Sustainable design

Environmentally sustainable design (also called environmentally conscious design, eco design etc.) is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the sustainability of the world is known as sustainable devalopment Environmentally sustainable design (also called environmentally conscious design, eco design etc.) is the philosophy of designing physical objects, the sustainability of the world is known as sustainable devalopment The intention of sustainable design is to 'eliminate negative environmental impact completely through skillful, sensitive design'. Manifestations of sustainable design require renewable resources, impact the environment minimally, and connect people with the natural environment. “Human beings don't have a pollution problem; they have a design problem. If humans were to devise products, tools, furniture, homes, factories, and cities more intelligently from the start, they wouldn't even need to think in terms of waste, or contamination, or scarcity. Good design would allow for abundance, endless reuse, and pleasure.” - The Upcycle by authors Michael Braungart and William McDonough, 2013. Design-related decisions are happening everywhere on a daily basis, impacting “sustainable development” or provisioning for the needs of future generations of life on earth. Sustainability and design are intimately linked. Quite simply, our future is designed. The term “design” is here used to refer to practices applied to the making of products, services, as well as business and innovation strategy — all of which inform sustainability. Sustainability can be thought of as the property of continuance; that is, what is sustainable can be continued into the future. The principle that all directions of progress run out, ending with diminishing returns, is evident in the typical 'S' curve of the technology life cycle and in the useful life of any system as discussed in industrial ecology and life cycle assessment. Diminishing returns are the result of reaching natural limits. Common business management practice is to read diminishing returns in any direction of effort as an indication of diminishing opportunity, the potential for accelerating decline and a signal to seek new opportunities elsewhere. (see also: law of diminishing returns, marginal utility and Jevons paradox.) A problem arises when the limits of a resource are hard to see, so increasing investment in response to diminishing returns may seem profitable as in the Tragedy of the Commons, but may lead to a collapse. This problem of increasing investment in diminishing resources has also been studied in relation to the causes of civilization collapse by Joseph Tainter among others. This natural error in investment policy contributed to the collapse of both the Roman and Mayan, among others. Relieving over-stressed resources requires reducing pressure on them, not continually increasing it whether more efficiently or not. Negative Effects of Waste About 80 million tonnes of waste in total are generated in the U.K. alone, for example, each year. And with reference to only household waste, between 1991/92 and 2007/08, each person in England generated an average of 1.35 pounds of waste per day.