FROM WHERE I SIT

How Green Was Your Mock-up?

How great to be in an industry where the principles of sustainability are around us all of the time. Of course, the challenge is to keep pushing further as to how and where we actually practice these principles.

If your carbon foot print is measured, in part, by how much we DON'T consume, then could it be the time to rethink the concept of the mock-up? Yes, a mock-up can be a helpful way for a client to choose which manufacturer best interprets the design concept proposed for their environment. It is not unheard of in the bid process to ask  three, four or even five manufacturers to each provide a mock-up as part of there response to an RFP. And like the Academy Awards, there can only be one winner in such a competition. But unlike the Academy Awards, the loosing performers can’t be easy sent back to make-up and wardrobe to try out for a new part. The unfortunate fact of the mock-up process is that since the specifications are so exacting to that one project that most of the product can’t be reused. And there is not a big market for single work stations even at a very attractive reduced cost.

The sad reality is that often the loosing contestants languish somewhere in a warehouse until their storage cost becomes prohibitive and then they end up in a land-fill somewhere. The end result is that three, four or five times the amount of materials is produced to create the one final mock-up that the client will choose.  And do we factor the production of all of the mock-ups produced into the carbon footprint of that final mock-up when we total how sustainable our project was? I wonder.

But we do have alternatives. First are the showrooms of the various manufacturers. Here a client can see the detailing and quality of the product being considered. Of course, we know that often clients have difficulty making the imaginative leap from the theory of product in a showroom to how it will actually look in their own space. This could be a great opportunity to take advantage of all of the amazing computer programs that can produce renderings of astonishing reality and detail. And renderings can be produced much faster than a mock-up and then tweaked, reconfigured or completely changed in their color palettes in ways that mock-ups never could.

We know that we can’t save the planet by continuing to assume that we can keep doing things as we always have without paying the consequences. I would love to hear of any other creative green alternatives to our current assumptions about the mock-up process. As an industry we have shown incredible leadership to all sectors of manufacturing to work toward a sustainable future. Now let’s shine our focus on this one particular factor in our world and see what giant step we can all take forward.