Abstract
Design’s increasing participation in sustainability raises questions on what sustainability it serves and how. Contextualized in a cartography of sustainability discourse and its four typologies, we establish that design’s efforts on sustainability to date are largely affiliated to the mainstream socio-technological pathway, a continuation of the modernization project deepening the crises. This affiliation, while granting design access to the increasingly active field of sustainability, risks reducing its versatile epistemology to amusing representation. Drawing from Human-Nature Relationships (HNR) research, we propose the utilization of the "sustainability space" as an analytical tool. The processual, embodied, and affective qualities inherent in design are evident in the reconfigured "sustainability space". This analytical lens highlights the unique potential design practice and research holds in becoming a new attractor for an alternative path of sustainability transformation. We offer three research directions and provide key theoretical repertoires for this emerging research agenda.
Keywords
sustainability; human-nature relationship; design for sustainability; deep leverage point
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.693
Citation
Zhuo Wang, C., Wu, Y., and Gutierrez, L. (2024) Repositioning design as the new attractor in sustainability, in Gray, C., Ciliotta Chehade, E., Hekkert, P., Forlano, L., Ciuccarelli, P., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2024: Boston, 23–28 June, Boston, USA. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.693
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Repositioning design as the new attractor in sustainability
Design’s increasing participation in sustainability raises questions on what sustainability it serves and how. Contextualized in a cartography of sustainability discourse and its four typologies, we establish that design’s efforts on sustainability to date are largely affiliated to the mainstream socio-technological pathway, a continuation of the modernization project deepening the crises. This affiliation, while granting design access to the increasingly active field of sustainability, risks reducing its versatile epistemology to amusing representation. Drawing from Human-Nature Relationships (HNR) research, we propose the utilization of the "sustainability space" as an analytical tool. The processual, embodied, and affective qualities inherent in design are evident in the reconfigured "sustainability space". This analytical lens highlights the unique potential design practice and research holds in becoming a new attractor for an alternative path of sustainability transformation. We offer three research directions and provide key theoretical repertoires for this emerging research agenda.