Designers have shaped every aspect of the world we live in today. From the chair you're sitting in, to the window you may be peering out of, conscious thought was put into each fine detail of the product's functionality, appearance and performance. So imagine the power of placing sustainability at the heart of those design decisions, making it a 'must' rather than a 'maybe' in every product, service or creative solution. The impact could be vast but is action being taken to embed these principles within design and if so, how far has this movement progressed?
Sustainable design is picking up pace but as Adam Aston writes in his latest blog, long development time frames and gaps in knowledge make commercialisation a tough nut to crack. However, innovation in materials, such as wetsuits made from the Mexican shrub, guayule, or the versatile new building material, Zeoform, made from just cellulose and water, is becoming increasingly talked about in the design sphere. Tackling the knowledge gap that exists between designers and the materials they use, will be vital to finding eco-friendly alternatives to the most unsustainable components within supply chains.
It's not just trained professionals that have the power to influence design though. The open design movement gives citizens the digital tools to create their own products and services and could offer fresh insight and talent. Accessible hardwares and new technologies, such as 3D printing, now allow users to become creators and find their own design solutions. As do initiatives such as the citizen science project, Bee Lab, which calls upon the beekeeping community to develop tools that can be used to gather data on bee health and wellbeing. But what are the risks of handing design over to non-specialists and how could this impact designers?
People-centered design also has huge potential to change behaviour. From a product that makes a green option more appealing to a feature that enables easy repair, designing with user action in mind can create natural shifts in behaviour. A subtle alteration, such as making a computer easy and cheap to fix so that, when it goes wrong, the owner will be repair it rather then replace it, could make a huge difference to combating a global issue such ase-waste in Bangalore.
The yet-to-be-made Phonebloks is another case in point. The concept from designer Dave Hakkens is to build a smart phone made up of easy to replace modular parts and aims to stem the throwaway culture in the smart phone market. Ideas such as this could not just revolutionise markets but also make acting sustainably effortless for consumers.
As we launch our new hub, we'd like to gather your insight on the topic. What do you think lies ahead for sustainable design? What are the challenges facing both business and designers and how can the science behind the products and services we buy help tackle the big global issues of our time? Do you know any examples of innovation in the space or do you have a designer or thought leader you'd like to see write for us?This is why, in partnership with Nike, we are launching a new content hub to focus specifically on sustainability in design. We'll explore topics such as how to embed sustainable design in global supply chains, the impact of digitalisation, design for re-manufacturing and the impact of product life cycle as well as showcasing the latest innovation and best practice in the space. We want to take a challenging and unique approach, laying bare the issues that business, designers and society as a whole face by harbouring insight, debate and thought-leadership on the sustainable design movement.
few importants films and documentries which tell us how to get sustainabilty by design
https://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_mohr_builds_green
https://www.ted.com/talks/kamal_meattle_on_how_to_grow_your_own_fresh_air
https://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_armstrong_architecture_that_repairs_itself
https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pawlyn_using_nature_s_genius_in_architecture
https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_biddle
https://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic
As the 2012 London Design Festival kicks off this week, one wonders how much has really changed. Are the objects of desire emerging from the festival destined to bulge our landfills or secure our future?
A look at the agenda shows scant reference to sustainability so one can only conclude, and hope, these issues are increasingly integrated rather than dealt with as a stand-alone.
Design matters
The material world that surrounds us – the signs that direct us, the smartphone pages we flick through, the way we use buildings, how we move around cities – is consciously or unconsciously designed. Sometimes this has been done well, but frequently not, even though how things are designed can have significant implications for sustainability.sustainable business
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) estimates that 75% of UK consumers' carbon emissions come from the use of products and services. We also know that 80% of the environmental impacts of those products and services are determined in the early stages of design. These two figures tell us that sustainability is chiefly about stuff and that the impacts of products or services are pretty much designed-in (or out for that matter) from the very outset.
So design really does matter, not only in how we shape and order our world, but also in determining our impact on it. We've made some serious headway on sustainability reporting and monitoring, governance, production, supply chains and communications, but paid much less attention (and allocated less budget) to how we design more sustainable products, services and systems. One probable reason for this, beyond a few notable individuals, is a lack of leading voices on sustainable design as part of the broader debate.
Though design may be guilty of past malpractice (who wasn't?), there's a growing sense that in the next wave of sustainability – focused on creativity, entrepreneurship, innovation and practical solutions – design skills will feature heavily in our toolkit. Californian design professor and Papanek contemporary, Nathan Shedroff, captured this well when he said: "Design is the problem as well as the solution". If environmentalism's success was in spotlighting sustainability problems to the world, the success of design will be in helping deliver solutions.
Why design for sustainability?
Why, you may also ask, should you turn to a designer, rather than a supply chain manager, factory manager, communications/ad agency or technologist? Great design makes the heart beat faster, solves tricky problems creatively, makes weird, new stuff seem normal, makes things cool, can make lives better and make businesses richer. Steve Jobs understood this intuitively in stating that "design is the fundamental soul of the human-made creation", and great design helped Apple become the wealthiest company there is.It may be fair to ask how much designers have earned the right to play in the sustainability space if they lack sustainability leadership. Yet there are positive signs of change, from the take-up of design methods like Cradle-to-Cradle and biomimicry, through to industry design collaborations like theSustainable Apparel Coalition. From the many thousands of designers voluntarily signing the Designers Accord sustainability principles, to celebrity designers like Philippe Starck, Wayne Hemingway and Yves Behar pinning their colours to the sustainability mast.
We now need to take design way beyond what Apple has done with it and turn its skills whole-heartedly and single-mindedly to the challenges of sustainability. We need people saying "wow," "ah ha", and "yes" to really great sustainable design.
The sustainable design gallery
It's far better and easier to explain design in action, so we put together a series of 12 examples that illustrate our points about design and sustainability in more detail. The gallery chiefly focuses on industrial or product design examples of everyday products and services. Rather than exhaustively detailing these here,take a look at the gallery.
Design is multi-faceted, tackling many types of challenges and sustainability is obviously complex too. The examples in the gallery cover a breadth of areas, from small changes to giant leaps, from redesign to new design, as well as covering a range of different sustainability issues considered and balanced as part of a design brief.
A roadmap for sustainable design
To explain the most important ways designers can help build a sustainable future we've created a roadmap for sustainable design. It shows how the sustainability movement can get more out of design, plus the main areas and ways that design needs to step up on sustainability. Over the coming weeks I will unpack this roadmap in more detail in a series of articles covering sustainable design.
Reading Papanek's Design for the Real World as a young design student convinced me that sustainable design was the only route for me, and I've worked in the field ever since.
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