Design For Sustainability

DISCOVERY PROCESS

For the discovery process, I used Cardiff for my centre of focus, I done numerous of comparisons of the surrounding area including Taff Trail v Western Avenue for transportation, Llandaff Fields v Bute Park for recreation, Tesco for consumption and local businesses for the economic side of sustainability.

Transportation

Taff Trail v Western Avenue

During my walk along western avenue the first sign of unsustainability was the traffic. Many cars, bikes, vans pass along this road every day and causes so much build up on rush hour times. Is poor road layout to be blamed? Maybe, but the fact is, billions of people choose cars over a more sustainable choice of transport like riding a bicycle to work and some would say it’s not improving.

Stepping onto the Taff Trail was a complete different world to walking along the Western Avenue. The first thing I noticed was a wide cycle path with many walkers, cyclists and runners using this trail. But one thing that really annoyed me, was the lack of bins, this encouraged people to litter and as a result, the path wasn’t very clean.

Recreation

Llandaff Fields v Bute Park

During the walk through these parks, in my opinion there wasn’t much difference with regards to sustainability. Both parks included many fields for sports such as football and rugby, outdoor fitness stations, picnic areas, nature trails and much more.

 

Consumption

Walking around Tesco and interviewing staff, I found many reasons for unsustainability but also some were very sustainable. First thing that I noticed was the lights in the car park. Lights are arguably one of the main reasons for energy wastage and every single light in the car park was turned on in the middle of the day, this is clearly unsustainable.

A food bank was included in the store and it was great to see that it was full and also I noticed that this store use local produce which is very sustainable.

Business

A local cafe that I went into was a small friendly family run business, the store used all local produce and also local sourced furniture which was nice to hear.

One thing I got from this research was that the world isn’t in a very good state at the moment and there are many problems for product designers to try to solve. As product designers, we have to be more sustainable and ideate around the word sustainable.