Reflection Week 11

From the podcast, “Design Research for Sustainability,” I learned that sustainability is about more than just caring about and mitigating the negative environmental and social impact of your products. It’s about creating a self-sustaining environment and helping it thrive and flourish.
One reason why the conversation around sustainability may be so controversial in business is the vagueness of it, and its inherent conflict between what shareholders would want to sustain, continual increases in profit, and what people pushing for sustainability would want to sustain, the support of practices that sustain a healthy planet.
While nothing can out-sustain time, considering sustainability means to consider the entire lifecycle of a product and how parts of your system transform themselves to become your system, and to transform out of your system.
There are reasons why companies will willingly choose sustainability. One reason for this choice is regulation, where any such laws exists. Another reason is that a growing number of users are caring more about sustainability. However, more exploration is needed for the ideas of sustainability and circular design to permeate further into the public. Only then can enough uncertainty be cleared to allow others to peer into the complexity of sustainable design so that it can be incorporated into people’s thinking when innovating.
Interestingly, the first thing you have to do when you design around planet-centered design is to consider the minutiae of your processes. The zooming in is necessary because we live among people and have to design first for them, before also considering the world at large. When governments design without considering the communities they govern, either resentment simmers, or resentment breaks into conflicts. This was partially surprising to me as the readings we previously read on systems emphasized that we cannot just focus on the decomposed parts of a system, as is the western train of thought, or the sky over the forest, as in eastern trains of thought, but rather we need to understand emergent behaviors that occurs when you couple consequences together in unexpected ways.
In the end, one needs to keep an open mind in order to innovate on the concerns of your local customers. This design thinking too is a form of sustainability