How Do You Measure a Product’s Sustainability?

What makes one product more sustainable than another? It’s a question that anyone concerned with their impact on the planet must confront. How do we choose the right couch, coffee machine, flooring, tiles, or curtain wall system—so that we’re doing the most good for both people and the environment? 
 
That’s the question Lisa Gralnek has been working to answer. 
 
Gralnek is the U.S. Managing Director and Global Head of Sustainability and Impact at the iF Design Awards—one of the largest and most prestigious design award programs in the world. This year, 131 jurors evaluated nearly 11,000 entries from 66 countries, judging everything from appliances to automobiles, furnishings to buildings. 
 
For the first time, sustainability accounted for 20 percent of the score for every submission. So how does an international awards program assess sustainability across such diverse design disciplines, regions, and product categories? 

In this episode of Deep Green, produced in partnership with Mannington Commercial, METROPOLIS editor in chief Avi Rajagopal sits down with Gralnek to discuss how the iF Design Awards are tackling this challenge. Read an excerpt from their discussion below or listen to the full episode on the Surround Podcast Network. 

Avinash Rajagopal (AR): How does an international awards program assess sustainability across such diverse design disciplines, regions, and product categories? Tell me a little bit about how you got involved with sustainability. 

Lisa Gralnek (LG): The simple story is that I grew up in Los Angeles, and even in the early and mid-eighties, we were having crazy wildfires. I watched Malibu burn for the first time from our front yard. We’d have days when we weren’t allowed to do physical education classes because of the air quality. 

I spent my summers with my grandparents on an island off the coast of Maine with no electricity, where we had to get rid of our own trash and carry our own groceries. The respect for nature and the contradiction between what we were building and what I truly valued established in me, at avery young age, a sense of the importance of taking care of the planet we call home. 

Then, I studied political science and focused on identity politics, the injustice of history, and the importance of culture. I wrote a thesis on “self versus others.” I focused more on the social side and somehow ended up in fashion, which bridged my love of fine art with this global world of branding and how you identify on the outside. 

After eight and a half years in that industry I was really starting to get grossed out by this lack of sustainability on the environmental side and decided to go back to grad school to do sustainability. Unfortunately, I graduated during the financial collage of ’08, and sustainability was not a topic at that point, especially in the luxury sector, which was completely a pants-on-fire situation for me. As a result, I ended up as an expert not on a sustainablity track in my career, but at every turn focused on these initiatives from within as a strategist, a change maker, and as someone looking ot help companies with growth. I asked the hard questions about how you do this in a socially and environmentally responsible way whenever possible.

iF Design’s Commitment to Sustainability

AR: You’ve certainly been that change maker in your role with iF Design, one of the biggest global award programs for design, where you had 11,000 entries this year. This was also the first year, thanks to your work, that sustainability was a major factor in how the designs were judged. So, why did iF Design decide to double down on sustainability for this year’s awards? 

LG: This is not the first time that iF has incorporated sustainability factors into the judging criteria. However, you are absolutely correct, that it is the first time that sustainability is a standalone criterion within the judging of the iF design award, which, as you mentioned, gets 11,000 entries every year. 

The bottom line is that there are five judging criteria, which are idea, form, function, classic design, and then you have differentiation, which incorporates a little bit more of the innovations, but also the commercial impact side.  

At the end of the celebration of the 2023 iF design award, which was our 70th anniversary, we had, for the first time, a few sustainability experts on the ground to support our jurors already for judging this impact criterion on the social and environmental [dimensions]. In 2024, after I’d built this sustainability working group, we had another group of experts on the ground to help our jurors. The jurors were excited, and that’s when we started moving toward answering questions like how do we not only support our jurors who may not be experts in sustainability in their respective categories but also help our participants understand what matters in sustainability? We’re on a journey towards 2030 to fully embed the social and environmental criteria into the primary judging. This year marked the first award season where it was a standalone criterion. 

