Design for Sustainability, D4S or Sustainable Design is one of those design catch phrases that gets bandied about, often incorrectly, to win over a client or impress the boss. It shares the stage with other marketable and suppliable three letter acronyms such as; DFM, DFA, DFS, HCD and ACD to name a few. That said, what is Design for Sustainability and more importantly what is the Design of Sustainability?
We all know that first and foremost a great design responds to the deign brief. The brief is written often completely by the designer or with significant input from the designer. Many would argue, with good reason that sustainable priorities and emphases should be written into the brief. Others may suggest that these sustainable considerations “go without saying” and are to be considered fundamentally high priorities in any design brief. No matter which school of thought we subscribe to there are two important points that all designs must address, the brief and the sustainability of our future.
Sustainability is commonly defined as capable of being maintained at a steady level without exhausting natural resources or causing ecological damage. Although Design for Sustainability is a topic that is difficult to wholly summarise in one statement. We must, when considering the sustainability of any design, consider all elements of the product’s production, lifecycle and system in which it operates in order to properly understand the entire impact upon resources of the product. It is only when we understand the impact of the product that we can begin to even think about tackling and reducing this impact to improve the sustainability of the product.
It is also very important to acknowledge that sustainability does not have an absolute value. The sustainability of any product is a comparative quality that will naturally vary greatly from one type of product to the next. The sustainability of the product can also vary depending on the resources of the particular region in which it is manufactured and the region in which it is used. How sustainable is a chair purchased in Australia that is manufactured from “sustainable” plantation bamboo grown in China, when that bamboo is transported to Australia via tanker ship? I can hear the groans already. Yes, I am an Australian designer, and yes, I work for and Australian Manufacturer and yes, I am passionate about design and manufacturing in Australia. However, I am under no confusion that we live in a global economy and the importing and exporting of volume materials is necessary. The point of the question is not to suggest that a designer can only use locally produced materials for locally manufactured products. Rather the point is that designers must be aware of the total environmental cost of including or excluding any material or process. Then the designer can choose the correct materials and processes for each particular design to improve the products sustainability, bearing in mind of course that the design must answer the brief. Instead of simply designing a product that uses materials marketed as sustainable and passing that marketing label onto their products.
So how can a designer become a practitioner of Design for Sustainability? I break down the practice to three key areas: the Designer, the Product and the System.
The Designer
It would seem to me hypocritical and counter productive in the extreme to design a wonderfully sustainable product without first looking at our professional practices and the impact they are having on our local resources. So we should perhaps measure the carbon footprint of our design studio. In doing this we can enlighten ourselves about the most negative activities we conduct. Then we can take steps to reduce this impact by modifying the manner in which we work and enlightening colleagues and clients about sustainable business practices. Especially for a designer living and working in Melbourne, water is a particularly critical resource, so let’s undertake to measure our usage and reduce it over time. There are numerous online tools and resources for better understanding and assisting in calculating our usage of these resources.
The Product
After we have our own house in order we can consider what we are designing and manufacturing. Basically in every sense we want to reduce the impact on resources and the environment of the product. As I touched on earlier green or sustainable materials alone are not enough. We need to use cleaner materials, re-use materials, use recycled materials (or materials with recycled content), use recyclable materials and use resource efficient materials (that use less resources to manufacture or process). We then need to consider where these materials are produced or harvested. Where they will be manufactured into a finished product and how they will be transported before and after the manufacturing process.
We then need to consider the manufacturing of the product itself beginning with the manufacturing processes we are using, whether or not they are energy efficient, emissions heavy, clean or dirty. We need to examine if we can reduce the number of processes used in the manufacture of the product and if we can reduce the number of coatings and finishes. Next we need to evaluate what impact the manufacturing processes and coatings used have had on the recyclability of the original materials. Also to be studied is the transport method used to deliver the product to the user and the amount and type of packaging used.
The product is sold and finds a home with our happy client. Our Sustainable Design product considerations are far from over. When developing the product we must understand the resource impact of the product through its entire life cycle. The battery usage, the water usage, the power usage, the emission of the product itself, the emissions and resource cost of maintenance. Then finally we must consider the energy usage of recycling the appropriate components and the impact of the waste to our planet. Now if all these questions and considerations are not enough for you to balance, the product must be safe, usable, appropriately costed, profitable and marketable – easy?
The System
Now that we have a sustainable design studio and a sustainable (and successful) product, what else could there possibly be to consider? The system, within which the product is being used, is often fundamentally flawed and creates a resource inefficient impact when examined on a macro scale. I recently had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Ezio Manzini, the Italian Engineer, Architect, Designer and Educator, who is a leader in sustainable thinking. Essentially in his lecture he presented the view that we can not reduce the impact we are having on our resources simply by designing more sustainable products. For example, if we compared contemporary washing machines with washing machines of 30 years ago we would no doubt find that they used far less water and far less power to complete the same or equivalent task and this example would be similar for any number if not all modern products. However, the drain on our planets resources over the last 30 years has increased significantly. There are more of us, we each own and operate many more products than we did 30 years ago and more and more country’s populations are becoming wealthy enough to join our global consumer economy.
We need to look into the overall system within which the product is operating and use our creative ability to develop new systems that operate more efficiently and with less impact, this is the Design of Sustainability. This may at first appear a very abstract concept and in many ways counter productive to somebody employed by a manufacturing company, or by company whose client is a manufacturer. There is no doubt that this topic is a difficult one to broach in the professional environment without people thinking you’re a nutty environmentalist, or that you accidently put something funky in your coffee, but we need to treat it seriously.
I am fortunate to have been trained as both a Mechanical Engineer and an Industrial Designer, and often I am internally torn between the two fundamentally different problem solving thought processes. Many people and companies do not have the tools to think beyond the immediate problems put before them. Industrial Designers find themselves in an interesting professional position. Straddling the boundary between technical doer and creative thinker, I feel we need to take a leadership role in creating a meaningful and fruitful sustainability dialogue.
I have attempted to highlight the complicated nature of Design for, and the Design of, Sustainability and we must not forget that these topics are by most measures still young. These factors would suggest that no one man or company has all the answers, I sure don’t. Even if one entity did have a concise plan, the nature and the extent of the systemic change required to make our growing global population truly sustainable, they would not be able to action or implement it alone.
So what do we do? Well, here is my action plan. It’s simple, but so are some of the greatest products ever designed. Let’s make our studios sustainable, improving every year. Let’s make the products we are designing today as sustainable as possible and let’s get active in creating a dialogue with clients, colleagues and employers about the more significant systemic changes that are needed. These systemic changes won’t reduce product related markets, rather they will generate entirely new opportunities for designers and product related businesses to flourish and benefit all stakeholders in the product lifecycle whilst reducing the impact on our planet.
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