Sustainable design creates long-term solutions and helps societies ensure the well-being of their people and harmony with the environment for generations.
Designers reduce waste by making products that are recyclable, compostable and even better - endlessly reusable. They might also create a manufacturing process to reduce or remove carbon dioxide emissions, to support a circular economy. As the most significant challenge of our age, many of these designs relate to environmentalism or combatting climate change.
One of the world’s leading User Experience and design experts, Don Norman, help us understand how to design for a better world. Spoiler alert: sustainability is not enough.
A sustainably designed product or service is one that considers the entire lifecycle of the product during development, from manufacturing to disposal. A truly sustainable design is optimized for reuse.
A physical product might use recycled materials, be manufactured in a plant that doesn’t use fossil fuels, or follow incremental modular design principles to become more sustainable. After the product is created, it should be useful for a long time. It should be designed in a way so it can be reused or repaired, or biodegrade once it is done being useful.
A sustainable service, designed with participatory design principles, should provide what the user needs while reducing the use of non-renewable resources. Ride-sharing apps are an example of a service that ultimately reduces the need for every individual to own a car. This has the potential to reduce waste since fewer cars are necessary. Options to carpool can also reduce gasoline use, further increasing the sustainability of the service.
Carsharing services such as GoTo Carsharing seek to reduce car ownership using the Transportation-as-a-Service model.
© GoTo Mobility, Fair Use
© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0
As important as sustainability is, it’s clear that the effects of climate change are already happening. In that regard “sustainability” is not enough, since that effectively means keeping things the way they are.
We have to stop creating products that create great harm to the planet. We have to create products that can last for a long time and that can be repaired and upgraded when they become outdated or stop working. Alternatively, we can design as nature does. We can design in a way where the waste itself is a valuable substance that can be reused by nature. Think of an orange. It’s protected by the peel (not a plastic wrap). Once we peel the orange the peel will naturally decompose and function as fertilizer for the planet.
User experience designers who work solely on digital products might think sustainability is irrelevant for software or applications. That is somewhat true, but new industries like crypto mining have demonstrated that even purely digital products can have unforeseen ecological impacts.
Designers can develop energy-efficient apps that work on older devices to reduce energy consumption and slow the obsolescence of older devices, which causes more waste.
Dark mode vs. light mode.
© Apple Inc, Fair-Use
Even something as simple as a “dark mode” for the UI of an app can reduce the amount of strain on the battery of a smartphone or tablet, thus reducing energy consumption. If everyone who uses the app uses dark mode, it can have a significant impact.
Traditionally, UX design has primarily focused on human-computer interactions. However, we can scale up the practices of design thinking, user research, product design and interaction design to even larger projects. Now more than ever, designers are called on to rethink infrastructure, education and transportation to create more sustainable models on a national or even global scale.
Sustainable design processes include reforming energy-efficient infrastructure or designing sustainable buildings for housing.
The founder of User Experience, Don Norman, has coined the term “Humanity-Centered Design” to give a name to this movement and inspire designers to design a better world for all of us.
If you want to learn more about sustainable design, take our course: Design for a Better World with Don Norman.
Norman, Donald A. Design for a Better World: Meaningful, Sustainable, Humanity Centered. Cambridge, MA, MA: The MIT Press, 2023.
Read more articles and essays by Don Norman on JND.org.
For an example of a large-scale sustainable design problem, read about the circular economy.
The UN’s 17 Goals for sustainable development
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Here’s the entire UX literature on Sustainable Design by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:
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