Sustainable Development

Sust. Dev. 20, 180–188 (2012)

Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/sd.1534

Sustainable Design: A Brief Appraisal of its

Main Concepts
Martina Keitsch*
Department for Product Design, Faculty of Engineering Science and Technology,
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

ABSTRACT
Research linking design to sustainability surfaced in the 1970s and has since received broad
attention in academic and professional literature. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring from
1962 and the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis from 1974 inspired
design, among many other disciplines, to search for an appropriate balance between
industrial cultures and natural surroundings. This article tracks a brief idea-historical account
of sustainable design theories. Main concepts in the field are consolidated under three
criteria: ethics, technology fixes and social interaction. These criteria are considered as the
main motivators for research and theory development in sustainable design. Following the
Introduction, which gives an overview of concept development in design in general and
sustainable design in particular, the second section explains the methodological onset
for the analysis and introduces three concepts that represent important trends in sustainable
design theory. The three concepts: Papanek’s socially and ecologically responsible design,
the Design for the Environment approach, and Manzini’s sustainable everyday philosophy,
are analysed in the third section according to the role they assign to the criteria.
Further, the section reviews the concepts within a wider debate on sustainable development.
The article concludes with a proposal as to how conceptualization in sustainable design
could proceed, to meet the complexity of sustainability issues in present society.
Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Received 15 January 2011; revised 21 January 2012; accepted 30 January 2012

Keywords: ethics; social interaction; sustainable design concepts; sustainability in society; technology fixes

Introduction

S
WANN (2002) LOCATES INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AS PROFESSION HISTORICALLY WITHIN THREE PERIODS, STARTING WITH
intuitive and applied design concepts in the mid-nineteenth century, which grew more commercial at the
beginning of the twentieth century. During this period, design emerged as a profession, whose representa-
tives initially had a highly reformative and ethical point of view on which to base their methods. The main
idea was that only designers were able to solve problems of public taste or of function and utility because the public

*Correspondence to: Dr Martina Keitsch, Department for Product Design, Faculty of Engineering Science and Technology, Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, Kolbjørn Heies vei 2b, 7491 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment
Main Concepts of Sustainable Design 181

was too ignorant and companies too profit-oriented (Jackson, 2012). During the 1960s and 1970s design became
closely linked to engineering as well, as it gained status as a marketing tool. The Modernist development in design
employs a positivist canon, an engineering onset, empirical methods and a technology focus and can be labeled as
the engineered industrial design period (Swann, 2002). A characteristic epistemological feature of this period is, for
example, the belief that objects have a predetermined meaning over which an observer, who is outside the observed
situation, can gain knowledge and which can be ‘designed into’ a product.
The third period, from the 1980s on, focused increasingly on contextualized design often in the form of user
involvement and stakeholder participation. The main ideas are here that the social and political interests of actors
influence their relation to products, that the dynamic relationships and interactions between design and its many
socio-cultural contexts have to be explored methodologically and implemented practically, and that this in turn will
influence production and consumption habits.
Swann’s periodical analysis of main trends in design development represents, to a certain degree, also the
(idea)- historical development in sustainable design and eco-design. Similarly to Swann, Bhamra and Lofthouse
(2007) categorize sustainability in design idea-historically in three ‘waves’. The first wave was inspired by ideas from
Carson and Lovelock. One of its main representative is Victor Papanek, who already in the 1970s was advocating a critical
stance towards commercial business imperatives, together with care for nature and a moral and societal responsibility of
the designer: ‘As a politically disinterested but morally motivated animal, the designer should not be a . . . pimp for the
excesses of big business interests (Papanek, 1997, p. 327).’ Instead, designers should focus on producing products with
‘real’ benefits for people, and by doing so contribute to the societal and moral needs of society.
The second wave is characterized by an increased ‘green’ design i.e. the fabrication of environmentally friendly
products as meeting consumers’ concerns over the environmental crises.
The third wave started with the Brundtland definition (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987)
and questions towards reducing overconsumption of resources on a global scale. Knight (2009) describes this transition
from eco-design to sustainable design as one of ‘broadening of scope in theory and practice’ (Knight, 2009, p. 4).
The goal of this article is to review the main concepts in sustainable design by linking the idea-historical development
with a systematic analysis. A systematic and contextual re-examination of sustainable design concepts is important to
understand why and how, for example, an increasing number of designers today attempt to encourage the public to
change from wastefulness to moderate consumption. The following section explains the methodological onset of the
article considering the criteria above, and gives a short historical background for the appraisal of sustainable design
concepts in the third section.

