Sustainability and Design (original) (raw)

2005, Business Strategy and the Environment

industrial society where information, services and knowledge are the main value creators, but even though Western economies are becoming more immaterial the world still brims with physical products, and material consumption is increasing. As industrial production is becoming more efficient in economic terms, the abundance of products and the way they are used appear to impede the path toward sustainability. In this world of material abundance, product life cycles are becoming shorter. Car manufacturers launch new models at a faster pace than earlier, clothing retail chains continuously update their collections instead of renewing them on a seasonal basis, and food retailers provide 'fashionable' foods from all over the world for limited time periods. This is to say that production and consumption is becoming increasingly fashion sensitive and dependent on aesthetics and well designed products and services. This special issue takes as its starting point the role of sustainability and design in a world of abundance. Sustainability in a post-industrial, or late capitalist, society gains from a simultaneous conceptualization of production and consumption. Production management and marketing are disciplines that traditionally have been treated as separate sub-disciplines in the general field of management studies. Production and marketing are seen as two sides of a process, and according to Firat and Venkatesh mainstream management theory rests on a dichotomy of production and consumption (Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). To produce implies to extract, construct and provide goods and services that have a value. Each step in production implies an increase in value. The latin verb consumere, from which consuming stems, implies a decay of value. This is to say that as soon as the consumer lays hands on the good it starts to deteriorate in value. This dichotomy gives rationale to economic growth. Since the consumer destroys, the producer constantly needs to produce new goods and services, and hence the wheels of the economy can continue to spin. However, placing the producer in opposition with the consumer has been questioned by scholars such as Keller, and Firat and Venkatesh (Keller, 1993; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995). To them, economic and cultural activities blend together. Consumption is, at least in late capitalist societies in the Western world, a co-producing expressive project where goods are consumed in terms of their sign value as well as, or even rather than, their 'functional' characteristics (Featherstone, 1991). Several scholars have argued that everyday life is undergoing a process of aestheticization (e.g. Featherstone, 1991). This is to say that the symbolic and aesthetic appearance of goods and services become the primary means of everyday experience. Consumption in such a late capitalist version is thus