Walker S. Sustainable by Design: Explorations in Theory and Practice

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DESIGN

PROCESS AND

SUSTAINABLE

DEVELOPMENT

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DESIGN

PROCESS AND

SUSTAINABLE

DEVELOPMENT

a journey

in design

Industrial design began in the early years of the 20th century to provide

design services for manufacturing.

Since then, its role has developed

with the industry and today it is often the key ingredient of a company’s

success. A broad range of expertise, knowledge and skills enables the

industrial designer to make important contributions to our modern,

globalized systems of product development, production and marketing.

However, when we add sustainable development to the mix of issues

to be considered by manufacturing industry, the industrial designer is

generally ill equipped to offer advice. In addition, a primary concern of

manufacturing has to be the economic factor. When sustainability issues

are raised, as they have been on an increasing basis in recent years, it

is perhaps understandable that many companies are reluctant to deal

with them; the issues are complex, company knowledge is often lacking

and, perhaps most critically, any action to address concerns about

sustainability is usually perceived as being detrimental to the

bottom line.

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Sustainable by Design

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Sustainable development often seems incompatible with conventional

priorities and business norms. To develop a more effective relationship

between sustainable principles and the creation of our material needs,

it may be necessary to take a rather different approach. Instead of trying

to ‘force fit’ sustainable principles into an existing and often unreceptive

manufacturing system, it may be useful to approach the subject from

the opposite direction, and consider how functional objects might

be designed and manufactured to be compatible with principles of

sustainable development. This would allow sustainable concerns to be

included from the beginning and could provide much needed direction

for developing new models of production. To do this requires a change

in perspective and for the purpose of illustration I would like to use an

analogy. The following comparison of two journeys demonstrates the

type of shift in thinking that is required of the designer who wishes to

explore the unfamiliar and uncertain territory of sustainable design.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin, an experienced explorer, set out from

England to discover a sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific through

the Canadian Arctic – the fabled Northwest Passage. This was his

fourth Arctic journey and the most well prepared and well stocked

expedition ever mounted to the region. It comprised two ships with 129

men. The ships were fitted with the very latest technologies including

steam engines and propellers to supplement the sails, a steam heating

system and desalinators to distil drinking water from seawater

. They

took enough provisions to last three years, with over 60,000kg of flour

and 8000 cans of food. They had a library of nearly 3000 books,

early photographic equipment, silver plate, mahogany desks, dress

uniforms and even a grand piano.

Sir John Franklin did not believe

in scrimping; he intended to live well and in the manner to which he

and his men were accustomed; and that was his undoing. Despite his

previous experience in the region, the technology, the planning and the

immense supplies, not one crewmember survived: all died of starvation,

illness and cold, and neither ship was ever seen again. Subsequent

accounts from the Inuit of the region and the recovery of frozen remains

have revealed a final struggle for survival of harrowing desperation and

indications of cannibalism.

The deaths of Franklin and his men were unnecessary and wholly

avoidable. Seventy-five years earlier another Englishman, Samuel

Hearne, had already explored the same region and had shown that the

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Design Process and Sustainable Development

Northwest Passage did not exist in any form that was useful as a trade

route. Over a period of nearly three years, Hearne trekked 5000 miles

in the area between Hudson’s Bay and the Arctic Ocean. In contrast to

Franklin’s struggle for survival, Hearne was able to maintain detailed

journals about the wildlife, the people and the environment; and he

spent time making careful pencil drawings of what he saw.

Unlike

Franklin, Hearne travelled light, and looked to the indigenous people

for guidance and instruction. He adopted their ways, their diet, and their

modes of travel, and he was not in the least prejudiced against them,

even though many of their customs horrified him and on more than one

occasion he was cheated, robbed and abandoned.

His willingness to

learn from the native people not only made him unusual for his day, but

also allowed him to successfully live and travel in the region.

The difference in these two stories is that, while both men were exploring

new territory, Franklin’s approach was impositional, whereas Hearne’s

was responsive. Franklin brought with him not only tons of supplies but

also a set of values and expectations from another context. He tried to

force

-fit the norms and conventions of 19th-century England into the

barren, frozen lands of the Arctic. And it worked for a while, until the

supplies ran out, and then the entire expedition perished because they

had not learned how to survive in their new environment. Hearne, on

the other hand, responded to the new conditions. His lack of egotism

and pretension meant that he was able to adapt to his new context and

he became competent in the nomadic ways of the native people. In

other words, Hearne’s approach was sustainable whereas Franklin’s

was not.

