Evolution of Design for Sustainability: From Product Design to Design for System Innovations and Transitions

Abstract

© 2016 The Authors. The paper explores the evolution of Design for Sustainability (DfS). Following a quasi-chronological pattern, our exploration provides an overview of the DfS field, categorising the design approaches developed in the past two decades under four innovation levels: Product, Product-Service System, Spatio-Social and Socio-Technical System. As a result, we propose an evolutionary framework and map the reviewed DfS approaches onto this framework. The proposed framework synthesizes the evolution of DfS field, showing how it has progressively expanded from a technical and product-centric focus towards large scale system level changes in which sustainability is understood as a socio-technical challenge. The framework also shows how the various DfS approaches contribute to particular sustainability aspects and visualise linkages, overlaps and complementarities between these approaches.