This book offers a comprehensive guide to the sustainable design of products, services, or related systems. It goes beyond concept explanations to provide you with practical instructions on how to apply the tools and methods to your own designs. The world is finally waking up to the necessity of sustainability, especially in the design and engineering of all the physical products that surround us every day.

Sustainable Design from Vision to Action not only provides a thorough understanding of the high-level values and goals of sustainable design, but also gives readers actionable step-by-step guides for how to implement them on the ground, in daily practice. This includes quick reference tables and other resources for practical design, with lists of resources for greater depth. The activities can be used by designers and engineers, in classrooms, or in industry. This innovative textbook focuses primarily on physical product development, but also applies to services, systems, and digital products. It includes a thorough range of quantitative and qualitative methods across the whole product life cycle, including material choice, energy use, systems thinking, design for recycling, user behavior change, business models, equity and inclusion, and more. The book aims to change your design practice to help build a world that is healthy, abundant, beautiful, and fulfilling for all species, for all time.

This highly illustrated text will provide an excellent introduction to sustainable design in practice for industrial design and mechanical engineering students. It will also be useful for professional designers, engineers, and managers in industry.

 

Critical Reviews

“Many books provide suggestions on how to address today’s ecological issues. These are essential, but they leave out the details necessary to transform the visions into action. The title of this badly needed text tells it all: this book has practical tools to make the visions real.”

Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things

 

“This book is a must-read for designers, educators, innovators, and changemakers. As we consider all the possible ways to apply sustainability to design practices, Sustainable Design: From Vision to Action bridges a longstanding gap between ambition and execution by equipping the reader with practical and implementable strategies that move us beyond the space of aspiration. By exposing multiple frameworks, it empowers a designer to tap into a broader perspective of sustainable design and have actionable steps to move their work forward.”

Kara Pecknold, VP of Regenerative Design at frog, part of Capgemini Invent

 

“This captivating book breaks down complex sustainability topics into actionable ways of designing, using straightforward language and many illustrations. It’s the sustainable design partner that you will want to go back to again and again.”

Cindy Pereira Cooper, Engineering for One Planet co-founder and initiative leader, The Lemelson Foundation

 

“If we’re to redesign our world to be more just, equitable and sustainable, we’ll need a roadmap to show the way. There may be no better one than this to leverage the full suite of tools, from biomimicry to behavior change to business strategy, needed for the journey.”

Joel Makower, co-founder and chairman, Trellis Group and GreenBiz

 

“I’ve followed Jeremy’s sustainable design thought leadership for more than 15 years and recommend this book to anyone looking for guidance on how to put theory into practice.”

KoAnn Vikoren Skrzyniarz, founder/chairwoman of SustainableBrands

 

“I have reformulated [my course] to follow your book chapter by chapter and with the suggested activities. I am pleased to report that it is going extremely well. Personally, I love the materials, and the students appear to be very engaged. I dare say ‘riveted.’ ”

Benoit Cushman-Roisin, professor of engineering sciences at Dartmouth College

 

“This book provides a thorough exploration of sustainable design – covering materials, energy, and lifecycle strategies to create environmentally responsible products and services. With practical methods and actionable insights, it equips designers and engineers to accelerate the necessary transformation toward circularity and sustainability.”

Prof. Steven Eppinger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, co-author of Product Design and Development.

 

More Information

For the table of contents and ordering information, go to https://SDVA.green (redirects to the publisher, Routledge), or online bookstores such as Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, Thriftbooks, Bol.com, or others.