Researching about Sustainability and Design and their connection to each other represents the foundation of almost all my teaching content. I am constantly asked what these two terms have to do with each other which tells me there is a lot of explanation to be done.
Researching about Sustainability and Design and their connection to each other represents the foundation of almost all my teaching content. I am constantly asked what these two terms have to do with each other which tells me there is a lot of explanation to be done.
Sustainability is perceived as a green eco trend that serves as a marketing trend to sell us products that are more environment-friendly than others. However, the true core definition marked by the United Nations along the so-called Brundtland-Report from 1987 says something else: “Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without comprimising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” So it is more about intergenerational thinking which is an instinct human societies have neglected over the last centuries rather than a short-term eco wave. Sustainability is directly linked to the future of human society on this planet, which is in profound danger due to senseless over-use of the planet’s resources.
Sustainability is perceived as a green eco trend that serves as a marketing trend to sell us products that are more environment-friendly than others. However, the true core definition marked by the United Nations along the so-called Brundtland-Report from 1987 says something else: “Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without comprimising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” So it is more about intergenerational thinking which is an instinct human societies have neglected over the last centuries rather than a short-term eco wave. Sustainability is directly linked to the future of human society on this planet, which is in profound danger due to senseless over-use of the planet’s resources.
Design on the other hand is perceived as the superficial styling of meaningless products misleading messages. Destined to serve the marketing world, Designers get to be creative within predestined frames at the end of creative processes. But since it is a comparably young dynamic profession the meaning and effectiveness of Design seem to be debatable. “Everyone designs, who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” says american social scientist Herbert A. Simon in his The Sciences of the Artificial, in 1981. So rather than decorating the objectification of mass consumtion at the finish line, Design can also be interpreted as a process-oriented problem-solving strategy which is independent from market segments.
Bringing both terms Sustainability and Design together in this different sense, they indicate a strong connection towards a positive future. They in fact find themselves in an interdepence, that finds itsself in an down-cycling spiral these days. The theory is, however, that this interedepence can be turned around so that both parties benefit from one another. This interdependence marks the center of my research. I want to discover the past of it and the development that brought it into the situation it find itself today as well as its potential for the future. In field research and teaching, I am eager to find out which mechanisms need to be changed to turn this interdependence around.
THE SUSTAINABILITY MEASUREMENT TOOL
Within an ongoing research project, I am developping a sustainability design measurement tool, which is basically a visualization of the multiple diverse aspects to consider when talking about sustainability. It can potentially serve as a dynamic seal of quality, labeling products about their individual sustainable background in a comprehensive form.
This measurement tool is based on the idea of bringing the three aspects of the triple bottom line TBL (society, ecology and economy) together with the aspects of life cycle assessment LCA (production, consumption and aftermath) in a 3×3-matrix. The emerging nine fields reach every aspect that needs to be reconsidered within Sustainability and so it can be used by Designers as guidelines when they aim to consider to integrate Sustainability in their creative processes.
The idea behind this project is originated in the research for my Master’s Thesis in 2011. After learning about Sustainability and the connection to Design in Finnland in 2009, I felt urged to know more about it and dedicate my thesis to it. I wanted to define what needed to be considered in order to design “sustainable” and read a lot of books before eventually coming up with some kind of a checklist. Lateron, I saw that each item of the checklist could be placed somewhere within this 3×3 thought framework and each field could get a different evaluation depending on the fulfillment of the conditions. Given the chance of four different values for each field (100%, 66%, 33% or 0%), gives this tool 6561 variations (9 to the power of four).
This could upgrade the definition of Sustainability giving it a comprehensive, yet differentiated visualization. After having this project rest in my drawer for a couple of years due to other projects, I am reshaping the setting these days to continuing this research, filling the matrix with explicit data and connecting it to existing measuring instruments.
EN:VISION
In summer 2016, I intend to extend my research to the topic of learning processes about Sustainability and Design. Giving an intensive workshop in selected cities in the United States over several weeks travelling through the country, I plan to collect field research data on how the processes of problem-solving design thinking processes can be simplified and displayed. The further goal is a guidebook for designers that leads. This could potentially be a bigger academic undertaking for the next couple of years with more countries with different education systems to come.