Sustainability is a measure of the resilience of a system, the capacity of a system (and all its components) to repair itself when damaged.
Awareness has been growing over the last thirty years that the design of modern built environments and the (>) lifestyles they support and promote appear to be fundamentally unsustainable. The construction and operation of those environments destroy resources at a faster rate than natural systems can create them, particularly when those natural systems are also hampered by a range of pollutants. The extent to which the designing behind modern societies has failed to deliver ongoing resource efficiency, durability, and flexibility is leading some to believe that “sustainable design,” if not an oxymoron, is insufficient for the problem.
The most commonly cited definition of sustainability is the one put forward in relation to the term “sustainable development” in the 1987 Bruntland Report Our Common Future: meeting the needs of the present without harming the ability of the future generations to meet their needs. This formulation of intergenerational equity is not practicable because it merely raises further questions about the needs of the present, the future, and the nature of “harm.”
Clarification of the meaning of the term sustainability is best found in the relatively modern discourse of ecology. The term was coined in the middle of the nineteenth century by Ernst von Haeckel, a promoter and advancer of Darwinism. Haeckel coined the term to capture the “fit” of species and their habitats. Haeckel argued that all the living things in particular niches were interdependent; if one species changed then all the species in that environment would be under evolutionary pressure to change in response.
At the time, nature was considered to be in eternal harmonious balance. Modern ecologists now argue that areas of wilderness
are not as they have always been, but instead experience violen booms and crashes in the populations of certain species, with resulting exoduses and invasions that lead to constantly changing environments. In fenced-off national parks, where migration is not possible, the balance between interdependent species can only be maintained through occasional human intervention, such as culls.
In this context, the sustainability of a species refers to its resilience to changes in its environment and the other species that comprise its environment. In other words, sustainability is the measure of the capacity of a system, whether this be a particular species, or the whole ecosystem of which it is a part, to reproduce itself in the changing circumstances upon which it depends. Importantly, the sustainability of a system is not just its ability to stay the same, but rather its ability to flourish, which may involve changing, moving location for example, or evolving in (>) form and (>) function over time. It also means that there is no final state of sustainability, just moments of dynamic equilibrium. Human civilizations have long experienced the extent to which natural systems can be damaged through resource extraction before the ability of such systems to recover from damage is exceeded: for example, rates of logging. Human beings have also long been aware of the fact that damaging the sustainability of one species can in turn lead to the damage of other species and entire ecosystems; for example, hunting predators leads to destructive booms in the population of their prey.
Modern civilizations have started to damage ecologies in less explicit ways. Contemporary ecological politics is often thought to have begun with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. After noting the absence of birdsong on a walk through the forest, Carson discovered the way in which pesticides bioaccumulated, that is, built up in concentration along ecological food chains. This drew attention to the fact that species could lose their regenerative capacity not only through direct exploitation, but also as a result of relatively small amounts of pollutants moving through the interdependencies that make up ecosystems. After Carson, who was both a scientist and an activist, ecological sustainability centered on the protection of natural ecosystems from the risk of damage beyond repair. There is much argument in the philosophical field of “environmental ethics” (> Ethics) as to why natural ecosystems should be protected from damage: anthropocentric arguments emphasize the dependence of humans on natural ecosystems (for example, the Amazon rainforest as the “lungs of the earth” as well as prospective source for cancer cures); biocentric arguments emphasize the intrinsic value of nonhuman species.
Ecological sustainability throughout the early 1990s was primarily concerned with minimizing qualitative ecological impacts. These are particular pollutants that can damage ecosystems almost in any quantity: heavy metals, acid rain causing gases, persistent chlorinated compounds. Manufacturers, mostly as a result of imposed regulations, pursued “cleaner production” or the minimized use of proscribed chemicals.
Toward the end of the 1990s, the scope of sustainable production increased to also take account of quantitative ecological impacts. These are pollutants that are less toxic in themselves, but become damaging when present in larger quantities: for example, global climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions (“greenhouse gases”). Manufacturers attempted to reduce the amount of these emissions through “eco-efficiency” initiatives. These were often undertaken voluntarily because of their “win-win” nature: improving the efficiency of industry, so that it needs less resource input and has less waste output, saves businesses in on-going costs, as well as “saving the environment.” Investment in eco-efficient reforms were judged in terms of “pay-back” periods, that is, how long before the cost of the reforms were recouped by ongoing savings to the business in its operating costs.
