Episode Theme: Exploring Sustainable Design for a Greener World

Guest: Christian Lodgaard, Senior Vice President of Design at Flokk Furniture, Norway

Defining Sustainable Design:

- Lodgaard emphasizes that sustainable design should improve industry sustainability and address environmental footprints.

- Iconic, eternal objects are praised, but longevity alone isn't enough. The focus must include reducing environmental footprints in production.

Circular Design Principles:

- Flokk follows circular design principles: low weight, few components, durable materials, long lifespan, and designed for disassembly.

- Transparent and intuitive architecture is encouraged to celebrate assembly and promote easy repairability.

Brand Building and Transparency:

- Lodgaard discusses the importance of transparent brand communication in addressing sustainability.

- Flokk's name change and brand redesign aimed to embrace human-centeredness and Scandinavian legacy while maintaining a global perspective.

Metrics and Transparency:

- Flokk has been transparent about sustainability, implementing environmental product declarations since 2004.

- The five, three principle focuses on using as little material as possible, choosing low-carbon footprint materials, and designing for disassembly.

Scaling Sustainable Initiatives:

- The challenge lies in scaling sustainable initiatives rather than introducing constant innovation.

- Discipline, patience, stamina, and joy are essential in creating fewer, high-impact products with longer market presence.

Personal Background and Inspiration:

- Lodgaard shares a personal story about his mother's influence on his path towards sustainability and industry.

- Growing up in Norway, surrounded by nature's challenges, influenced a design tradition favoring essential, durable, and functional products.

Future Initiatives and Scaling Challenges:

- The future involves scaling existing technologies and practices rather than constant innovation.

- Lodgaard stresses the need for systematic approaches and joyful initiatives to create sustainable products with a lasting impact.

Closing Thoughts:

- Host Mark Stinson emphasizes the importance of face-to-face interactions for meaningful connections and creative inspiration.

- The podcast continues to explore global creativity, actionable plans, and making positive impacts in sustainability.

Join in for future episodes where global creativity takes center stage.

Copyright 2024 Mark Stinson

  Welcome back friends to our podcast, unlocking your world of creativity. And today's topic is a world of sustainability as we try to build a more environmentally friendly, a more sustainable world. And we're going to talk about how to do that through design, engineering, even brand building. And my guest is Christian Lodgaard.

He's senior vice president of design at Flokk Furniture in Norway. Christian, welcome to the show. Thank you, Mark. Glad to be here. It was great to meet you during Oslo Innovation Week, and you were a primary speaker on the platform of this idea of how we apply creativity to building a more sustainable world.

Maybe you could bring us, first of all, up to date on the definition, what do we think about when we say sustainable design?

. So I suppose where I'd start is by, pointing out that to us and should be to most design is means to an end. We don't just design for the sake of design. We do it to do things preferably improve things. And then sustainable design should, of course, then do improvements to the sustainability and in industry, of course, it to strengthen the sustainability of industry, how can we continue to manufacture goods sustainably so that we can continue to do so also in future generations?

And then, iN many categories and certainly in the furniture category what's often boasted and raised is to produce iconic, eternal objects. Objects that people will keep and hold onto for their lifetime. And even maybe the kids would inherit it, which is all good and well.

When you think about that when would the improvement. Arise if I were to buy an iconic recliner for my home, that would never change. That improvement would actually take place at that moment in time, 15, 20 years from now, when I would have otherwise replaced it. That longevity, that iconic status, it's not enough in its own right.

We have to also address the footprint where that occurs when producing the item. So we need to do both. We need to design things that have as little environmental footprint in production as possible, that has the longest lifetime service life as possible, that, ages with dignity, is built to be repaired, maintained, and loved for a long time.

And then when the journey is Ultimately over not more to be had. It must be possible to recapture all the resources that went into it and bring those resources back into the cycle. Yes, that's what we need to do. And

I think most people think about the early part, like you said, the manufacturing, are we using recycled materials?

