Hasta La Ideas

ShelterBox, disaster relief in a box

As social, economic and ecological conditions continue to worsen and with the increasing sophistication and connectivity of information technology and social media, design for sustainability is now moving towards a new qualitatively different area of exploration: designing to build adaptive capacity. Its been almost 10 years since McDonough and Braungart’s ground-breaking book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things set the standard for sustainable design: toxic-free closed loop material cycles, use of renewable energy in manufacturing, post-consumer separation of biological and technical materials and service and flow takeback programs by manufacturers. [Ed Note: Don’t miss our recent Q+A with Braungart on Designing a New Material World.]

Emily Pilloton lays out design for sustainability 2.0 in her excellent introduction to her 2009 book Design Revolution. In “Design Can Change the World,” she brings social sustainability to the forefront by adding a human-centered, activist, user-friendly approach that expands the environmental focus from how we build things to the social question of what we should be building. Core77’s Allan Chochinov’s foreword to Design Revolution describes moving beyond good design to design for good, reinforcing the argument for design activism.

Similarly, recent projects like Ecovative Design’s EcoCradle—packaging material grown from fungi and agricultural byproducts and Open Ideo’s online multi-disciplinary platform for the collaborative design of social good—demonstrate the persistent power of Cradle to Cradle and design activism to inspire effective sustainable design. Designing to build adaptive capacity does not replace our current state of the art but adds a new layer of intention and concern that deepens our sustainability efforts and continues to reinterpret the role of designers in the sustainability movement.

DESIGNING FOR RESILIENCE

Designing to expand adaptive capacity means creating objects, templates and platforms that allow people and systems to survive and even thrive in a complex and uncertain planet. In a world increasingly shaped by peak oil, global warming, economic uncertainty and environmental disasters (Deep Water Horizon, Pakistani floods, Fukushima), designers are coming to grips with how to help users create local resilience and self-reliance. In fact, the concept of resilience has become an important term that designers are just now grappling with. An emergent property of systems that is related to the “longevity” tenet of sustainability but qualitatively different from its “no impact” focus, resilience is concerned with cycles of change and positive adaptation. Resilience thinking integrates social and environmental factors into a holistic framework that helps users prepare for —or even take advantage of—shocks to a system.

In their 2006 book Resilience Thinking, Brian Walker and David Salt explain the concept of the four phases of the adaptive cycle: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganization. They argue that building adaptive capacity based on resilience, not optimal efficiency, allows systems to absorb and prepare for external disturbances without crossing thresholds that shift to another regime. Designers need to consider differentiated, integrated strategies for change rather than rational, efficient strategies that maximize and exploit the growth of early stages. These growth-focused systems certainly yield more substantial paybacks but at the expense of resilience, such that they are more prone to massive shakeups after significant fluctuations. As Salt and Walker explain, “any proposal for sustainable development that does not acknowledge a system’s resilience is simply not going to keep delivering goods and services. The key to sustainability lies in enhancing the resilience of social-ecological systems, not in optimizing isolated components of the system.”

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