trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

longer product centred. It is widely recognized, however, that the very concepts of sustainability and thesustainable development DfS attempts to promote are fuzzy and ill defined.On Design for a Sustainable SocietyBecause of this fuzziness, and because we have witnessed the complexity of environmental problemsolvingand the number of constant trade-offs that emerge when prioritizing, we have chosen anumbrella framework developed by The Natural Step to guide our work. The Framework for StrategicSustainable Development (FSSD) provides a principled definition of sustainability, which serves toclarify and strategize fuzzy, fragmented intentions (see e.g. Robèrt et al, 2002; Robèrt 2009). Based onthe framework’s five levels, four sustainability principles and Backcasting from sustainability principlesstrategy process, we can better envision how design and designers can and should operate within asustainable society: not only what the sustainable society should look like, but how we can achieve it.The FSSD has therefore been central in developing the Barometer’s survey framework, as we explainfurther below.3. Expanding our notion of designTo summarize the discussion thus far, the practice, profession, and competence of design is generallyrecognized as valuable to innovation processes and strategic regional competitiveness, and some – whilenot all – projects, studies and organizations expand this to include innovation that is alsoenvironmentally and socio-ethically sustainable. This suggests that the role of design is evolvingnaturally as driven by business needs, but it also suggests that we as professionals need to furtherexpand the scope of design driven by ecological and societal needs if markets alone are not suffice.To clarify what is push and what is pull in the design industry, it is helpful to examine twoinstitutional practices in particular. Both the history and evolution of design competitions and thedevelopment of national design policies 1 illustrate the changing role of design, as they show both whatexactly is valued in designed products and services as well as what aspects are deemed worthy of rewardand promotion in the larger context. In this section we will therefore describe how the concept of valuein design and the perceived jurisdiction of the designer are expanding, based on a literature review andour own analysis. This knowledge fed the design of the Barometer survey framework, as we wished todiscover if and how deeply design practitioners have internalized these ideas and embedded them intotheir professional practice, identity and personal worldview.Design ValueHow the design industry and designers themselves define success in their work as well as howcustomers, users and stakeholders define the success of the end results of design constitute design value.1 This paper will not examine national design policies. (For an overview, see e.g. Sorvali & Nieminen 2008.)However, it is important to note that design policies encompass entire design processes, while design competitionstend to focus only on the end, most visible, result.518