Designing for Sustainability: Challenges and Theoretical Considerations

Abstract

Product demand and high consumption have been traditionally viewed as traits of successful business in the mass market. However, the environment is under immense strain to sustain hyper-consumption driven lifestyles fuelled by conventional mass market business strategies. Sustainable services have started to emerge to disrupt such business practices and alter consumption driven processes to reduce the harmful impact on the environment. However, the adoption of such services has largely been limited to a niche environmentally conscious audience. Research has argued that for sustainable services to have a noticeable environmental impact, they need to be adopted in the mass market. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and outline the theoretical design considerations needed to frame desirable value propositions for sustainable services intended for the mass market. To do this, we review literature from the fields of strategic design, service design and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and identify conceptual overlaps with broader discussions on sustainability and suggest that sustainability can potentially find a familiar voice in design due to their common interest in advocating an emphasis on people’s needs and aspirations for a better present and future. Mutually, design and sustainability can discover new representations and opportunities for a better future beyond offerings designed to fuel incessant consumption of resources.