This study reports on the results of a systematic literature review on ‘open design’ in academic fields including and beyond design and HCI. The review investigates how studies are framed as open design and open-source design (including ‘open hardware’): how researchers contribute to conceptual theorizing about open design or study its practical operationalization, in do-it-yourself ‘making,’ manufacturing and practices in-between these domains. Most of the papers reviewed were empirical studies from diverse fields. Open design was analyzed not only as contributions and solutions, but also as open-to-participate processes, openly shared processes, and open, closed, and modular (open and closed) outcomes. Various research fields presented an open design framing as an alternative to the status quo: new ways to do business and/or to foster socio-environmental sustainability. On the manufacturing side, open design was sought especially to accelerate innovation cycles; on the making side, it was espoused to foster democratization. However, the studies reviewed indicated that companies do not appear to develop much beyond business-as-usual. From the research perspective, the conceptual potential of open design to promote sustainability saw little practical exploration. Additionally, issues around open design community governance and ownership, safety and reliability of open outcomes require further investigation.
Eco-oriented makers and grassroots subcultures experimenting with digital fabrication technologies, and other activists designing sustainable futures, are increasingly the subject of research. As they address problems of environmental sustainability beyond institutional contexts, their work may appear vague, even confused, yet their activities are underpinned by intense and principled commitment. Working through their confusion, many maker communities build new understandings about what ‘sustainability’ could mean. We argue that herein lie important resources for new knowledge, and further that ethnography is the ideal way to track these processes of learning and knowledge production. The ethnographer participates in local confusion, over values and the definitions of sustainability, but also about what constitutes useful knowledge. Supported by STS (and other) literature on environmental expertise, we argue that maker communities' own acknowledgement of this vagueness actually makes possible a position from which epistemological authority can be reasserted.
Materialist Activist Communities (MACs) concern themselves with material flows in a politically engaged form of maker culture. They speculate, design and make collectively, with a marked environmental orientation, often developing impossible forms of bio-hacking and bio-art. The futures animating them grow out of technoscientific and mundane presents, but as they make knowledge on the sidelines, materializing the existing and the improbable, such groups render the Anthropocene and more-than-human futures tangible. While “maker culture” has been prone to techno-utopian hype, MACs embrace dirt, mess and bodies nurturing a “dirt way” of learning, a principled way of being in situated and partial confusion. We imagine alongside them, also in the dirt way, through ethnography, an explicitly messy way of working out what is important and why.
What is Helsinki's future and are there alternatives? This book is written by professionals who love Helsinki. Each writer has chosen an element of the city that has inspired delight, disgust, sorrow or enthusiasm. The book looks not only at the pasts of the Finnish capital but at what its future might be. Could vacant office space be transformed into homes? Does building within city limits have to mean clearing away its forests? what might the authorities learn from the resident who have occupied buildings, set up meeting places and worked as volunteers to protect cherished built heritage? What is it that is unique about Helsinki?
Collaborative arrangements between users and designers today are enacted in a broadening array of circumstances. These include extended, even years-long projects within corporations, the public and third sectors, as well as open-ended, peer-to-peer open design initiatives. Building on a literature review and analysis of four concrete participatory design projects, in this paper we argue that besides skills in selecting and implementing co-design methods, there is a larger repertoire of issues that need attention, if one takes the promises and limits of participatory design seriously. We elaborate on how these issues have purchase in the interplay of four interrelated domains: the strategic considerations that drive all those implicated, the mundane acts involved in co-design work, the choice of methods that is conditioned by strategic and mundane issues, and the producing of design outcomes permeated in turn by all the above. These domains co-constitute each other in such a way that one domain cannot easily be considered apart from the others. Participatory design understood from this perspective is not about facilitation skills, but rather skills to translate among strategic, mundane, method and design domains, and being aware of how they qualify and permeate each other in order to achieve results.
