Abstract
People are intertwined with their social and physical environments, and humanity is intertwined with the earth. This link has been lost in our culture. Our culture thinks in straight lines; we buy things, utilize them, and then discard them. Companies strive for maximal development, profit, and efficiency, but nature operates in a different way. When something is discarded in nature, it rots and becomes a source of fresh life, following a cyclical pattern. There is a dynamic equilibrium of species in nature that are interconnected. Our future depends on a fusion of these two realms, a fusion of industrial civilization and its natural foundations.
Design may be more than just something that has a purpose and looks a specific way. Design may provide us with a new way of seeing the world and link us to a larger reality. A design must have a function, inspire an emotional reaction, and be in accordance with our cultural style in order to connect with us, whether it be urban design, product design, or the design of our own life; this design would then become an extension of our identity. However, in order for a design to effectively link us to the rest of the world, it must be built on a belief system with which we can identify, as well as having a purpose with which we can empathize.
Our society is constructed in such a manner that we prioritize corporate profits, making items or planning cities that rely on polluting materials, have a negative impact on millions of people's health, do not pay people their fair share, and are intended to be abandoned. It's no surprise, therefore, that many of us experience a sense of alienation from our civilizations.
It was only inevitable that a system that failed to contemplate its ongoing life cycle would finally catch up with us. As early as 1977, oil executives were aware of climate change, and the plastics industry was well aware that its products would contaminate the ocean and soil. A system that would churn out untold sums of money for a finite period of time in exchange for centuries of pollution, the effects of which would be felt far into the future, well beyond their lifetimes. Everything about the system was created with a specific goal in mind. It is, in some ways, ideally designed. Despite the fact that it is the source of immense human and environmental pain. In the same way, the opposite can happen. Designing goods, urban landscapes, or processes with a purpose that helps the many rather than the few, while including notions such as function, emotion, culture, and belief, may be really transformational, not only for the present but for future generations.
Main Body
It's no surprise that nearly every industry area is contributing to the planet's demise. Each person's role in the malaise engulfing the planet's ecosystems is rooted in a deeper issue that dates back long before the industrial revolution. To properly bring ourselves into harmony with the natural world, we must return to recognizing humanity as a part of it.
The extensive separation of people from nature in Western society may be traced back to a few significant historical changes, beginning with the establishment of Judeo-Christian ideals over 2000 years ago. Previously, belief systems based on several gods and earth spirits, such as paganism, were dominant. They saw the sacred as being located all over nature, and humans as being deeply entwined with it.
When Judaism and Christianity became the main religious forces in Western culture, their singular deity, as well as holiness and redemption, were relocated outside of nature. According to the Old Testament, God created humanity in his image and gave them dominion over the Earth.
Such ideas, as historian Lynn White famously argued, formed the groundwork for contemporary anthropocentrism, a set of beliefs that views humans as different from and superior to nonhumans. Indeed, people who believe the Bible to be literally true are more concerned about how environmental deterioration impacts humans than animals.
As the only rational beings on earth, and through a millenary dance of life and death with nature for our own survival, the conquest of our surroundings was always primordial to our societies. Even the language we use has a profound impact on how we view our surroundings, with examples such as “natural resources” and “fish stocks” implying that the goods of the earth hold no value apart from what they can provide to us, and it is our moral responsibility to exploit these goods recklessly.
When one digs into the core of the woes of humanity, sometimes they are causal effects of things outside of our control such as natural disasters or geographical accidents that influence the pace of history, but oftentimes they are causal effects of carefully designed protocols with clear objectives in mind. In the examples above, aspects of religious doctrines were purposefully implemented to influence the development of societies and to instill in them a sense of righteousness over their surroundings. The planning of how these implementations would look and function in societies is design.
But if it works one way, it can also work the other way around. The perception of being cut off from nature is not shared by all humans on the earth. Nonhumans are frequently depicted as relatives with intrinsic value to be respected, rather than external objects to be ruled or exploited, in Australian, Amerindian, and numerous other indigenous worldview systems.
Humanity and nature are also intertwined in Eastern philosophies and faiths such as Zen Buddhism, which emphasises that there is no such thing as an autonomous person and that all things rely on others for their life and well-being. Bhutan, for example, has entrenched ecological resilience in its constitution, which is heavily inspired by Mahayana Buddhism. The country is one of only two in the world that absorbs more carbon than it emits, thanks to a law that requires at least 60% of the land to be forested. It assesses development against a "gross national happiness" metric, which places a premium on human and environmental well-being above endless economic expansion.
Design naturally doesn’t only work at these macro, historical levels, and not all designers are big politicians or hugely influential individuals that can carefully plan out the future development of societies across time and space. These historical examples help explain the possible impact that a plan of the look and function of a product, a plan, or a service can have on its surroundings. Design seeks to influence behaviour in a particular way. It’s never neutral and
it eventually boils down to what our ethics are.
Ethics is about discerning how we should live and what it means to live a good life. Designers raise the topic of “design ethics” to try and sustain that their design is pursuing an improvement in the life of the users and/or the environment. However, I've seen that designers rarely highlight the economic environment in which they create as if these. Traditionally, these unintended implications of our work are framed as technical issues: how can we design and code ethically while retaining profitability and growth?
