Design thinking as an approach for sustainability

Abstract

Papnek (1971) can be considered as the first researcher that raise the issue about environmental and social responsibilities of the designers. He started than a whole new movement called ecodesign or design for the environment (DFE) which nowadays evolved toward sustainable design involving the social and ethical implications of the products. Design thinking is user-centered approach to problem-solving that emulates the ways in which designers think and work and it dates back to the 80s, but it gains popularity in the recent years as an approach for complex problems solving. There are not lot of evidence of implementation of this approach into the academia, this is why we wanted to conduct this kind of research. In our opinion the aspect of reflecting as part of the design thinking approach is also very important element in the academia. We conducted this research within the course Research in design, part of the Industrial Design curriculum at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Skopje. At the same time in our opinion the design thinking approach is the most appropriate for design with social impact, which is the area that we are working. One key element that give us optimism that this is appropriate approach is its aspect of empathy. In this paper we present two student projects that are dealing with problems in the area of sustainability. The problems were chosen by the students, we wanted for them to be familiar with the issue, have some connection to it or fell very strongly about it. This was important for the research, because the time that we had is not very long to establish connection with some issue and develop strong feelings and empathy, so we wanted to have head start. The only requirement for them was to be a global problem, influencing larger group of people.