Experiments are deemed not only useful, but necessary in sustainability transformation to enhance local decision-making. This is especially apparent in Finland where national government programmes and city administrations promote sustainability experimentation and bottom-up initiatives in the interest of equitable participation. At the same time, universities are expected to respond to societal calls for major infrastructural transformations, while neoliberal principles shift responsibility from authorities to individual citizens. This paper examines the case of a student-driven sustainable campus initiative called “Test Site” in a university committed formally to sustainability education. The students questioned whether sustainability should be taught in air-conditioned classrooms, what topics were socially just and worth pursuing, and rather sought material engagement, creative exploration and autonomy. Invested faculty members were dependent on demonstrations and proof of impact, or at least convincing visuals, to sustain the initiative. The outcome of experimenting most valued by the students however was the material-based social learning on how to self-organise. The meaning of such “minor” experiments thus becomes muddled, involving local, situated power dynamics among university management, faculty and students and what is regarded as useful space and activity for learning. The case illustrates how an experimental site partly removed from university constraints rendered explorations of self-organising participants as valuable yet depended on visible proofs to justify this very exploration as worthwhile. Even within a neoliberal and highly hierarchical governance structure, some participants are able to make small gains to pursue socially just solutions.
Felix Holm is co-founder of the Maker Station makerspace in Cape Town, South Africa, a coordinator of the Cape Town maker movement, and contributor to a pan-Afrikan makerspace founders’ network. Suné Stassen is founding director and custodian of Open Design Afrika (ODA), a festival and activation platform that advocates, demonstrates and educates how design and creativity should be used for social, environmental and economic transformation. Over many years these two organisations have made significant contributions to reposition the roles of design, making, creativity and innovation within the greater ecosystem and helped build a healthier and more prosperous South Africa. Some of these efforts also contributed to Cape Town’s proposal, submitted before the city was eventually crowned as World Design Capital in 2014. Maker Station and Open Design Afrika believe that fostering people’s ability to become more active and responsive global citizens is key to increasing impact, improving more lives and initiating work towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a collective effort to design our new preferred futures. Their efforts bring to light contributions to DIY making and hacking and alternative histories less addressed in academic research. Felix (FH) and Suné (SS) spoke to Cindy Kohtala (CK) and Yana Boeva (YB) about their passions and the recent histories of South African DIY making over video-conference, mere days before South Africa went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, for this issue.
Maker spaces and maker activities offering access to low-cost digital fabrication equipment are rapidly proliferating, evolving phenomena at the interface of lay and professional design. They also come in many varieties and change fast, presenting a difficult target for, for instance, public authorities, who would like to cater for them but operate in much slower planning cycles. As part of participatory planning of Helsinki Central Library, we experimented with a form of collaborative futuring with and by makers. By drawing elements from both lead-user workshops and participatory design, we conducted a futuring workshop, which allowed us to engage the local maker communities in identifying the issues relevant for a public maker space in 2020. It further engaged the participants in envisioning a smaller prototype maker space and invited them into realising its activities collaboratively. Our results indicate that particularly the information about future solutions was of high relevance, as was the opportunity to trial and elaborate activities on a rolling basis in the prototype space. Insights about more general trends in making were useful too, but to a lesser extent, and it is likely that these could have been gained just as easily with more traditional means for futuring.
This paper presents an integrated literature review on how the environmental sustainability of distributed production is studied in a variety of disciplinary sources. The notion of distributed production suggests an alternative to mass production that differs in scale, location and consumer–producer relationship. Understanding its environmental implications (and thereby dematerialization potential) is regarded pertinent and timely. Key themes in the review included how distributed production can promote product longevity and closed material loops, as well as localizing production. New and closer ties between producer and consumer seemed central discussions but were underdeveloped with regard to sustainability potential. Empirical work was seen especially in research on Additive Manufacturing Processes, while the bulk of the studies were conceptual explorations with little testing in the real world as yet. This affirms the emerging nature of the topic and points to a clear need for more (and more diverse) empirical research. The review summarizes the opportunities for greater environmental sustainability as well as potential threats that could serve to guide and improve these novel practices today. It sets the stage for ‘distributed production’ to be examined as its own phenomenon by proposing how it can be characterized and suggests that a research agenda could build upon the work initiated here.
