WDO World Design Agenda

The World Design Organization was founded in 1957 as the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design and took its current name in 2017. It represents design associations, companies, institutions and government bodies rather than individual designers, and it holds Consultative Status at the United Nations. The World Design Agenda is the document in which that organisation states, in its own voice, what it thinks industrial design owes the world. The Agenda has three parts. A preamble sets the situation: unprecedented population growth, decreasing natural resources and rapid technological change, which together create what it calls an imperative for the organisation to lead. A declaration then commits members to contributing to the United Nations 2030 development agenda, to setting ambitious goals, and to communicating progress openly, transparently and collaboratively using the organisation's UN status. The heart of the document is a list of eight Sustainable Development Goals that members identified as particularly relevant to industrial design, each with a sentence of commitment: good health and well-being, quality education, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, industry and innovation, sustainable cities, responsible consumption and production, and partnerships. Five proposed action items close it. Two of the eight commitments are worth reading closely because they say more than the others. On education, members undertake to strengthen industrial design teaching that emphasises sustainability, social responsibility, context and systems thinking, and that mentors the next generation of sustainable design leaders. On innovation and infrastructure, the commitment is qualified by a focus on user affordability and accessibility, which turns a general goal about industrialisation into something a designer can act on. What the Agenda is not should be stated as plainly as what it is. It is not law. It binds no state, no company and no individual designer, and it contains no compliance mechanism, no reporting requirement and no consequence for a member that ignores it. Its own text calls it a living document. The organisation does not print an adoption date on the page, and this archive records it as undated rather than guessing one. Its interest for a designer lies in the translation work it performs. The Sustainable Development Goals were written for governments, in the language of national statistics and international development. The Agenda is one profession's attempt to say which of them its own work actually touches, and in what terms, which is a different and more useful thing than endorsing all seventeen.