Design is generally thought of as a way of making things look good and work better, but one needs to recognize it as a way to improve lives and make the world a healthier place. With homelessness and slums growing at exponential rates around the globe, the need for better shelter and infrastructure has become a pressing equity issue. With greenhouse gases and solid waste rising due to increased consumer consumption, we need to design our world more efficiently. And with development taxing finite fossil fuel resources and degrading limited fresh water supplies, more sustainable ways of living and working have become essential to our future.

Also there have been shifts in consumer culture and the design process. There has been a shift in focus on entire history of a product from materials extraction, through manufacture, transportation, sales, use, and post-use. We now purchase not only because we need a product, but also to construct our societal image since our style of consumption defines our values.

So it is becoming increasingly about ‘Sustainable Design’ to address the need for a more equitable designed environment or rather call it ‘Design Economy’

Sustainable design engages the idea of an effective economy by empowering communities with access to dignified and viable income generating opportunities, while producing profits for companies in the business of making profits, in tandem with celebrating the natural world.

The parameters of sustainable design are that:
• It has low capital investment
• It generates jobs for livelihood creation
• It not only employs local skills and labour but also aims at increasing skill sets
• It can be understood, controlled, maintained and afforded locally and regionally.
• It is flexible so that it can adapt to changing circumstances.
• It has scope of scaling up and replication for purpose of sustenance.

The issue of concern is that the initiatives in the name of sustainable design seems to be less concerned with helping the marginalized in particular than with helping to better the whole world's built environment on a general level.

This is where the difference in sustainable design and green design occurs. Green design prioritizes what its proponents consider to be environmental sustainability over economic and cultural considerations.

For example, a cutting edge treatment plant with extremely high maintenance costs may not be sustainable in regions of the world with less financial resources. An environmentally ideal plant that is shut down due to bankruptcy is obviously less sustainable than one that is maintainable by the indigenous community, even if it is somewhat less effective from an environmental standpoint.

The challenge lies in accommodating cultural and economic considerations within the design process due to some blocks of creativity: perceptual blocks, emotional and cultural. An example of a cultural block is our thinking that the recycling of body wastes is distasteful. Many people within society would be turned off by the thought. If scientists hadn't investigated the possibilities of waste recycling to tap into energy resources some remote villages in the third world would be left without their primary source of power. Also villages in Africa have made entire houses out of tin packaging of certain product sent to their villages, this opens up another avenue of possibilities to be socially responsible through means of sustainable design.

In order to strike a balance between various components, sustainable design should not rule out the need for aesthetics and functionality within society. Perhaps we can think of beauty in a more natural or creative way. Like in case of the design of radios made locally with tin cans to assist literacy in remote areas of India and Indonesia. Users have taken to decorating their radios with pieces of felt and sea shells.

Design already has a long history of addressing issues relating to social responsibility. This includes: design for the real world, ecodesign, inclusive design, design for all, design for disability, and more recently, eco-efficient innovation and design against crime.

However the current need is to use design to address social, environmental, economic and political issues collectively. Sustainable design interventions, whether focused on the individual or wider society should also move beyond economic and consumerist considerations to embrace ethical, emotional and humanitarian values.

And just in time, for we have entered a century of dramatic change where world has become a giant design problem; one desperately is in need of alternative futures and imaginative solutions to manage the constraints.

Jalaj Chhatwal
jchhatwal@devalt.org

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