Methodological Considerations

By justifying the three criteria for systematically locating sustainable design concepts, one may refer to the Aristotelian
activity model which consists of theoria – wisdom/knowledge, praxis – political action, and poesis – production/
technology (Keitsch, 2006). The activity model has, slightly modified, served among others in philosophy and the social
sciences to explain knowledge generation, communication structures (Habermas, 1983) and social practice (Giddens,
1984). For the analytical purposes, theoria refers here to the world-view and ethics of the respective sustainable design
concept; praxis refers to forms and significance of social collaboration and poesis refers to the role technology plays in
the design concept to achieve a sustainable development.
From a history of idea perspective, theoria and praxis were fundamental constituents of societal acceptance, while
poesis held a relatively marginal position between the Antique and the Renaissance. The Scientific Revolution
starting in the mid-sixteenth century initiated, however, a change, and left theoria, in the form of natural science,
and poesis as a technological, natural science-based application as inherently tied together at the end of the
eighteenth century (Keitsch, 2006). Regarding the socio-political context, European manufacturing industries
started in the mid-eighteenth century to produce simpler and rougher goods and used less skilled workers by put-
ting the knowledge needed to run the process of production to the engineers and the management of the company.
Mass production was developed in the USA in the early 1920s (Swann, 2002).
This philosophy of conformity at the beginning of the twentieth century leads not only to the production of standard-
ized commodities in large amounts but also to the development of a mass consumer society. Changes in societies’

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 20, 180–188 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/sd
182 M. Keitsch

production and consumption habits influence, in turn, changes in moral value systems. Obsolete ‘protestant’ deeds
such as modesty and temperance are sorted out and values, related to increased production and encouraging spending
and ostentatious display, become proper, contributing to a new world-view of pleasure and a good living standard as
meaningful life-goals.
The counter-reaction was, however, just around the corner, as for example resistance against mass production grew
stronger in the design community. In 1964 a group of graphic designers signed the first anti-commercial manifesto:
First things first – a design manifesto, where they argued for ‘a reversal of priorities in favour of more useful, lasting and
democratic forms of communication – a mind shift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and
production of a new kind of meaning’ (Garland, 1964/2000). The design manifesto is a pamphlet rather than a theory,
but it gave way to following sustainable design concepts that mirror a successive socio-political recognition of the
environmental crisis and reflect this crisis in different ways.
The end of the twentieth century marked not only the end of the Modernist development (Swann, 2002) but at
the same time the human–nature relation entered a new stage, represented by a general acknowledgement that
human actions have global impacts on nature of so far unknown potential. The unpredictability of the environmen-
tal effects of human actions is a typical feature of the so-called ‘Reflexive Modernization’ (Beck et al., 1996), a
concept that expresses doubts on continuous industrial and technological progress because of its negative side-
effects such as dynamics of market economies, increasing urban concentration, and a consumption culture. An
adjunct to Reflexive Modernization was, that it advanced sustainability in concert with human flourishing over
the next decade to be an almost mandatory criterion for successful design, expressed in Margolin’s statement:
‘The aim of design, at least for me and for some of my colleagues, is human wellbeing. And if we say that, it means that
the designer has to consider more than just a simple object. The object is part of a much larger experience or situation, i.e.
it is one thing to make a table from recycled material but the table sits in a much larger system of the circulation of materials,
which involves lots of other people. Designers need to use the skills they have to articulate what these bigger situations and
environments are, and to show how they need to be addressed with design thinking.’ (Margolin, 2009).

