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Reader SurveyEditor's Notes
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart
You're hearing a lot about green; we are too. As we went to press with our story about kontentreal's Autodesk-sponsored series of PBS programs on the economies of environmental design (p. 38), I got a press release on another self-produced (Panasonic-shot) documentary on corporate environmental trends. If that sounds like an oxymoron, catch up. Green is smart business now — at least that's what the drumbeat says.
In fact, green energy and design technology is the next wave of innovative, irresistible technology. The technology you can already see is starting to turn heads (LEDs anyone?), but what is behind the curtain in R&D will energize even our not-very-green industry.
Autodesk's new director of sustainability, Lynelle Preston Cameron, who came over from a similar job at HP, says she thought she was hired to launch environmental initiatives, only to discover that it was already well on down the road. Autodesk's products — unlike many in our industry — are pretty low-impact. They're software. Corporately, the company had already looked at things such as packaging, sustainable procurement policies — the various “triple-bottom-line” things that improve efficiency, reduce costs, and shrink the company's environmental footprint.
But Preston Cameron is more focused on the “triple top line” — on the vast opportunity that Autodesk sees when it thinks about enabling design and media innovators worldwide who will ride this wave. Sustainability design, Preston Cameron says, is really just smart design, and it will eventually become the norm. In the meantime, there's a curve for designers and producers learning to factor environmental impact and energy efficiency in practical and aesthetic terms.
“We can make it easier for designers to visualize and make sustainable choices,” she says. “And those are the designers who are going to be in demand.” Similarly, Autodesk is looking at ways to help media and entertainment customers build more sustainable pipelines and to plan production in ways that chew up fewer resources. Preston Cameron says she understands the corporate responsibility to be lower-impact. But her imagination is fired by the idea of not just being “less bad,” but actually making meaningful change possible and “working on the right problems, with the right people through technology. We want to shape the discussion beyond sustainability and equip our customers to lead,” she says.
