Professor Chris Ryan
Co-director of the Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society (ACSIS) and Director of the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL).
Why Design?
The role and practice of Design for Sustainability (ecodesign) is on the edge of a major transformation, as the world around us is about to be transformed. For close to two decades, designers have played a leading role in reconstructing the world to reduce the environmental impact of existing goods and services. Much of that work has been, appropriately, about building eco-desire – a task requiring designers’ skills every bit as significant as their ability to reduce the (life-cycle) impacts of products, buildings and services. New low-impact goods have to be more sexy, more desirable, than the high-impact one that they are seeking to replace.
Now, as we come to understand the implications of climate change, oil depletion, water shortages and resource insecurities it is suddenly clear that our world of products, buildings, services, systems of production and consumption and lifestyles, needs far greater change than can be achieved by making existing things more efficient. Sustainable life needs to be re-invented. Designers will be called on to re-organise systems, to redefine desirable life-styles, to revalue natural and social capital, rethink the satisfaction of human needs and to re-design business and zero-carbon products and services.
