Design decisions determine what we eat, what we wear, what we value, and how we communicate. Besides its utilitarian and aesthetic functions, design powerfully shapes our desires, sparks our imaginations, and fuels our aspirations – influencing our purchasing behaviours through the use of seductive campaigns that feed our need for the new, the next, the better. Design shapes the very need for a object in the first place. Throughout any product’s journey to market, many people – not only those who call themselves designers – impact how we design, make, and use the things around us. Architects, material scientists, business strategists, branding creatives, engineers, makers, and many others also influence design decisions.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation chose designers as agents of change, alongside public managers.
And us? We organize our daily lives and our lives from an individual, not a collective, point of view. By expanding the scale, companies think about their business and do not consider the possible negative environmental and social impacts. Sometimes we compare ourselves with Europe's achievements. Is this comparison correct? Is it fair? Oh, they recycle 70% of the packaging and we only recycle 5%. But our problem goes beyond investing in recycling technology. There is no point in taking inputs from here to China and there producing a bottle of water that will be filled in France and exported to Brazil.
The academic world has always treated the topic of environmental respect with care. But the way of teaching must also change so that we arrive at a different place. Designers know how to deal with machines, not people, their training is technical, not humanistic. What is the first thing we need to do before creating a wooden chair? The answer is to plant a tree – if you don't plant it, you don't have raw materials and you don't have a chair. Do I have to worry about this? Yes, someone should be concerned.
The concern with "zero waste" is extremely important and urgent. So much so that What Design Can Do, an international organization that defends design and creativity as instruments to promote social change, and the Ikea Foundation are promoting the No Waste Challenge, and are calling on designers from all over the world to propose innovative solutions that reduce waste. But actually eliminating waste in the manufacture of a product is still a challenge and the search for a project that combines entrepreneurship and circular design is expected to continue. The problem is that everyone ends up reasoning based on conventional processes and generating waste. It is essential to work on a more sustainable and circular alternative as possible from the planning phase: 100% upcycling and zero waste. This means not buying any raw materials.
And what do we learn from this? That to do this type of design we cannot just look at our navels, we need to invent ecosystems with new business models.
Change to change. A simple sentence, but when we read it two or three times we realize the difficulty of modifying our behavior so that things really change.