Sustainable Design Concepts

Concepts of design for sustainability emerged when Papanek (1971), Maldonado and Bonsiepe (1972) and Schumacher
(1973) started to criticize modern and unsustainable product development and suggested alternatives. Although con-
cepts from the 1970s and 1980s were highly ethically motivated, the 1990s concept such as design for the
environment (DfE) predominantly focused on scientific and technological fixes for problems of sustainability. The first
decade of the new millennium is characterized by the designers’ growing concern for socio-cultural sustainability, life
quality and user innovation, displayed in Manzini’s (2003) philosophy. The following section will analyse Papanek’s
socially and ecologically responsible design concept, the DfE approach and Manzini’s sustainable everyday concept
in relation to the main characteristics of sustainable development.

World View and Ethics Focus in Design

Papanek’s world-view on the state of the environment is both pessimistic and pedagogic: ‘There can be little
doubt that the environment and the ecological balance of the planet are no longer sustainable. Unless we learn to
preserve and conserve Earth’s resources, and change out most basic pattern of consumption, manufacture and recy-
cling, we have no future.’ (Papanek, 1995b, p. 17).
A main constituent of design is its ethical importance expressed by the social and ecological responsibility of the
designer, and the importance that design plays for modern society: ‘There are professions more harmful than industrial
design, but only a very few . . . by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choos-
ing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed . . . In this age of mass
production when everything must be planned and designed, design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes
his tools and environments (and, by extension, society and himself). This demands high social and moral responsibility from
the designer.’ (Papanek, 1997, p. IX).

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 20, 180–188 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/sd
Main Concepts of Sustainable Design 183

One question the designer has to ask in this context, is: ‘Am I on the side of social good, or will the object that I design,
be an addition to the catalogue of unnecessary fetish objects?’ (Papanek, 1997, p. 327).
In Papanek’s opinion, a lot of designers are preoccupied with aesthetics, whereas it is more important to focus on
producing products with ‘real’ benefits for people, and by doing so contribute to the communal and moral needs
of society.
While Papanek sees design theoretically as a meaningful activity and a bridge between human needs, culture and
ecology, he ascribes designers the role as some kind of saviours of humanity. Thereby, he is less referring to political
or collective actions than to the individual attitude, the world-view and understanding of the designer. To under-
stand the moral, political and social obligations of the design profession, design education should, according to
Papanek, not only be grounded on learning skills, nourishing talents, and mediating concepts and theories that
inform the field, but it has to build on philosophical fundaments in a way that makes values and ethics intrinsic
to design methods.
The entanglement of descriptive, philosophical statements and normative claims in Papanek’s writing displays a
common feature of quite a few ethically motivated design theories, where authors seem to believe that individual
enthusiasm and moral ambitions are convincing enough to make an argument and do not bother to clarify their
assertions. Papanek refers, for example, implicitly to nature and the human life-world as if they were governed by
the same principles, which is a problematic assertion in itself. The programmatic title The Green Imperative: Natural
design for the real world (Papanek, 1995a) illustrates this reference, as well as it presupposes a sort of genuine reality
that, in turn, implies that there is a world, which is not real . . . and which we should not design for? The other title of
the 1995 publication, The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in design and architecture (Papanek, 1995b), suggests
that the ecological environment is a particular area that forces the designer to take a moral stand point. Nature is
generally described as unproblematic and with connotations such as ‘harmony’, ‘balance’, ‘healing’. The consumer,
on the other hand, is presented in some sections as being contradictory in nature by possessing a prevailing
materialistic attitude: in the ‘. . . greedy rush for more and more material goods in the West’ . . . we are losing love
and affection and respect for each other . . . ‘Convenience is the new buzzword . . . to help to sell more goods to a
jaded public,’ (Papanek, 1995b, pp. 12, 160). The counter-picture to the commercialist Westerner is the wisdom
and knowledge of the indigenous unspoiled natives, e.g. Balinese people: ‘We have no art, we just do the best
we can,’ (Papanek, 1995b, pp. 12).
As a professional designer, Papanek traveled around the world, initiating many sustainability and social projects
to aid the poor, the disabled and the elderly, and his book Design for the Real World is indisputably one of the most
influential books in sustainable design and has inspired various scholars and practitioners. From an analytical
perspective Papanek’s texts can be labeled as doctrinaire (Rowe, 1987), they are based on a pessimistic evaluation
of current design practice as unsustainable and give a counterproposal of how to do it better.
Papanek’s ideas on design convincingly reply to the criteria of ‘world-view’ and ‘ethics’ (corresponding in our
modified Aristotelian scheme with theoria) in at least the following ways:
• A critical world-view of contemporary society,
• An overarching moral and social assignment for the designer, often based on subjective abilities (indicating a
surpassing role of personal responsibility),
• Rationality criticism combined with nature romanticism and technology scepticism.