Fab Labs, fabrication laboratories, are shared workshops where citizens can access digital fabrication equipment to design and make their own objects. They are proliferating rapidly and represent an alternative to mass production and consumption, an ideology whose environmental and social benefits their “makers” like to espouse. A longitudinal ethnographic study in a Fab Lab in a European design school examined the Lab’s ideology building, how ideals were enacted and where compromises were visible. Environmental issues were intertwined with other ideological concerns, but they were rarely promoted in their own right. Engagement with sustainability-oriented makers and stakeholders is recommended.
Short abstract: Fab labs are institutionalising, and they are aligning with various institutional partners in ways that indicate pathways of future prosumption in cities. Examining maker culture as an “industrial transitions movement” focuses on the dynamics of alternative and mainstream design and production.
Long abstract: Makerspace and fab lab communities encourage others to actively participate in locally relevant and socially good design and production, by offering shared technology workshops in urban milieu. Such spaces include access to digital fabrication equipment as well as traditional craft workshop facilities. Maker groups align with institutional partners to mobilize publics, and they create and promote sociotechnical imaginaries also at national, regional and international scales. Their visions proselytise openness in democratising and localising technology. Moreover, municipalities leverage maker communities and spaces to explore their own ambitions related to citizen participation, material circularity, creative industry development, and so on. As fab labs have been operating since the early 2000s, they are institutionalising, and their aims and alignments indicate various pathways for how citizens are engaging in production and consumption – such as alignment with education or entrepreneurship. I examine fab labs as an industrial transitions movement and technology- and product-oriented movement (David J Hess). I study how makers engage their publics, with whom they align, and how sustainability is represented in their practices and imaginaries. I will present insights from my longitudinal research on open design and fab lab communities in Europe. I also discuss how Hess’s framework of industrial transitions movements guides analysis of such urban activism, bridging STS, transitions studies and social movement studies, and the tensions of ‘mainstream’ versus ‘alternative’ in maker practices and discourse.
The characteristics of 'solarpunk' as an eco-feminist future vision resonates with maker cultures that espouse autonomous development of products and technologies that use renewable energy sources, foster community resilience, accord with principles of environmental justice, and highlight symbiosis with nature and natural systems, even in urban contexts. In this study, we examined solarpunk in online discourse, project descriptions, Fab Academy project concepts, and academic publications, to see how it has travelled from its origins as a sci-fi literary genre to other creative fields, especially design, engineering and fab lab contexts. While there is no agreement on what constitutes solarpunk and what not, we see potential for the concept as a sociotechnical imaginary to motivate fablabbers into more environmentally oriented work in the face of environmental and social crises. Solarpunk may provide impetus in maker culture for alternative organizing and community governance models, to strengthen resistance to capitalist encroachment, precarity and collapse, in a way that is still pragmatic, anti-dystopian and materialist. The study also provides STS insights into how sociotechnical imaginaries may be shaped from below.
FabLabs can be studied as a technology- and product-oriented movement. In this study, I review material objects in European FabLabs as sociomateriality that represents and embodies the ways FabLabs are institutionalising. This refers to FabLabs’ relationships with incumbent institutions and how they impact the formation of norms and routines internally. Labs may adopt procedures familiar in mainstream organisations, borrowing from formal institutions in a quest for public inclusion and mainstream legitimacy, or they may seek to innovate in organisational structure, establishing themselves as informal institutions to maintain their counter-culture identity. Examining sociomateriality helps make visible how Labs manage the contradiction between 'openness' and recruitment of allies, and maintaining alterity. The studied FabLabs' institutionalising processes are ongoing, performative and heterogeneous, encompassing mixed tactics oriented towards both public inclusion (commodification and conforming) and counter-culture (reconstitution and transforming). We also propose that analysis conducted through three types of objects, work, knowledge and imaginative objects, provides a more articulated account of the tensions in material peer production.