AR: It is fantastic and impactful that you are doing what you do. I want to discuss how things are now, as the question of how one judges the environmental and social impact of designs is still unsettled. I think you know and see that at every level. At Metropolis, we have a smaller awards program called the Planet Positive Awards, where we evaluate products. However, it is a very small subset within one sector of the industry, which includes interiors, furnishings, and architectural materials. Even then, making decisions about the criteria on which we are going to judge these products is complicated. Whether you are an architect or designer selecting a material for a building or a homeowner choosing something for your home, the same kind of judgment applies. You are presented with many choices, and if you care about environmental impact, you try to decide what will have a better impact in the context of your needs. Can you outline how the judging process was incorporated this year? 

LG: The two aspects are intimately linked because the sustainability working group is our external experts, whom we’ve assembled to help us figure out exactly the answer to your question. What I can say at the highest level is that you’ve identified the challenge of being objective about a subject that is, A, hyper-complex, and B, not even nationally, much less internationally aligned. I still can’t believe that we don’t have an adhered definition of sustainability generally internationally across business or industry. 

Exploring the Process of Design Awards

AR: Tell me more about this working group. How did you arrive at the process and what criteria did you use this year? 

LG: The working group is a group of seven, soon to be eight, external experts who have deep expertise from various fields. Not only are they on the ground to help our jurors understand and make sense of what our participants have entered concerning the criteria and answering of the optional questions, but they’ve also collaborated with me to create these optional questions.

For the sustainability criteria, we didn’t just put a blank box like you have for idea, form, function, or differentiation with some guiding texts. We worked together intensively to figure out what the highest impact areas are by discipline or by category across social and environmental dimensions. This is because a lot of times, people filling out these applications for awards aren’t necessarily the designers or the sustainability leaders. Through our questions, we’re trying to educate both our jurors and our participants along the way on what sustainability even means and what impact is. To round it out, we created a list of accreditations and certifications that our participants can select from. 

AR: I love that process and structure. You are providing these really profound questions and multiple-choice responses that break them down a little bit. Overall, the system recognizes that even within the same category or area, there are multiple pathways to positive impact, and there are multiple priorities that people can pick. 

It’s important that one has picked the pathway and that you have a priority; ultimately, you’re not pitting priority against priority. I think that just makes so much sense. Give me a taste of some of the winners, especially ones that really featured some great impact stories. 

LG: The thing that’s really inspiring this year  is that there are two things that were really inspiring. One is that for the first time we really had juror buy-in. So, we brought in 131 jurors who are design leaders from around the world, some really, really big names with very illustrious careers, some younger who may not be experts in sustainability, and some much older. But there is always a little bit of pushback, like in the 2024 award before we had moved this forward, where Ferrari, who participates regularly, won their first gold in a long time this year, which is the premier award, representing less than half a percent of entries. 

A Case Study for Sustainable Design

The question last year between the sustainability expert advising that group and the jurors, who are leaders in car design and automotive design, was why should a sample car like this ever exist? It’s gas-guzzling. It’s not made with recycled materials. It’s made for one person. It’s a one-off. It doesn’t make any sense, right? And it was a real battle. I use that as an example. It was a battle of a conversation and of a different point of view, and it happened at micro levels across the award in different ways, as a pushback. And in 2025, I was blown away by how much that attitude had shifted in just one year. 

Ferrari won gold this year for a very different car because, in fact, you say yes, it’s still these things, but it’s not meant to be driven thousands of miles a year. It is not meant to be tossed away after three years or five years, right? And there was a real profound discussion, and this happened at every single category level with jurors engaging our working group and experts in a very meaningful discussion and dialogue. 

That was again, in packaging, digital design, product of every shape and form, and then architecture, interior architecture. So, I’m proud of some of the winners. One that’s close to home for all of us is Turner Construction’s new headquarters in New York City. It’s really a monstrous achievement to get LEED Platinum certified, and I happened to be lucky enough to have a conversation with a woman who is heading sustainability at Turner. She kept saying that there was no cost spared. We didn’t cut corners in order to get to this place. It could have just been a nice story for architecture, It wasn’t recognized specifically.  