Technology Fixes
In 1989 the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) began to work on approaches to prevent pollution
from occurring in the first place. The resulting strategy, Cleaner Production is an essential part of the Sustainable
Production and Consumption Policy and defined by UNEP as follows: ‘We understand Cleaner Production to be the
continuous application of an integrated, preventive strategy applied to processes, products and services in pursuit of
economic, social, health, safety and environmental benefits,’ (UNEP, 1999). Industrial designers worked from the
early 1990s with cleaner production and started to pay attention to the reduction of negative impacts along the
life cycle of a product – from extraction of its raw materials to its ultimate disposal. In concert with incorporating
environmental concerns into service solutions, DfE evolved out of product life cycle assessment. Life cycle

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 20, 180–188 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/sd
184 M. Keitsch

assessment is defined by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry as: ‘. . . a process to evaluate the
environmental burdens associated with a product, process, or activity by identifying and quantifying energy and materials
used and wastes released to the environment; to assess the impact of those energy and materials used and releases to the
environment; and to identify and evaluate opportunities to affect environmental improvements,’ (SETAC, 1993).
The DfE developers apply life cycle assessment to all potential environmental implications of a product or a service
being designed, energy and materials used; manufacture and packaging; transportation; consumer use; reuse or recy-
cling and disposal. DfE tools enable consideration of these implications at every step of the production process from
chemical design, process engineering, procurement practices, and end-product specification to post-use disposal. The
DfE approach also enables designers to consider traditional design issues of cost, quality, manufacturing process, and
efficiency as part of the same decision system. In an applied context, Design for Environment has, for example, been part
of the Xerox industrial design since 1990, when the company started a 5-year effort to create waste-free factories includ-
ing 90% minimum reduction in solid waste to landfills, air emissions, hazardous waste, and process wastewater
discharges (Azar et al., 1995).
In the 1990s DfE and the emerging eco-design concept widely consisted of quantitative and empirical methods, and
believed in a problem-solving approach and in people as rational beings. Solution strategies in DfE and early eco-design
were instrumentally oriented and present an amalgamation between natural science and technology. Improvement
strategies concentrated on the material and energy flows within a system of producers and consumers, aiming to build
knowledge about how these flows can be fed into design processes to improve products and production routines.
Normative questions such as if designers need a certain ethical attitude towards the environment or how design may
contribute to social sustainability were not considered relevant. However, researchers’ questioning of genuine produc-
tion and consumption values contributed to a successive broadening of scope, beyond the rather simplistic world-view
in DfE in the next decade. This enlarged perspective is increasingly occupied with DfE impacts on a large scale (e.g.
nationally and globally) and with industrial designers’ tasks to contribute to change society for the better (Madge 1997).
John Ehrenfeld, the Nestor of the Design for the Environment approach puts it as follows: ‘Producing sustainabil-
ity takes much more than simple problem-solving and incremental improvements in the present economic system . . . Sustain-
ability will come only by deliberately addressing the systemic conditions that underlie cultural behavior in the United States,
the West and every modern or modernizing society in the world . . . I believe there is a way to sustainability, and that way is
design, based on taking new ideas from every trace of sustainability we can locate,’ (Ehrenfeld, 2008, 65 ff ).
Even if Ehrenfeld (2008) is still struggling with the naturalist dilemma – on the one hand, he asserts that human
history cannot provide metaphors for sustainable ways of living as it is a succession of states generally built on the
last one, but that nature can lead to such metaphors (Ehrenfeld, 2000) – on the other hand we cannot trace social
and moral norms and values from nature and so have to refer to human history – his statement indicates a recon-
ciliation trend in current ‘design for sustainability’ approaches, where ethical criteria, technology fixes and social
interaction are involved. Ehrenfeld regards it as a primary task for today’s designers to meet eco-technical principles
such as low material-energy intensity and high regenerative potential as well as to respond to users’ and societies’
needs through product and service solutions: ‘The key to sustainability will be a balance between devices and a modified
consumption . . . and products and services that can transparently restore the human capability for caring and coping in all
dimensions of life,’ (Ehrenfeld, 2000, pp. 123, 124).
Summarizing the DfE concept, the techno fix criterion of poesis seem to be widely expressed by ideas such as:
• A genuine division between what is technical and what is social, between machine and organization.
• The view that technology has developed independently from society in terms of being self-driven and depending
on its own premises. In this view new technology is a logic product of technological conditions only.
• The idea that technology is an independent variable for the evolution of society, based on simple cause–effect
conditions (see e.g. Andersen and Sørensen, 1994).

