Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design

Jonathan Chapman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317435921
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Design
• Categoría: Product Design

As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers, the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book's contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.

PART I

The made world

Human destruction of the natural world is a crisis of behaviour and not one simply of energy and material alone. The made world is the way it is, because of the thinking, values and understandings that underpin its formation. As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us – for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age.

This opening part of the book takes us beyond the field’s preoccupation with materials, manufacturing and distribution, to engage the underlying cultural and psychological phenomena that foster cycles of desire, consumption, experience and waste. Each of the six chapters engages the core theme of design, and its relation to the made world. Their collective aim is to reframe the underlying behavioural phenomena that shape patterns of design, consumption and waste. In doing so, they show the complexity of the territory, while highlighting key opportunities for sustainable product design research and intervention. The contributors writing in this section draw together previously disconnected scholarship in behavioural psychology, anthropology, sustainability and design history, culture and theory. In doing so, they reimagine the role and purpose of design as a transformative process, driving human flourishing, prosperity and wellbeing. Their chapters may be summarized as follows:

1 A brief history of (un)sustainable design – Damon Taylor

This chapter examines the emergence of the paradigm of sustainability in the practice of product design over the last half-century; arguing that the changing relation of design to issues of sustainability can be understood as an emergent ‘environmentality’, which shapes designed response.

2 The half-life of a sustainable emotion: searching for meaning in product usage – Gerald C. Cupchik

The roots of product attachment can be found in the experiential structures of our interactions with material things. This chapter explores these roots, asking why users hold on to certain products that are beyond their prime, while discarding and replacing other products so frequently?

3 A renaissance of animism: a meditation on the relationship between things and their makers – Michael Leube

Designers speak of the spirit of good design, yet it escapes definition, description and often evades discussion. This chapter reviews animistic epistemologies to further clarify the term and to enable a more inclusive and relational discourse for product design theory.

4 The object of nightingales: design values for a meaningful material culture – Stuart Walker

Dominant commercial and political interpretations of progress and growth run in conflict with human values. This chapter reconsiders product design values that are congruent with age-old understandings of human meaning as well as with contemporary notions of sustainability.

5 Challenges of the cultural differentiation of technology – Petran Kockelkoren

The ubiquitous dissemination of technologies has led to one universal consumer society revolving around the products of a handful of multinationals. The universalizing tendency of technology is over, making way for culturally differentiated forms of technological intimacy.

6 Sustainable product design: an oxymoron? – Clive Dilnot

The origin, logic, direction and operative power of ‘sustainability’ and ‘product design’ are often deeply opposed. This chapter uncovers the limitations of the term ‘sustainable product design’ to propose a new language and direction for this expanded field of practice.

As these chapters collectively argue, the process of consumption is motivated by complex drivers, and is about far more than just the mindless purchasing of newer, shinier stuff. Rather, it is a journey towards the ideal or desired self that through cyclical loops of desire and disappointment becomes an endless process of consumption and waste. As we inefficiently fumble our way through countless embraces with material experiences – from skyscrapers to saltshakers – we temporarily connect with a longer-standing struggle to understand complex existential phenomena such as time, mortality, identity, meaning and utopia, for example. In the context of sustainable product design, this scenario raises critical questions, surrounding the greater role, meaning and purpose of products in our lives.

Our ecological impacts have been shaped over decades by the choices we make as an industry, the values we share as a society and the dreams we pursue as individuals. Ever increasing rates of consumption married with diminishing levels of societal and personal wellbeing expose the folly of this progress illusion. Furthermore, while the designed world continues to develop in technological and scientific complexity, the underlying human condition has changed relatively little. And so today, we find ourselves as primitive beings, transplanted into progressively abstract and technologically complex environments that are, arguably, beyond our nature as a species.?

The made world may be understood as an inevitable consequence of the human condition, in which we have progressively found ways to modify and enhance the world around us. The urban spaces we roam, buildings we inhabit, products we use and garments we wear, collectively represent our intellectual capacity to imagine a better world that is beyond our current level of experience. Whether faster processing speeds, taller structures, smarter textiles or smaller components, we apply science, technology and design to realize our visions, and make them liveable. Take the running shoe, for example. Dissect such a product, and you will learn something of its construction, of the way it functions and of the basic relational properties of the materials and processes that make it, as a system, perform. Yet, the information revealed through this technical exercise would be limited, as it tells us nothing of the origin, direction, drive, intention and future of the design vision that underpins the development of this product. Now, dissect 20 generations of running shoes, one per season dating back 5 years, and you will learn significantly more. You will reveal the incremental adaption that this product has undergone. You will see clearly the direction of this evolution, and from this understand the values, goals and aspirations of the design culture from which it emerged.

