Environmental Justice and Sustainable Purchasing: Product Design

The circular economy describes a world in which reuse through repair, reconditioning and refurbishment is the prevailing social and economic model. The business opportunities are huge but developing product and service offerings and achieving competitive advantage means rethinking your business model from early creativity and design processes, through marketing and communication to pricing and supply. Designing for the Circular Economy highlights and explores 'state of the art' research and industrial practice, highlighting CE as a source of: new business opportunities; radical business change; disruptive innovation; social change; and new consumer attitudes. The thirty-four chapters provide a comprehensive overview of issues related to product circularity from policy through to design and development. Chapters are designed to be easy to digest and include numerous examples. An important feature of the book is the case studies section that covers a diverse range of topics related to CE, business models and design and development in sectors ranging from construction to retail, clothing, technology and manufacturing. Designing for the Circular Economy will inform and educate any companies seeking to move their business models towards these emerging models of sustainability; organizations already working in the circular economy can benchmark their current activities and draw inspiration from new applications and an understanding of the changing social and political context. This book will appeal to both academia and business with an interest in CE issues related to products, innovation and new business models.

What is the relationship between design, sustainability, inner values and spirituality? How can we create designs that provide a convincing alternative to unsustainable interpretations of progress, growth, consumerism and commercialism? Building on the arguments first advanced in his widely acclaimed books Sustainable by Design and The Spirit of Design, Stuart Walker explains how we can achieve the systemic changes needed to address the challenges of sustainability. Challenging common assumptions about the nature of our contemporary material culture and its relationship to human flourishing, the author introduces approaches to design that draw inspiration from nature, summon the human imagination and create outcomes which are environmentally responsible and socially just, as well as meaningful and enriching at a personal level. Offering a unique and original contribution to this vital debate, Designing Sustainability is destined to become essential reading for students on courses in design and sustainability and for design practitioners looking for a deeper, more meaningful basis for their work.

As a cultivated form of invention, product design is a deeply human phenomenon that enables us to shape, modify and alter the world around us - for better or worse. The recent emergence of the sustainability imperative in product design compels us to recalibrate the parameters of good design in an unsustainable age. Written by designers, for designers,　the Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Product Design presents the first systematic overview of the burgeoning field of sustainable product design. Brimming with intelligent viewpoints, critical propositions, practical examples and rich theoretical analyses, this book provides an essential point of reference for scholars and practitioners at the intersection of product design and sustainability. The book takes readers to the depth of our engagements with the designed world to advance the social and ecological purpose of product design as a critical twenty-first-century practice. Comprising 35 chapters across 6 thematic parts, the book's contributors include the most significant international thinkers in this dynamic and evolving field.

This book discusses the most significant ways in which design has been applied to sustainability challenges using an evolutionary perspective. It puts forward an innovation framework that is capable of coherently integrating multiple design for sustainability (DfS) approaches developed so far. It is now widely understood that design can and must play a crucial role in the societal transformations towards sustainability. Design can in fact act as a catalyst to trigger and support innovation, and can help to shape the world at different levels: from materials to products, product-service systems, social organisations and socio-technical systems. This book offers a unique perspective on how DfS has evolved in the past decades across these innovation levels, and provides insights on its promising and necessary future development directions. For design scholars, this book will trigger and feed the academic debate on the evolution of DfS and its next research frontiers. For design educators, the book can be used as a supporting tool to design courses and programmes on DfS. For bachelor's and master's level design, engineering and management students, the book can be a general resource to provide an understanding of the historical evolution of DfS. For design practitioners and businesses, the book offers a rich set of practical examples, design methods and tools to apply the various DfS approaches in practice, and an innovation framework which can be used as a tool to support change in organisations that aim to integrate DfS in their strategy and processes.

Whether it is the effects of climate change, the avalanche of electronic and plastic waste or the substandard living and working conditions of billions of our fellow global citizens, our ability to deal with unsustainability will define the twenty-first century. Given that most consumption is mediated through products and services, the critical question for designers is: How can we radically reshape these into tools for sustainable living? As a guide and reference text, Product Design and Sustainability provides design students, practitioners and educators with the breadth and depth needed to integrate the most appropriate sustainable strategies into their practice. It establishes the principles that underpin sustainability and introduces a diverse range of social, economic and environmental design responses and tools available to designers. The numerous real-world examples illustrate how these strategies play out in different product sectors and reinforce the view that sustainability is the most positive opportunity and creative challenge facing designers today. This book delivers a comprehensive guide to the principles of sustainability and how they apply to product design that can readily be integrated into curricula and design practice reveals many of the issues specific product sectors are facing, and provides the depth and breadth needed for formulating and developing sustainable design strategies to address these issues empowers and inspires designers to engage with sustainability through its many examples and insightful interviews with practitioners is fully illustrated with over 300 photographs, graphs and diagrams and supported by chapter summaries, annotated further reading suggestions, and a glossary.