My recent challenge to coin the one rule of sustainability yielded more than 100 responses. The Wordle of all the submissions revealed a slant among the definitions toward energy.
Sustainability, meet lovability
A few days later, I read this passage in Wayne Curtis’s article in The Atlantic:
Two years ago, at a conference on traditional building held at the New Orleans convention center, the architect and New Urbanist Steve Mouzon asked a crowd of contractors and architects to think about a basic point. “The very core of sustainability,” he said, “can be found in a simple question: Can it be loved?”
Then TreeHugger reported from the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, quoting Steve Mouzon:
“The first of the four foundations of sustainable buildings is Lovability, because it does not matter how efficiently the building performs if it is demolished and carted off to the landfill in a generation or two because it cannot be loved.”
Is Steve Mouzon on to something, not just in building but generally? Does lovability have a place in sustainable marketing?
Certainly. What is loved will endure, and enduring over time is the core meaning of the verb to sustain. It would, therefore, behoove you to design and build products that can be loved.
Differentiate love and taste, however. Tastes change rapidly and relate to the perception of beauty or to other sensory experience. Love is a long-term emotional relationship with rational elements, in which aesthetics plays only one part. In his sensible argument for loving stuff more, Sami Grover says it best:
“The problem is not that we love stuff too much — but that we don’t love it enough. (…) Once we make the commitment to fall in love all over again with our houses, with our clothes, with our furniture, we start looking for qualities of durability, reliability, craftsmanship, beauty and sustainability, instead of cheap thrills and shallow gimmicks. We start nurturing, nourishing and maintaining what we have, rather than looking for something new. In short, we learn to live with less. It’s time to spread the love. Embrace your dining room table. Love your bicycle. Swoon over your spoons. And look forward to sharing your life with them for years to come.”
Overcoming the subjectivity of love
We all love different things, differently. Aesthetics and values also shift from generation to generation. The subjective, deeply personal nature of love may pose challenges for marketers. However, when marketing to your target niche, the lovable features and benefits of your product should have limited appeal. Customize to the needs and love inclinations of your customers as much as possible (by default, you must love your customers first).
For objects with wider reach or those in public spaces, Steve Mouzon counters the subjectivity objection on Original Green:
“If we focus on what it means to be human rather than just what is popular in this moment, then it is clear that some things have resonated with humans throughout the ages. These include shapes that reflect the basic arrangement of the human body. Humans also resonate with (…) a set of mathematical proportions that are both rational (1:1, 4:3, 3:2, etc.) and irrational (the square root of 2, the Golden Mean, etc.) [and] with natural laws, such as the law of gravity.”
Steve shifts the subjective and individual nature of love and lovability into the collective, archetypal realm by identifying the common features of things people have loved throughout history. In essence, he proposes a human-centered version of biomimicry: examine humans and their cultural history and emulate or take inspiration from it to solve human problems sustainably. In green building – and perhaps in other industries as well – this anthropomimicry requires “building things that incorporate patterns that reflect timeless aspects of our humanity.”
What do you think? Is lovability a reasonable and viable part of sustainability?
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Emphasis in quotes is mine throughout the post. Image credit: PakyuZ and Madmoiselle Lavender