The discipline of design is also about exploring new ground and

charting new

territory, and if we are to do this effectively and sustainably,

we must be fully aware of the new context in which we find ourselves

and learn to respond to it in an appropriate manner. We must also

consider the baggage, in the form of preconceptions, that we bring

along with us.

When we are in the midst of things, it is often difficult to appreciate

the context: there are too many details getting in the way

. So we must

try to obtain a different perspective, and one way of doing this for our

current situation is to look at it in terms of its historical development. In

the previous chapter, I discussed the key historical events that led to the

emergence of sustainable development in the late 20th century. Our

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contemporary manufacturing systems are quite clearly a culmination of

some 500 years of scientific progress,

the development of rationalism,

the rise of utilitarianism,

200–300 years of industrial capitalism,

century or so of mass production and accelerating consumerism,

and

perhaps 30 years of the age of information. And in just the last few

decades, Postmodern understandings have also begun to permeate

society, bringing with them perspectives that often challenge and

undermine previously held certainties. Within this relatively recent

period, the concept of sustainable development has emerged in

response to the detrimental effects associated with our activities. When

we look at it from this perspective, as a rather new but systemically

challenging and potentially disrupting idea, it is not surprising that our

industrialists, economists and politicians are having some difficulty

in understanding what it means and how to reconcile it with long-

established industrial and economic norms.

What is clear is that many of our conventions and practices are no

longer valid for the context in which we now find ourselves. As I will

elaborate in later chapters, a multitude of social and environmental

indicators make it only too apparent that contemporary production

systems and consumption patterns are physically

, ethically and spiritually

untenable. And so we must move forward into unknown territory and

explore new approaches that are more environmentally benign and

personally and socially enriching. It is the role of designers, as well

as design educators and researchers, to be in the vanguard of this

exploration – to visualize new possibilities and offer new responses. As

designers, we can set about this exploration in a variety of ways. At one

end of the spectrum, we can be like Franklin and retain the practices

that have brought us thus far, assuming they will take us further. Most

companies and most designers seem to be adopting this approach.

They move forward but in a manner that maintains the behaviours of

an increasingly outmoded context. It is not unusual for environmental

advocates to be viewed as unfortunate irritants or as being against

technological advance and progress; one group has even referred to

them as ’the new life-haters’.

Environmental legislation tends to be

opposed at every turn because it is perceived as having a negative

effect on earnings. One major company has made much of its use

of recycled materials in its products, while simultaneously employing

sweatshop labour in the Far East for product assembly.

New products

are developed but, for the most part, the main intention is to boost

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Design Process and Sustainable Development

sales, increase profits and foster growth. Whether or not the product

is capable of making a meaningful and responsible contribution to

material culture is often not even a consideration.

It is important to acknowledge that there are now numerous companies

making genuine efforts to be more environmentally and socially

responsible. But within the current system, where the dominant measure

of success is financial profit, with little else of comparable importance,

then change is slow and it is difficult to stray too far from convention.

This approach to design and manufacturing is impositional – the

practices developed in one context (the Modern) are being applied

within another (the P

ostmodern) that has different requirements.

Essentially, it is merely a projection into the future of what has worked in

the past. This may have been effective once, but today it is not viable.

A central tenet of industrial capitalism is growth, but nothing can grow

for ever, and we now seem to be reaching the limits of growth – at least

in terms of the types of growth we have valued over the past century.

To simply extrapolate from the past and to ignore the evidence around

us of the consequences of our actions reveals a blindness to the

circumstances, a lack of creativity and a moral failing.

At the other end of the spectrum, we can take an approach more

like that of Samuel Hearne. This requires an open mind to the new

context. W

e do not attempt to impose our outmoded behaviours but

instead learn to adapt to the situation in which we now find ourselves.

Only by fundamentally changing our approaches to deal with the new

circumstances can we hope to develop new models for design and

production that are more compatible with sustainable ways of living.

