Grant Kristofek

What is your background?  Where did you go to school and what attracted you to Continuum?

I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, the son of a professional ballet dancer and a tax accountant.  While I was growing up, I was a full-time tinkerer.  I was always building various contraptions and was quite interested in understanding how everything worked.  In middle school, I joined the science club where we built model rockets, raced CO2 cars, and played with snakes, spiders and chinchillas.  My high school physics and chemistry teachers, Mr. Horton and Dr. Ngoi, ran a wonderful 4 year science program known as Chem-Phys which was incredibly influential on my life.  Their lessons emphasized the fundamentals of science and reinforced them through a hands-on experiment-based approach.  When I wasn't doing homework or practicing my distance swimming (I specialized in the 500 freestyle), I could likely be found in a nerd oasis aptly called the "Theory Center."  There, I rocked out to cassette tapes of Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead and worked on my Westinghouse project, "A Microscopic Study of Static Friction."  Mr. Horton was my mentor for the research, and his guidance really opened my eyes to the fascinating world of science, complementing my enthusiasm for tinkering and fostering my interest in engineering.

In 1998, I entered MIT where I gained my bachelor and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering.  Within the scope of mechanical engineering, I had a chance to explore many different subject areas.  I characterized aerospace materials at NASA, built experimental mobile manipulator robots for future Mars exploration in the Field and Space Robotics Lab, developed a conceptual medical device to treat cataracts in developing countries, and created an automated instrument for testing small single fibers of materials such as hair, silk, and Kevlar® in the Bioinstrumentation Lab.

My diverse experiences at MIT made me thirsty for an equally dynamic post-collegiate environment.  After exploring many industries that didn’t really strike my fancy, a friend of mine recommended that I interview at the design firm where she worked, Continuum. The company impressed me in a number of ways, but it was the incredible people I met during the interview process, and the focus on people in general, that really motivated me to join Continuum.

What is your role at Continuum?

I have two complementary roles at Continuum.  I am a mechanical engineer in our product innovation practice and am also one of the company’s two sustainability champions.  As an engineer, I help our clients to make their ideas real in the technical sense.  I have worked with a broad range of clients including American Express, Sun Microsystems, Pepsi, Starbucks, U.S. Genomics, and several startups, as well.  The diverse project work has given me insight into and sensitivity to the technical and business considerations of several distinct industries.

As sustainability champion, I have had the opportunity to help Continuum understand and implement sustainable principles in our design practice and operations.  My co-champion, Mark Bates, and I are responsible for driving sustainable thinking within Continuum, with our clients, and in our industry. 

How did you get into sustainability?

My path to sustainability was not direct or immediate.  The environment always seemed to me like it was doing just fine in my hometown of Evanston, Illinois, where visitors are a greeted with sign declaring, “Welcome to Tree City USA.”  Growing up, the motto at my house was always, “why should we recycle when everyone else does?”.

When I was at MIT, I began to meet people who had traveled much more than I had, and through their stories, I gained understanding that things in the world weren’t “exactly perfect” as I had imagined.  In particular, I had an opportunity in 2001 to work with recent MacArthur Genius Award winner Saul Griffith to help develop a robust, low-cost technology to prescribe eyeglasses to people in developing countries.  This was one of the first points that I really began to see first-hand that there was a major disconnect between the world I grew up in and the world abroad.  Not long after that, I lived with several folks who spent a lot of time in Africa working with AIDS patients, and by that point, I had developed a far clearer picture of the state of the world.  Latent concern from these two eye-opening exposures motivated me to embark on a path that has led to many interesting, and often surprising, discoveries.

How is Continuum leading the way in sustainability?

Continuum has taken the stance that sustainability is an opportunity for innovation.  We have chosen not to consider the issue as its own separate initiative but rather as one of our core business objectives.  To that end, we have worked closely with our local colleague and resident sustainability guru, Ben Linder, to develop a curriculum to educate our entire staff on the fundamentals of sustainable design.  Ben is the Associate Professor of Design and Mechanical Engineering at nearby Olin College, and through his own lifelong passion for the topic, he has developed an extensive knowledge of the risks and problems facing our planetary environment and also the design approaches which we might employ to mitigate them.  Our interactive 12-hour workshop series introduces top issues concerning Earth's ecosystems and resources, presents current thinking around solutions to sustain them, and engages participants to envision novel sustainable solutions.  So far, over 80% of our staff has participated.  We offered the course for free to our clients last April and offered a second round again in early October 2008.

To keep our team actively engaged in the pursuit of sustainability, we are working to integrate sustainable thinking where possible on every project.  We've also worked closely with our marketing team and program developers to attract clients who want to engage in sustainable design and to integrate green solutions into the scope of work for new proposals on incoming client projects.

