Illuminating Design: Sustainability at Apple
Interview by Kim Heng; edited by Liv Jenks
In this installment of “Illuminating Design,” Stanford Womxn in Design’s interview series, we reached out to Mariel Lanas, a Product Design Engineer on the Sustaining Packaging team at Apple, to tackle questions about designing for a future where environmental impact and sustainability are central to what we design and how we design it.
In this series, we’ve cast a wide net, talking to industry leaders in health, wellness, education, tech, and social entrepreneurship to bring you answers to big design questions, including: What is “good” design, and how is that definition evolving? How to overcome challenges? How can intersectional perspectives be incorporated into the design thinking process? After years of industry experience, what advice do you have for student designers?
Below, Mariel not only offers bold insight on these questions, but also highlights the power designers have to shift human behavior by making sustainability easier to achieve.
Kim Heng: To get us started, could you tell me a little bit about how you got into design?
Mariel Lanas: I really loved math and making things growing up; we always had some kind of project going on at home — sewing, baking, playing with clay — and I loved the mix of problem-solving and creativity that those activities engaged me in. As I got into high school, people started using the word “engineering” to describe what I might want to pursue as a career, but it wasn’t until college that I really understood what it meant. My older brother went to Stanford, so I learned about the Product Design (PD) major through him. It felt like a combination of all the things I enjoyed doing: problem-solving, building, understanding things thoroughly. Through Stanford’s undergraduate PD program and then honing in more specifically on manufacturing through my master’s work, I felt like I was taking my love of crafting to a new level. I’ve spent my career navigating the overlap between design and mechanical engineering, and over time have been better able to understand the unique contributions I can make from that cross-functional intersection. From my first internship working on soft-goods products for a small stroller company to the work I’m doing in packaging at Apple today, it’s been a fun challenge and a constant learning experience.
Heng: As a designer focused on sustainable packaging, your work must focus a lot on forecasting the lifespan of a product beyond the immediacy of its creation, which begs the question: how do you know when you’ve achieved sustainable design?
Lanas: Sustainable design is thoughtful design: design that considers all aspects of a product’s purpose and also its impact. To that end, good design is no longer contained to a product’s lifetime, but starts even before it’s made and extends into its impact after use. This has been especially interesting to think about in the context of packaging at Apple, where the life of the product — in this case, a box — is often very short: it contains, protects, unveils, and then tends to be quickly discarded. I think there’s so much potential to use packaging as a way to rethink product design as a whole, and that’s a big part of why I’m excited to be delving into this space.
Heng: We have definitely made huge strides towards bringing sustainable design practices into the mainstream, but we still have a lot more to do. What is the biggest challenge you have faced in designing for sustainability?
Lanas: One of the toughest parts about working in design has been finding my own process in output-centric environments. It’s been particularly apparent for me because I’ve always been at the intersection of design and engineering, and the two can be very different when it comes to a productive work style. On one end of the spectrum, engineering can almost feel like math: there are inputs and outputs, and sometimes it just takes time and focus to crank out progress. With design, there isn’t always a clear sequence of events that needs to be checked off to get to an end goal. A big part of the process requires going wide to try to refine and understand a problem. That means there’s some amount of time spent without certainty of direction, and that’s a really tough spot to be in when there’s perpetual pressure for answers. In our work culture it can be really difficult to feel “unproductive,” and it’s taken a lot of mental reframing for me to accept that productiveness doesn’t always look like immediate output. In design we often have to bravely venture out and try things — explore, research, learn, test. I’ve realized that those ventures are progress, even if they’re helping inform directions that we don’t want to pursue. It’s been exciting to bring that perspective to engineering over time, too, because even though it can seem cut and dry, engineering is a creative process in itself and can definitely benefit from thinking differently.
Heng: What values are central to design thinking for your work?
Lanas: Sustainability and environmental impact are core design values in my eyes, especially when making products that use material resources and take up physical space. Through design, we have an opportunity to emphasize these values by fundamentally integrating them into the products we make. From the materials and manufacturing processes we choose to the details of a product’s form and function, we’re defining a product’s impact on the world. I think the idea of enabling behaviors through design is really interesting because it doesn’t always work to tell someone they should or have to do something. But we can use design to make a behavior easier to achieve. Waste management is a good example of this — and one that definitely can still use improvement! We can help make widespread change — like getting people to reduce, reuse, recycle, compost — by making those actions easier, more obvious, and more accessible.
Heng: You touched on this a bit, but one of the huge hurdles to sustainability is making it more accessible and inclusive. How are intersectional perspectives incorporated into the design process? How is intersectionality used to avoid designing for just one person or just one group?
Lanas: This is really important. The example that comes to mind for me is around different perspectives at work, but I think it applies to so many other things too. My work is really collaborative, so I often find myself working closely with people with different areas of expertise, which I think of as intersectional perspectives. Everyone is advocating for these very specific priorities that we probably wouldn’t fully appreciate without each others’ input. For example, I’m not an expert in antenna engineering, nor do I know what the cutting edge is for technology in that field: I don’t know what “great” is compared to just “ok.” So if I was designing a product that contained an antenna, I would be ill-equipped to define the specs for that antenna on my own. Even if I’m capable of making it, I wouldn’t know what to make. But if I worked with a team of experts in antenna physics, I’d have access to their insights and would be able to integrate them with my skillset to build something better than either of us would have been able to create on our own. I work with a variety of teams that have huge depth of experience in different disciplines, and the more I learn from their perspectives, the better equipped I am to have discussions with them and advocate for them in decisions about the final design. Like I said, I think this applies to so many areas, including considerations about our own individual experiences and how that impacts our collective experience. Having varied perspectives in the room allows for the generation of much richer and more thoughtful solutions.
Heng: Many of the people in our community are just beginning their design careers and journeys. What do you wish you had known when you were first starting out as a designer?
Lanas: One thing that’s been really helpful for me to understand over time is that in life (as in design!) there’s really no single right answer as we navigate a path forward. It can be paralyzing when every decision feels like it has a right and a wrong, and it was a huge relief to start to recognize that each option is just a doorway towards a different story. Someone once described career trajectory to me as tossing a stone in a direction that feels interesting, and then walking to pick it up; from there you might throw the stone in a slightly different direction, and so on, but rarely are we be able to predict where the last stone will be thrown when we’re making the first toss. That’s been a really helpful framework for me when I come across big life decisions; it’s helped me focus on my own values and inclinations in the moment rather than spinning into “what if’s” that I can never really know the answer to without trying.
On that note, it also feels really important to recognize that our personal values are really important! Pulling from my own experience, it can be really easy to lose sight of them when surrounded by louder external opinions. I’ve found myself absorbing others’ values without fully realizing it, and ultimately finding myself somewhere I don’t want to be because I thought it was where I should be going. I’m getting better at zooming out in those moments and remembering that I am the maker of my own future. Don’t let other people throw your trajectory stone!