With design ethics, we will not be able to overcome issues like authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia, disinformation and addictive technologies, mental health and public health, or climate change. While designers should think about the ramifications of their work carefully, the issues plaguing the design and technology industries are not the fault of a few bad apples. Rather, we must recognize that design decisions are economic decisions––and that in our existing economic system, people's economic interests frequently clash with their social repercussions. Technology companies are "economic players within a capitalist mode of production, compelled to seek profits in order to fight off competition," not cultural or ideological actors. We must first analyse how technology is rooted in capitalism if we genuinely wish to design ethically. Our capacity to make technology function better for society as a whole is contingent on our willingness to rearrange our priorities and redefine value beyond profit maximisation. If we want to design ethically, we need to focus on the design of our policies, institutions, and economies, rather than designing at the margins and under the frameworks of age-long systems. To me, "design" is a political and philosophical issue in its broadest meaning.
Nevertheless, the principles of design can be applicable to nearly every challenge and can be democratised in a way that empowers people into solving smaller problems on a case-by-case basis. A new design to transport water in rural areas or better insulation for homes can have a profound impact for the people affected by it. Design is critical problem-solving that entails conducting extensive research into people's lives to determine what they lack and what they require, as well as extensive brainstorming to generate several ideas. Then putting those ideas through a prototype or testing process to discover if they truly fulfil their intended purpose.
Those that dedicate themselves to design itself tend to be very multidisciplinary. Combining engineering, biology, art, or pedagogy into the framework of design in order to create a solution, rarely is design on its own. More so than the “tools” of a designer, what is most important for design is the access to information, and in this age of information explosion one can get the information needed easier than ever before. One may learn about what has previously been done, what has been tried, and where one can receive technical knowledge. Previously, that would have required a significant amount of research. It's possible that one will have to spend a lot of time looking for the answers to that query. It should just take a few minutes now.
This radical expansion of design is a catalyst for the growing conversation around the power of design for social good. This discussion goes beyond a product's aesthetic merit. Design is being used by individuals and executives to innovate, distinguish, and ultimately establish brand equity and meaning. Designers and the communities to which they contribute are becoming more conscious of the influence of design on communities, the environment, and the social landscape. The value of ideas of individuals carrying out small scale interventions grows as the discourse broadens.
It may be argued that designing for sustainability is a paradox, given that most goods or breakthroughs remove resources from the exact earth we are attempting to preserve. Designers must now work backwards from the brief to consider how to accomplish the same result using locally sourced, recycled, renewable, or biodegradable components — and, more importantly, how to eliminate waste from the lifespan through reusability or upcycling. Design is what gives significance and value to objects made with restricted materials. And when it comes to addressing issues like rising urbanisation, renewable energy, or trash reduction, design is at the forefront.
In this sense, design for sustainability is an approach to activities that emphasises people and the environment's well-being as the end result. It develops products and methods with an emphasis on resource efficiency and the use of ecologically friendly materials. The design for sustainability technique is also known as a lifecycle design approach, because it takes into account information regarding a product's whole lifespan stages as well as its impact on the environment and living beings. The current consumer and industry drive for sustainability has expanded the usage of the design for sustainability methodology, particularly for new product and process development.
As contemporary designers that put sustainability as a core pillar in our design practice and a lens under which we view the approach to any given project, it is easy to imagine that we would act similarly in any timeframe. To imagine oneself 80 years ago and assume that one would not take part in design actions that would be harmful to the land, water, or air. The truth is that we are more likely to follow the trends and the established schools of design of the time than we would like to believe. Nowadays, we have benefited from decades of research on materials and processes that have facilitated the widespread adoption of sustainable practices.
These practices have also expanded beyond the realm of design into other areas of an organisation, where previously the design of a product would be performed in isolation without concerns for those that would carry out the fabrication of the product.
My world is specifically affected by the rapid and reckless encroachment of plastics and pollution on the environment. I have seen in my lifetime pristine beaches turn into dumpsters from sea currents that will navigate plastic bottles from the sea onto the coast, lush rainforests that have been sliced down to make way for unsustainable urban sprawl, and native populations that have been displaced to make space for open air mining projects. The city transformed from a place where children could safely play hide and seek anywhere, to one designed for cars, trucks and exhaust fumes with little to no space for the individual. It essentially accentuated the giant legacies of inequality that have been carried over through centuries, marking a clear divide between those worth designing for (the car users, the users of products with precious minerals in them, the people that need to drive to get to their country house or beach house in time) and those not worth designing for. It also demonstrates just how important design is, as the examples of reckless growth and construction are evident.
The practice of design can equally be used to transform this world. With core pillars of sustainability and social good in mind, one can effect change locally and scale it through our globalised world. In a similar way to how design has been democratised thanks to the age of information, one’s locally impactful design can contribute to that knowledge that humanity has been accumulating and which can affect the life of someone on the other side of the world that is perhaps dealing with a similar problem.
As an industry and as a society, we have been learning from our previous mistakes. As designers, we are now aware of the consequences of our previous actions and have realigned our values so that our creations can harmonise with the future rather than taking from future generations. Designing solutions that are built on a belief system with which we can identify, as well as having a purpose with which we can empathise. Incorporating various groups of people so that everyone is represented and we can grow together and not at the expense of each other or of the natural world.