Are we using Low footprint manufacturing, either techniques or materials and even just the manufacturing process itself and how much are we emitting, into the air, into the water and so forth. Does your design thinking even start there and back to the

process? Absolutely. Absolutely.

So we maintain a set of circular design principles in in flock. So set of five principles bearings that we that we adhere to and that we try to improve on that will then make sure that we improve on three three metrics. So this is what we call the five, three principle. And it's, it's down to hard maths, if you're manufacturing operations like ours you'll find that 90, 80, 90 percent of the footprint of the company comes from the products and doing furniture, which doesn't emit anything in the use phase.

95 percent of that again is down to the material consumption. A lot of this will revolve around using as little as possible of as good materials as you possibly can in meaning. Durable long lasting, but also low carbon footprint materials. So if we do that, low weight, few components, choice of materials, long lifespan, and ultimately designed for disassembly. If we pursue all of those five points we know that we do the best for the climate, for reducing climate emissions, we do the best to reduce resource consumption, and we also make sure we omit any use of toxic substances.

Very good. At least we, the battle stands in the concept development, doesn't it? The minute you design the product, you build the architecture of the product. You've made all decisions about materials and assembly processes and even much of the logistics. And it's too late to start talking about or addressing the sustainability of it or the carbon.

That's an important point that you're making because you're saying, I think about the various elements, the basic elements of furniture. There's the wood and there's the coverings and there's the metal. And there's the fasteners and so forth, and you're right. So at the very outset, you've set the direction, haven't you?

Exactly.

So if we find that, we do we've got quite an active acquisition strategy in the company as well. So we have a fair bit of experience in taking on, acquiring other people's legacy and to improve. On the legacy is a is a fascinating how challenging that is on these these metrics, if you want if you have a certain knowledge about a kind of material that you need to do, you need to use, and, these days talking about climate change the materials you need to use are those that have been used already, aren't they, isn't it?

Yeah, good. So you've got to you've got to increase the use of post consumer recycled materials, and you can't just retrofit that, you have to design for it, you have to engineer for it, because your engineering outcome will be a different one.

Continue this thought on the circular economy or in the circular design process.

You've tried to reduce as much as you can at the manufacturing, but I loved what you said that, okay, 15 years from now do I need to get a new chair? A sofa, a desk, or can I extend the life of this one? And I thought one of the points that you made at the summit, and it was also brought up on things like electronics, was the repairability, can I continue the life of this?

And I guess, maybe in your case, is this patches is this, replacing a caster, fixing a drawer, what have you..

Yeah. So I think this is an, a very pressing topic in this in this arena of sustainable design too, that, you need to be able to maintain things.

You need to be able to repair things. And I also think that these days, that there's a general. Tendency that consumers want to relate to how their consumables or how their products are actually made, that you need, you want to understand how things are assembled. So for a piece of furniture and, 10 days, 10 years ago you typically want to have all your joints, all your assembly mechanisms invisible, a magic, magic assembly.

These days we're trying to pivot. Completely and say, let's celebrate how this product was assembled. Let's celebrate what kind of materials it was made from. Let's make it, clearly visible how this was put together, meaning also clearly visible how you can use it, take it apart and fix it.

Instead of trying to hiding the fasteners, we've tried to place them beautifully. Instead of giving them special screw heads, we give them standard screw heads where that you could operate with tools you have in your kitchen drawer so that you know how to dismantle it. You know how to take the seat off and if you need to replace the cushion.

It's transparent. Intuitive architecture of a chair or another object, I think it's aesthetically appealing and it may just makes a lot of sense.

Very good. And all of this that you're doing, it sounds very engineering. Of course, it's very design thinking. But you're also in charge of the company of the brand building the overall design even the redesign of the brand a few years back.

How does this fit in the sustainability thinking? How do you build that into the brand, in the company culture? Yeah.

You need to realize that these days a good piece of marketing is a very transparent, Piece of glass, if you like through which you look at an attribute of your product or your service.

, that might be an elaborate frame around that glass. But it needs to be highly polished and super transparent. The minute there's a slight tint pink or yellow you get suspicious, don't you? So I think, to that extent that you can create communication, a brand platform which is.

