ABSTRACT
The discourse on sustainability has reached a point where the present common view is that there is a need for radical transformational change in how human society operates. Design as a primary function for innovation in business, and increasingly in government and in other social organisational units including local communities has been engaged with different aspects of sustainability discourse and practice since the mid-twentieth century. The history of Design for Sustainability (DfS) has seen, in the last decades, the development of a variegated set of design approaches. Eco-design provides a set of design strategies to extend product lifespan from a technical point of view. Even if ecodesign can help designers to reduce the environmental impact of a product throughout its whole life cycle, it must be highlighted that this approach does not devote much attention to the influence that user's behaviour can have on the overall impact. Social innovations, either refer to those innovations aiming to solve social problems.
