"Sustainability is a design challenge," states Chris Sherwin, the new—and first—head of sustainability at future-gazing design agency Seymour Powell.

Sherwin is now working with the designers at the agency to build sustainability into the design process. He says that doing this is, in fact, a "non-negotiable imperative," especially as 80 percent of the environmental impact of most products is locked in at the early design stages.

He is also working with the Seymour Powell Foresight team, a group that looks even further forward than the agency as a whole, to tackle big questions about trends and ethnography "to help clients understand what they could do" with advice that's not tied down to the production of a specific product.

One of the conundrums that he is first to wrangle with though has to do with simple semantics—the stigma connected to the word "sustainability." He explains: "People think sustainability is about doom and gloom, or hardship culture—it's about losing out or giving up. I've seen this with vox pops or surveys constantly. When you ask the public about the term, you either get confusion or negativity. People tell me not to call myself head of sustainability because it's a really crap term for these reasons." Sherwin points to the fact that the Government has re-branded all of its sustainability initiatives instead talking about quality of life.

Ask the public about the future or future hopes and the response can be more positive. Sherwin argues that we need to pick up on this. "A lot of people have started adding social and environmental responsibility to what their notion of a better future is," he explains. Therefore, we shouldn't be ditching the word "sustainability" but trying to bring the positives of sustainable work to the fore. He points to Nike, which named its sustainability team Nike Considered. "The simple idea of being considerate in design works," he says. "At Seymour Powell, we're looking to come up with a term that captures all of the interest but doesn't lose the core of what sustainability is about."

Some industries, including consumer electronics companies, recognized the importance of sustainable design many years ago. The wider movement was helped by the release of the film An Inconvenient Truth and the Stern Review in the UK—both of which championed the argument for sustainability from an economic point of view.

Sherwin argues, however, that it has only been in the past two or three years that outfits in the advertising and design spheres have appreciated the importance of having someone in his kind of role. PR agencies led the way helping companies get attention for green products and initiatives. Advertising and product design agencies have followed, but there is, he admits, always the issue of cost for the latter. He says: "It doesn't always cost more to integrate sustainability into your design. The most obvious reason why not is the efficiency argument. If you use less materials or energy to produce a product, or produce less waste, it can save you money. That said—if you use materials that are from a renewable source, then they can cost more. Bioplastics or biopolymers, for example, are more expensive than oil-based plastics. Companies need to consider whether they will get an increased market share, or kudos, or customer loyalty from using the environmentally kinder materials."

Persuading smaller, what Sherwin terms "fleet of foot" organizations, to take a risk and adopt new materials or new ways of working is easier than changing the modus operandi of multinationals. You do, of course, have a larger risk of the smaller company not surviving. But there is always a certain amount of friction to change with whoever you are working, argues Sherwin: "I think this is an issue for any kind of up-stream project. The success rate is relatively low. I don't think the challenge for sustainable projects is any different. There are just lots of economic, technical, structural, and organizational reasons why it's quite tricky for companies to get innovations through their production process. I don't think pushing a new sustainability program through would be any different from pushing a new social media project through."

At Seymour Powell, Sherwin is now hoping to include sustainability as part of every brief, whether the client calls for it or not, simply as a value-added service. There are also several projects with a sustainable focus, which he is working on but can't yet make public. Seymour Powell itself has already earned its green credentials with the EDF Energy Eco Manager—a device that lets you wirelessly

control your appliances to monitor and control how much electricity you are using. In 2005, it helped launch the ENV, which was the world's first purpose-built hydrogen fuel cell motorcycle. For Sherwin, it's now not only a case of finding similarly green products; but also trying to introduce a sustainable angle to every project that the agency tackles. In these days of austerity and financial nervousness, that could be a huge challenge.