Approaching the User

The products’ price, manufacturability and marketability have long been the holy cows in industrial design, while the
design process itself seems to focus more on use than on consumption (Hestad and Keitsch, 2009). Of course the
interpretation of the user has changed significantly over the last decades. While the 1970s and 1980s emphasized

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Sust. Dev. 20, 180–188 (2012)
DOI: 10.1002/sd
Main Concepts of Sustainable Design 185

the users’ physical needs (e.g. Dreyfuss, 1967, 2003) and introduced ergonomics as an important consideration for
design, the early 1990s, with Krippendorff (1989) for example, started to focus increasingly on the users’ social and
symbolic needs, extending the concern of designers to cognitive and emotional constraints and social interactions
when using a product. An even more important contribution to user involvement in sustainable design than the
general increase of user focus in the design community (Lee et al., 2008) is the concept of ‘people-centered sustainable
development’, introduced in 1995 by the Copenhagen Declaration on Social Development: ‘We commit ourselves to
promoting and attaining the goals of universal and equitable access to quality education, the highest attainable standard of
physical and mental health, and the access of all to primary health care, making particular efforts to rectify inequalities relating
to social conditions and without distinction as to race, national origin, gender, age or disability.’ One design reply to this
statement is a concept called ‘Universal Design’. Universal design appeared in the USA in 1980. The concept
addresses needs, social participation and access to goods and services by the widest possible range of users and
is gaining increasing recognition in the political arena and in the corporate world.
One of the most relevant design representatives for sustainability and user involvement is Ezio Manzini and his
‘Sustainable everyday life’ philosophy. Manzini’s world-view is optimistic and focused on foresight, creativity and inter-
action: ‘Indeed, we cannot act in a forward looking way if we are unable to imagine a state in which we could potentially live in a
different and more attractive way than now,’ (Manzini and Jégou, 2003, p. 13). Epistemologically, Manzini combines a
natural science and engineering oriented approach (technology fix) with social constructivism (social interaction).
His article Design, ethics and sustainability, Guidelines for a transition phase (Manzini, 2006) gives a definition of design
from the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID): ‘Design is a creative activity whose aim is to
establish the multi-faceted qualities of objects, processes, services and their systems in whole life-cycles (ICSID, 2005). A creative
activity that is also the reflective one of choosing between different possibilities,’ (Manzini, 2006, p. 1). In the same article he
continues on the position of designers who play an important role in society, here as operators: ‘Conceiving and proposing
products, services and lifestyles, designers play an important role and consequently have an equally important responsibility in
generating social expectations in terms of wellbeing . . . Of course designers have no means of imposing, for good or bad, their point
of view on others. But they do have the tools to operate on the quality of things, and their acceptability, and therefore on the attraction
of the scenarios of wellbeing they help to generate,’ (Manzini, 2006, p. 2, see also Manzini and Jégou, 2003, 233 ff ).
Furthermore, Manzini presents practical guidelines in the form of two fundamental principles for designers:
Low material-energy intensity and High regenerative potential. These principles are very much in line with the
eco-technical part of sustainable development (as is the life cycle concept). However, he connects these principles
with personal and social wellbeing: ‘The concept of wellbeing is the most basic set of visions and ideas that legitimate
socially and ethically the same existence of the production and consumption system.’ (Manzini, 2003). Building scenarios
for sustainable wellbeing is (again) a social task for designers: ‘Goal: we have to conceive scenarios of wellbeing in which
the overall quality of the context of life has to be considered, in which the physical and social common goods are regenerated
and where contemplative time has its place,’ (Manzini, 2003, p. 8).
The idea of creative communities where stakeholders interact locally in daily life is the most significant feature of
Manzini’s concept: “There is, in my view, a new model of organizing society and the production and consumption and
whatever. When I use the words small, open, local and connected, this is my way of telling the story . . . For me, dealing with
the needed sustainable changes that are mainly cultural and behavior change, the pivotal moment has been when I moved
from saying “What can I do to help people change behavior?” toward the discovery that a lot of people (even if they aren’t yet
so visible) had already changed, and in a good way, their behaviors. And that therefore, the right question is: “What can I do
to trigger and support these new ways of thinking and doing? How can I use my design knowledge and tools to empower these
grass-roots social innovations?”’(Manzini, 2011).
Conclusively, Manzini’s concept summarizes the most recent ideas in sustainable design with an activist agenda
for designers and stakeholders (Fuad-Luke, 2009). The focus on social sustainability and the belief that sustainable
design will not only meet the triple bottom line, but contribute simultaneously to human wellbeing and social
stability responds to the praxis criteria of the Aristotelian, which emphasizes citizens’ involvement, interaction with
stakeholders and mutual responsibility instead of proclaiming a solipsistic individual ethos.

Sustainable Design and the Sustainable Development Context

Sustainable development is often defined according to the Brundtland report as: ‘Development that meets the needs of
the present without compromising the ability of further generations to meet their own needs.’ (World Commission on

