Design for Sustainable Change : How Design and Designers Can Drive the Sustainability Agenda

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Design for Sustainable Change explores how design thinking and design-led entrepreneurship can address the issue of sustainability. It discusses the ways in which design thinking is evolving and being applied to a much wider spectrum of social and environmental issues, beyond its traditional professional territory. The result is designers themselves evolving, and developing greater design mindfulness in relation to what they do and how they do it. This book looks at design thinking as a methodology which, by its nature, considers issues of sustainability, but which does not necessarily seek to define itself in those terms. It explores the gradual extension of this methodology into the larger marketplace and the commercial and social implications of such an extension.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Students in all the design professions should read this admirable and wise book by Chick and Micklethwaite (both, Kingston Univ., UK). Its essential purpose is to explore how design must work to best preserve the planet for future generations--an important subject for all forms of design. Yet this book is much more: it is a fascinating explication of the philosophy of design that offers a vision of how designers should think and work and what design should be. The authors begin their exploration with the concepts of design thinking and design activism, emphasizing the value of design as modeling and as an attitude, and suggesting that design's modalities can be expanded to solve problems in other fields of study. The accompanying case studies, a fascinating collection of local, national, and global solutions, show how design can address ecological and social problems (including problems that design has identified). In the second and third parts of the book, the authors first define sustainability, and then explore it as a specific problem that design can solve. This volume thoroughly discusses a variety of approaches, including design for need, design for development, and design for equality. This beautiful book is superbly illustrated. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. R. M. Labuz Mohawk Valley Community College