Last Friday’s sixth session of the Sustainable Brands Boot Camp focused on sustainable product design. Nathan Shedroff outlined 8 frameworks and 12 strategies of sustainable design. The frameworks were the usual suspects like cardle-to-cradle, biomimicry, or the life cycle analysis. What seemed like the shorter part of the presentation covered the strategies.
Strategies for sustainable design
The 12 strategies for sustainable design, as outlined in the presentation and in Nathan’s book Design is the Problem, are built around the reduce – reuse – recycle model, with restore thrown in at the end:
- Design for use – focus on product’s usability, accessibility, and meaning
- Dematerialization – reduce materials, energy, and transportation
- Substitution – use less harmful materials or forms of energy
- Localization
- Transmaterialization – turn products into services
- Informationalization – turn physical objects into digital ones (“atoms into bits”)
- Design for durability
- Design for reuse
- Design for disassembly
- Design for effectiveness
- Design for systems
- Design for restoration
The list constitutes a great overview of possibilities to keep in mind when designing your product. Combine the different strategies for even better results.
What about the end user?
I’m a huge fan of sustainable design. In fact, I’m starting to believe that design, rather than “green”, will be the differentiator for sustainable products: it affects functionality, reliability, and convenience, all of which feature in the product evolution model of competition.
However, in the sea of frameworks and strategies, the consumer seems to have drowned, if she got in to begin with. The consumer — the ultimate user of the sustainably designed product — is explicitly present only in the first strategy, as crucial as it may be, while the rest deal primarily with the product and its eco-system.
Do crowdsourcing or participatory design have a place among the sustainable design strategies?
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Image credit: StephenMitchell
* Disclosure: Sustainable Life Media granted me a free press pass for the Sustainable Brands Boot Camp – regular registration for the online seminar series is $395.
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