1
A BRIEF HISTORY OF (UN)SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

Damon Taylor

Abstract

This chapter examines the emergence of the paradigm of sustainability in the practice of product design over the last half-century. It begins by acknowledging the difficulty in attempting to write any such history, while suggesting that it is by discussing the discourse of sustainability in design that any coherency can be achieved. The analysis centres upon three strands: international conventions and reports from bodies such as the UN are used as an index of the shifting nature of how the problem of sustainability has been understood; the response of the ‘design world’ to such changes is charted; and, the manner in which this has happened against a developing consumer culture is then mapped against these coordinates. It is argued that the changing relation of design and the wider culture to issues of sustainability can be understood as an emergent ‘environmentality’, a certain form of subjectivity that determines how such issues can be conceived of, which thus shapes the nature of any designed response. Three phases of this developing mindset are then identified: the ‘greening’ of design; ‘ecodesign’; and sustainable approaches. Each of these paradigms are then critically examined to demonstrate how design, as a field of activity, has responded to the shifting definition of the problem as the model we now recognize as ‘sustainability’ has developed.

Keywords: sustainability, green consumerism, ecodesign, environmentality

Introduction

Until relatively recently, nobody outside of forest management talked very much about sustainability (Caradonna, 2014). Now, the idea that the design of any product should consider its environmental impact and the extent to which it should be sustainable have become commonly recognized parameters of design. It is difficult, therefore, to believe that sustainability has only been a recognizable concern in product design for less than twenty years. Yet in attempting to write the history of this development, to chart how this has come about, there are clear difficulties. Not least is that there is no agreed model for how this should be done. As the design historian Kjetil Fallan has observed, ‘the history of sustainable design remains to be written’. His suggestion is that one way to do this would be to examine ‘how sustainability has been envisioned and visualized in the history of design since the 1960s, and how these visions have varied between different (sub)discourses and arenas and changed over time’ (Fallan, 2015, p15). This seems a good way to approach the subject, since to come at it head-on may give something of a false impression. If the method was to chart the actual material design interventions themselves, to examine the actual products, then what might start to emerge is the appearance of a smooth progression from the carefree, polluting and resource-heavy product design of the 1960s, through to the increasingly efficient devices and dematerialized Product-Service Systems of the present day. It would be perfectly possible to do this: improvements in recycling could be demonstrated; appliances could be shown to use less energy and work more effectively; transport systems could be shown to be green, clean and ever improving. But this would be a distortion.

Yes, the above advances have been taking place, but this has been against a backdrop whereby, at least until very recently, such innovations actually represent very small interventions in a process that seems in reality to be going in the other direction. In order to chart the way in which an idea of sustainability, what might be called a discourse (Foucault, 2001; Dryzek, 2005), a way of talking and thinking about the problem, has come to change how product design is practised and conceived of, it may be necessary to examine the bigger picture. While it is beyond the scope of this short chapter to take on Fallan’s larger project, the modest goal of this chapter is to chart the way in which three strands in the history of the last half-century have become interwoven. Throughout, the ‘official’ response to growing concerns about the way in which we are living is altering and damaging our natural environment, in the form of international conventions and reports from bodies such as the UN, is used as an index of the shifting nature of how the problem has been understood. Against this is placed the response of the ‘design world’, that is the practices of industry and the operations of the market, as positioned in relation to the often more radical commentary offered by those who reflect upon the practice of design. Finally, these themes are examined against the backdrop of a popular culture of making and using that could be described as the rise and rise of consumer culture. The final purpose of this is to lay out the development, or more properly the descent(Agamben, 2008),in the meaning of lineage, of a particular way of conceiving of the environment. The purpose of this is then to show how this has given rise to a certain way of seeing the world, a particular form of subjectivity, the effect of which it is argued can be seen in our relationship to the designed products that we make and use.

Design and the environment

Product design as a category is hard to define, given that it can refer to the design of appliances, furniture, lighting, signage, or even these days, elements of services or systems. As a practice it can be said to refer to the creation of objects that originate as design proposals in the form of sketches, drawings and models, through a process of prototyping, production, distribution and marketing (Slack, 2006). Historically speaking, what is described as product design developed to facilitate the creation of material objects to be sold in the marketplace and used by consumers. Trying to understand how product design could then be described as in any way becoming ‘sustainable’ is perhaps more troublesome. As the design historian Jonathan Woodham has observed, one of the key problems that the design profession has faced in adopting a more responsible role has been ‘its intrinsic economic dependence on business, manufacturing industry and the retail sector’ (Woodham, 1997, p230). Modernism, even at its most ideological in the early days after the Russian revolution, was intended to pursue a socialist design agenda through the optimization of function (Kiaer, 2008). The sense was that through greater refinement of the design and making process ever-better goods could be created for use; that a grammar of design could be elaborated and through this design would constantly improve, function would be optimized and design and the objects it helped create would be constantly made better (Heskett, 1980). What has been crucial to the form that product design has taken, however, is the extent to which this approach to the conception and making of things has been determined by its role in not just imagining how they might manifest on a physical level, but in bringing them to market and ensuring that designed products come to be interwoven within the lives of those who consume them. As Victor Margolin notes, as long as there has been anything that could recognizably be called design, it has been firmly ‘embedded in consumer culture’ (Margolin, 1998, p83). This has therefore been a defining feature of how design as a practice and a profession has been able to respond to the environmental crisis that has become increasingly apparent in the last half-century.

It was in the 1960s that the developed West discovered that it was living in an environment. It seems to have been an issue of scale. With regard...