For a sensitive and sustainable world
The pursuit of innovation redirected toward sustainability is becoming paramount. New solutions are emerging for improving how we make and do things that include a critical analysis of society’s values and ways of living.
Design is ultimately the art of the possible. As Etienne Souriau says: Design “is a state of mind seeking to harmonize human environment.” When it comes to changing perspective, design crafts possibilities consistent with all aspects of our world, imagines futures, disrupts and re-arranges systems, and, in the process, improves living. Acting at the heart of human communities, fostering a regenerative and participative approach, design engages people, promotes individual actions and helps represent collective ones.
From the pragmatic to the poetic, design fosters systemic changes, part of a global framework of mutual obligations, sensory qualities of physical behaviors and cultural connotations for living, working and making. It also offers broad human-centered methods for bottom-up, participative design collaborations. Used to engage in every aspects of our everyday lives, design is an agent of sustainability through humanizing innovations toward dynamic social, economic, cultural environment transformation.
Along with the virtual technologies that increasingly inform our lives, design and its qualities combat the social amnesia that comes with uncritical consumption and threatens a sustainable planet. Instead, design can resolve the conflict.
As computational design and technology grow, we might have to question the preconceived roles of those technologies and redefine how we think, make and produce our objects, habitats and surrounding environment. Because mass-scale customization is quickly becoming a reality, the relationship between the designer and the consumer is shifting.
Starting with materials sourcing, choices and agencies, sustainable design is the backbone of sensible and responsible processes, systems of forms and societal implications.
A renaissance of design that involves the user at the highest degree: the human way of life and its quality of living. If computational design is bringing an explosion of new patterns, textures and forms, digital technologies are transforming the platform for designing in a way that provides an unprecedented level of responsibility and capabilities in the pursuit of real sustainability.
Beyond improving our ways of doing, completely re-thinking products in light of sustainability choices is an imperative for new product development – designing with the end in mind and experience-driven system thinking for products and services – which can challenge current consumption and production patterns. In addition, design approaches combined with the digital technologies could set the new standard for sustainability design.
It is time for design strategies to create sustainable solutions for businesses, local communities, supply chains, the environment and citizen-consumers, the human. It is a unique opportunity to change our unsustainable habits, beyond feel good cleaning products and lifestyle choices, to initiate a change in our consumption habits in order to realize our purpose to preserve life.
Join me and designers from around the world at Dassault Systemes’ Design in the Age of Experience event during Milan Design Week, April 19-26, 2020. Pre-registrations are open!