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186 M. Keitsch

Environment and Development, 1987, p. 46). A definition of sustainable product design could then be: ‘. . . taking all
ecological, social and economic concerns into account in product and service systems, meeting the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (Keitsch, 2011).
Roughly spoken, sustainable development has a worldview that regards a human being as a ‘zoon politikon’, a social
being, which exists in a (democratic) society. Ethically, sustainable development demands intra- and intergenerational
justice, which is the consideration of contemporary human actions according to future needs. Concerning natural
resources, social distress may cause results just as bad as those caused by the irresponsible actions of unlimited
economic growth. Hence, the ethics of sustainable development is a combination of utilitarianism (the best for all)
and an ethics of justice (justice for all or ‘universal fairness’). Sustainable development expresses further the idea that
the good life for humans is connected with the existence of other species and of the ecosphere and that economic, social
and ecological development are dependent on each other. Since the environmental crisis, the maxim of ‘man as
dominator (or manipulator) of nature’ has been replaced by the maxim of ‘man as a steward for nature’. A core presup-
position of the latter is the assumption that humans can reduce the gap between nature and culture with scientific
expertise and appropriate technology fixes or socio-economic management. The intention is to coordinate the vitality
of nature’s ecological systems with economical activities on the one hand and to establish a balance between different
national economies on the other.
The sustainable design concepts presented in this article reflect to a certain degree ideas and beliefs of the general
sustainable development concept. While approaches before and in the first phase after Brundtland were more or less
technology oriented, sustainable design concepts of the new millennium and its first decade are characterized by
designers’ growing concern for socio-cultural sustainability and user innovation, programmatically expressed by
McLennan: ‘Sustainable design starts with the understanding that the purpose of people,’ (McLennan, 2004, p. 5).
More recently, biocentric approaches have come forward in an originally rather rationalistic oriented sustainable
development debate, which are also interesting for a revised sustainable design approach. Arne Næss’ gestalt concept
(Naess, 1989) can be valuable in this direction. For Næss, the joy, when aesthetically experiencing nature’s gestalt,
triggers empathy with other living beings. The fact that every organism is part of a whole becomes realizable
through experiencing the gestalt. Næss’s gestalt ontology supports a moderate, aesthetically motivated biocentrism,
based on the awareness of everyday experiences and different ways of communication about sustainable ways of
living. The aesthetic implications of Næss’s gestalt ontology appeal to creative and innovative methods within the
design process and therefore envelop interesting material for the future development of sustainable design
concepts, which has not been examined yet. As Goldsmith points out: ‘There is a tendency in design that comes from