MIT-Fablab Norway was one of the first Fab Labs ever established, in northern Norway in 2002. Despite this auspicious beginning to a network that is rapidly growing, surprisingly little has been written about the genesis of the network or the Fab Lab itself. We therefore aim to contribute to this knowledge gap with a narrative account of our independent ethnographic research visits to the Lab. We combine our researcher perspectives, which are informed by, on the one hand, Aesthetics and a phenomenological understanding and, on the other, Science and Technology Studies, with Design Research bridging both. Our account aims to richly describe the Lab’s unique profile in the MIT Fab Lab network as a socially shaped entity and product of a particular time and place. Most salient in this narrative is the role of its charismatic founder, whose stories and metaphors become vehicles by which we come to understand how a Fab Lab forms its own identity, balancing the relationships with local stakeholders against those with the Fab Lab network; how it promotes certain principles and values of peer production; and how it represents itself to both maker insiders and outsiders. While situated and particular to this Lab, our interpretations may have implications for the trajectories of other Fab Labs and makerspaces, as well as our understanding of peer production as a new paradigm.
Distributed manufacturing is rapidly proliferating to citizen level via the use of digital fabrication equipment, especially in dedicated “makerspaces”. The sustainability benefits of citizens' personal fabrication are commonly endorsed. However, to assess how these maker practitioners actually deal with environmental issues, these practitioners and their practices need to be studied. Moreover research on the environmental issues in personal fabrication is nascent despite the common perception that the digital technologies can become disruptive. The present paper is the first to report on how practitioners assess the environmental sustainability of future practices in this rapidly changing field. It does so through an envisioning workshop with leading-edge makers. The findings show that these makers are well able to envision the future of their field. Roughly 25% of the issues covered had clear environmental implications. Within these, issues of energy use, recycling, reusing and reducing materials were covered widely by environmentally-oriented participants. In contrast, issues related to emerging technologies, materials and practices were covered by other participants, but their environmental implications remained unaddressed. The authors concluded there is a gap between different maker subcultures in their sustainability orientations and competences. Further research on the environmental aspects of real-life maker practices and personal fabrication technologies now could help avert negative impacts later, as the maker phenomenon spreads. This knowledge should also be directed to developing targeted environmental guidelines and solutions for personal fabrication users, which are currently lacking. Potential also lies in seeking to enhance dialogue between pro-environmental and new-technology-oriented practitioners through shared spaces, workshops and conferences.
People not only purchase and use products and services, but creatively appropriate, hack, redesign and even innovate in them. Typologies of active use have emerged in various disciplines, remaining piecemeal even if complementary. Together they produce a blurry depiction of active design engagement, despite active use being pivotal to many emerging design approaches. To remedy this, we synthesize a taxonomy of different aspects of active use and design engagement. Use as-is, active use, locally new designs and globally new innovations mark different intensities of engagement. These can concern the material form of design, new uses, new meanings, adjustment to local settings, or the collective endeavours to shape communities and organizations, ideologies and imaginaries, and global platforms that facilitate active use.
Despite claims to being counterculture and a better alternative, grassroots activist design groups and free culture movements may replicate the marginalizing behaviours of dominant society, also in their governance and designs of their interaction platforms. We developed a code-of-conduct, or Community Guidelines, for our online commons-oriented group to nurture a sense of a caring and mutually responsible community. The guidelines aim to bring into online interaction the living person-to-person dialogic relationality we exhibit in collaborative work offline. Our social learning process could have implications for designing healthier online community protocols and platforms and be able to better tackle the challenges of intersectionality.
