Explore sustainable design guides, toolkits, and frameworks offering structured approaches and best practices for minimizing environmental impact. From the Cradle-to-Cradle framework to Design for Sustainability toolkits, these resources equip designers to implement sustainable principles effectively, fostering an eco-friendlier future.
“Sustainability” in design focuses on minimizing environmental impact by reducing carbon emissions. Design choices, from tool energy consumption to product interactions with the environment, affect the planet’s climate. This collection offers resources to grasp green design principles and seamlessly integrate them into workflows and product creation processes.
Time to Design for Sustainability
The EU Science Hub’s Sustainable Product Policy estimates that over 80% of all product-related environmental impacts are determined during the design phase. But how can design teams ensure that sustainability is at the core of every design choice they make? To help their designers develop design habits about sustainability, IBM published “IBM Design for sustainability.”
The framework centers on prioritizing user, community, and social value over negative environmental and social impact, both now and in the future. To realize this vision, experiences must be inclusive, user-friendly, and efficient in terms of both usability and overall power consumption.
Sustainability Guide and Design Principles
The Sustainability Guide from SVID is an overarching framework for design and development practices that contains sections wholly dedicated to methods and design principles that are centered around sustainable practices.
Sustainable Design Strategies
The crux of sustainability in design strategies, according to Leyla Acaroglu, is ensuring that the tools we use in a design workflow and how we use them today do not have a negative impact on the planet in the future.
What Leyla does in this extensive Medium post is curate an ecodesign strategy set that covers core considerations for product design that build sustainability into the process, from manufacturing and recyclability to efficiency and modularity.
Sustainable Web Design Practices
A lot of questions need to be asked when you want to deliver digital products and services that respect the principles of the Sustainable Web Manifesto. The site Sustainable Web Design helps you find the right sustainability strategy for your project.
Bonus resources
6 Best Tools to Analyze Sustainability in Design
