Archives of Design Research

There are numerous approaches for pursuing sustainability from tens of thousands of organizations in various fields and Edwards (2005) explained the decentralized leadership as one of five characteristics of the sustainability movement. He introduced 23 selected principles in his book, and four, including The Hannover Principles and The Sanborn Principles, are directly related to sustainable design. I reviewed 16 sustainable design approaches in total including the four principles from Edwards’ book and discovered that those approaches can be classified into three categories. Table 2 lists all the reviewed approaches for this study by category and the terms such as principle, manifesto, guideline and strategy used in this study are derived from these reviewed approaches. The first category includes principles and manifestos that declare the fundamental behavioral criteria or philosophy of individuals or groups. In this category the statements are condensed and the document lengths are very short, usually just 1 or 2 pages. The second category includes guidelines and strategies that suggest lists of specific action items for implementing sustainable design results. Explanations and examples for each item tend to be included, so the document lengths range from several to scores of pages. The third category includes frameworks and processes that explain systematic procedural approaches for achieving sustainable design results, and usually those documents have larger volumes similar to book lengths.

I selected four guidelines for the comparative analysis from all 16 reviewed approaches and used the following selection criteria. First, I tried to choose approaches optimized specifically for industrial design rather than the guides targeted at the engineering or architectural fields. Therefore, I excluded the nominees like The Hannover Principles and The Sanborn Principles because their contents actually concern architecture rather than industrial design. Second, I focused on the second category, guidelines and strategies, in this article because they are usually the first and most handy guides that designers and design students, who are aware of the environmental impacts of their practices and want to know specific ways to achieve more sustainable design results, can easily consult and apply to their projects even at an individual level. Sometimes guidelines and strategies are proposed as parts of bigger processes, but I regarded them as the second category in this article as long as their guidelines can be used separately. Also, I examined if the guide provides proper explanations and examples for detailed analysis. I have found the 16 sustainable design approaches mentioned above during my search of guidelines with these criteria and finally selected four guides that are considered to best match the criteria: The Designer’s Field Guide To Sustainable Design by Lunar, ESP Design Strategies by Tom Greenwood, A Guideline for Sustainable Design by Jiyeon Kim, and the Okala Ecodesign Strategy Wheel by the Okala Team.

One of the world-renowned design agencies, Lunar (founded in 1984), established its internal initiative, Elements, in 2008 “to enliven LUNAR’s long-standing charter to use creativity to make a difference for our environment” (lunar.com, 2016). The Elements team introduced The Designer’s Field Guide to Sustainable Design to help Lunar designers and engineers create more sustainable products, and also made it available to anyone on Lunar’s website. The guide provides 15 strategy items categorized into four topics like “What is it trying to accomplish?”, “How is it brought to life?”, “How is it used?”, and, “Where does it end up?” The topics are basically arranged in the product life cycle order, spanning from product planning through manufacturing to use and finally, to disposal. It provides detailed explanations and examples for each strategy item. The item numbers in Lunar’s guide are much fewer than the other three guidelines, and the simplicity makes this guide easier to access. However, the oversimplified item numbers are not sufficient enough to specify all important topics for sustainable product design. And another overlooked aspect in this guide is that it does not include the social aspect of sustainable design even though its title references sustainable design instead of ecodesign.

ESP Design Strategies are a set of action items for sustainable design suggested by Tom Greenwood, a British brand consultant with a sustainable product design and engineering background. He started an online review of sustainable design tools, methods, and principles called ESP Design in 2004 under the acronym of Environmentally Sustainable Product Design, and a year later changed the name to Entirely Sustainable Product Design to include broader sustainable design issues. The UK government awarded him the 2007 KTP Business Leader of Tomorrow Award for his commitment to sustainability. He is not currently running the ESP Design website any more since 2013, and the previous website, www.espdesign.org, is now accessible only through the Internet Archive service (Greenwood, 2012). Now he is running another site called Live Wholesome (livewholesome.co.uk), and sharing his thoughts on wholesome living, green technology, and plant-based food. He wrote a blog post titled “The New Sustainable Design Manifesto” on this site and explained why he stopped updating ESP Design. He concluded that “genuine sustainable product design is simply not possible when we are designing for a system that puts financial profit before all other factors, and for a culture that is addicted to ever increasing levels of consumption” (Greenwood, 2014). ESP Design Strategies consist of 44 action items marked with icons representing environmental, social, or financial sustainability. For example, the 29th item, “Reduce Transportation” is marked with three icons because it relates to all three issues. Also, all the strategy items are explained with relatively detailed expatiation in ESP Design Strategies, but it does not provide case examples for each item.

J. Kim extracted 60 action items for sustainable design from case analysis at the early stage of her study and verified the list through a survey targeting 25 designers and 25 consumers in her Master’s thesis (J. Kim, 2011). Then she refined the list and reduced the number of items according to the survey result into 52 items to be used as sustainable design guidelines or a checklist for evaluating sustainable products. Though her study is relatively focused on electric and electronic products, she extracted the items from actual product examples. The most important reason I selected her guide is that I thought her strategies are concrete enough to be used as action items when compared to several other similar studies conducted in South Korea. She also tried to integrate her sustainable design guide into the design process and actually designed an air purifier using her sustainable design process as the final result of her thesis.