Wrestling with existing models and trying to modify them is not an

effective strategy. Progress is frustratingly slow, changes are incremental

and acceptance of change is often grudging. By contrast, envisioning

and building new models could, eventually, render the old ways

obsolete. While improving the existing system is undoubtedly beneficial

and to be encouraged, there are many examples showing that a more

radical approach can be an effective strategy for instigating more

fundamental change. An example from the world of product design

would be the calculating machine. Until the 1970s, the basic operating

principle of the mechanical calculator had remained essentially the

same since the 19th century. However, with the advent of microchip

technology those calculators, and the knowledge base and production

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systems that were in place to produce them, were rendered obsolete

within just a few years. Manufacturers had to rapidly revolutionize their

approach if they were to operate successfully within a fundamentally

new context, or they found themselves quickly out of business. Another,

more recent example is the transfer from disc-based formats of recorded

music, where a tangible product was purchased from a store along

with packaging, to a digital-based format that is flexible, accessible

from home and less expensive; a similar revolution has occurred in the

transfer from film-based to digital photography.

It is important to acknowledge that, in the case of sustainable

development, while we recognize that many of our conventional

approaches are unsustainable, we do not know what a sustainable

approach might look like. This truly is a journey of exploration. But,

like Samuel Hearne, we must leave behind our preconceptions, many

of the things we hold dear and many of our expectations. This is not

a comfortable thing to have to do; it is disconcerting and the route

forward is uncertain – but this is the nature of exploration. It is also the

nature of design. T

o be a designer is to be on uncertain ground.

So let us look at some of the things that, perhaps, we would do well

leaving behind, or at least challenging

, and then consider how we might

begin to take some tentative steps forward.

The imposition of preconceptions on a design project is not only very

common, it is also rather unimaginative. When it occurs, we are simply

drawing on our existing notions of how objects should be – irrespective

of the requirements of the object or the context of use. W

e just have to

look around to see that this type of impositional design is the dominant

form today – most cars look virtually the same and they have visual

characteristics that are very similar to other products, such as CD

players which, in turn, look very similar to vacuum cleaners. There are

thousands of designers in professional practice around the world, all

trained at universities and colleges to be creative – and yet so many of

our products look essentially the same in terms of their overall visual

language. Now, one might argue that this is a trivial point, that it is

not so important how things look. This is not the case. It is critically

important how things look – because ‘how things look’ is a reflection

of ourselves, of who we are, of the things that we believe are important

and the things we choose to ignore. So the fact that things tend to look

the same, that the look of things is geared towards transient trends,

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fashion and consumerism – these characteristics of products and design

are actually very telling; especially when we know, unequivocally, that

our current practices are so damaging to the environment and are

socially inequitable.

We must ask ourselves why this is so, why do industrial designers tend

to design in this way? In my view, it has much to do with the baggage

that is brought along. The very term ‘industrial design’ brings with it a

great deal of baggage. It defines an approach, carrying with it a set of

expectations, and it represents a particular set of knowledge and skills.

Industrial design is closely linked, as a term and as a discipline, with the

development of mass production and consumer goods in the early years

of the 20th century

. It is generally understood as the design of products

for large-scale distribution and it is commonly described as a service

profession to manufacturing industry.

But the characteristics that are

inherent to the term industrial design are today highly questionable, as

are the characteristics of the industrial system it serves, because many of

them are entirely incompatible with sustainable principles. For example,

industrial design means the design of mass-produced products,

often with an intentionally short life span, for mass markets, whereas

sustainable approaches tend to place far greater emphasis on smaller,

local-scale initiatives and product endurance. So the term industrial

design is not very useful in discussions of sustainable development; the

term ‘product design’, which is used interchangeably with industrial

design, has many of the same problems.

Therefore, some of the baggage we might leave behind as we explore

new

, more sustainable directions would be the labels industrial design

and product design and our conventional notions of what they imply

about the production and aesthetics of functional objects.

