Symbiotic Sustainable Design
Introduction to sustainable design across the whole life of what it makes
Gonzalo Raineri
Designer and educator
About this course
Sustainable Design has been promised for decades, and most of what carries the name is a material swapped, an energy figure improved, or a label added at the end. It loses where it matters: in the brief, where the client asks what sustainable means for this product, this service or this interface, and gets a list instead of an answer.
Symbiotic Design fills that gap. Joined to sustainable design, it gives the designer a working view of everything a decision touches: the people who will use it, the people who make it, the materials and where they come from, the energy it uses, the cost, and what becomes of it afterwards. Each is weighed against the others, with ethics first.
This course teaches both sides of the work: designing from sustainable strategies, and defending them. Each strategy is chosen for the case and argued with Symbiotic Design. That way the designer leads the decisions of the project and can explain every one.
You leave able to design from sustainable strategies and defend each one to a client and a manufacturer.
What you will be able to do
- Choose the sustainable strategies a product, a service or an interface calls for, across its whole life.
- Make design decisions for a project based on those strategies.
- Differentiate between a Tame Problem a method can solve and a Wicked Problem that keeps changing while you work on it, and learn to work on both.
- Defend each strategy to a client and a manufacturer, in terms they accept.
- Weigh each decision against the people, the materials, the energy and the cost, with ethics first.
Your instructor
Founder of the Academy, Bioclimatic Architect and expert in Symbiotic Design, the new frontier for sustainability