What is Sustainable Design?

In the day and age of environmental awareness, customers have become more environmentally conscious and a survey shows the design industry is also moving this way. Product designers are now focusing more on sustainable design, most importantly since the market is moving towards sustainable and environment-friendly products, there is a growing demand for designers with good knowledge of sustainable design for designing these physical and digital designs. In this article, we will discuss what sustainable design is and why you as a designer be aware of it.

Sustainable design is a technique of designing any physical or digital product keeping in mind its long-term sustainability. Sustainable design refers to the process of coming up with long-term solutions for the core design issues or for designing new features for the product while ensuring that the product produces as little harm to the environment as possible and is as environmentally friendly as it can be.

Sustainable design is taking the design industry by storm with more and more people as well as designers prioritizing the environment over other factors. In the process of sustainable design, the focus is on designing recyclable, reusable, and biodegradable components for the product. This also includes designing the creating/manufacturing/packaging process which reduces the waste as much as possible and tries to integrate that waste into the product itself.

The Three Principles of Sustainable Design are:

Social Sustainability
Economic Sustainability
Environmental Sustainability

Like most of the UI/UX designers wonder, you must be wondering what does digital design has to do with Sustainability. After all any UI/UX design does not do any harm to the environment. But with industries with large energy consumption, digital products and their design, for example Crypto Currencies do impact the environment and that too mostly in negative terms. As a Product Designer or a UI/UX designer, one can come up with innovative design solutions to develop digital products or optimized websites/applications which consumes lesser energy resources and is highly optimized and efficient.

For Example, A simple feature of having a “dark mode” in your application, product or website reduces the strain on energy consumed by the local machine, these are very small individual steps but collectively, they product immense results.

The need of Sustainable Design can be understood under following points:

1. Brand Perception

With more and more customers becoming aware about the impact of the products on the environment and with issues like climate changes becoming mainstream, Sustainable Design is a great tool for improving the Brand Perception on the eyes of the customer.

2. Saves Resources

Sustainable Design not only reduces the waste generate and optimizes the raw materials taken, it also has a huge positive impact on the unit economics of the organization in the longer run. For example, with less waste products generated, the inventory cost and logistics cost to store and dump waste decreases.

3. Long term Sustainability

Sustainable Design helps in the longer term sustainability of the product and makes it future proof. Also since the design is optimized for Sustainability, it eats up lesser resources hence works better in the longer term with the same amount of resources.

4. Environment Friendly

At its core, Sustainable Design enables the product be it physical or digital, Environment Friendly where the product reduces the harm that may be done to the environment and maximizes the positive impacts of the product on the environment.

5. Moral Responsibility

One very important ways to answer the question “Why Sustainable Design?” is the fact that whatever we have that makes our life better and easier is due to earth and our environment so we do hold a moral responsibility towards making this environment a bit better than we got it.

1. Minimalist design

Minimalist design is an important practice for designer concerned with Sustainable Design since it saves resources meanwhile also reducing the cognitive load on the customers.

2. Optimized design

Be sure to optimize your application or website, this not only saves your energy resources and is less harmful for environment, but also helps in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

3. Three R’s of Sustainable Design

In the product design, make sure to follow the 3 R’s of Sustainable Design which are:
1. Repairability
2. Recyclability
3. Reusability

4. Minimize waste

While coming up with the manufacturing process, one must make sure to streamline the process to ensure minimum wastage of raw material, this reduces the inventory cost for the organization and is good for environment.

5. Minimizing CO2 emissions

At every step of the production, make sure to use Sustainable design techniques to to reduce or remove carbon dioxide emissions. This can be done using alternatives to hydrocarbons as the raw material.

Sustainable design is a technique of designing any physical or digital product keeping in mind its long germ sustainability. Sustainable design refers to the process of coming up with long term solutions for the core design issues or for designing new features for the product while ensuring that the product produces as less harm to environment as possible and as much environmental friendly as it can be.

The need of Sustainable design will only increase in the future so make sure to work on the points we discussed in the article in order to design your next product, website or application keeping in mind its long term sustainability.