Introduction

The DfS Guide is a 10 stage introduction to Sustainment Design for all design disciplines. This guide will help you gain insights into the cultural agency of design: the ability of design to help shape the values, expectations, desires, habits and behaviours of people. Its main purpose is to develop your intuitive sense for sustainability and to encourage you to discover the potential of your design projects to contribute to more sustainable ways of living and working. The idea is to get you to think comprehensively about the entire life cycle of designed things—production and user side—as well as about your own design process.

While this guide will provide you with practical information, it is not a 'cookbook' for sustainable design. There is no ulitmate guide for sustainable design, nor are any true 'experts' in it. Sustainable design involves issues of material impacts, but it also involves value judgements, observation, self-reflection and collaboration. More than anything, design for sustainability requires a 'learning' disposition. We all have to learn to conduct design activity differently to how we have in the past. This means identifying problems that we have sometimes not even thought about before, creating new concepts in light of what we have learnt through research, re-negotiating design briefs with clients to introduce them to these concepts and finally, applying these concepts in the design delivery process.

Most of what needs to change about how we do design happens in what is usually called the 'pre-design' or research phase. This guide is therefore focussed on what you need to think about, do, ask and research before designing anything. It is a design planning tool that will help you to lay out the key issues and impacts associated with the life cycle of your product—whether it be a graphic icon, item of clothing, appliance or a building—in this first phase of designing. This will enable you to see problems and find opportunities to create sustainment through what you design at the 'front-end', where it counts.

Over the next year, you will be able to source examples of products developed using this guide at the Product Portfolio page on this website.

As this is the first version of the DfS Guide, we would welcome and value your questions, comments and feedback on this guide.

Use this guide to:
• work out and source design problems and opportunities
• explore ideas for new products
• design a 'return brief' to introduce sustainable options to your client.

Go straight to the Guide.

Find out How to Use the Guide.

Or, find out more about the theory behind the guide by choosing from the menu on the left.