The concept that technology should be designed iteratively is a well-established tenet in participatory design. However, iteration has received insufficient attention regarding how and why we should also evolve tools that support participatory processes. Based on empirical material from five participatory renewable energy projects conducted in different school communities, this paper documents how a seemingly mundane participatory design tool, a paper template, evolves through iteration to better scaffold collaborative design work. We show how iteration has implications for the overall direction of the project towards sustainability by surfacing future issues. The templates allowed a collective move from designing a renewable energy generator towards making a school collective for sustainable use, management, and adjustment of the generator they built. The iterations illustrate how participatory design tools can collect mundane things relevant for design decisions and how such things can be translated at higher levels.
Short abstract: This paper illustrates how codesigning and building a small-scale renewable energy technology with students unfolds and how it can be institutionalized in schools through unpacking interrelations and tensions across different scales such as artifacts, people and institutions.
Long abstract: Citizen-led renewable energy initiatives are a key player in accelerating inclusive and democratic energy transition. Recently, the urgency of addressing global warming at an unprecedented rate requires more diverse types of communities to engage in energy transition. Educational institutions (schools) have a great potential to teach not only energy citizenship but also create novel and innovative forms of engagements for youth who are a key stakeholder as well as a minority in the current energy transition. This paper reports on an action research project that investigates how codesign activities, combined with a Do-It-Yourself method, can support energy innovation and by extension foster transition from mere educational institutions into a community of practice around energy innovation. Six projects were conducted in five secondary schools in Finland and South Korea, and data was collected in each site from the stage of planning to designing and use. Inspired by situational analysis, we broaden our analytic view to map the interrelations and tensions across artifacts, people, institutions, national and international norms and standards, and so on, which reveal opportunities and barriers across different scales. The projects of codesigning and building a small-scale renewable energy technology unfolded across different scales of both education and energy domains. We also discuss concord and conflict between the scales and the impact on how the renewable energy generators could be embraced in the school. This lends insights into how such initiatives can be “institutioned” and how energy communities can be supported.
Collective and citizen-driven activities for energy transition have been thriving globally in recent decades. Community energy innovation (CEI) developed through hands-on engagement with materials has garnered increasing attention from the interdisciplinary energy research community. The recent scholarly discussion has highlighted the role of materiality and its relation to collective agency, inclusion, and approaches to partici- pation. Accordingly, paying attention to materiality in CEI can clarify sociotechnical aspects of energy innovation which have been commonly understood through either solely a social or technical view. Furthermore, fostering citizens' take-up of renewable energy in more democratic ways is a prerequisite for accelerating the energy transition and is arguably best done via material, hands-on engagement. However, the focus on materiality, particularly hands-on material engagement, in research on community energy appears to be fragmented. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review to better understand how researchers understand and approach materiality and material engagement in CEI. The results of analyzing 36 papers highlight that mate- riality in CEI has been studied in interdisciplinary fields through diverse methods, and we identify four types of networks in which such innovation emerges. We also identify geographically dispersed and Do-It-Yourself enthusiast-led energy innovations which go beyond the existing understanding of CEI. More importantly, a network may change over time and place because of the configurational material nature of decentralized small- scale renewable energy technologies. However, studying materially-engaged CEI needs further efforts to inte- grate empirical data more centrally with the existing knowledge base and concretely define how materiality plays out in collective energy innovation.