Unfortunately, most of the reductions in ecological impact accomplished by cleaner production and eco-efficiency in the late 1990s are being eroded by the “rebound effect.” This is where the cost savings from one initiative are reinvested in increased net production/consumption. If a business is saving money by not being fined for pollution by a government environment agency, it will have more cash to expand its operations. The rebound effect also applies to domestic (>) consumption. If a household is convinced to buy a more efficient air-conditioner, that household will save money on its electricity bills that over time it will probably respend on extensions to the house, creating whole new spaces to be filled with furnishings and cooled/heated by air conditioners.
In recognition of the fact that “per product” efficiencies can be outstripped by increasing numbers of products being purchased and used, the focus of current sustainability research and policy also includes sustainable consumption. This refers not just to informing customers about the qualitative ecological impacts associated with products on offer in order to encourage “buying green,” but also persuading consumers to consume less—sufficiency rather than efficiency.
Ecodesign refers to the role designers played in facilitating ecoefficient cleaner production. Throughout the 1990s many guides were developed to help expand the process of designing products and environments to include consideration of ecological impacts. Design for the Environment was to be given equal weighting alongside all the other concurrent “Design for”s (that is, cost minimization, ease of manufacture, durability, usability, safety, marketability, and so on). Unfortunately, many of these guides were not easily integrated into the creative processes of designers, and gave no guidance on how to handle conflicts between the various “Design for”s.
Some of the more sophisticated guides developed to help designers select less eco-impacting materials or operational designs were Life Cycle Assessments. These are decision-making tools that attempted: firstly, to identify all the ecological impacts associated with a particular product configuration over its life span, from raw material through manufacture and use to disposal; and secondly, to compare different types of ecological impacts, for example, ozone depletion versus groundwater contamination versus endangered species habitat destruction. The aim was to quantify all the impacts, each weighted in terms of unsustainability, to give figures that could be used to calculate the least unsustainable design option. A crucial factor in Life Cycle Assessments is the “functional unit.” Comparing the ecological impacts of one 1 liter glass milk bottle with one 1 liter liquid paper-board milk carton will miss that glass milk bottles are washed and reused, so the LCA’s functional unit needs to be perhaps the packaging associated with one hundred liters of milk. Comparing one cloth nappy with one disposable nappy will miss that disposable nappies are designed to “take the wetness away” from the baby’s skin allowing the baby to be changed less frequently before crying, so the LCA’s functional unit needs to be twenty-four hours worth of nappies.
Life Cycle Assessments have proved problematic decision making tools for sustainable design. They are time-consuming and expensive to do comprehensively. And despite seeking objective measures of sustainability, they always depend on contestable decisions, most notably in the weightings given to distinct types of ecological impacts, but also in determining where the boundaries of these impacts lie. For instance, the transport energy used to ferry miners to remote locations could be counted as part of the embodied energy of the final product made with those minerals. So too could the energy associated with the food that sustains the workers. A final questionable area of Life Cycle Assessments is the predicted ecological impacts associated with average use-life. Use is usually one of the most impacting periods in the life span of a product, whether it be a toaster or a building; but it is also the aspect of a product’s ecological impact profile most open to variation, depending on whether the user is, or is able to be, diligent or negligent. Taking up these last complications have been new attempts to calculate whole-of-system ecological impacts, such as those associated with cities, bioregions, or nations, rather than those that can be attributed to this or that product, or even industry. In keeping with what was discussed earlier, these are measures of quantitative ecological impact only; they assume that a good indicator of the unsustainability of modern societies is the amount of stuff it takes to sustain a set of people. The best known of these is the “ecological footprint” which converts quantities of goods consumed over a given period into the amount of land nominally needed to produce those goods. Generally, if everyone in the world was to live as most people do in developed urban centers, the land area needed would be the equivalent of three to seven earths. A more detailed measure comes from Material Flows Analysis, which calculates the total weight of material in (standing stock), and passing through (throughput), a place over a given period of time. A related measure that has proved useful for design is Materials Intensity per unit Service, also known as “ecological rucksacks.”
