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Sustainability
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This design chapter examines sustainability as a goal for product and system design, connecting everyday products like shampoo bottles and their microplastic-shedding contents to broader environmental challenges. Design choices from product conception through end-of-life determine whether a product contributes to microplastic pollution.
Designing for sustainability is all about the future and effecting positive change for the planet’s long-term flourishing. From atomic bomb fallouts to shampoo microplastics, the Earth’s environmental woes are indelibly linked to people’s socio-technical activities, particularly in the Global North. To curb their impacts, many such governments have signed the Paris Agreement with the goal of keeping global temperature increases to a maximum of 1.5°C whilst pledging to meet ambitious Net-Zero decarbonisation targets by 2050. Despite this growing consensus, how we collectively instigate the vital societal, economic, and technological transformations needed to surpass the current Anthropocene remains a contentious issue. Resultantly, the dialogues surrounding sustainability—both broadly and within the field of design—often deviate into two opposing silos: one which frames ‘the future’ as a sustainable utopia, the other an unsustainable dystopia. This chapter examines these perspectives, proposing how an ‘and/both’ rather than ‘either/or’ approach might be possible.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.