E ric Benson was born into a family of science — both of his parents were chemists. Yet from the time he was little, he was drawing comics. Today, however, he has been able to fuse science and art together. Benson, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Art and Design, teaches sustainability and graphic design.
“I’m really looking at how a particular profession — in this case, graphic design — can be sustainable or exist now and into the future,” said Benson. “With keeping in mind that as we use resources to do and make things, we want to make sure that those resources can still be plentiful for those in the future and not be damaging to their health and our health as they currently are.”
Benson graduated in 1998 from the University of Michigan. After changing his major six or seven times, he said, he ended up in the art school, found his passion for design and graduated with a degree in graphic and industrial design. It wasn’t until a few years after he graduated that he realized the possibilities of sustainability.
“I started to question what happens to things that I make after people stop reading them or stop looking at them,” he said. “It’s all thrown away, but even if some of it’s recycled, there are going to be people who don’t recycle it, so that kind of got me interested in how I can do things different so that doesn’t happen.”
Benson then pursued a graduate’s degree in design and social responsibility from the University of Texas in Austin and graduated in 2006. At the same time, he developed a website called Re-nourish (re-nourish.com) to fully launch his theories and research on sustainability and graphic design.
“The main purpose of the site is to create awareness,” said Benson. “I want people to make better, more responsible decisions.”
The site has definitions and resources where people can connect with more responsible printers or where they can find greener paper and tips on how to design their projects and waste less. Benson said the site will be having a mini re-launch in the spring with more tools and resources.
Part of Benson’s campaign for a greener arts community includes traveling and speaking
at conferences.
“The long-term goal is to see if I can translate for educators,” Benson said. “It doesn’t seem like an approachable topic, so I am training professors that teach graphic design to address the sustainability perspective. I have to educate the educators.”
His website has also helped him reach other countries that are interested in sustainability.
“There are people all across the world that have had me come and speak about Re-nourish and my work here at U of I,” he said.
What he said he found funny was that his biggest audience is British design students — mostly seniors working on final design projects — but it’s Re-nourish that draws the most attention.
Benson’s research focuses on the balance between people, profit and the planet.
“If you discover a material that could be substituted by something better, that new material could be more expensive and more unattainable for some people,” he said.
His research also raises the question of how we should be looking at current events and translating those to the future and focusing on how society is changing.
Benson questions, “What are we, as graphic designers, supposed to be making? What we’re making should be in that realm of sustainable, socially responsible and ethical.”
On campus, Benson has been working towards creating a greener environment through teaching his classes. Recently, he had a class examine a green product they owned and examine it to see how they could improve it. They visually mapped out the entire system of how it was manufactured, sold and transported, and determined where it could be enhanced to truly make it a sustainable product.
Benson has also been working with professor Steve Kostell on producing paper through raising fibers on farmland that can be pulped and grown into a regional economy.
“We can use this paper to make a letterhead for the University,” Benson said, “in hopes of creating a more responsible use of paper on campus.”
Part of this project includes investigating native grasses and prairie grasses that are being grown on the student sustainability farm on Windsor.
“We’re collaborating with the farm manager to grow these grasses that are native here,” he said. “We can use these grasses to make a blend of paper that can be used by art students to draw on or make a book that we might eventually see in copy at stores on campus.”
Benson said he wants to see his research and the tools on Re-nourish become utilized nation-wide.
“I hope the future of sustainability can be to reach more universities in the U.S.,” said Benson. “We’re all just sort of making it up as we go and trying something new and finding out it doesn’t work or is really successful — like a lab experiment. Then it’s trying it again as soon as we can in the next class or project. It’s a continuous work in progress.”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
[...] I recently got to design the cover for Buzz Magazine’s feature story on Eric Benson, a graphic design professor at the university who also runs a project called Re-Nourish, to promote sustainability in design. Benson happens to be teaching my graphic design studio class, this semester, so I was also able to get some photos of him, which also appear in the magazine. If you didn’t get a chance to pick up last week’s, Buzz, you can always check out the article here. [...]