We don’t do a call-out for sustainability, but it’s an amazing sustainability story, which helped elevate their overall score; but the score wasn’t carried just by sustainability. It’s just a really great, nice-to-have. Another project that was quite phenomenal, and a jury favorite, is going to be awarded a Gold Award in Berlin at the end of April: the World Food Waste Tea House. This is a public tea house pavilion with a European cultural center, and it’s made entirely out of recycled food waste. 

This is obviously being shown in Venice and during Dubai Design Week. It was a combination project from 2023, but that’s pretty extraordinary. Then you have things like, out of Japan, this incredibly high craft broom set, if you will—like cleaning tools, you know, that are low carbon emission, high craft, employing old-school craftsmen, teaching younger generations how to make them. There are high price points, so they lose a little bit on the social accessibility side, but they’re cleaning tools that are meant to be passed from generation to generation and engage a workforce. I could go on because we have a lot of winners, but these are some of the ones that just stand out.  

AR: But I mean, look at those three; they illustrate the concept in context. There are so many different pathways you can take that are contextually and situationally appropriate for the design and the communities it engages with, and I think that’s so important. Are you seeing any patterns across the winners? Are you seeing businesses or designers gravitate towards certain pathways or strategies for impact over others?

LG: Not yet. I don’t think we have enough insights based on just the first year. I am immensely grateful to iF CEO as well as our board at the iF Design Foundation. Since we’re a nonprofit dedicated to design, research, and education, the mission has always been about how design serves humanity. I’m really amazed by the willingness to embark on this journey. It’s not a one-and-done effort, and it’s not greenwashing. It’s a real dedicated investment of time and resources. This close-knit collaboration with our participants, esteemed jurors, external sustainability experts, and, of course, the broader global design community we engage with through our content and various awards, such as the Student Award and the Social Impact Prize, all ladder to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. So we see an enormous amount of interest. 

The iF Design Award is the pinnacle of design excellence, cross-disciplinary and cross-geographical, where we have our greatest opportunity for impact. We’ll keep monitoring because the momentum is now in place from 2024, building towards 2030, to really understand where people are leaning in— Are there differences between the disciplines, geographies, and categories? Is social equity easier to access than environmental impact, or is it the opposite? 

What does that look like? Is it on the employee or supplier side? Is it materiality or recyclability? What is it? I don’t think we have the data right now, but I’m excited to see it. But to your point, there are many ways of having an impact and making design decisions that lead to better outcomes for all stakeholders, including people and the planet.  

AR: Is there something you’ve learned after having been through this process the last couple of years with iF Design? Setting up the structure, working with the working group, and collaborating with some of the brightest minds thinking about sustainability in the design space at the moment, and hearing from all of them— what are you taking away from all of this? 

LG: I think, you know, Avi, you and I both have been in business long enough to understand that the dollar is still the bottom line. You need to have the means to drive things forward. I am impressed by what can be achieved when groups come together. 

When big corporations such as Turner Construction, Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, IBM, or Hyundai make commitments, it’s impactful because of their scale. I believe big corporations have a responsibility and can afford to make these decisions. It’s irresponsible not to. I wish we could have a stick and carrot approach. I’d prefer the carrot, where consumers want sustainable products but don’t want to pay more, but there should also be a stick, which is regulation. 

AR: Absolutely. I think you maybe you’ve been on the stick side in the past, but you’re on the carrot side now. So am I. We’re both handing out carrots for good work. Carrots are powerful too, and I love that balance you struck. We need both. We need the regulations, and hopefully, as society changes and situations change around the world, we’ll gradually move towards that consensus. You’ve been such an advocate for this kind of transformative growth and sustainability throughout your career. 

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Listen to “Measuring What Matters in Product Design” on the Surround Podcast Network. This season of Deep Green is produced in partnership with Mannington Design. 

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• Sustainability

• Circularity in products
• iF Design Awards
• Metropolis Editors