Designers and Sustainability: What next? or Just forget it

Abstract

Our main goal is to raise designers’ awareness of the importance and urgency of including the sustainability dimension in their projects, trying to minimize the secondary effects of their designs, either in graphic, digital or other areas. Digitalization of everyday life – of social relations, economy and also in design – has been strongly induced in all occidental and capitalist societies, mostly without regarding a critical thought on the different and complex dimensions of its effects. In this process we are also conduced to tendentiously forget critical thinking about printed artefacts that many designers still work with. Taking the case of newspapers, a central medium for democracy, we have a closer look at a print prototype designed to respond to sustainability issues. Here we can find some of the possibilities designers may use to design for sustainability