This latter was developed by the Factor 10 Club, a group of sustainability researchers and policy makers who argue that a good target for a more sustainable future would be for developed nations to service their lifestyles using one tenth of the amount of materials currently required. This figure is not based on any measure of the carrying capacity of the earth’s ecosystems, but rather global equity given that one fifth of the world (the developed nations) at the moment consumes four fifths of the world’s resources. Attaining this target is unlikely to be achieved soon enough, and without rebound effects, through lightweighting or energy-efficiency breakthrough technologies. Factor 10 is therefore best achieved by households having less stuff (sufficiency), having what stuff they have for longer, getting more use out of it (increasing service intensity), and spending more of their time on activities that do not require as much stuff (also known as dematerialization). Designers committed to developing more sustainable futures in the last decades have tended to arrive at (>) heuristics similar to those of the Factor 10 Club as a way of steering through the complexity of Life Cycle Assessment. Exemplary is the designer Ezio Manzini’s typology of product life spans: for some product categories, those with strong symbolic ties to their users, or those subject to little technological innovation, it is appropriate to prioritize very longlife designs; for most products, subject to changing fashion or technological improvement, priority should be given to making the product disassemblable, for repair, upgrade, or component and material recovery; for all products with necessarily short use-lives, priority should be given to making the products from single or separable biodegradable materials. Crucial to this version of design for sustainability is not confusing material and product use-life; for example, using near-eternal plastics for disposable products, or fusing moving parts liable to wear and tear to longer life casings. The strategies Manzini identified for midlevel longevity products are now being institutionalized through Extended Producer Responsibility regulations. These primarily European Union initiatives force or persuade manufacturers to take their products back from consumers at the end of their use-lives. As a result, manufacturers are beginning to design products in anticipation of their return, so that their components and materials can be more easily removed and reused.
The “closed loop” nature of product take-back by manufacturers represents a fundamental shift from the current mostly linear nature of capitalist economies. (It is noteworthy that a strong current sustainability initiative in China goes by the name “The Circular Economy.”) For example, one of the easiest ways of ensuring the return of products to manufacturers is to not transfer the ownership of the product to the consumer in the first place, but instead lease the products. By selling the use of the product rather than the product itself, businesses are in a position to influence the use-phase of products, allowing integrated strategies for sustainable production and consumption. By retaining ownership of the product, businesses have an incentive to invest in more efficient, more durable, but also more easily serviceable and parts-recoverable products. Where conventional productsales companies concerned about sustainability suffer from “split incentives”—the need to sell more product for profit, but sell less product for sustainability—“functional sales” companies internalize environmental costs and profit from being more sustainable. While there are political concerns for the autonomy of the household for example (families outsourcing their appliances to profit-driven companies), these sorts of “product-service systems” seem to suggest business opportunities that would lead to significant leaps toward much reduced societal materials intensity. This is a very different game to the current management discourse of “triple bottom line,” where companies report on the competing objectives of economic, ecological, and social sustainability. (Social sustainability in this sense refers to investments in fostering the resilience of people, by enhancing their know-how and know-who for example.) Other non-market-driven initiatives toward reduced materials intense lifestyles have been identified in a series of recent research projects initiated again by Ezio Manzini. “Creative communities” in both developed and developing nations are groups of people who establish systems for the shared-use of products (carpooling for instance) or for the procurement of less ecologically impacting goods, such as locally produced, organic, and/or fair trade (the Slow Food movement for instance). For Manzini, sustainable design then becomes the project of finding these attempts by people to create new systems of provision not currently offered by mainstream markets, and (>) redesign them so that they are more sustainable, and more desirable to other people less ideologically committed than those who initiated them. Again, this role, as a facilitator of (>) participatory design, is a new set of skills for conventionally product-oriented sustainable designers (> Service Design).
To conclude, Ulrich Beck has argued that ecological politics is a form of reflexive modernization. By this he means that issues of ecological risk put lay people in a very ambivalent position. Ecological impacts, such as the toxicity first identified by Rachel Carson, are not discernible except with the assistance of technical experts, the very technical experts who caused the problem in the first place—hence public ambivalence toward modern institutions like science and engineering. Much ecological politics is therefore about people reasserting some control over their future. Sustainability is less a scientifically determinable state than the state of being able to be involved in forming the future (and not just being informed about the choices experts are making). The aim of sustainable design is therefore to avoid what Tony Fry has called the “defuturing” that characterized twentieth century design, that is, designing in ways that close off alternative futures, restricting future options. It is to create what Manzini has called “error-friendly” design, designs that remain open to being redesigned for other futures.
> Environmental Design, Materials, Slow Design
