Focus on Relational Design

Sustainment design is about integrating the projection of what you are designing with how and why you are designing it. The assumption is that every product of design exists in a system of relations that exist 'before' and 'after' any specific product. This system includes the product, its users, the environments it depends upon and of course you, the designer. It is the interrelations of these aspects that are modified by design and cause far reaching cultural and environmental effects. The focus of this guide is therefore on working out and designing these relationships as much as it is on the product per se—in fact they are considered 'part' of the product. Considering a product as a system of relations is very useful in drawing attention to the cultural context as well as the material consequences of your designs.

The word design is translated in Latin-based languages with a word that is very similar to project, (for instance progetto in Italian). This word comes from the Latin pro-jectum, that means 'thrown towards'*. Think of your product-to-be as a pebble being thrown in a pond. As it hits the water, it creates a 'ripple effect' that moves outwards in all directions. Now run this image backwards. The ripples move inwards, toward the pebble. Design for Sustainability requires you to jump back and forth between these two dynamics: what your 'pebble' will generate and what generates your 'pebble'. The 'pebble' becomes in the designer's eyes more a nexus of relations than a 'thing'. Designing in this relational way is not easy, as there are many variables that will have to be taken into account along the way; the ripple effect always depends for example on a range of other things, like the changing condition of the water. You are not however striving to make your product 'perfect'. This is impossible, as the stupidity of even the highest-end 'smart' machines when faced with the normal unpredictability of life, show. What you are trying to do is to better understand what you are sending out into the world, and using this understanding to design more sustainably.

The additional knowledge you secure in the process of relational design can open up choices and opportunities that weren't previously available to you. You can, for example expend your effort in designing more short-life products, giving new ephemeral form to the old, unsustainable habits of our 'throw-away' culture, or you can explore the creation of new forms that embody and communicate sustainment like adaptable, modifiable and modular designs. The process can also sometimes have unexpected results. It is not assumed, for example, that some thing must be designed (though this goes against the grain of productivist logic). It may be more appropriate in a given situation to design a different way of doing things that doesn't actually require new material forms, such as designing a strategy for the co-operative use and maintenance of products. Arriving at such a design decision would only be possible as a result of understanding the designing relations a product exists within. More radically, this could lead to the 'un-designing' or elimination of a product. (On elimination design see Sustainments newsletter for April 2002).

Go to Examples for 'snapshots' of relational design scenarios.

* From editorial note in Ezio Manzini 'Prometheus of the Everyday' Discovering Design: Explorations in Design Studies Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin eds. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997) 221.