Today I am lucky to have a great guest writer. Alison Masters is an old colleague of mine. We have worked together in two Commercial Interior Design companies. Recently Alison has concentrated her career on sustainability and design. Her post is in harmony with a local and global re-evaluation of our roles as consumers. Thanks Alison.
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Design and Sustainability
Are you bored of hearing about ‘sustainability’? Do you wonder what it has to do with design? More than one contributor to the chalk wall at the recent Kingston University MA Design for Development show at Tent, London Design Festival said as much. The ‘S’ word has been overused, abused and hyped. So what is it really about? And why might it be of special interest to the design community?
‘Sustainability’ is a concept of extending the longevity of a desirable, livable future for our species. What it is not is a trend, a religion, a political stance, a brand or a product. It’s about us, making our world work well, for all, for as long as humanly possible.
Perhaps the problem today is that as sophisticated consumers we are so used to being cajoled, entertained, and flattered into desiring and experiencing our world as customers that an idea that challenges us to learn to rethink how we live on this earth; how we interact, plan, and create, is not immediately appealing. After all we may ask, ‘what’s in it for us... right here... right now?’
For designers, it’s about the ‘grand design’, whatever the project. We like to get our teeth into a problem and come up with an elegant solution that satisfies all aspects of the brief. It’s about making ‘it’ work better, more efficiently, more beautifully, and more productively; in this instance not only for the sake of aesthetics and commerce, but within the context of a creating a future world we would want to live in and in respect to its current limits.
‘The brief’ doesn’t just refer to the project in front us at that very moment. By the way we work and what we prioritise we are also defining the brief of our age. For our forebears at the Bauhaus in the early 20th century, that brief was about democracy through design, utilising technology to make good design available to the masses for a better life against a backdrop of poverty, war, political instability and glaring social inequality. They understood that the spaces we live in, the products we make, the images and symbols we use to communicate all shape the perceptions, behaviours and collective philosophy of larger society. So, as designers today what do our creations tell us about how we live? What is our goal? How do we respond to contemporary challenges? Who and what do we value, and who and what do we choose to overlook?
If we begin to design with a whole systems approach, we widen the context so that the measure of success of any project, be it architectural, communicative or product design is balanced against its environmental, social and cultural effect on the whole. ‘Good design’ from this perspective demands that the designer thinks multidimensionally, satisfying many variables in pursuit of the best solution.
A positive benefit of a systemic approach is the opportunity to think as well about the design of those systems themselves, opening up our discipline to roles beyond the visual and material. One step beyond consideration of environmental, social and cultural systems within the design process of artifacts is making creative interventions to positively impact the way we interact at a systemic level, creating fertile ground for broader change. ‘Design thinking’ employs many of the same processes and skills we use in the design of artifacts and spaces but applies the concept to innovation within business, society and increasingly our complex relationship to the biosphere, our life support system.
We live in an era of unprecedented global ecological, environmental, economic, social and cultural crises. To design without fully understanding the gravity of our situation or our potential to positively affect it is to design blindly. Creative solutions of the highest order are critical to our collective future. Design is so much more than people pleasing products, spaces and marketing; it’s the blueprints for how we choose to live. We have the opportunity to make a difference with what we do by opening up the way we create, re imagining what design can be and taking on the challenges of our world and our time.
That, design lovers could be really interesting.
Alison Masters (MA Design for Development)
Contact Alison
Interested? Read some more....
‘The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability’, Ann Thorpe – a designer friendly guide to sustainability - http://www.designers-atlas.net/
Ann Thorpe’s blog - http://designactivism.net/
‘Cradle to Cradle’, William McDonough, Michael Braungart – Remaking the way we make things - http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
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