Emma Dewberry

Demi: a case study in design for sustainability

The Design for the Environment Multimedia Implementation Project – demi – links design and sustainability information in a Web‐based resource and was set up in response to a number of UK Government reports which highlighted the dearth of knowledge and activity about sustainability in higher education design courses across the country. This paper details the design and development of demi, discussing its content, structure and educational potential. Also included is an investigation of design and sustainability pedagogy, which discusses the importance to the demi Web‐resource of a sustainability (rather than design) context and an exploration of the possible transferability of the demi structure to other disciplines, promoting practical and widespread action in education for sustainability.

Sustainable Consumption by Design

Publisher Summary This chapter explores the role played by design in achieving more sustainable patterns of consumption that examines in detail a variety of approaches associated with clothes washing. The discussion has obvious relevance for all designed surroundings and includes various levels of approach, including a focus on products, results, needs, and issues associated with materials, technology, systems, economics, and consumer behavior. Achieving optimal environmental improvement through design is contingent on the people and on understanding the way in which the people responds to their material surroundings. The common approach designed for sustainability; tend to focus on pollution reduction and resource efficiency rather than human choices and actions. Design for sustainability with a focus on people considers ways of satisfying fundamental human needs. A focus on needs and the ways that needs are satisfied does not exclude the design and production of products, services or systems. There is a dyadic relationship between design and policy, where design not only makes policy real through practical output, but policy is also informed and revisited in the light of design practice. Design has potential as an agent of change for influencing more sustainable consumption. The design processes are reflective, informed by other disciplines, and areas of expertise make connections among people, policy and practice. An effective manifesto for sustainable consumption is seen as a manifesto for the design.

Critical Reflections on Designing Product Service Systems

ABSTRACT 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.

Exploring the need for more radical sustainable innovation: what does it look like and why?

It has been argued in recent years that Western economies need to increase their resource productivity by 90% over the next 50 years. This is a radical aim. This paper draws on design for sustainability (DfS) thinking to scope interventions that encourage greater levels of resource productivity through reconfiguring concepts of growth and well‐being within organisational strategies, structures, systems, processes and outputs. Based on research from a UK EPSRC funded project Design Dialogues (2005–2008), this paper links together sustainable design and innovation literatures and dialogue‐based primary research that together inform the development of an approach to innovation for sustainability. The emphasis on sustainable innovation is to understand what is designed (the outputs of business) and why (the inputs: the values, beliefs, visions and objectives) within a context of ecological limits. The foundations of this approach are introduced here in order to demonstrate the potential to provoke a new way of thinking about longer‐term organisational innovation through making explicit the intrinsic connections between natural and human capitals. This paper explores the need to think differently in order to create sustainability and presents the outcome of this research: a methodology for innovation for sustainability.

Developing Scenarios for Product Longevity and Sufficiency

This paper explores the narrative of peoples’ relationships with products as a window on understanding the types of innovation that may inform a culture of sufficiency. The work forms part of the ‘Business as Unusual: Designing Products with Consumers in the Loop’ [BaU] project, funded as part of the UK EPSRC-ESRC RECODE network (RECODE, 2016) that aims to explore the potential of re-distributed manufacturing (RdM) in a context of sustainability. This element of the project employed interviews, mapping and workshops as methods to investigate the relationship between people and products across the product lifecycle. A focus on product longevity and specifically the people-product interactions is captured in conversations around product maintenance and repair. In exploring ideas of ‘broken’ we found different characteristics of, and motivations for, repair. Mapping these and other product-people interactions across the product lifecycle indicated where current activity is, who owns such activity (i.e. organisation or individual) and where gaps in interactions occur. These issues were explored further in a workshop which grouped participants to look at products from the perspective of one of four scenarios; each scenario represented either short or long product lifespans and different types of people engagement in the design process. The findings help give shape to new scenarios for designing sufficiency-based social models of material flows.

Building Information Modelling Design Ecologies: A New Model?

This paper considers the barriers to BIM adoption and demonstrates they are symptoms of existing problems in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations AECO industry. When current external pressures are considered, a varied and complex set of problems emerge that require a significant paradigm change if they are to be resolved sustainably. It is argued that Building Information Modelling BIM does not represent a paradigm change on its own and the concept of the design ecology is presented as a framework within which BIM can act as a catalyst for change. Specific affordances of this model are presented in terms of responding to the challenges presented in the Low Carbon Construction report Innovation and Growth Team, 2010 and to the general characteristics of the original problems identified. Examples are presented to demonstrate that this is already emerging in practice and some suggested areas of further investigation are suggested.

Sustainability by design: a subversive strategy for transforming our consumer culture

transforming our consumer culture, by John R. Ehrenfeld, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008, 272 pp., £18-00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-30013-749-1 This book takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the roots of a vision that holds potential to change existing habits, beliefs and activities and create new ones for sustainability. Ehrenfeld reminds us that sustainability is an ‘essentially contested concept’, much like freedom or liberty, where we understand their meaning but lack wisdom and capabilities to make them real. Much of this book sets out our common understanding of sustainability, and as Ehrenfeld defines it as ‘the possibility of flourishing’. He interweaves ideas from a range of disciplines to produce a narrative, which highlights what we do (badly), why we do such things and what we need to change. Also and importantly, he highlights how a design for sustainability approach can be fostered through reawakening our awareness of how we should care for ourselves, for others and for the world in which we inhabit. Broadly speaking, Ehrenfeld makes the useful distinction between the meta-concept of sustainability, on the one hand, and current action, on the other hand, that is predominantly focused on micro-managing efficiency gains in existing products, services and infrastructures. He terms this type of activity as ‘reducing unsustainability’ and emphasises that reducing unsustainability will not create sustainability as sustainability and unsustainability are not two sides of the same coin. Sustainability is not the result of making the present slightly better; it, he argues, belongs to a new world served by a different language, cultural habits and stories – and until we find ourselves in that new world we must be able to hold on to these multiple realities and use design to develop new language, tools, institutions and strategies that aid our transitional journey. Ehrenfeld’s is a thought-provoking approach that calls for the need to think differently. His ambition is not for a revolution but rather for a series of small changes that can make a big difference over time; and it is in the seeding of such change that design is accorded a key role, in achieving a transition of minds rather than technological innovation. Ehrenfeld suggests that through over-reliance on technology to solve problems, modern society has lost sight of some basic principles, namely: our sense of place within and as part of nature; our understanding of what it is to be a human being; and our ethical ability to act responsibly. He suggests that although it is beyond the reach of an individual or group to quickly alter the fundamental patterns of unsustainability, it is within our grasp to challenge our understanding of reality and adopt different perceptions of the world and different ways of behaving in it. A key phenomenological theme of the book is that humans have the unique capacity of Being-in-the-world; of leading meaningful lives. Our ability to do this though, according to Ehrenfeld, will be dependent on our ability to substitute traditional market satisfiers intrinsic to our culture of consumption for a more subversive design strategy that creates meaningful products and services ‘that can transparently restore the human capability for caring and coping in all dimensions of living’. Ehrenfeld points out that this could happen in many ways: from inscribing instructions through product semantics that inhibit normal routine behaviours; to engagement strategies which involve users more deeply in understanding product identity and function; to participatory design activity where users are intimately involved in reframing problem and design outcomes. He believes that sustainable cultures evolve through new paradigmatic elements; and the capacity of design to understand, and build on, these elements (new beliefs and norms) and to reimagine a world that is authentically sustainable.