The strategy items in this guide are grouped by each item’s nature, such as cycle, energy preservation, efficiency, safety, and sociality, while the items in other three guidelines are ungrouped (ESP Design Strategies), or grouped by product life cycle stages (Lunar’s guide and Okala Ecodesign Strategy Wheel). Another important difference is that J. Kim’s guide tries to earnestly cover social issues as a part of sustainable design while the other three guides are actually ecodesign guides, mainly focusing only on environmental and economic issues. However, when we look closely at the social items, they leave something to be desired. For example, the items belong to the first subcategory E1. User Consideration such as e3. User Convenience and e4. Understanding User Needs, sound too general to be used as action items. Also it is highly questionable if the items belong to the second subcategory E2. Information are relevant to the social category.

Philip White, chair of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Ecodesign Section, Steve Belletire, and Louise St. Pierre formed the Okala Team in 2001 as a result of the designers’ and academics’ struggle to understand how to practice and what to teach about ecological design. The team named itself after the Hopi word “Okala” which means “life sustaining energy” and started to develop an ecodesign curriculum for undergraduate industrial design schools. They also started to teach field designers in partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency the next year. They published “Okala: Learning Ecological Design” in 2004 and have updated their publication at intervals of every two or three years up to the current edition, “Okala Practitioner: Integrating Ecological Design,” published in 2013. The authors provide practical information about ecodesign from business and ethics perspectives, and also present Okala Impact Factors which can be used for quick impact assessment in the Okala Practitioner, besides the Okala Ecodesign Strategy Wheel. The Okala Ecodesign Strategy Wheel successfully converted the original Ecodesign Strategy Wheel (Brezet & Van Hemel, 1997) UNEP published into an industrial designer’s field guide. However, some of its 47 action items are actually redundant because they are classified by the product life cycle order. For instance, the items about minimizing energy use (items no. 18, 29) and toxic emissions (22, 32) appear repeatedly in the category C. Manufacturing and E. Use. Another critical limit of the Okala Ecodesign Strategy Wheel is its scope. As it specifies in its title, this guideline focuses on ecodesign and does not properly include social aspects of sustainable design.

Each of the four guides has its own strong points. On the other hand none are perfect, and each leaves some room for improvement when compared with each other. Lunar’s guide is essential and easier to remember but its simplicity is also a disadvantage because the guide list is too short to thoroughly cover sustainable design methods. Also it does not include social aspects of sustainable design. The ESP Design guide explains each action item relatively in detail but it does not provide example cases. Only J. Kim’s guide covers the social aspects of sustainable design in earnest, while the others actually just focus on ecodesign. Many of J. Kim’s social items, however, seem unsuitable for the category or too comprehensive to be used as strategy items. The Okala guide successfully converts the original Ecodesign Strategy Wheel published by UNEP into an industrial designer’s field guide, but it also overlooks the social aspects of sustainable design. Table 4 summarizes these key features of the four guides for easy comparison at a glance. In the case of the Number of Society Items, the seventh comparison standard of the table, the financial, environmental and social relevance overlaps in the ESP Design guide, unlike the other guides that classified the specific items to be included in a specific group. So the classification criterion has been reviewed on an equal basis with the rest of the guides, and the detailed information on the two items of the ESP Design guide categorized as the society group can be found in section 4.4 Extraction of Sustainable Design Strategies.

Environmental problems are closely related to social issues and we can find that viewpoint’s origin in the sentence “many problems of resource depletion and environmental stress arise from disparities in economic and political power,” explained in the Brundtland Report’s Equity and the Common Interest section (World Commission On Environment and Development, 1990). Environmental design philosophies have evolved from green design to ecodesign to sustainable design to keep pace with the times, as we discussed earlier. However, the three guides except J. Kim’s guide are actually ecodesign guidelines, and even J. Kim’s social items leave room for scrutiny before taking them as strategy items for sustainable design as I explained in chapter three. So I tried to study the social aspects of sustainable design further using three social design books. I summarized their major topics in Table 8 and as a result, I categorized the topics into six groups.

