Future Design Essay

Why Sustainability is the clear future for design. Discuss.

Design, first and foremost, is concerned with solving problems, but from where we currently stand we have created more problems than we have solved. Sustainable product design is focusing on creating products with the least possible negative impacts on the environment, featuring eco-sound materials, energy efficiency, and easy recycling.

A new product on the market may look all shiny and new and be appealing to customers but what is the story behind the product and what is the underlying future for this product. Where were the original materials from? Is it all legalised? Where did the manufacturing take place? How was the product manufactured? These are all questions that are never properly addressed in the design industry and are just simply overlooked. They are the aspects of designing and producing a new product that need to be carefully looked at to make a good design, and to make sustainable products.

The future for these products is also quite often over looked. The components are not made to be detachable, so the different materials cannot be recycled correctly or recycled at all, which leads to landfills and pollution. Every material, from wood to steel to carbon fibre has an environmental story behind it and these can all be reused, however there is quite often not enough thought into this design aspect. These components are not labelled correctly for recycling and the result is a scarred landscape. However recycling these days has now turned into a way of life for us. Bins are now everywhere marked with the unmistakeable ‘three-green-arrow’ (another remarkable graphic design – now playing a huge role in the way we live), which lets members of the public kn...

... middle of paper ...

... Each chair is made from decks of skateboards cut from second-hand plywood and leftover material from the skateboard industry. The decks are refurbished, re-laminated and recoated, with some chairs covered with cushion made from wetsuit material. This shows an inventive way of recreating a once very popular mid-century chair, into a modern sustainable product.

Currently there is an urgent need to make products and processes sustainable, and beneficial to everyone and everything. This is because the true facts are that if we do not act now, our resources will run out and we wont be able to do anything about it. We must now design for the future and not our currents needs, and everything should be compatible with nature to correspond with sustainability. The question designers should be asking themselves now is ‘is this design choice moving us in the right direction?’