Transparent that offers that kind of insight into your ethos, what you're trying to pursue your purpose your design intentions, then you're doing good good marketing. When we did that name change a few years ago We had a need to come up with a name that could embrace this to embrace that the human centeredness of of what we're trying to to accomplish.

We wanted to provide a nod to the Scandinavian legacy of the company without limiting it geographically yeah, and we came up with with Flock, which I think embraces that quite quite well. Also, the company culture is embraced in that in that in that name. And for that sake, we do contract furniture, so for employers to furnish their offices and...

What they want to do is, of course, to, to create their flocks and using interior and furnishing as a part to create that culture is is a very valid and powerful mean.

AnD one of the topics at the conference, of course, was this idea of green washing and you're addressing this with this transparency, but, thinking about, Hey, it's easy to tell a story of environmental, care.

So forth, but it's another to tell the truth and be transparent and say, what's out there? Are you guys able to show these kind of metrics and measures, in a sustainability report if I call it that Yeah, it really says we're we're changing the way we work.

, so You know, we try to be very transparent in this and we have been for quite a while.

So that you can see what kind of contributors come how it adds up to key metrics like carbon footprint, percentage of recycled material, energy consumption, water consumption these aspects of a product so that you can relate to that when you acquire one that, You know that when I acquire this chair, it will bring about this climate change.

It will bring about this energy consumption, this water consumption and so on. And you can look into the details of how that figure aggregate. So I think, still, 19 years ago and the standard has evolved, the practice has spread, so there's a lot of us now, colleagues out there in in industry that use this way of declaring environmental performance.

It's still the golden standard, I would say, of of transparency in sustainable performance of products.

And thinking about your own creative background , and , how your philosophy was built, how did you come to embrace this and apply your creativity? In this direction,

if I may tell you a little story about my mom.

So he was my stature. I'm roughly 80. He lost half his weight during captivity. And of course for a girl aged 10 when he came back, that placed a strong imprint on her character and her ideals and aspirations. So that's Pulled her off in a direction academically and through her career, she co founded with friends, the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, where she also met my father later.

And that's their upbringing and their aspiration. And then they had their careers in academia, in politics international affairs. So I grew up with that kind of bigger picture, but also with an immense joy through other members of my family in, in building things and creating things.

And if you combine the two, combine the bigger picture with the joy of making things, the destination is called industry, right? Because in this is the beauty about the industry is that it scales. So if you want to do good and if you want to scale that effort, there's no better place to to be than industry.

So that spurred me into engineering and then design wanting to work with finished goods products, the way we relate to them. . And that's how I landed here. And then you add kids. And you start thinking about their future, and then it's very easy to mobilize a lot of energy and motivation , to prove, to demonstrate that, you can change, we can change this, we can really change the way objects are manufactured industrially, , we can take linear things and bend them to something very close to circular, probably completely to circular some day very soon.

Yeah, sharing

those personal stories. It seems and this might be a U. S. centered point of view, but there really does seem to be a love of design in Scandinavia, Norway, in particular, a love of design, but also a love of the environment, very outdoors, a very, we live on land and sea, we're very positioned in our geographic, world To really appreciate these things, and I wondered if you felt like you were a product of this environment, even

Oh, we all are.

Aren't we product of the environment that we're surrounded with? But yeah, it's it's a small by population. It's a small country. Small nation. So it's it's pretty dense around the capital of slow and some very few other cities. But then it's we're few and far between. Again so meaning that historically and culturally, we've had to deal with with climate with nature, and it, it's far north, so it changes there's warm light summers, but there's dark, cold cold winters, too, and you had to make the most of things and also make it pretty much on your own.

I think this has it. So in terms of how that influences design tradition, it brings us to an essential style. We create, we tend to create or favor essential objects, essential designs because There wasn't that much surplus, there wasn't that, that much room for ornaments or excessive material consumption or resource consumption at all.

You have to make robust, durable, functional. Essential product. It's not unique to Scandinavian design, but I think it has made it stronger, maybe, than than in many other places.

