trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

“memories of the future” that enhance sensitivity towards upcoming signals and challenges (de Geus1999, 59). Through foresight and scenarios it is then possible to anticipate future changes in the contextof industrial design and shape the agenda of sustainable design towards a future of wider acceptance andutilization.This paper is divided into three parts. First, the barriers sustainable design has faced are exploredthrough interviews conducted with design professionals on the topic of sustainability, supported byliterature on the topic. Second, insights are drawn from three scenarios that focus on the topic of howsustainability will change and develop. Last, future prospects and requirements for the domain ofsustainable design are discussed. Before moving along, one note on the scope of this paper: although thedimensions of environmental, social and economical sustainability are often presented as equal to eachother, the environmental dimension often stands out as “more equal than the others”, forming a“precondition for the other dimensions” (Tukker 2008, 15). Also in this paper the main focus is on theenvironmental dimension of sustainability, due to its close linkage to the tradition of industrial design(ie. designers can fairly easily implement methods that eg. save material but have a lot less to say in whatkind of work conditions the product is manufactured in).2. Barriers to sustainable designThis section is based on eight semi-structured interviews 1 that were conducted between November 2008and February 2009 with design professionals, supported by insights brought in from literature.Although the focus is on industrial design, the selection of interviewees was not strictly limited todesigners with formal education in industrial design. Instead, designers that work in industrial settingsor are influential in the context were chosen in order to achieve a slightly broader view on the matters athand. Thus, the final sample consisted of six industrial designers, a ceramic designer working in anindustrial company and an interior architect who has been highly influential in design education.Another important – but not decisive – selection criteria was a background in sustainable design, ie. thedesigner had visibly brought forward sustainability in his or her work previously. Two designers withoutan expressed preference towards sustainable design were also interviewed because of the insights theymight offer to the problems that relate to sustainable design itself as an approach. As most Finnishdesigners work in design agencies and not as in-house designers in companies the sample is fairlydescriptive of the overall field with six out of eight designers coming from an agency background. Theages of the interviewees ranged from about 30 to 65 years, featuring a good mix of veteran designers whohave been around since the formalization of the industrial design profession as well as younger designersgraduating in the 21 st century. The interview theme was focused on sustainable design and especially onhow it was practiced and reacted to in the context of the design practice.All interviews were recorded, transcribed and analyzed utilizing the Barley & Tolbert framework ofinstitutionalization (Barley & Tolbert 1997). According to the model, there are four phases in theinstitutionalization of new ideas and practices. In the first two phases actors encode and enact existing1The interviews were originally used for the author’s Master of Art-thesis, of which this section is a re-iteration witha more limited focus528