We have also looked candidly at our operations and have made changes to help us "walk the walk."  Our efforts include early adoption of the Designer's Accord; measurement and disclosure of our carbon footprint; offsetting of all our facility emissions with Renewable Choice 100% Wind RECs; participation in the EPA's Climate Leaders program; institution of recycling, composting, and reuse of scrap materials; an effort toward "green" catering; e-Steward-certified disposal of all e-waste; sourcing of EPEAT-certified computing equipment; pursuit of LEED certification for our facility; investigation into solar panels for our roof; and several other initiatives such as switching our lighting to CFLs and ordering local, seasonal floral arrangements for our front desk.

What are the big questions your clients are asking regarding sustainability?

Our clients have had many concerns about sustainability: Will it cost more?  Will we be accused of greenwashing?  Will our customers even care about a green product?  How will we know if it's really green?

While we can't always have a precise answer for our clients without digging in and doing some research, Continuum has invested a good deal of effort and resources to address these sorts of concerns.  In addition to our ongoing sustainability education efforts, one particular project we've undertaken has piqued our clients' interest quite a bit.  It's called Colorblind, and it's an investigation we've carried out to understand the consumer connection.  The goals of our nationwide study were to understand how people think and feel about their choices in relation to the environment and to help consumers make green choices by communicating to them appropriately through design.  Our findings will be published very soon on our website, www.dcontinuum.com.

Tell us about your involvement with Colorblind.

SI've been involved with Colorblind from the earliest planning stages back in the fall of 2007 until now as we are beginning to unpack the data and present our findings.  Early on, we engaged a large team of folks from various disciplines around Continuum.  People from our design strategy group, brand experience team, and product innovation practice devised a research plan and brainstormed an assortment of activities to help us gain insight into the American consumers' relationship with sustainability.  We then took our show on the road, interviewing teens, young adults, singles, families, and retirees from Boston, Fort Collins, and Atlanta.  I participated in several interviews in Atlanta. To substantiate our findings, we partnered with Communispace, who manages a collection of over 300 private online communities representing various industries and interest categories.  Using activities we derived from our qualititative in-home interview process, Communispace helped us conduct an extensive quantitative study of over 40 different online communities with 6,500 individuals representing all 50 states.

Most recently, I've been helping the core Colorblind team focus their learnings and identify ways to apply them to our work.  I'll be speaking about Colorblind at The Green Event in NYC on September 18 as part of a retail panel called "Creating Green."

What do you think is the next big thing in environmentally considered product design?

I think the truest form of sustainability will be driven by designers who embrace the design principles of nature.  As they design products, and increasingly services, they will expand their scope of consideration to include holistic systems, entirely coupled to the flows and processes of natural ecosystems.  They will create products that don't subscribe to the concept of waste.  They will eliminate the use of materials that contain persistent toxins when those materials cannot be properly contained in use or disposal.  Furthermore, they will draw energy from the vast pool of renewable, non-depleting sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power.

I think the one of the great goals of environmentally considered product design is the implementation of such systems level thinking, often called "cradle-to-cradle" thinking.  Some thought leaders who I look to for inspiration in this realm are Gunter Pauli, the founder of Zero Emissions Research Initiatives (ZERI), and Janine Benyus, founder of the Biomimicry Institute. They both share an optimistic and pragmatic approach that I find to be technically feasible and visionary.  I also see Van Jones as a critical voice as he calls for an end to social and economic woes through the cultivation of "green collar jobs" - the greening of the work force.  We have a lot of work to do to restore and maintain our natural balance, and doing so will be a team effort requiring an ever-growing reconsideration of our natural environment by all stakeholders.

What has been your favorite project at Continuum? Why?

My favorite project so far at Continuum is one we recently completed for Sun Microsystems.  Sun realized that the out-of-box experience for significant technology purchases often falls short of end-user expectations.  We worked with them to redesign that experience for their T2000 Ontario server, the world's first eco-responsible server.  Our team of designers, engineers, and sustainable packaging experts considered every touch point, both from an interaction perspective and from an environmental impact perspective.  We went beyond the packaging itself and examined the entire life cycle of the server shipment system. 

The depth of our research led us to some enlightening discoveries that informed our final design in compelling ways.  We determined that the server itself has an environmental impact hundreds of times greater than any packaging, and therefore our imperative was ensuring that the server would not be damaged in transit.  We ultimately designed a reusable shipping package with a tough exterior shell made from recycled HDPE plastic to protect the technology within.  The packaging concept offers a greatly improved out-of-box experience and can be reused for multiple shipments, resulting in an overall environmental impact far lower than even the most economical cardboard shipping containers.  The project is a great example of how a small design team with diverse perspectives and a broad scope can create an improved user experience while simultaneously reducing environmental impact.

To find out more about Design Continuum, visit www.dcontinuum.com.

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