Sustainable futures require impactful organisations
You have to rethink your purpose, goals and metrics, capabilities, roles, and responsibilities.
You can't just design a sustainable product or service and hope it sticks.
You have to design the organisation that's capable of delivering and maintaining it..
Select low impact materials that will promote longevity in your product.
Avoid coupling materials that cannot be recycled.
Preference materials that can be recycled in the country the product is intended for.
Use design techniques such as honeycombing to reduce the amount of material used..
Sustainable futures require impactful organisations
You have to rethink your purpose, goals and metrics, capabilities, roles, and responsibilities.
You can't just design a sustainable product or service and hope it sticks.
You have to design the organisation that's capable of delivering and maintaining it..
This is where design factors like energy and materials efficiency come in.
Other factors that make something more sustainable are durability, recyclability and source of materials.
Design for Sustainability is a whole system approach that considers the overall impacts of designs..
There are examples of eco-design in all kinds of consumer goods, such as biodegradable furniture, recycled tableware, edible coffee cups and bamboo sunglasses or toothbrushes, as well as clothes and shoes made with plastic recovered from the ocean and ecological gold jewellery..
The term sustainability is broadly used to indicate programs, initiatives and actions aimed at the preservation of a particular resource.
However, it actually refers to four distinct areas: human, social, economic and environmental – known as the four pillars of sustainability..
In Design for Sustainability, however, designers have a higher level of ambition: additional to a high consumer value, they make sure that designs result in less degradation of our environment, less depletion of materials, and more social equity in our world..
Sustainable design is an integrated, holistic approach that positively impacts all phases of a building's life-cycle and encourages compromise and tradeoffs..
A study of the evolution of different design approaches related to design for sustainability was published by Ceschin & Gaziulusoy ( 2016 ).
In this study, the authors present a framework that locates the approaches developed over recent decades from green design to design for systems innovation and transitions (Ceschin & Gaziulusoy 2016 ).
In this paper, we identified that the terms searched and their appearances in the papers presented at the ICED conferences represent well the evolution of the design for sustainability area over the last 30 years, even if the amount of data found might be small compared with other areas.
This Beginner’s Guide to Designing for Sustainability will break down and demystify barriers to entry within sustainability, whether you are a seasoned design veteran, freelance go-getter, recent industry addition, or corporate decision maker.
The most sustainable designs combine both the technical efficiencies of low environmental impact design and the enhanced connections to nature characteristic of biophilic design.
Low environmental impact and biophilic design are the complementary components of restorative environmental design.
