53 research outputs found
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Seeing sustainable futures: the potential of design education
The process of sustainable development requires us all to think differently about what we do, how we do it and why we do what we do. Questioning activities in the context of sustainability can often result in difficult and perhaps uncomfortable conclusions about our current development paradigm – one that gives primacy to economic growth and wealth creation over welfare and well-being.
The practice of design operates within this development paradigm and is complicit in the unsustainable activities of the business domain. Designers support the economic system through the conceptualisation and production of goods: goods multiplying in variety and number, responding to escalating global demand. Unfortunately most current business operates for economic profit alone, ignorant of key sustainable ecological and social parameters. For example material throughput is linear rather than cyclic in nature; social inequities exist in relation to trade and well-being; and natural resources are considered convenient dumps for pollutants and toxins. Designers, among many others, are thus implicated in the augmentation of unsustainable outcomes rather than the reduction of them.
This paper aims to explore how this situation can be reversed to enable design to play a positive and supporting role towards the goals of sustainable development. Challenging the current paradigm of development will need people who have the ability to think creatively and laterally and draw on disparate areas of knowledge to vision new, more sustainable futures. Design education has a big role to play in this transformation and as such needs to alter its focus from the current outcomes of design activity to a range of alternative responses that embrace joined-up thinking and generate apposite learning outcomes. This paper investigates the sort of knowledge required and discusses the potential shift in values needed for design for sustainability to be accepted as a catalyst for change. It addresses the potential of current design education in channelling such change and investigates the sort of tools required for this to happen. Ultimately, the paper proposes, it is a key responsibility of existing design educators to prepare the graduate designers of tomorrow with the skills and inspiration to vision sustainable futures for this century and beyond
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Developing an ecology of mind in design
The relationship between design and sustainability (DfS) is forever evolving: from the early focus on cleaner production processes and resource efficiencies to more recent endeavours to promote environmentally benign behaviours or to counter the increasing impacts of climate change. The uncomfortable truth though is that the majority of design activity serves market forces at a global scale and at an ever-increasing rate. Despite predictions of resource scarcity – peak oil, peak minerals, peak water – the increase in the linear transit of material through the Global economy rises year on year. Design straddles this production consumption cycle: it conceives of the processes and technologies that shape our artificial world; and it fashions the forms of that artificial world that drive a consumption ideology. Neither position is sustainable. Informed by Sterling’s rigorous exploration of different sustainable education paradigms, this paper reconstructs a design literacy that has the capacity to realize effective transitions for the long-term wellbeing of environment, biodiversity and humankind
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Eco-literacy in Transition: the role of design ecologies in developing our capacity for radical change
This short paper explores the people-product relationships that are forged in the course of everyday life and addresses the role of design ecologies in fostering long term socio-ecological adaptability and resilience. I reflect on the premises and principles of Transition Design and explore the different kinds of knowledge required for designing with the natural world in mind
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Crime reduction through design: insights from ecodesign
The recognition for humankind to act in more sustainable ways has evolved new theory and practice within design. This new type of design is commonly described as ecodesign. This paper describes the different approaches to ecodesign and places them within a framework illustrating a broad range of initiatives. Approaches to crime are explored in relation to the ecodesign framework and conceptual links are made between these two fields of study. To ascertain how such initiatives may inform design and development in decreasing the number of crime and disorder events, an overview of ecodesign policies, tools and drivers is presented, and the transferability of these discussed
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demi: linking design with sustainability
This paper describes an educational framework offering one possible approach to linking sustainability and design. This framework, developed as part of the demi project, provides links to information new to designers thereby challenging the design status quo. For example, it incorporates the integration of different communities within designing - often from outside traditional boundaries - and an appreciation of environmental and social impacts as designs are conceived, produced, used and then discarded. The paper discusses the demi framework, its content and its educational potential. Further, it explores the possible transferability of the framework to other disciplines, promoting practical and widespread action in education for sustainability
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Design interventions, prediction and science in the sustainable transition of large, complex systems,