a desire to appear objective and “scientific” to try and quantify each aspect of design, from square footage of area, to kW of
cooling. Extending even to our own field of sustainable design we take the science of ecology and use it to define the ecosystems
we build in with terms like solar inputs and types of waste outputs. This is all in an effort to make the art of design seem more
legitimate in a world that values quantification above appreciating the gestalt of a design’s function. In Naess’ essay “The
Place of Joy in a World of Fact” he condemns this view and asks us not to try and reduce our experience to a simple knowledge
of the basic physical realities of our surrounding world, but to appreciate them for their experiential reality of sounds, sights,
smells, and feelings,’ (Goldsmith, 2009, p.4).

Conclusion

Considering the designer’s role as mediating between ‘what is possible by nature and our knowledge from the natural
science on the one hand and of what is accepted or wanted by society on the other,’ (Hermansen, 2006), it seems
relevant to strive for a combination of the criteria discussed in this article theoria, praxis and poesis: worldview and
ethics, social interaction and technology fixes, instead of overemphasizing a single one and marginalizing others as
is often done in the single concepts. For sustainable design a balanced approach means: cultivate world-views, ethics
and knowledge to attain triple-bottom-line goals (theoria), engaging in the development of ways to interact with stake-
holders to pursue these goals (praxis) and allocating optimum resources to support their realization (poesis). Promoting
a balanced approach, industrial design can contribute with ecological and technological know-how, and with methods
and tools to advance social sustainability and social inclusion. Newer research on design and life quality of older people,

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DOI: 10.1002/sd
Main Concepts of Sustainable Design 187

e.g. from the WISE group (Well-being in Sustainable Environment), at the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Develop-
ment shows that a holistic approach in design, considering the social, economic and ecological dimensions of solutions,
maximize the success of future developments (Mitchell and Burton, 2006). Possible guidelines for future sustainable
design research and curricula within a holistic framework could be:
• The onsets for sustainable design strategies are existing challenges.
• User and stakeholder involvement are fundamental attributes of meaningful sustainable product design solutions.
• Facilitating an interdisciplinary experience that includes comprehensive learning opportunities for different stake-
holders is essential.
The goal of this article was to explore the idea-historical development of sustainable design concepts and to
examine representative approaches in the field with help of three criteria (theoria, praxis and poesis) systematically.
Future research and development activities have to analyse in more detail what specific methods are applied in the
concepts and what their use implies for ‘design for a sustainable society’, for example, how green communities
can be organized with the help of designers to strengthen people’s ability to help and create opportunities for them-
selves and others within the local system.

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