Sustainable design (also referred to as "green design", "eco-design", or "design for environment") is the art of designing physical objects and the built environment to comply with the principles of economic, social, and ecological sustainability. It ranges from the microcosm of designing small objects for everyday use, through to the macrocosm of designing buildings, cities, and the earth's physical surface. It is a growing trend within the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, urban planning, engineering, graphic design, industrial design, interior design and fashion design.
The needed aim of sustainable design is to produce places, products and services in a way that reduces use of non-renewable resources, minimizes environmental impact, and relates people with the natural environment. Sustainable design is often viewed as a necessary tool for achieving sustainability. It is related to the more heavy-industry-focused fields of industrial ecology and green chemistry, sharing tools such as life cycle assessment and life cycle energy analysis to judge the environmental impact or "greenness" of various design choices.
Sustainable design is general reaction to the global "environmental crisis", i.e., rapid growth of economic activity and human population, depletion of natural resources, damage to ecosystems and loss of biodiversity. Fan Shu-Yang, Bill Freedman, and Raymond Cote (2004). "Principles and practice of ecological design". Environmental Reviews. 12: 97–112. handler_=HandleInitialGet&journal=er&volume=12&calyLang=eng&articleFile=a04-005.pdf" target="_blank">link The appearance is that our growing use of the earth has exceeded the sustainable limits of the earth importantly because of continually increasing investment in diminishing resources. Proponents of sustainable design generally believe the crisis may be resolved by using innovative design and industrial practices which reduce the environmental impacts associated with goods and services. Green design is considered a means of doing that while maintaining quality of life by using clever design to substitute less harmful products and processes for conventional ones.
The limits of green design in reducing whole earth impacts are beginning to be considered because growth in goods and services is consistently outpacing gains in efficiency. As a result the net effect of sustainable design to date has been to simply improve the efficiency of rapidly increasing impacts. The present approach, which focuses on the efficiency of delivering individual goods and services does not solve this problem. The basic dilemmas not yet well addressed include: the increasing complexity of efficiency improvements, the difficulty of implementing new technologies in societies built around old ones, that physical impacts of delivering goods and services are not localized but distributed throughout the economies, and that the scale of resource uses is growing and not stabalizing. 'Transformative' technologies are hoped for, but workable options are not yet evident. Only if the scale of resource uses stabalizes will the efficiency of how they are each delivered result in reducing total impacts.
The motivation for sustainable design was articulated famously in _E. F. Schumacher's 1973 book Small is Beautiful. Finally, green design is not the attachment or supplement of architectural design, but an integrated design process within architectural design. Ji Yan and Plainiotis Stellios (2006): Design for Sustainability. Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press. ISBN 7-112-08390-7