I aimed to complement the guidelines by adding social design topics that were overlooked or treated as subordinate issues in the previously examined guidelines, so that the integrated guide can be used as a sustainable design guideline beyond the role as ecodesign guides. I also tried to integrate the previously examined four guidelines by extracting commonly suggested strategy items to make it easier for field designers and design students to consult specific sustainable design methods. The augmented guide basically inherits the product life cycle order as grouping criteria for the strategy items from the Okala guide because I determined that the classification method has been refined since Brezet & Van Hemel’s Ecodesign Strategy Wheel. I also located the newly added Society group between the Innovation and the Material groups because social topics need to be considered at the planning stage of design process. The grouping and arrangement results of the final guideline items, item descriptions and case examples can be found in detail in the section 4.5 Sustainable Design Strategies, and the criteria from which each of the detailed items are derived are as follows. Basically, I selected strategy items when more than two guides suggest them or when I see them as equally important to other selected items if they are suggested in just one guide. I tried to minimize the number of items by integrating similar items when they appear repeatedly due to the product life cycle classification method. Section 4.4, Extraction of Sustainable Design Strategies, explains how strategy items overlap among the guidelines, how similar items are integrated, how social items are complemented, and how the final sustainable design strategies were extracted. I selected item titles from existing items when I found the proper title to represent the integrated items; otherwise I made new titles for the integrated items. I also integrated five topic categories extracted from three social design books as strategy items in the Society category of the new guide.

In the section 4.5 Sustainable Design Strategies, individual design examples for each strategy item have been presented in order to introduce as many cases as possible that best feature each item. However, for real products that accomplish sustainable design successfully, it is often true that many of the strategy items are met at the same time. In this section, I will explain the practical value of the sustainable design strategies presented through this study by looking at the examples of two successful sustainable product designs in which the strategy items are actually applied in combination to become sustainable products. Green Toys Inc., which makes eco-friendly toys, was founded in San Francisco's Bay area in 2007 and currently sells products in more than 80 countries, including the US, through retailers such as Amazon, Whole Foods, Pottery Barn and Nordstrom. According to Forbes, over 10 years after its establishment, now it is considered as a leading brand in the US preschool toy market(Choi, 2015). Green Toys' products are basically made of pure high-density polyethylene (HDPE) recycled from milk jug (M4. Use recycled or recyclable materials) without using any screw, glue, or paint so that there is no need to disassemble them when recycling (M2. Minimize material variety / M8. Minimize composites or contaminative finish / P1. Make it less complex). As of March 2017, more than 47 million milk jugs have been recycled so far according to the company's homepage (greentoys.com). Since they only use the recycled food packaging container, their material does not contain harmful substances such as bisphenol A or phthalate (M7. Avoid hazardous & toxic materials, substances). The packaging of the product is also made to a minimum size with recycled paper printed with soy ink (T2. Reduce size & weight). Green Toys stimulates local economy (S3. Stimulate community) and reduces greenhouse gas emissions for transportation compared to many other companies that manufacture in China because their headquarter, plastic recyclers, product manufacturers, packaging companies, and warehouses are all within five mile distance (T1. Reduce transportation). In terms of aesthetics, Green Toys adopts a relatively classic design direction, so their toys can be used for a long time without style obsolescence (U3. Create timeless aesthetic). Also, their products can be cleaned in a dishwasher so they are easy to maintain (U5. Design for maintenance and easy repair).

Figure 1 Recycling Truck by Green Toys (www.greentoys.com)

The second example of a sustainable product design is the 606 Shelving System designed by Dieter Rams and built by Vitsoe, which has been sold for nearly 60 years since 1960. When we take a look at Dieter Rams' well-known 10 principles for good design, we can understand that the principles like "9. Good design is environmentally friendly" and "7. Good design is long-lasting" refer directly to sustainability, and most of the remaining principles are also largely related to the sustainable design strategy items reviewed in this study. In particular, the 606 Shelving System is one of the most representative products that reflect his design philosophy. 606 Shelving System consists of E-Tracks (a thin strip-shaped wall mounts), the shelf modules made of folded metal sheets and connecting pins, and basically the use of materials is extremely efficient in this system compared to other shelving designs because it uses walls as the frame of the shelving structure (M1. Reduce material use). 606 System can be easily expanded or modified according to the user's changing situations thanks to its modular structure consists of the components such as various shelves of four depths and two widths, sloping shelves inclined at two angles to accommodate magazines, hanging rails for hangers, cabinets, drawers, and even tables (U6. Consider upgradeability / U7. Make it modular / P2. Make it more useful). Users can easily replace only the problematic part when it is broken (U5. Design for maintenance and easy repair) or they can reuse it in parts (U8. Design for reuse). Also, it is easy to recycle because basic modules such as E-Tracks, shelves, and pins are made of single material (aluminum or steel) just except for some modules like cabinets (M2. Minimize material variety / M4. Use recycled or recyclable materials / D1. Design for disassembly). The 606 system was designed using an essential design language and the product's aesthetic completeness is so great that it has been more than 50 years since the product was designed, and is still a success story of a typical timeless design that is still loved and steadily sold by users without a sense of outdated feeling (U3. Create timeless aesthetic). The designs of each modular component are simple, complete and robust, so they minimize the possibility of trouble (P1. Make it less complex / U1. Create proper and durable designs). If the various sustainable design strategies covered in this study are taken on board and can be applied in combination as we have seen through the examples of Green Toys and the 606 Shelving System, the result of this study can be used as a useful guideline to set the design direction for making more sustainable products in actual design projects.

Figure 2 606 Shelving System (www.vitsoe.com)