crafts movement and what it means for the future of design and the assembly line.

How do you define “techno-craft?”

It’s all these new ways in which people are bringing the notion of craft into design, the notion of self-made, self-crafted, self-developed products and software. The big phenomenon that the show is trying to explain and walk visitors through is this notion that while a lot of people said craft was disappearing, actually there’s a new type of craft, a new type of involvement of the human and the hand in the mass-production process. Read more…