Sustainability: methods and practices

This chapter provides an overview of the methods and practices being used to address design for sustainability. Different approaches to aid design for sustainability are introduced ranging from those which focus purely on incremental design such as improving existing products, or redesign, through to those which result in more radical innovations such as developing new concepts or moving towards system innovation. The chapter outlines these approaches in detail and discuss their strengths and weaknesses. A number of case studies are used to illustrate the way in which these different approaches have been applied in practice and the resulting products, services or systems. Finally conclusions are drawn around the benefits of applying these approaches, the limitations are discussed and the future directions needed for the field are explored in order to illustrate how current research in this area can be developed further for use by designers.