Sustainability

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.