Sustainist Design Guide

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MICHIEL SCHWARZ co-created Sustainism is the New Modernism: A Cultural Manifesto for the Sustainist Era (with Joost Elffers, 2010) that provides the framework for this guide. His international work as an independent cultural thinker, strategy consultant and innovator focuses on how the future is being shaped by culture. DIANA KRABBENDAM is a social designer and cultural innovator. She is co-founder and director of The Beach, a network of creative innovators. She leads a social innovation hub in the Nieuw-West area of the city of Amsterdam.

Social innovation is experiencing a resurgence at a time when cultural boundaries are shifting. A wave of new social initiatives is coming into view worldwide, where millions of dedicated people are beginning to “design” different kinds of living environments that are more collaborative, more socially just, and more sustainable. This movement is what this Sustainist Design Guide is all about. As the authors say: “It is no longer a matter of designing for society, but within it.” This exploratory guide travels the new landscape of social design thinking and practice. It does so from the perspective of an emerging culture of “sustainism,” which The New York Times has called a “new ethos for design.” The Sustainist Design Guide presents an agenda for social innovation, based on values such as sharing, connectedness, localism and proportionality, as well as sustainability. It challenges us to transform these and other sustainist qualities into design criteria and include them in our design briefs. The Sustainist Design Guide maps out best practices and explores how designers can become more socially and ecologically responsible. It opens the debate on what it means to be “sustainist designers.”

Sustainism will drive the creativity of the twenty-first century ≥ TIM BROWN, CEO and President of design and innovation consulting firm IDEO

Michiel Schwarz Diana Krabbendam

THE BEACH is an Amsterdam-based network of social designers. The Beach initiates and produces projects that are geared at building a more social and sustainable society in collaboration with creative partners, companies, and institutions.

SUSTAINIST DESIGN GUIDE

BY THE CO-AUTHOR OF SUSTAINISM IS THE NEW MODERNISM MICHIEL SCHWARZ & SOCIAL DESIGN INNOVATOR DIANA KRABBENDAM OF THE BEACH

SUSTAINIST DESIGN GUIDE

AUTHORS

SUSTAINIST DESIGN GUIDE How sharing, localism, connectedness and proportionality are creating a new agenda for social design

SUSTAINIST DESIGN QUALITIES

SHARING Collaboration Open exchange Commons

LOCALISM Community Local experiences Rootedness

CONNECTEDNESS Connectivity Interdependence Connections

Michiel Schwarz Diana Krabbendam WITH THE BEACH NETWORK

INCLUDES 12 CHANGE-MAKING CASES RANGING FROM URBAN FARMING AND CROWDSOURCED PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE TO FAIR BUSINESS AND COLLABORATIVE CRAFTS

PROPORTIONALITY Proportion Appropriate scale Human scale

Sharing is increasingly becoming a valued quality of life. It informs new forms of social interaction, business practice, and consumption. Shareability centres around collaboration and exchange, often linked to mobile and Internet technologies. Bringing shareable assets into the design of products, media, places and information is driving new forms of “collaborative consumption” and open source innovation.

“Local” is becoming a quality in itself. New forms of localism are less concerned with local as a geographical marker, focusing instead on local experiences and belonging. Sustainist design focuses on localist attributes, such as sense of place, nearness, locally rooted experiences, and community building. It is grounded in the local, whilst willing to embrace the global.

Sustainism represents the culture of connectivity and networks, where everyone and everything is interconnected. As a design requirement, connectedness focuses on building connections between people, their living environments, and nature. Relationships, communities and peer networks are becoming core attributes to designing for connectedness.

Sustainist design shifts our focus onto questions of appropriateness: from scale to proportionality. It goes beyond modernist design approaches where bigger (and faster) is always better. Focusing on proportionality moves the design agenda towards questions of selective slowness (rather than speed) and to appropriate and human dimensions (rather than unquestioned upscaling).


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