The way that human beings live and consume the natural and environmental resources of the planet are not sustainable. Sustainability involves changes in individual beliefs, expectations, values and behaviours at the microlevel, changes in policy at the macrolevel of governments, and changes in the design of objects, social organisations and structures at the mesolevels. Design for sustainability has a big challenge: we need a ninety percent gain in energy and material efficiencies over the next thirty years. Bottom-up and top-down design and policy interventions are needed at all levels. These multilevel dynamics interact in ways not understood by conventional social and natural science: human beings and their physical environment form a bewilderingly complex multilevel system of systems of systems. The science of complex systems must, necessarily, conduct experiments through policy: scientists do not have the mandate or the money to perform large interventionist experiments. Policy can be construed as designing the future. Thus complex systems are entangled in both policy and design. We conclude that (i) the design professions impact on the community at all levels, and that 'good? design at any level is relative to design at all other levels, and the emergent design of the whole, (ii) design, complex systems science and policy must all work together to create a sustainable future, and (iii) policy and complex systems science must progress through a designerly way of thinking to achieve sustainable design coherently applied at all levels in the complex multilevel system of humankind living on planet earth in the decades, centuries and millennia of the future. This view puts design and complexity science at the centre of policy for sustainability
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Escaping from the old ideas
The anthropologist and systems thinker, Gregory Bateson said that the world partly becomes - comes to be - how it is imagined. Well, designers are in the business of imagining our artificial world, whether that be products, buildings, the processes behind them, the information about them, the ways in which we interact with them and so on. Designers have a big role to play in how such imaginings play out and thus, how our world comes to be. This short talk explores what this means in a world of depleting accessible natural resource coupled with an out-dated view of production and consumption. Design, situated in the middle of this dynamic, needs to imagine an otherness – one that responds to real-world limits while meeting peoples’ needs equitabley, in inspiring and hopeful ways. This is more than ‘a tag’ of responsibility for the profession; it will come to be the form and meaning of design in the 21st century
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Ecodesign
Environmental degradation and concepts of 'sustainability' have recently become a focus of political, commercial and social concern. This thesis addresses one of the issues concerning human impact on the environment, namely the environmental awareness and action of those involved with design and development. This project provides an overview of designers' current attitudes to environmentally responsible design and investigates design that is perceived to be more environmentally responsible.
The research was exploratory and qualitative in nature. The postal and telephone pilot surveys and the main study of 20 in-depth interviews were carried out with individuals involved in design and development in design consultancies and a range of design-based manufacturing companies within the UK.
It was found that most designers were unaware of many of the issues surrounding environmentally responsible design. Few companies were including environmental criteria within design and development processes, the exceptions generally responding to legislative or market demands. Three main levels of environmentally responsible design are discussed in this project; green design addresses a focus on one or two environmental impacts of a product, ecodesign refers to a comprehensive product lifecycle design strategy, and sustainable design describes a move beyond the current context of design and questions, for example, the need, value, and ethics of a product's development.
The significant qualitative data gathered during the project led to the development of a visual analysis method, the 'Environmental footprint'. Different types of business approach (proactive, reactive and cynical) to incorporating environmental issues within product development emerged from this analysis. These were further developed into a hierarchy of environmental business strategies which aided the identification of approaches that relied on 'bottom-up' action (e.g., action of an individual 'environmental champion' within the company), and those which tended to be a result of 'top-down' action (e.g., a company's strategic environmental policy).
The research showed that to achieve effective, long-term environmentally responsible design and development the following are desirable: (a) design-specific information on environmentally responsible design, (b) effective communication channels within companies and throughout the supply chain, and (c) greater understanding of the qualities and scope of design by senior management.
The research also questions how a design profession focused almost entirely on increasing the production and consumption of goods can re-evaluate its role in society and move towards a more responsible and environmentally sustainable existence. 'Sustainable design' is discussed as a concept which moves beyond 'green design' and 'ecodesign', and hence the remit of the designer, to one which can only be successfully addressed by a change in the political and economic global development system
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Critical reflections on designing product service systems
In response to unsustainability and the prospect of resource scarcity, lifestyles dominated by resource throughput are being challenged. This paper focuses on a design experiment that sought to introduce alternative resource consumption pathways in the form of product service systems (PSS) to satisfy household demand and reduce consumer durable household waste. In contrast to many other PSS examples this project did not begin with sustainability benefits, rather the preferences of supply and demand actors and the bounded geographical locations represented by two UK housing developments. The paper addresses the process through which the concept PSS were designed, selected and evaluated, alongside the practical and commercial parameters of the project. It proposes the need for a shift to further emphasize the importance of the design imperative in creating different PSS outcomes that reorganize relationships between people, resources and the environment
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