Responsible Design for Sustainable Innovation: Towards an Extended Design Process

Abstract

Design as a discipline has changed a lot during the last 50 years. The boundaries have been expanded partially to address the complexity of the problems we are facing nowadays. Areas like sustainable design, inclusive design, codesign, and social design among many more have emerged in response to the failures of the production and consumption system in place. In this context, social, environmental, and cultural trends have affected the way artefacts are designed, but the design process itself remains almost unchanged. In some sense, more criteria beyond economic concerns are now taken into consideration when social and environmental objectives are pursued in the design process, but the process to reach those objectives responds to the same stages and logic as in traditional approaches motivated only by economic aims. We propose in this paper an alternative way to understand and represent the design process, especially oriented to develop innovations that are aligned with the social, environmental, and cultural demands the world is facing now and it will face in the future. A new extended design process that is responsible for the consequences produced by the artefacts designed beyond the delivery of the solutions is proposed.