A related issue here is the whole notion of the professionalization

of design. P

rofessions tend to categorize, separate and distinguish

activities, and product design has become a defined, professionalized

discipline, which implies certain ideas about material things. By contrast,

sustainable development points towards approaches that are holistic

and more inclusive and, certainly at this early point in the development

of our understandings of the subject, we must encourage diversity and

variety, trial and error, and experimentation. The narrowing of our

understandings into a specific discipline and within the boundaries of a

specific ‘profession’ is not consistent with the integrative, interdisciplinary

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and experimental approaches that are needed here. Carl Jung once

suggested that one of the roles of religion is to shield us from the religious

experience.

Similarly, we could argue that one of the roles of industrial

design, together with manufacturing industry, is to shield us from a

meaningful experience of material culture.

Hence, the terms we use and the systemic characteristics they imply would

seem to be a hindrance rather than a help, and it may be useful to drop

them from the lexicon of sustainable design – at least for the present.

Instead of thinking about design within this conventional frame, we can

approach it in fresh ways and think about how to create a material culture

that is consistent with, and beneficial to, personal and social well-being,

environmental stewardship and economic stability

. To do this we must start

with fewer preconceptions and improvise as we go.

This might seem rather unrealistic – but let us continue the analogy. If

Samuel Hearne had turned to the other ‘professional’ explorers of his

day for advice, he would have received the established view of how to

go about Arctic exploration. F

ranklin took the established view, and even

if he hadn’t perished, his approach, despite appearances, was far more

precarious than Hearne’s.

A characteristic of improvisation is that we have to make do with what is

available and use limited resources in creative new ways. A priori solutions

are less feasible, and a type of design is encouraged that is more sensitive

to, and contingent on, context. An important source of precedents of this

type of approach is vernacular design. In traditional cultures, there is often

a very good ‘

fit’ between material artefacts and the environment, cultural

values and beliefs, and ways of life. Traditional cultures can be excellent

examples of how to live in more sustainable ways. Objects are often deeply

symbolic and meaningful within these cultures, and for this reason they

have value over and above functional benefit (this point will be explored

in more detail later). We can learn from vernacular design because an

important aspect of sustainable development is the ‘local’ and the specific

characteristics of place. Vernacular design can provide us with at least

some insights into the diversity and richness of locally appropriate design.

We can also learn from the craft and folk design traditions. But it is our

challenge to find ways of bringing together the local and the global to

create designs that are suited to modern, technologically and economically

developed societies. Such an integration would also go some way to

bridging the chasm that has grown between craft and design for industry.

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To encourage exploration, improvisation and integration, perhaps,

instead of trying to be professional, we should become amateurs and

dilettantes. These terms are usually taken to be derogatory, but the

word ‘dilettante’ comes from the same root as ‘delight’, and ‘amateur’

from the same root as ‘amare’, meaning love. To be a dilettante and

an amateur is to be someone who delights in the diverse beauty of the

world and engages in a pursuit because of a love of the subject. Rather

than defining objects within strict boundaries, and ‘professionalizing’

material culture, we need to open up new ways that allow us to delight

in the act of creativity, and in the products of creativity – ways that are

pursued because of a love of the activity and a love of the environment

and the world. Most contemporary products are not expressions of

delight, nor are they manifestations of love. It is difficult to feel delight

when we know our products are causing enormous environmental

devastation, and it is difficult to feel love of a subject that contributes

to a system of manufacturing that is permeated by unconscionable

social inequities. By contrast, sustainable approaches to design have

the potential of not only ameliorating the environmental and ethical

concerns associated with conventional practices, but also of helping to

create a material culture that truly is a thing of beauty, in which we can

find delight because it is a meaningful expression of human values that

are responsible, ethical and caring.

Another facet of contemporary design is also worth challenging. We

often hear that design is about solving problems. Ironically

contemporary design often seems not so much about solving problems

as creating them. Marcel Duchamp once said, ’There is no solution

because there is no problem’.

If there is no problem then what does

the designer do? In my view, it is more accurate and more constructive

to say that designers create possibilities. We create possibilities of how

things could be; but we have given less thought to the question of how

things should be. When we pass from could to should we introduce

an ethical dimension, and this is a key feature of a more sustainable

approach.

The concern of this chapter has been the need to reframe how we think

about the creation of functional objects in the context of sustainable

development; the main points are summarized in T

able 4.1. The

development of fresh perspectives can be hindered by the terms,

conventions and expectations of established practices, and so it seems

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