Whilst design discourse tends to reify the commons as a utopian site of potentially emancipatory ways of living, commons are also fraught with internal struggles often leading to their disintegration and thus ultimately their ephemerality. We refer particularly to the quasi-institutional, cross-border, often self-organizing collective actions in which we often find ourselves immersed, as design academics. We play roles as researcher-observers, design intervention organizers, and activists, in networks and initiatives from conventional academic listservs to online groups to place-based participatory projects. ‘Commons’ and commoning has become a distinct analytical and strategic device for designers working with (and sometimes as) activists in social change (Botero et al. 2020), with "design research” playing various roles. At the same time, we have seen how grassroots activist communities committed to providing positive socio-ecological and anti-capitalist economic alternatives fail to sustain commons they purportedly valued and maintained. Meanwhile, critics of Western scholarship of the commons see its emphasis on governance as reductive, as against commons as embodied, aesthetic or affective communities. We thus see messy tensions related to the production of commons discourse in design academia, stemming from politicised framings, means and ends, and the occasional inability of design research to recognize itself as part of the problem. We aim to illustrate how design discourse tends to reify the commons as a utopian site of potentially emancipatory ways of living that can, in fact, render them as designs from nowhere. As commons are intimate to care and ecologies, these issues we observe in commons practices readily speak to our long-term and shared collective socio-ecological responsibilities. Whilst we invoke commons as a site of care and responsibility, an act of leadership of a hopeful form, such claims also present counter-intuitive questions pertaining to concepts and practices of commoning. Asserting that the governance of commons necessitates forms of responsibility, checks and balances on problematic forms of leadership that undermine their existence and vitality, shouldn’t manifest as rigid frameworks for constructing commons ‘from scratch’ at the behest of listening to community practices that already exist. The question then becomes, how can we negotiate tricky and often ambiguous questions about practices of commoning? How do we reconcile the construction of gendered, circumscribed and artificial spaces of ‘commoning’ that appear detached from people’s daily lives with ideals of participation and aspirations to democracy evident in such models for new forms of social cooperation, and in contrast to manifold contemporary empirical examples of commons appropriation and disintegration? To this end, we argue that a combination of naivety and proceduralism renders design commons research as rhetorical in its idealism whilst also displaying excesses of pragmatism that seem only to conceal power politics in practice. This comes into stark focus when juxtaposed with the uncommoning practices at play in design higher education institutions and this clarity is essential for challenging the abject practices emerging under the auspices of commons framings. We attribute these issues to commons design research having become delinked from critical traditions, which necessarily sit at the heart of a feminist embodied anticapitalist commons practice and an absence of which jeopardizes commons as a site of ecological care.
This is a landmark publication for the field of design. It was catalysed by unprecedented circumstances, as designers around the world had to rapidly deploy their competencies in strategic problem-solving to help humanity in the fight against an invisible enemy during a global pandemic. In alliance with other disciplines, from medicine to mechanical engineering,from computing to anthropology, designers everywhere have addressed the challenges and produced remarkable results through a diversity of initiatives. This Special Issue presents a peer-reviewed sample of these initiatives.
This is a landmark publication for the field of design. It was catalysed by unprecedented circumstances, as designers around the world had to rapidly deploy their competencies in strategic problem-solving to help humanity in the fight against an invisible enemy during a global pandemic. In alliance with other disciplines, from medicine to mechanical engineering, from computing to anthropology, designers everywhere have addressed the challenges and produced remarkable results through a diversity of initiatives. This Special Issue presents a peer-reviewed sample of these initiatives.
This study explores the intent of designers involved in design for sustainability and how responsible innovation can be collectively implemented. To do so, a case study using situational analysis was conducted with graduates of the Fabricademy program: a 6-month program on textiles and new technologies taught in a distributed manner out of the Fab Lab Network, focused on the value of open-source sharing and a hands-on approach to learning. In a context where both designers and consumers find the fashion industry increasingly devoid of purpose and connection, building skills through collective intelligence empowers actors in systemic transition, pointing to alternative pathways. Our findings indicate how the pedagogical approach of the Fabricademy program builds the technological literacy and self-awareness of learners so that they may transform products, services, systems and practices. We discuss these findings in light of dimensions for responsible innovation: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness.
