Abstract
Sustainable innovation and eco-innovation have become priorities within the area of sustainable design. Focusing not only on production, also consumption and systemic changes have been addressed in order to handle increasingly substantial issues. Consequently, the focus of sustainable innovation has shifted from products to solutions and systems. However, as design has traditionally been a product-oriented profession, adopting operational models that require greater influence throughout the value chain is not necessarily easy. This article explores the issues that the scale of sustainable innovation poses on design and suggests that the concept of environmentally sustainable innovation should be approached more deeply also at the product level.
Keywords
Sustainable design; sustainable innovation; eco-innovation; design; innovation; product-service systems; lifecycle design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2011.026
Citation
Murto, P.(2011) Sustainable Innovation and the Issues of Scale., Nordes 2011 - Making Design Matter, 29 - 31 May, School of Art & Design, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2011.026
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Exploratory papers
Included in
Sustainable Innovation and the Issues of Scale
Sustainable innovation and eco-innovation have become priorities within the area of sustainable design. Focusing not only on production, also consumption and systemic changes have been addressed in order to handle increasingly substantial issues. Consequently, the focus of sustainable innovation has shifted from products to solutions and systems. However, as design has traditionally been a product-oriented profession, adopting operational models that require greater influence throughout the value chain is not necessarily easy. This article explores the issues that the scale of sustainable innovation poses on design and suggests that the concept of environmentally sustainable innovation should be approached more deeply also at the product level.