Ty at Did You Know? in Rhode Island...

If you live in Rhode Island, you will be able to check out our Ty Recyclable Shower Curtain at the Did You Know? store in the next few weeks. They specialize in "products that sustain you, and the planet too" and have locations in both Wakefield and East Greenwich. Yeah Rhode Island!

Hello Intern!

In partnership with Brown’s Environmental Justice outreach group and RISD, Grain is developing an illustrated book depicting Rhode Island stories of Environmental Justice. The final result of the project will be used as an educational tool for afterschool programs on environmental health and possibly used for the upcoming Community Environmental College. 

To work on this project, Grain has adopted an intern! Please welcome Bee as we introduce her here. Bee will be working with Sami Nerenberg to illustrate the RI stories throughout the Spring semester.

 

Bee (Beeyun Sally Jo) is a senior in graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Originally from South Korea, she moved to Germany when she was in 6^th grade. She considers herself a balanced by-product of this global epoch and as a designer believes it is her responsibility to create projects of socially redeeming purposes. With her core interest in e-waste management, in partnership with Brown University, she is currently developing her Degree Project to create an active e-waste collection system on the RISD campus.

Bee’s experiences include interning at SIEMENS (Frankfurt), INNOCEAN advertising company (Seoul), and Teaching Assistant in RISD's foundation classes. She is also a part of RISD’s Respond|Design group, a community of artists and designers to create better solutions to environmental and social problems.  

As a small taste of what is to come, below is a quick sketch Bee did to visually depict the term "environmental justice." Stay tuned for more...

Sami Nerenberg to teach new RISD studio: Design for Social Entrepreneurship!

The Rhode Island School of Design has asked our Sami Nerenberg to develop and teach a new course in RISD's industrial design department! Her answer? An innovative new senior studio: Design for Social Entrepreneurship. Reading the course description (below) it sounds like it will be an amazing and inspirational experience for the lucky RISD students who get to take her class. Makes me want to go back to school! We'll keep you posted as the course develops.

Design for Social Entrepreneurship (DeSE)
RISD Fall '08

A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. This course aims to cultivate social entrepreneurial designers by investigating the power of product, system and service design to create positive social and environmental change. Looking at both international and domestic issues, this course asks, how can design and design thinking be used to solve the world’s leading problems to achieve triple bottom line sustainability—environmentally, socially, and economically? Structured around holistic thinking, collaborative and individual design work, with mentorship from experts in the field, this course uncovers how to design products and/or services, wrap a business around it, and create tangible positive impact in our world today.

>Sami's Blog
>RISD
>Grain

IDSA interview with our very own Brit Kleinman!

Interview with Brit Kleinman now up on the IDSA Rhode Island website! Topics include Grain, sustainable design, and what she's got in store for the future. Click on the link, or see post below.

> Full article
> Grain

Brit Kleinman interviewed for the Industrial Designers Society of America's Rhode Island Chapter

What is Grain?
Grain is a multidisciplinary consultancy that unites sustainability and business through design. As consumers and businesses continue to realize the hidden costs of the objects they use and create, both must evolve towards a more sustainable future. At Grain, we do not consider this fact a burden but a chance for innovation. Our commitment is to find new opportunities within markets and provide sustainable solutions, which exceed the expectations of both our clients and end consumers.

How did you decide to form the company?
Founded in 2007 at the Rhode Island School of Design, a ‘dream team’ of RISD talent emerged collectively actively asking how, as designers, we could make our world a better more sustainable place to live. There are many ways one could go about changing our unsustainable consumer culture. One way is by force through various forms of government regulation. Another is through education over time. At Grain, our first step is always to question what sustainability means within the context of each project. Even if a product is made "sustainable", we still have to question its relevance to society. Is it necessary to create new products, or is it more sustainable to provide a service-based design? There are numerous creative ways of looking at a problem to optimize the economic, social, and environmental value. Grain believes that by optimizing all three systemically, one can achieve the greatest outcome for the greatest number of people. There is no reason sustainable products and services can't be even more desirable than their inefficient and/or toxic cousins. As designers, we must help both businesses and consumers want what is also good. This is why we've created Grain.

Who is involved and how?
Right now Grain operates as a mixture of full time and part time designers. James Minola (RISD BFA '07) is our Founder and was the driving force behind bringing us together as a business. Chelsea Green (RISD MID '07, Pratt BFA '02), Partner at Grain, has also been instrumental in getting us to where we are today. Together, they work full time on both the business and design aspects of the company. The rest of the team includes Jackie Guido (RISD BFA '07), Sami Nerenberg (RISD BFA '07), and myself Brit Kleinman (RISD BFA '07). We all work independently for outside companies but come together to collaborate on Grain projects. We're a well-rounded group that all worked (or are currently working) for some very high profile companies. We're proud of Grain and believe firmly in what we stand for. We take all our outside experiences and contribute them to our larger goals with Grain.

How is Rhode Island a good place for design and business?
RISD has, of course, been a huge resource for us. The richness of its community is unmatched. We miss being students there, but we're definitely taking our passion and dedication for design to inform how we move forward with Grain. When someone's passionate about their work, you can see it in the way they talk about it, the way they interact with their clients, and in their end product.

What's up next for Grain?
We're a new company, so we're still doing everything we can to get out there and make an impact. We recently had two pieces in Design Within Reach's Modern + Design + Function furniture show in Seattle where we won the "Best Green Design" award. We also do outreach and have various internal projects going. Two of our designers recently did a workshop on design and sustainability with a class of 4th graders. I'm also working on AVO:Market (www.avoavo.com) which is a collaborative image guide and think tank for street markets all over the world. Recently AVO has been featured in international magazines and design blogs. The rest of Grain may get more involved with AVO through projects here in Providence for Fresh Farm RI. As we move forward we continue to design for competitions and look for exciting prospects for Grain to be a part of. The dream projects are the ones where the client is open and able to understand the value of innovation. We also believe design's role should extend far beyond product. Our clients don’t have to already be a zero-impact, Cradle-to-Cradle company to work with Grain. We're working to make change, and it's a work in progress.

>IDSA Rhode Island
>Grain