Sustainable Product–Service Systems (S.PSS) carry great potential to deliver social well-being and economic prosperity while operating within the limits of our planet. They can however be complex to design, test, implement and bring to the mainstream. To increase our understanding of the potential benefits, drivers and barriers in S.PSS design, the research community has been inspired to collect and analyse an extensive number of cases in diverse sectors and to develop and test several design methods and tools. This Special Volume on “New Design Challenges to Widely Implement ‘Sustainable Product–Service Systems’” presents results of key studies in the following areas: user satisfaction and acceptance of S.PSS solutions, how industrial partnerships and stakeholder interactions can be designed for environmental and socio-ethical benefits, how knowledge of socio-technical change and transition management feeds S.PSS design processes, and the role of policy instruments to foster their implementation and scale-up. This Introduction reviews the current state of research and summarises the articles presented. The articles demonstrate increasing confidence in integrating approaches and theoretical frameworks from other arenas. These approaches include sociological practice theory, to shed new light on consumer practices in S.PSS configurations, and strategic niche management, to foster a suitable design and experimentation milieu. Experimentation, iteration and cyclical design processes were also seen by many authors as crucial to implementing and stabilising S.PSS solutions, but also their continuous sustainability evaluation. Several articles highlight the importance of local authorities, in developing S.PSS-enabling policies as well as supporting novel networks of stakeholders in the co-production of value. Finally this Introduction highlights key issues for a design research agenda, including but not limited to the development of new knowledge to support S.PSS designers (such as S.PSS design in low and middle-income contexts) and the role of Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in the diffusion of knowledge and know-how to companies. Together, the papers in this special volume provide insight into the promise of the S.PSS concept for understanding, advancing and accelerating sustainability.
This open access book introduces design for Sustainable Product-Service Systems (S.PSS) and for Sustainable Distributed Economies (S.DE). These are introduced as technical and operative tools for the development of a new generation of designers, responsible and capable of designing environmentally-sustainable products.
The book provides a comprehensive theoretical framework but also a practical tool to support the design process. It overviews methodologies, tools and strategies for Sustainable PSS design applied to Distributed Economies (DE) and provides strategies and design guidelines. All of these are highlighted and expanded upon with international case studies.
This paper presents a review and critical analysis of papers submitted for the Ecosystems Track of the Life-Changing Design conference, which focused on "Changing Ecosystems" through design for sustainability. The conference track aimed to explore the multifaceted dimensions of sustainability and its connection to design practice, research, and education. The papers covered various subthemes, including products and product design, Sustainable Product-Service Systems, craft, materials, aesthetics, more-than-human design, biodesign, and the role of designers as actors in society influencing policy, local-global dynamics, place-making, strategy-setting, and stakeholder interactions. Through synthesising the findings and insights from these papers, this review aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the advancements made in design for sustainability and highlight emerging trends and future research directions.
This book, based on a huge European and Asian research project, is a state-of-the-art examination of the theory and practice of system innovation through Product-Service System (PSS) design for sustainability from a trans-cultural viewpoint. PSS design incorporates innovative strategies that shift businesses away from simply designing and selling physical products to developing integrated systems of products and services that satisfy human needs. The book provides background, advice and tools for designers interested in sustainable PSSs and has a wealth of case studies for practitioners to digest.
Extending the lifetime of the product, as one of the strategies for design for sustainability, may increase the value of the product in use, repair, recycle and disposal phases for a longer lifetime thereby decreasing demand for new manufacturing. However, employing these perspectives may be challenging and requires long development processes. In the current structure, small scale companies have a potential to be a significant actor in transition for sustainable manufacturing and design due to their agile development skills. We will present empirical data collected from eight participants regarding five small scale companies who design and manufacture long-lasting connected smart speakers. Key findings and implications highlight that small scale smart product producers strive to maintain control over design decisions in order to enhance the potential for long-lasting products; such companies thus need to be empowered towards distribution and decentralisation of design and manufacturing. To do so, (1) local manufacturing of the hardware is needed; (2) distributed and decentralised repair services need to be available to distribute the responsibility and increase the resilience of the product; (3) new types of intermediary relationships such as collaborating with local incubation centres and local initiatives should be encouraged; and (4) future designers may also need to practise their production skills and include open-source hardware and software development in their projects.