Now, looking towards the future, your company continues to grow. You were sharing with me that you have manufacturing and offices literally all over the world from Poland to even LA and the In California what do you see as future initiatives?

How do you keep getting better? It's like we, we've achieved what we've achieved today, the bar keeps getting raised.

Yeah, that's a good question. I read this this article from one of the partners of McKinsey a few weeks back on LinkedIn and he, they were onto how the climate crisis, the nature crisis doesn't really demand.

Too much innovation. It demands scaling on. I think there's there is a lot to that, but that there's a lot of potentials in technology that we know materials that we know waste streams that we can capture that the problem is really to take it in and to scale it. And , it's hard work.

I think it's hard work. And then we need to make sure to have a fair bit of fun along the way. I think we demonstrate that it can also be very joyful. And that joy can come out of of objects, even objects that are primarily made from waste fractions. So I think we need to, We need to get the foundations, the bearings, right?

In industry at large, we need to do the maths be transparent about where where the deficiencies lie and then be systematic in, in how we approach that. And then I think, you need to make it. Attractive. So that needs to be food for the left brain half.

But they need needs to be some food for the right brain half to so that it, we need to demonstrate that we can solve this. We can create objects with very low footprint with very high levels of circular consumption. And still objects that possess and convey a fair bit of the joy that went into creating them.

I think it's this systematic approach more than anything that we that we need. And then, and this is a tough one, the, the joy of bringing new things out to the market just for the sake of it. It's a mechanism in any competitive industry, and I think, to take a step back and not refrain from just not just launching the next thing, but launching something new when you have something which is genuinely better and different from what's already out there.

I think we can have all of these things are. Navigable. It's understandable. It's even available technologies and practices, but it's a bit of discipline, that goes into into it. I think we demonstrate how this can be quite successful in in Flocker and also be a strategy that can grow and scale organically and with acquisitions.

There's a lot of good points of that creative brief, that design brief that says if we've got something really good to bring to the market, let's let's create it, scale. You're bringing up a great point that of the scaling, we often talk about the, on this show, the creativity of coming up with the ideas, but the true innovation of bringing them out.

And that is the challenge, isn't it? That there's lots of ideas we could read about a new, Creative scheme every day, but is it scalable and will it make impact?

Exactly. And the more I work in this field, the more try to , grow wiser and better at this the more I return to the view that there's really no shortcuts, in, at least in the industry, there isn't that if there seems to be a shortcut, it's bound to get back at you someday. yoU just need Crack down on it. And but when you do, if you have the stubbornness, if you've assembled the right team if you have the patience, the stamina to do it, if you manage to bring the joy into it, you can also launch fewer products, but with really high hit rates.

And products that stand out in the marketplace for longer than they otherwise would. Yeah, . It can connect with sound good business objectives. , these are not conflicting, thoughts. No,

not at all. my guest is Christian Lodgaard.

He's senior vice president of design at Flokk Furniture in Norway Christian, this has been really great catching up with you again. As I mentioned, we met at this conference and on this podcast, I often talk about traveling around the world virtually, zoom has been a wonderful thing to keep us all connected, especially through the years when we couldn't get out and travel much, but I tell you that there's Often no replacement from being eye to eye.

We shook hands, we talked and it's great to reconnect. So I'm really encouraging people to get back out there and meet more people and meet and mingle and travel because I also took a lot as we've been talking about from the culture, from the surroundings.

And now that I can picture where you are, and where you work, it also brings a lot more of the creative light to that story. Yeah. Excellent. Great. Thanks, Mark. Thank you. And listeners, come back again next time. We're going to continue our around the world travels. We're going to talk to people who are inspired with new ideas who are organizing those ideas into actionable plans.

And most of all, we're going to talk about making the connections and the gaining the confidence to launch our work out into the world and make the kind of impact, especially in the areas of sustainability make. Positive impact in the world. And that's what it's all about. So until next time, I'm Mark Stinson, and we'll be unlocking your world of creativity.