ABSTRACT
It is a fruitless task to try to define sustainable product design – there is no common essence and it is inappropriate to try to find one. Sustainable product design encompasses a great diversity of approaches that will vary with place, time, environment, culture and knowledge. No one knows what a sustainable society will look like, we can only speculate on possibilities. However, as we work towards it, our knowledge and understandings will increase and our vision of development that is, in some sense, sustainable will evolve – the goalposts will keep moving, as it were. Sustainability is thus a fluid, dynamic, unfocused goal – and this is how it has to be; any attempt to define a vision of a sustainable society will always fall short. Similarly, any one approach to sustainable product design will be incomplete. Some current approaches focus on product life cycle assessment, others on product longevity, design for disassembly or the use of recycled materials. All these can make a contribution but all, in and of themselves, are inadequate. I have made my own attempts to translate ideas about sustainability into product prototypes. These too are inadequate, but it is the attempt to interpret abstract, theoretical ideas in the creation of tangible objects that is important in this type of investigative design work.
