Green Design vs. Sustainable Design

Green Design vs. Sustainable Design

I often wonder what

When people use the term "sustainable design" I often wonder what they mean exactly? Their answer is, invariably, what I would consider "eco" or "green" design (be it in architecture or product design). Equating sustainability with eco or green is inaccurate. Eco/green design is not the same as sustainable design, although it can be a subset of it. Reducing environmental impact is a worthy goal and an important discipline, but it's often far from striving for sustainability. Sustainable design involves an emerging design methodology, one that strives to understand the system in which a particular issue exists before attempting to solve it (don’t fix it if ain’t broken). Unlike just about every other design discipline, with sustainable design, the end product is not determined beforehand. Rather, it could be a product, a communication piece or campaign, a policy initiative, a building, a product service system, etc. Sustainable design is also a discipline which, in addition to the environmental, strives to at least acknowledge the social and economic ramifications (for starters) of a project as well. As you might be thinking, this emerging discipline is difficult and requires greater and broader training than many designers ever attain. It demands that one be multilingual in the sense of being able to speak the language of design, business, marketing, environment, and public policy, for starters. The methodology is a fairly simple, something that I aspire to write more about in the coming months.

We should be more aspire to refine and practice (and eventually teach) sustainable design, recovering (or creating as the case may be), a more values-based discipline.